by Louise Ure
Lolly was even more skittish than he was, and he’d tried to cheer her up by celebrating with a bottle of Myers’s Rum and some Coke he found tucked into the corner of a low cabinet. She’d pretended to party but only drank Coke, just like she should with a baby on the way.
What would that be like? Holding that perfect baby in his arms, a new person created by the love of two. Had his parents ever felt that way about him? Had they spent days planning his future? He didn’t think so. He’d make things different for his new family.
Or maybe he was just passing along more of his family’s bad blood—genes that determined his child would never be happy.
Never succeed.
His insulin levels were going crazy. Flop sweat covered his face and chest and his pulse raced like it was nearing a finish line.
He knew they couldn’t stay here for long. One more car change ought to do it. And maybe a name change to go with it. They probably knew his name by now, and certainly knew Lolly’s real name. That’s okay. New names to go with their new life.
He’d love to head south. They could lose themselves in Mexico, find a little thatched house on the beach and grow brown as coconuts watching their soon-to-be child play in the sand. But that road led through Pima and Santa Cruz counties, and there were far too many people looking for them there. Maybe head east. New Mexico or Texas. Lots of room there to build a new world together.
They should have left town right after he killed James McDougall. It would have meant leaving with nothing but his last measly paycheck and nineteen dollars from Mrs. Prentice’s coffee can, but they would have been safer. Except that they would have been leaving a witness to their crimes alive.
“What are we going to do with the lady?” Beatrice asked, joining him in the leather chair and rubbing the back of his neck.
“Maybe we should let her go.”
Why had it been so important to go after her, even after the cemetery when he learned she was blind? If he ended the woman’s life, would it somehow erase all trace of his crimes? Could he go back to being the Gerald Pickett who had a future separate from his family’s rotten roots?
“But she knows who we are,” Beatrice crooned in his ear. “Finish what you start. That’s what you always say.”
Pickett shook his head. Everything had become so complicated.
He moved to the kitchen in search of something sugar filled and found an old can of peaches in heavy syrup. He opened it and ate half, willing his dizziness to disappear with every bite.
“You, in the house, the place is surrounded. Come out with your hands up.”
The amplifier turned the voice tinny but it was still clear. Pickett jerked at the sound and ran to the front window, peeking through a slit in the heavy curtains. His heart caught in his throat. Three Highway Patrol cars were angled like an open fan across the dusty front yard. The doors had been thrown open and cops crouched low behind them, guns raised and aimed at the house.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” Beatrice keened.
“Quick, Lolly, get her out of the bathroom!”
Beatrice hustled back down the hall, shoving the blind woman with each step.
Pickett ran back to the kitchen and peered through the shuttered window above the sink. Two cops were off to the left, hunkered down behind a big creosote bush. It was too late now. This felt like something that had been destined generations ago. The decisions had already been made for him.
“Take this,” he said to Beatrice, handing her his knife. “Hold it right up to her neck, tight. And stay real close to her.” He slapped a quick two loops of duct tape around the blind woman’s wrists.
Pickett opened the back door and yelled, “We’re coming out. We’ve got a hostage. Don’t try anything or we’ll kill her!” He held the gun to one side of the woman’s head, and Beatrice jittered the knife against her neck on the other side.
“You make one sound and they’ll have brains on cactus all over the place,” he told the blind woman, his voice shaking with false bravado.
They edged out the door and toward the black Mercedes. Radio static crackled as the officers in the back of the house alerted the rest of the team to the movement.
When they reached the car, Pickett told Beatrice to put the woman in the backseat, duck down by her feet, and stay low. He eased into the front seat, hoping that none of the shooters had a clean shot at him with the blind woman’s head directly behind his.
He started the engine and the car took off like a jackrabbit across the open desert. In the rearview mirror, three officers scattered as they returned to their cars in pursuit.
The car scraped bottom as they sped through the thick sand of a shallow, dry arroyo. The steering wheel spun out of his hands, and Pickett thought they were going to get stuck, but the tires found hard-packed caliche at the last minute and they skittered up the other side of the wash.
He could see the freeway in the distance and headed northeast across the flat, dry land to intersect it, once crashing through a barbed-wire fence and dragging fifty feet of wire and. metal posts with him until the car shook it off.
Sirens raged behind him, although he couldn’t see them through the roiling dust he’d kicked up. Then, off to his right, two more cop cars, hoping to cut him off at an angle. He veered left, paralleling the distant freeway now instead of aiming straight at it. His heart thudded in panic.
The city of Casa Grande was behind him. No hope of getting back there and losing themselves in even that small town. But the Mercedes, while old, had been built for German autobahns; maybe he could try to outrun them. He glanced down at the dashboard. Fuck! Less than a quarter of a tank of gas. He’d have to do something soon. Beatrice was crying in the backseat, but the blind woman was quiet now.
“Hold on, Lolly. It’ll be okay.” He didn’t believe it any more than she did.
Another barbed-wire fence. They crashed through like a bull on locoweed. What was this? A straight paved road, right in the middle of nowhere. Then he saw the wind sock, fluttering uselessly in the already hot air. A small airport.
He floored the gas pedal, pushing the old Mercedes up to a hundred right down the middle of the runway. In the distance, heat waves radiated off two metal hangars. A dozen small planes were tied down on the tarmac to the left of the buildings. He aimed for those and screeched to a halt beside an old orange and white airplane that was just beginning to taxi out.
Pickett leapt from the car and tore open the door of the idling aircraft. He couldn’t keep the gun steady against the pilot’s head, but the guy was spooked enough not to notice.
“Hey, c’mon man, what are you doing?” the pilot said, hands raised reflexively in surrender.
“You’re going to fly us out of here.” He turned back to the Mercedes. “Hurry up, Lolly, get her in the plane.” The flashing lights and sirens of the Highway Patrol vehicles raced down the runway toward them.
“We don’t need her anymore. You said it yourself. She’ll just slow us down.”
“I never leave things undone, Lolly. I promised you that.”
“I can’t take all you folks,” the pilot said, still maintaining a veneer of politeness although his face was white with fear. “We’ll never get off the ground.”
“The girls don’t weigh much,” Pickett said, helping Beatrice into the cockpit. He wormed his way into the rear compartment with her and then dragged the blind woman into the copilot’s seat by her wrists. That way he could keep an eye—and a weapon—on both hostages.
“Shut the door,” he told the pilot, who reached across his unwilling passenger to slam the right door shut. “Now go.”
The pilot, a man of about fifty in a clean white T-shirt and khaki shorts, tried again to abort the takeoff. “We’ll never make it past those cars on the runway. In this heat, with a heavy a load like this, we’ll need a lot more runway than we’ve got.”
“If we don’t make it, I’m putting a bullet right through the back of your head.” He knew he could do it. He’
d already killed for Lolly, and she’d killed for him, for their new life together. One more death—two—what did it matter?
The man gulped and pushed in the throttle. The plane responded with a shudder and began a fast taxi roll to the northeast. At the end of the runway he slued the plane around and turned back toward the southwest for takeoff.
Two Highway Patrol cars had skidded to a halt and parked nose to nose, halfway down the mile-long runway.
“Go!” Pickett pulled back the hammer of the gun in punctuation, hoping that he looked more at ease with the weapon than he felt.
The pilot nodded, stood on the brakes, and revved the engine as high as it would go. When he released the brakes, the little plane shot forward like a racehorse and barreled toward the waiting police. “Sixty…seventy…we’re not going to make it.” The man’s hands shook with the trembling of the yoke.
Pickett’s eyes widened as the patrol cars filled the windscreen. With only feet to spare, the pilot jerked the yoke to his chest and the nose of the plane began to rise.
“Damn good thing those cops ducked,” the pilot said.
Chapter 93
Dupree’s Crown Vic had kept pace with the dark Mercedes, paralleling it across the creosote-studded desert until he saw the tiny airport up ahead and cut across at an angle to intercept the car.
It hadn’t worked. He’d gone nose-down in a steep wash that he hadn’t seen coming, the grille buried in the sand and the rear wheels airborne and spinning. The Mercedes raced on ahead.
“Get your cars across the runway!” he thundered into the radio. “We’ve got to keep them from taking off!”
Nellis grabbed the binoculars and they scrambled up onto the roof of the car. The airport was more than a quarter of a mile away, and heat waves danced across their vision, blurring and watering the image so that it looked like a dream.
“See anything?” Dupree asked.
“They’re in the plane now. It’s coming this way.”
Dupree grabbed the binoculars to see for himself. The orange and white plane was moving quickly toward the end of the runway. A half dozen Highway Patrol vehicles and two unmarked cars were arrayed like scattered sugar cubes midway down the tarmac.
The plane started rolling toward them.
“Oh, please God, no,” was all Dupree could manage. He handed Nellis the lenses. “Did they make it?” he asked a moment later.
“Barely.”
Dupree had one more question. “Rich, when they made a break for the car, or when they were getting into the plane, did you see the little girl?”
Nellis’s silence gave him the answer he didn’t want.
Chapter 94
I shuddered along with the plane as we streaked down the runway. By the sound of it, we were at a small airport, no control tower, unless the pilot was too scared to even try picking up the radio to announce his departure.
His voice was tight but still calm. I hoped he knew what he was doing. What had Kevin said about hot weather takeoffs? How much extra runway would you need for a small plane like this?
I gasped when the nose of the plane rose into the sky, willing it to go higher, faster, to make sure we didn’t end up as a pile of smoldering spare parts at the end of the runway. We bumped into a sky full of summertime thermals, jostling the plane like a satanic fun house ride.
“My name’s John,” the pilot said. “John Anderson.” I applauded his calm and his attempt to ease the tension of the standoff. “I’ll take you wherever you want to go, but you’ve got to put that gun away.”
“Shut up and head south. We’re going to Mexico.”
The plane banked slightly to the left. “I’ll take you south, but I wouldn’t recommend Mexico. They’ve really beefed up the response to unidentified aircraft over the border. We have every chance of getting forced down by jet fighters, or just shot out of the sky. How about if I find some out-of-the-way landing strip and you all can take it from there?”
Keep him talking, Mr. Anderson.
“Lollipop, how you doing, honey?” The girl’s breathing was rapid and strained.
“Lolly, you okay?” I felt Pickett lean toward her to say it this time. Again no response. “You hang in there.”
I wondered if the girl was injured. Maybe afraid of flying? Or maybe the killings, the car chase, the sense of desperation had all become too much.
Suddenly the plane plunged down and to the right in a steep spiral. The sound of grunts and fists landing on soft flesh, the whine as the engine revved and the nose of the plane turned farther down.
“Gerald! He’s going for your gun!” Beatrice shouted, coming out of her hyperventilated trance.
Two shots! The smell of cordite and blood. Moaning from beside me.
“What’s happening?” I screamed.
The pilot gave a wet, gurgling breath.
I lunged sideways, my bound hands mapping the slumped shoulders of the pilot in the seat next to me. “Is he still alive? Pickett! Is the pilot still alive?”
From Pickett, a whistled intake of air through gritted teeth. From the pilot, nothing but a soft moan and a gush of blood from the chest.
The plane continued to spiral down.
“Hold him straight back in the seat,” I ordered Pickett. I pushed the pilot’s body back from his slumped position, knowing that if he let go of the yoke, the plane would at least return to horizontal flight instead of the death plunge the pilot had put us in. A moment later, the nose came up and the plane leveled off.
“I’m sorry, Bea. I’m so sorry. It wasn’t supposed to end like this. I love you, Lollipop.”
I gave silent thanks to whatever God there was that Teresa wasn’t in the plane with us. And that this plane had dual controls like Kevin’s did.
Flexing my knee, I foot-tapped around me on the floor to trap the jittering rudders and gasped at the pain when the wound on my knee reopened. I placed my hands on the yoke and tried to swallow the bile that rose in my throat at the thought of what I had to do.
“Pickett, I’m going to need some help up here.”
“Fuck you.” A teenager’s all-purpose snarled retort, and one of my favorites as well. Nice to know we had something in common.
“You help me right now or I let this plane fly itself.”
Pickett leaned forward into the tiny space between me and the pilot, his breathing shallow and rank with his disease. Then he slumped into unconsciousness, head wedged between my shoulder and the side of the seat.
“Gerald! Wake up, wake up!” Beatrice wailed. Soon her cries descended into wordless ululations, broken by tears.
I explored Pickett with my bound hands and found a sticky, wet mass of clothing and torn flesh on his torso. He’d taken a bullet in the stomach.
Somehow, that didn’t make the situation any better. A dying pilot, a gut-shot murderer, a catatonic teenager, and a blind lady in an airplane. It sounded like the setup to a very bad joke. God couldn’t have made my last moments any more ridiculous if he’d tried.
“Pickett, get this tape off me!” I stretched my hands in his direction, but there was no response. I ripped the tape off with my teeth for a second time.
“Pickett!” I yelled again, jostling him with my elbow. I needed him awake and alert. “What does this dial say? This one right here.” I pointed at the Plexiglas cover to the instrument panel. “Does it look like a watch, and the numbers go from zero to nine?” The plane felt familiar to me. If it wasn’t exactly the same model of Cessna I’d practiced flying, it was at least a kissing cousin to it. Maybe a 172 if it had rear seats. I hoped I was pointing to the altimeter.
No response from Pickett, but Beatrice leaned over my shoulder. “It says four o’clock. And the one that looks like a second hand on a watch is stuck on zero.”
Her response was almost childlike. I couldn’t let her retreat any farther into physical and emotional withdrawal; I needed her eyes. But her description meant we were at four thousand feet. We might be okay for a little while.
“Beatrice! Look around, tell me if you see any mountains anywhere.” I hoped to hell she wasn’t going to say yes. She took her time, leaning from one side of the plane to the other. Sweat ran between my breasts.
“The two tallest ones are one behind the other, way off over here”—she pointed past my right ear—“and there’s a littler one behind us.” I wondered if she’d ever flown before, if she understood the perspective I was asking for. In any case, I thought we’d be all right for the moment.
Pickett roused himself, leaning forward between the seats and fumbling around on the floor of the aircraft. A moment later, he jammed his newly recovered gun into my ribs. “South. We’re going to Mexico,” he grunted with pain.
“Sure thing, boss.” I turned the plane to the right, having no idea at all where south was but hoping that he didn’t either. Two minutes later, when I tried to turn back to the left, he jabbed me again. “Straight. Go straight.”
If the gas tank on the plane had been full when we started, we could fly straight to Utah, east Texas, or the Pacific Ocean before we fell out of the sky. Or we could be shot by overzealous Homeland Security defenders as we crossed into Mexico.
Maybe I could keep us close to the cops who were looking for us. I reached for the radio. Pickett lunged forward, smashing the gun on my outstretched fingers.
“What the fuck was that for?” I said. “The Border Patrol will shoot us down unless I radio who we are.”
“No radio.” He ripped the mike from the instrument panel.
We weren’t going to make it. Sure, I could keep a plane flying straight and level, but, like the aviation-loving terrorists in Florida, I’d never learned to land one. Without help from a radioed Mayday—and even then I wasn’t sure they could talk a blind person through a safe landing—as soon as we ran out of gas, we were going to crash into the empty desert like a hurled stone.
Chapter 95
The plane had been gone for almost a half hour.
“Did you get through to the Mexican Air Force?” Nellis asked.