Susannah Screaming (The Krug & Kellog Thriller Series Book 2)

by Carolyn Weston

  “Lean against the side there. Against the door—move it! That’s right. Hands out wide. Feet out—”

  The driver was smallish and wiry, with long blond hair. Twitching with nerves as Casey frisked him. Smelling of fear-sweat and a potent aftershave lotion. Except for a soft groan when Casey snapped the handcuffs on him, he kept silent, refusing to answer any questions about where the truck was headed.

  “Go after it,” Krug told Casey grimly. “I’ll handle this fruitcake.”

  “No, wait a minute, sweetie”—the driver’s wavering, scared voice followed Casey as he ran to his idling Mustang—“you’re making an awful mistake—”

  Gravel flying like buckshot behind him, Casey roared out of the parking lot, swinging northward onto the highway. No sign of the truck ahead. But with only a five-minute lead, he knew, his chances of catching it were good. The only escape routes off the highway were infrequent canyon roads leading into the hills.

  At the first, Topanga Canyon, he swung into a lighted gas station, skidding to a stop on the cement apron between the pumps and the glass-walled station office. “Police,” he yelled through the open door at the attendant sitting inside. “You see a U-Haul truck pass in the last few minutes?”

  “Yeah, and driving like a loony!” Grinning, the attendant pointed right, toward the canyon road. “Took that rig around the corner on two—”

  “Call the Sheriff’s station right away. Tell them all units to a restaurant called the Ultimate Perception. You got that?”

  “Ultimate—yeah, I got it. Hey, what’s—?”

  “And tell them a U-Haul truck on Topanga Canyon Road. They’ll know what it’s about when they get to the restaurant.”

  Casey gunned away again, streaking up the curving grade which, as it climbed into the mountains towering between the sea and San Fernando Valley, became a sinuous nightmare of switchback cornering. A Grand Prix course at almost any speed, suicidal if you pushed it. But if he was to catch the U-Haul truck, he had to.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Agony from the constant jolting roused him. A snoring sound. His own breathing, Rees realized dimly. Long snorting suckings of air through his nostrils. Because his mouth was sealed shut.

  He opened his eyes—thought he opened them, lids lifting, a sense of seeing—but he was utterly blind. Or blindfolded. Trying to feel if it were so, he was reminded that his wrists were tied. His ankles also. Painfully twisting one wrist so that he could investigate, he felt his face, confirming tape over his mouth, sweat-sticky cheeks, nose, quivering eyelids—no blindfold. So this pitching, disorienting darkness was the inside of some moving sealed-in place? In his confusion, prison horror stories of solitary punishment holes blazed up, terrifyingly real. He closed his eyes, trying to will himself into unconsciousness again.

  But his brain would not sleep. A stubborn perception of life stirred in him, and with it, a dim hope. With numb fingers, he worked at the tape over his mouth, finally loosening it enough so that he could breathe freely. It was comfort for a time: lying cramped and aching, he gulped in air greedily. Then molelike, cautious, he began to investigate as much as his bound hands would permit. The seat he lay on felt like leather. A split seat. No, it was Naugahyde, he decided. His half-dead fingertips gave back other tactile recognitions: glass, knobs, pedals, a slanting column topped by a wheel. A steering wheel. And everything familiar: the Volkswagen. Driverless, vehicle in a lunatic nightmare, it was roaring through black nothingness.

  His headlights punching out the darkness seemed to pull Casey’s Mustang, dragging it wildly around curve after curve, a giant child’s toy. At every outside corner arc, his rear wheels drifted, the chassis fishtailing as he compensated, pitching like a cowboy tied to a crazy bronc. Flashing glimpses of houses reeled by, signs saying For Rent and Speed Kills, brushy hillsides, clumps of live oak, steep gullies which his lights jumped eerily, creating the optical illusion that he was flying.

  Speed kills. Climbing up and up the dark mountainside, Casey risked a look now and then to see if he could spot any lights ahead on the switchback turns. Speed may kill the killer, too. No such luck. But a truck going at this rate—The hell, he thought, nuts like that one lead charmed lives. Only policemen and other mortals suffer consequences.

  Light flickered ahead, for one moment fooling him. Then Casey realized it must be Topanga Village—a modest shopping center which probably enjoyed a bit of community nighttime illumination. A minute later, as he boomed by stores and a startled hippie couple walking on the roadside, his guess was confirmed. Beyond lay another sharp curve. As his tires howled, he was presented with the sudden choice of two roads—the one he was on or Old Topanga Road, which forked to the left. Did the two join again later? He couldn’t remember, and it was too late to worry about it.

  All around him now was what looked to be a real wilderness—an illusion, he knew, for the area was a network of dirty side roads leading to mountain hideaways and tiny so-called ranches. Any one of them might serve as a bolt hole for the truck. But only the steeliest sort of fugitive would try such a trick. If he did, Sheriff’s units would catch him on the way down again. Maybe.

  Neon-paint letters six feet high—GRACIOUS COUNTRY LIVING—caught his headlights. Retaining a surreal retinal image from the sign—a giant couple embracing in front of a palatial home—Casey realized he must be approaching a new real estate development. Some subdivider racing to beat the ecologists, he decided. By next year what was left of this mountain area must surely be designated parkland.

  He could see the tops of the mountains now, rounded, folded black velvet against the hazy midnight-blue of the sky. Only a few more miles and the vast panorama of the San Fernando Valley would be spread out below him. All downhill grade from then on, a free-wheeling curving deathtrap. Casey pounded the wheel. Damn, damn. Either the truck had ducked somewhere—

  He saw it then: two winking red coals which for an instant became one as a vehicle disappeared around the curve ahead. Taillights. Behind Casey’s eyes, a pulse began thumping. Let it be the truck. Let it. Screeching around the sheer rock cut which walled the inside of the curve, he held his breath, waiting for his wheeling headlights to show him. But there was another curve ahead, something silvery disappearing just as his high beams caught it.

  Rocking wildly through the turn, the Mustang began to drift left ward, and Casey eased the wheel over, watching the emptiness of a hundred-foot gully sliding toward him. Be like flying, he thought, hypnotized, and for one tick of his blood a thrill-temptation scorched his mind. Then instinct and training took over, sensing the end of the drift. Steering right again, he gunned on the uphill straightaway. Less than a quarter of a mile ahead, shining like sheet silver, he could see the truck, read the orange lettering: U-HAUL, and below that, Adventure In Moving.

  With no hope of response, Casey flicked his lights, signaling. And as if in answer, black puffs of carbon exhaust billowed from the truck. Accelerating, Casey pushed the Mustang closer and closer, planning to draw abreast of the truck and herd it into the next narrow lay-by cut into the right-hand hillside. But as he started to draw up beside the truck, it reeled toward him suddenly. “Oh, beautiful,” he yelled, “very hincty,” and he stood on his brake, watching fascinated as the rear of the truck missed the front of the Mustang by no more than a couple of inches.

  So the game was to be Chicken. Between a truck and a passenger car? No game at all on a mountain road, Casey decided. One near miss and he could clearly calculate how easily he might be bounced off into the sheer-sided gully to the left. So pursuit then, he thought. Push the bastard till he either cracks up, or that U-Haul finally craps out.

  But the driver of the truck chose another alternative.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  His Volkswagen was a hearse, Rees realized now. A hearse carried piggyback complete with corpse-to-be. He would be found somewhere like the motorcyclist. Bottom of a cliff, probably. Another accident case. FUGITIVE DIES IN MISHAP. And investigating police would find�
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  The gun, the gun. Jerking upright, bracing himself against the steering wheel, he tried to manipulate the door handle, but his numb fingers would not work. His hands and feet felt like alien putty. Must find something, he thought feverishly. Anything that might saw through the wrist bindings.

  No, light first, he thought. Fumbling in the jolting blackness, he found the headlight switch on the dashboard. The sudden blinding brilliance of the aluminum truck interior was agonizing at first and then merciful. To see again was to live again.

  Scrambling out of the Volkswagen, Rees found that he could not stand, so he knelt beside the car, searching under and behind the seats. But the gun was gone. A wave of blackness engulfed him, and he slumped on the reeling floor of the truck. Hopeless. But the blessed glare of his headlights made a lie of his fatalism. Somehow he must untie himself. Or cut free? Time was probably short on to. Trying to picture what might aid him from the glove compartment, he suddenly remembered his sunglasses. Plastic lenses, had to be. But breakable. And anything that breaks makes a cutting edge.

  For one breath-held moment as he whirled around the corner, Casey believed he had lost the truck; it must have plunged into the gully. To the right a huge billboard rushed at him, GRACIOUS COUNTRY LIVING, a repetition of the one he’d seen before. A banner across the bottom said Open October. This was the entrance to the subdivision: skinned hillsides, snowy-white concrete avenues already laid out, acres of houses in various skeletal stages of framing. The truck had turned in.

  Passing the billboard which had hidden the U-Haul for a moment, Casey shot between pretentious gateposts, careening into a turnaround with a palm tree island in the center. Then he streaked after the bobbing taillights. So the game wasn’t to be Chicken after all, he guessed, but Hide and Seek? A duel of driving skill, mano a mono. Okay, he thought. Okay.

  The spotless concrete streets curved gracefully, following the rolling contours of the hilltops—climbing, dipping, a confusing cat’s cradle he could get lost in fast, Casey knew, unless he tailed the truck as closely as possible. Feeding power to the already roaring motor, he kept narrowing the distance from the twinkling red dots. Then suddenly they went out. On two wheels, the truck dodged into a branching narrow avenue—a continuous turn, like a cloverleaf, which disappeared behind a knoll.

  Afraid of losing his advantage, Casey spun into the corkscrew turn, fighting the wheel. Then he spied the U-Haul ahead. But it was going the wrong way. Oh wow, oh mother, the bastard’s going to ram! Blinded by the sudden flaring headlights through his windshield, he jerked the wheel right, bouncing up over the curb, slewing into a wild spin which sent a pile of lumber flying. His tires, trying to find traction on the soft graded surface, spun, whipping the chassis. And hanging onto the wheel, Casey caught a dizzy glimpse of a monstrous looming shadow bearing down on him. Mountain to Mahomet, he thought crazily. Sandbagged.

  Inside the truck, Rees had been sawing frantically at the cord cutting into his left wrist, the piece of broken plastic lens clamped in the numb fingers of his right hand, his arm through the spoke of the steering wheel to keep from being flung to and fro. Each lurch of the truck made him miss and slice himself. His left wrist was bloody as raw meat. But he could feel a loosening, a tingling as his constricted veins once more fed feeling to his hand. Just one free and he could untie himself. One minute more, he thought. Then suddenly weightless, he was lifted and flung like a puppet against the Volkswagen’s windshield.

  The soaring sensation of weightlessness caught Casey, too, as the passenger side of the Mustang caved in, glass shattering, and the car heeled over, skidding on two wheels into the scattered pile of lumber. His head hit the window frame beside him. One of his headlights burst with a gunshot explosion. In the lopsided light left to him, he glimpsed the truck through a cloud of radiant dust. Hunter now, not the hunted. But if he could reach the pavement, he’d have the advantage of greater maneuverability. Casey gunned the motor. But his tires kept spinning. The Mustang was a trap now, he realized, and a second before the truck hit him again, he jumped out, feeling something snap as he landed, tumbling through dirt and broken glass and smashed lumber.

  Only vaguely aware of the warm trickling on his forehead, Rees lay dazed, half in, half out of the Volkswagen, which was shifting unsteadily now, brakes creaking as it rocked this way and that. His hands were free, he discovered, the wrist binding having snapped where he had been sawing at it. Crouching, he tore wildly at the knot at his ankles, finally loosening it enough to pull one foot free. Then he staggered to the loading doors. But there was no way to open them from inside.

  The second impact threw him against the side of the truck and then to the floor. Gasping for the breath that had been knocked out of him, Rees watched the Volkswagen’s jolting changes of position. Sooner or later it might crush him, he realized. Like a battering ram. But what can kill might also save? Like fire, he told himself. Like water. For God’s sake, take a chance.

  Pushing himself upright again, he clung to the car, reaching in to check that the gearshift lever was in neutral. Then he released the hand brake and plastered himself against the side of the truck, waiting.

  Pain in his right arm half paralyzed Casey, and for an instant stunned, he watched his Mustang rearing through the clouds of dust at a crazy angle. Metal ground on metal, rending. In the U-Haul’s headlights, shards of glass flew like crystalline rain. Then a living thing, mindless, raging, the truck roared around the wreckage, straight at him through the swirling dust.

  All the things he had depended on were useless now—badge, gun, two-ton car. But an armored man, he thought as he ran dodging, is the prisoner of his armor. His own shadow leaped enormously long ahead of him as the headlights gained. Prisoner, his mind repeated back at him insanely. Prisoner? Stopping abruptly, he turned and faced into the white glare. Oh, Jesus, so close. His flesh shrinking in dread against his fragile bones, he waited, cradling his broken arm. And when the truck was almost upon him—he could see the space between the front wheels, the height underneath—he flung himself into the dirt, praying as the front tires rumbled by on either side of his head that he was flat enough for the drainpan and drive axle to clear his body.

  Sound battered him. Fountains of dirt half buried him. For the space of a heartbeat, Casey was not sure he had survived. Then the truck was gone, and choking on dust, he jumped up, seeing the red blaze of brake lights as the truck skidded. Something crashed inside the aluminum body, and risking a quick look as it swung about, accelerating, he saw the loading doors bulging outward. Then suddenly they burst open and light streamed out. Unbelieving, Casey saw a blue Volkswagen emerging weirdly slow, back wheels dropping off the truck bed, the underside of the body grinding as the chassis slid over the tailgate, hung there for a moment, then bounced off with a clang of shock absorbers and punished springs.

  But the truck did not stop. Casey was pinned like a moth in the high beams which sought out every stone, twig, heap of building materials, casting immense, eerie moonscape shadows. His .38 was useless, he knew, unless he could duck somewhere long enough to brace his left arm and take accurate aim. Peashooter against an elephant. But if he could hit a tire. Dreamer, dreamer. He’d be hamburger unless he could find a hiding place immediately.

  The Volkswagen seemed to careen away in the darkness, headlights bobbing, tires squashing—an illusion, Rees knew: it was the truck which was moving. Again in darkness, he crouched near the flapping loading doors, and when the one nearest him swung wide, he jumped. He lit hard, rolling over and over to lie stunned in the soft dirt. But alive, alive. Sky above him. Smell of sumac, openness, wonderful space—but still caught in the nightmare.

  He saw the wreckage of the car first, a man running for it gnomelike but strangely familiar in the blanching whiteness of headlights. The man dodged behind the wrecked car. And as the headlights bore down on it, Rees saw a spat of flame, heard the crack of a gunshot. Then the truck hit the wreck, and with a roar the crippled Mustang exploded. In the
hellish glare, Rees saw a shadow leaping from the cab of the truck.

  Casey saw it, too. No hiding now. With no hope of hitting anything, he fired left -handed again and again. But the huge figure, an evil djinn out of the orange-yellow crackling glare, kept coming at him. Either a maniac or some muscle type as strong as a gorilla. “Police,” he roared. “Freeze!” Then the giant shadow sprang at him, and gripped by pain, terror, rage, Casey went down. His gun flew. Tumbling, grappling helplessly, he had a wheeling glimpse of something at the edge of the leaping light. A man. Blue Volkswagen. My God, his mind made the connection, Rees? “Help,” he yelled. “Help me.”

  But Rees only stood there.

  Blind man in a tunnel. Running man. And in his mind she kept laughing. Falling. Laughing. What you can’t see—

  But in the red-hot unearthly light from the burning car, he saw it very clearly, gleaming like a snake in the whirling dust. Keep living dangerously. He scooped up the gun. Keep living.

  Whatever happened from now on, he knew he was through running.

  THIRTY-SIX

  “What a scene,” Krug hooted, no respecter of hospital quiet. His voice seemed to explode inside Casey’s head. “Looked like the end of a war up there on that goddam hill! Mustang’s burning. U-Haul’s burning. Volkswagen’s sitting there with three flats and the headlights on. You’re laying there maybe dead in the dirt. And if that ain’t enough, there’s for Chrissake Rees, playing King of the Mountain with your .38!”

  A wanted ex-con in possession of a policeman’s gun. Feeling suddenly sick, Casey stared at him. Between his shout for help and waking up in the ambulance was utter darkness: no one knew perhaps that Rees had saved him—

  “Talk about showdowns,” Krug was saying, obviously relishing his story. “For a while there I figured we hit the granddaddy of ’em all—”