Cut and Run

by Ridley Pearson

  The younger man who’d found her burst through the door, a look of panic in his eyes. “Boss?”

  Now she heard gunfire as well-short handclaps and staccato pops through the window that sounded nothing like she thought they should.

  Philippe was frozen, picturing his guests on the first floor panicking at the sound of small weapons fire and fleeing for their cars.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  “Hang on, guys,” Larson told the two children, the first bursts of light bouncing off the low clouds up by the manor house. It reminded him of the Fourth of July, of festive holidays and drinking too much. Weak and faint from the loss of blood, his every wound stinging unmercifully from the salt of his sweat, Larson looked and felt far worse off than he was. Most of the cuts were shallow, none life-threatening, and yet he felt himself fading fast.

  Penny rode bareback in front, gripping the mane. The boy-Adam, he’d finally told Larson his name-held fast around Penny’s waist, a stranger to horses. Larson led the quarter horse by the halter, first at a walk, then a trot, following a westbound trail. He’d discovered a laminated map of the compound’s trail system posted outside the tack room and followed it now in his head. There were three major forks he would face-two rights and a left-in order to reach the estate’s western boundary. It was there he was to rendezvous with SPD, although he wasn’t ruling out seeing Rotem himself. Hamp and Stubby would be sights for sore eyes. But being with Hope and Penny together was all that mattered now.

  With the detonation of the ordnance, he believed Hope’s chances greatly diminished. With the compound now under attack, any extra baggage would be dealt with quickly. He might have believed her already dead had it not been for the second message from the BlackBerry:

  MM, 3rd Fl.

  Meriden Manor, Third Floor. It had arrived just before the first explosions. It at least gave him faint hope that she’d escaped or had bought herself time.

  “Firefly!” he heard from behind him.

  Two black-clad SWAT operatives converged on Larson from behind. One took the horse’s reins from him. The other, wielding a semiautomatic rifle, continued sweeping the surroundings, forward and back in constant motion.

  “As far away as possible,” Larson instructed, “as quickly as you can.”

  “Copy that.”

  He reached up and touched Penny’s small hand. “You’re doing great,” he said.

  “But where’s Mommy?” she said. The two kids had held up amazingly well, Penny a leader throughout.

  “I’m gonna go get her,” Larson said.

  The SWAT guy took off at a jog, leading the horse. The kids hung on.

  Larson turned back down the trail, and started to run.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  LaMoia waited at the estate’s back gate, waited for the driver of the Navigator to climb out and unlock it. He waited for the exact moment the man inserted the key into the padlock and twisted. Waited for the lock to pop open and the man to remove it and the chain from the gate.

  Then he stepped out of shadow and calmly announced, “Police.”

  The driver jerked from the surprise and reached for a weapon. From just over three feet away, LaMoia squeezed the trigger and blew the man’s kneecap away. As the driver spun around, screamed, and fell to the ground, LaMoia saw someone inside lunge from the backseat up into the driver’s seat. He could have fired on the man, but until a gun came out either window, he had a better option.

  Instead, he counted silently in his head-singing, actually-to exercise the proper patience. Right when the man slipped in behind the wheel, LaMoia fired repeated rounds directly at the car’s front bumper. One, two, three, four… With the fifth round, he hit the G spot and the front airbags deployed, inflating and snapping the driver’s head and body back into the seat like a sixteen-ounce glove on the fist of Muhammad Ali.

  He strode forward then, the gun trained right into the face of the would-be driver, ready to send the first person who twitched to his Maker.

  He tore the driver’s door open, not seeing the woman in the far back until the interior lights came on. That one needed medical attention. He might drive her himself-the Navigator was a nice ride.

  He recognized the man behind the wheel as Ricardo Romero. He’d been doing his homework.

  “Sorry,” LaMoia said. “Road closed.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

  Larson had no craving to run headlong into a firefight, but he accepted it as a necessary evil as he chugged uphill with a pronounced limp.

  He reached a gridlock of confusion as a stable of black vehicles battled for position. One car backed up onto the grass and shot off in twin rooster tails of mud. Another followed. Both came within a matter of feet of Larson, nearly running him over, yet no one bothered with him. Perhaps no one saw him. Perhaps he wasn’t there. Maybe he’d died beneath the double-wide and was now living out a final fantasy that was nowhere but in his head.

  Rotem had orchestrated quite the show. To look at it, to hear it, one would think a hundred agents had stormed the compound, when Larson knew it had to be many, many fewer. Lacking any organized defense, shots were returned sporadically, with many of the estate’s guards already apparently AWOL.

  Amid this hellfire, Larson made directly for the mansion’s front door. Once inside, he left behind what looked, smelled, and sounded like a small war and entered a world of opulence and grandeur. In their seclusion within this estate, the Romeros and others had spared little expense.

  He glimpsed himself in the entranceway’s oversize, gilded mirror, wondering at the walking horror there, and turning away from it. He didn’t recognize himself. His sleeves and pant legs shredded, blood darkening even the black windbreaker he wore, Larson entered the grand staircase and climbed, his legs dragging, barely willing to cooperate, unmoved by the desperation that drove him.

  He marched toward the third floor, another man’s gun in hand.

  The lack of electricity was no doubt Rotem’s doing. Close to the manor house now, several percussive stun grenades exploded, rattling windows and shaking the foundation. Designed to throw shock waves meant to rupture sinuses and puncture eardrums inside enclosed spaces, the use of the grenades outside, where they were less effective but impressive as pyrotechnics, smacked of Hampton and Stubblefield and his squad’s methods of overwhelming a fugitive prior to a final strike.

  The harsh white light from those flares burned through windows and lit the upstairs hallways. He climbed beneath the ostentation of a dozen portraits of jowly old men looking proudly officious with their golf clubs.

  In the distance now, the first whine of approaching sirens. Backup. A stupid tactic, given Hope’s captivity. The sirens would panic Hope’s captors and shorten her life considerably. If she wasn’t dead already.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

  The man held her in a one-armed necklock, swinging first toward the room’s windows and then the door, back and forth like a drunken dancer.

  It sounded like Normandy Beach out there.

  His words muddled, he spoke aloud for the sake of hearing himself reason. “All this time of wanting you dead for what it is you claim to know…” A half minute or so passed before he completed the thought. “… and here you are, more valuable to me alive.”

  She knew better than to try to speak, for each time she opened her mouth he cinched down harder on her windpipe and drove her toward unconsciousness. In these brief few minutes under siege, Hope had come to understand that she would not die the overpowered victim. Though overpowered, she playacted now, offering no physical resistance while she searched for opportunity, the tendrils of her training as a protected witness creeping back into her consciousness. Elbows. The heels of her feet. The opponent’s groin. His windpipe. She’d been told it took less than twenty pounds of upward pressure to tear a human ear away from the head, to grip it by the lobe and work it like a stuck zipper. Flooded with such thoughts, her mind had reached an uneasy calm, where time and sound and action s
eemed to slow, and during which time confidence grew in her. She had come this far on her own.

  You shouldn’t have let me live, she thought.

  Her moment came sooner than she’d expected, and when it arrived she knew it, she saw it as a gift, and she had no intention of allowing it to pass. It came as a one-two punch. First, a blinding flash, much more vivid, more present than what had come before. A ball of light so bright it flooded the room in a bluish tint that went beyond pure white. This was followed, nearly instantaneously, by a concussive sound wave that found its way deep inside her bones while shattering two of the windows and cracking the third. Glass rained down, sounding like a waiter’s misfortune. Hope rocked forward, using her bottom as a fulcrum, and then snapped to attention, catching the man’s jaw with the crown of her skull. She spun to her right, away from the elbow that clamped down on her throat and broke the viselike grip, never hesitating for a moment as she sped to the first of the shattered windows and paused only long enough to clear the jagged mouth of broken glass that rimmed the now-lopsided frame. She went out through that window like a hurdler, one leg stretched before the other, bent over toward her extended thigh like a diver, three stories up and falling, arms flailing now as she saw the two Dumpsters slightly to her left and realized she’d misjudged and chosen the wrong window. But no matter, she was free of him, in freefall, hands out swirling like a teenager leaping from a high rock into the pristine lake below. Her lake was asphalt, and her landing, horrific.

  In total disbelief, Philippe watched his one remaining negotiating tool fly out the window like Peter Pan. The sheer nerve of her jumping out the window-an act he could never have done himself-so pissed him off that he ran to the open wall, leaned out, and trained the gun down on the collapsed and broken form below. He fired off a round, not seeing well enough amid the smoke and confusion to have much of an aim, and then fired again. Missed with both. He sighted more carefully this time, determined to end this, finding the bead and locking it onto her sprawled frame.

  Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a red firefly light onto his chest, his first reaction, like anyone’s who spots a bee or wasp on their person, to swat it off. But it did not fly, for it was no insect. His last thought was recognition of what it was: a sharpshooter’s laser sight creating a red circle at the center of his chest.

  And then, a hole. A ripping and shredding as a large-caliber-rifle slug exited a cavity five times larger than it entered.

  Philippe was thrown back off his feet as if struck by a truck, arms out to his sides, on the bed of broken glass that jumped around him like sparkling fairies on the floor.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

  As Larson arrived at the far end of the upstairs hallway, he heard two shots exceptionally close. Bam… bam… the sound of an execution. He arrived at a door and kicked it in, gun extended, only to see a well-dressed man lying dead in a sea of broken glass. Not bleeding, eyes open, and dead.

  He might have moved on had he not seen the blue plastic of his smashed BlackBerry on the carpet in front of an empty overstuffed chair.

  He checked closets. He spun around in the center of the room, convinced she was here. And then his mind reassembled the shattered windows, the dead guy in the tailored clothes killed where he was, and Larson rushed to get a look outside.

  If his mind had been free of emotion, if he’d been able to clinically abstract how it was that this man could lie dead on the floor, he never would have approached the open window. But he was desperate for her now, and he knew without knowing, understood without any evidence whatsoever, that Hope had jumped.

  He saw her there down on the asphalt, writhing in the pain of broken bones. And she saw him as well, just before it happened. He made that connection with her, somehow eye to eye, or perhaps heart to heart, from that great distance, the Glock in his right hand.

  A red bead lit his jacket. Like a firefly.

  His head snapped up to face the edgy sharpshooter somewhere out in all that darkness, and then… the heat of a bee sting, and the world went silent.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

  The sound of applause. Ethereal. Or the beating of wings. The swirling white lights of angels, and a heavenly chorus rising like a whine. Then, blackness broken by a flickering gray wind and the faces of red pulsing demons all looking down at him. He, the center of attention, the focal point. It was how he’d imagined it might be, all but the strained faces of Hampton, Stubblefield, and Rotem glaring down at him like he’d done something wrong.

  “Leave me alone,” he wanted to say. “Let me die in peace.”

  If this was death, it felt anything but peaceful.

  “He caught the insignia.” It was Rotem, shouting above the roar of the Bell jet helicopter-for that turned out to be the source of the wind and the drumming applause and the flashing red lights. The white spotlights came from the news choppers high overhead.

  “Their sharpie caught the insignia on your jacket.” Rotem pointed out the white Fraternal Order of Police insignia on the chest of Larson’s borrowed windbreaker.

  “Just as he fired, he jerked,” Hampton shouted. “Took your collarbone and a piece of your shoulder, but left you your heart.”

  They had oxygen on him and intravenous in his arms. He tried to speak but could find neither the breath nor the ability to form any words. It was as if he were in someone else’s body and didn’t know the right controls.

  The paramedics hoisted him up and passed him off to their colleagues in the helicopter.

  “We’re right behind you,” he heard Hampton shout.

  Larson felt his stretcher turned and placed down. A flurry of hands in thin plastic gloves rose above him as straps were pulled across him and tightened. If only he’d been able to ask, someone might have been able to answer, and so he tried again, his lips unwilling to cooperate, his brain a tangle of life-after-death and prayer and penance. An incomprehensible moment.

  The red and white lights still flashed rhythmically, the only real things convincing him he might indeed be alive. How much a dream? How much wishful thinking?

  And then he knew it had to be a dream, for as it turned out, the helicopter was made to carry two, not one. Two stretchers side by side with overhead stainless-steel hooks for the bags of intravenous fluid. There beside him she lay, her eyes open and moving to find his, which absolutely meant she must, too, be alive, or they were both dead and somehow sharing this moment, which wouldn’t have surprised him at all.

  He saw on her legs inflated splints, and in her eyes a loving-kindness that confirmed in him this must be heaven, and he didn’t mind a bit.

  Finally words did come, or at least he heard himself speak, and he would wonder in the days and weeks and months to come if he’d actually said anything to her. “She has your eyes,” he said.

  Her hand twitched, its fingers stretched at the end of an arm bound by nylon straps. It reached for him, for his, and he too pushed with all his strength to move his index finger toward her. Her eyes brimmed with tears, which rolled down her cheeks, clearing tracks through the smudged dirt on her face.

  Their fingers did not touch, only wiggled out in space toward each other as the helicopter shook and rattled and thundered as it lifted off. Larson tried to force the snarl of pain into something resembling a smile but didn’t know if it took.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

  Larson pulled on the oars, working the stubborn tissue and tightness in his left shoulder to the point of pain, and then backing off to where it was manageable.

  There was something about Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The smell, maybe, or the darkness of the water. The way the forest crept right to the edge of both the mainland and the island, the trees reflected like tall soldiers.

  There were bugs in the air and the smells of early summer-the perfume of fruit blossoms carried on winter’s freshened air spilling out of Canada. He heard a red-winged blackbird’s sprightly, lilting song, heard the rhythm of the oars carving into and scooping the
lake’s mirrored surface, heard her joyous squeal and the thrashing of her feet on the island trail as she endeavored to keep pace with him. Penny was a fast little runner.

  He looked to see her blond hair bouncing, her smart little body sprinting the trail in a pair of pink shorts and a white T-top. White sneakers and socks her mother had mail-ordered.

  “Break… fast!” she called across to him when she knew he was looking.

  He met her at the dock and she helped him stow the scull in the old boathouse and wipe down the oars and rigging. She told him of a dream she’d had in the night, spoken in one continuous monologue-of princesses and magic potions, and trees that could talk-that lasted from the boathouse clear up the trail to the sprawling log cabin known only as Baby’s Breath. As they approached the back deck, buttoned down with tubs of recently planted annuals, Hope was there to greet them, a pair of binoculars in hand. Larson slowed as he saw her. Penny rushed past, drawn by the scent of cooking bacon. Hope was clearly distressed.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “The launch,” she said, pointing at the white dot of a distant boat approaching. Beyond it, the steady green of the mainland. Through the binoculars the launch carried a distinctive bright-blue flag. Hope knew of what she was speaking: The rules were strict concerning the waters around this island. “You ordered it, or it wouldn’t be coming here.”

  “Yes,” he answered, “I called for it. But I’m not going anywhere. It’s not like that. Come with me?”

  Rotem had convinced Larson and Hope to remain in protection through not only the trial of Ricardo Romero, but his sentencing as well. With the trial now less than ninety days away, pressure from Justice remained high for them to maintain the “zero profile” they’d kept over the past few months. The man driving the launch was on the federal payroll.