“Jesus!” Lansing said, sitting back into the corner formed by the wall and the back of the booth. He looked at Peterson, who was looking back at him.
“So he would have had no trouble getting his hands on some dynamite and rigging your car to take you out so it wouldn’t look connected to what happened to Coleman or Magruder,” Peterson said, turning to me as he came to the same conclusion to which logic and intuition already had taken me. “He would know exactly how to do it.”
“Call me crazy,” I told them, “but my gut tells me Dell Curl has killed three people trying to protect Henry Bryant’s nomination and that he still wants to kill me. Originally, it was because he thought I could identify him from the park. But now, I expect he’s looking for me out there somewhere because I called Judge Bryant up and started asking about this so-called loan. Which tells them I’ve picked up the old trail that they almost had managed to wipe out.”
I looked over at Lansing, who was giving me a measuring look in return.
“What?” I asked.
“Oh, I was just thinking that you probably were one of those kids who felt compelled to poke every hornet’s nest you saw, just to see how much you could stir the hornets up.”
* * * *
I ate a few bites of my salad and then took a bathroom break. By the time I came back to the booth, Peterson and Lansing were in agreement on what they needed to do.
“Jim is going to call Detective Moore and fill the Alexandria P.D. in on this,” Lansing explained to me when I sat back down. “Moore says they haven’t made much progress yet, and this might give them something that could break things open for them.”
“And,” Peterson added, “I think it’s time for another powwow between them and us. If this Curl guy really is a suspect in all three cases, there’s no point in us tripping over each other while we all look in the same places. I’ll try to get us together with Moore and his people some time tomorrow or first thing Monday morning at the latest.”
He slid out of the booth and reached into his jacket pocket for his wallet. I put my purse up on the table and began to get my own wallet out.
“This is on me,” Peterson told me, waving at my purse in a gesture that said to put it away. “You didn’t have that much, anyway.”
“Then I’ll have to leave the tip,” I told him, standing up as well and moving to one side to let Lansing out of the booth. “We’re not supposed to accept freebies from the people we cover. After all, I can’t have you thinking you can buy me off, especially not for that little bit of money.”
Why worry about that when certain people you cover can have you for free?
“Suit yourself,” Peterson said, shaking his head and walking toward the cash register that sat on one end of the back counter. I ignored my interior critic, got out three one-dollar bills, and put them on the table.
“After this conversation, you’re definitely coming back to the house tonight, aren’t you?” Lansing asked as we walked over to the door and waited for Peterson.
“If I said no, it would just be another argument, wouldn’t it?”
“Big time,” Lansing agreed.
“All right, I’ll come back,” I said finally, “but I’m running out of clean clothes. I have to go back to the apartment and pick some stuff up.”
“Then I’ll ride over with you. I’ll leave the Explorer here and we’ll come back this way afterward and get it.”
“Do you really think that’s necessary?” I asked him, a little petulantly, no more fond now of the idea of needing to have my hand held all the time than I was before. “I’ve seen no signs of anybody following me at any point.”
“That doesn’t mean a thing,” he said. “With your change of cars, your trip to Florida, and spending time at my place, whoever is after you may have had a hard time tracking you down. But he’s going to catch up with you sooner or later, and your apartment is one logical place to do it. So just humor me and let me tag along.”
“Fine,” I said, “be my guest.”
Peterson joined us at the door, and we went through it and out to the parking lot.
“I’ll call you as soon as I’m able to reach Moore,” Peterson said to Lansing, opening the door to his car and climbing in. “I’ll let you know when we need to get together.”
“I’ll be there,” Lansing told him. Peterson closed his door and started the car. As I walked over to my rental car, with Lansing right behind me, and unlocked the doors, Peterson drove past us in a U-turn that would take him out of the parking lot.
Lansing opened the passenger’s side door and let himself in. I did the same on the driver’s side.
“I’m surprised,” I said to him sarcastically when I put the key into the ignition, “that you didn’t insist on driving, too.”
“I’m not saying the idea didn’t occur to me,” he responded, grinning, “but I wanted to live long enough to get you back to my place, and I figured if I broached that subject, you’d kill me.”
I wouldn’t know until later just how ironic that little exchange was about to become.
Twenty-five
Although I had noticed Lansing readjusting the sideview mirror next to him as we pulled out of the parking lot onto eastbound Little River Turnpike, I hadn’t said anything. But within a few blocks, it became clear that he was watching the traffic behind us. Even though I recently had developed a similar habit of my own, in hindsight, I suppose I felt free to tease him because his presence in the car made me feel safe. Of course, we all know what they say about hindsight. At any rate, after several minutes of watching him watching everyone else, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut any longer.
“Seen any killers back there yet?” I asked as we approached the overpass that spans I-495, and he looked into the mirror for the umpteenth time.
“As a matter of fact,” Lansing said, turning in my direction with a serious expression, “I am keeping my eyes on a couple of cars that have been back there since we left the shopping center. It doesn’t hurt to be aware of what’s going on around you, especially when somebody is trying to kill you.”
“Well,” I told him, “if you see anybody hanging out a window with a stick of dynamite in his hand, let me know.”
Lansing looked back in the mirror again.
“Looks like at least one of them has decided you’re going too slow,” he said, giving me a play-by-play now. “It’s a black Chevy Suburban, coming up on your left.”
I glanced into my rearview mirror but only in time to catch the corner of some large dark vehicle disappearing into my blind spot. Looking ahead again, I took my foot off the accelerator in reaction to the slowing of cars in front of me that were taking the first ramp to the right onto southbound I-495. As the car immediately ahead cleared my lane, I accelerated slightly again and looked to my left as something hulking moved just into the edge of my peripheral vision. As I turned my head in its direction to eyeball the vehicle Lansing initially had thought might be suspicious, the Suburban veered suddenly and rammed my much smaller Pontiac on my front quarter-panel. That was all it took.
At the Suburban’s unexpected movement in my direction, I instinctively had turned my wheel to the right, trying to get out of its path. But the impact of the much heavier vehicle against the car’s side jerked the steering wheel in my hand even more to the right, adding to the momentum I already had given it toward the edge of the highway. It was more than I could correct for in the second in which it all happened. As Lansing shouted my name, we went off the road, taking out a section of the guardrail that extended up to the overpass.
In the expanded time that such moments bring, there was first what seemed like a long stretch of silence as the car hurtled out into groundless space above the steep, tree studded embankment that dropped down to the level of the interstate highway below. It was as awful as my worst dreams of falling, the kind where you know you’re going to hit the ground hard, after a long, sickening drop. Then the car nosed down and began turning in a sideways r
oll until it struck the ground on Lansing’s front corner with a loud whump. The force of the impact righted the car so that it didn’t roll over after all. Instead, it dissipated the rest of its momentum with a furious sideways slide into a tree, against which it came to a halt with a second jarring crash to the passenger’s side.
In the three or four seconds it must have taken from when the Suburban hit us until we hit the tree, the observer part of my brain not only had time to watch us falling to what I thought had to be our deaths, but also to conclude that perhaps I should have let Lansing drive after all, that in my arrogance, I had managed to deprive David of the only parent he had left.
Once the car stopped moving, the instinct-driven part of my brain that was still in charge began yelling at me that we had to get out of the car quickly, in case it caught fire. I turned to Lansing to tell him that and saw that he was slumped over in his seat, held upright only by his shoulder strap, with blood pouring from some sort of ugly wound on the side of his forehead where it rested against the large, spiderweb pattern of cracks that now crazed the window next to him. It was obvious that Lansing wasn’t going anywhere under his own power.
In a panic, I unfastened my own seatbelt and then reached over to unfasten his, which succeeded only in letting him slump completely down into the passenger’s seat, still unconscious, and leaving an ugly smear of blood down the window. His door was pinned shut against the tree trunk. I tried to pull him toward me, but his dead weight, combined with the canted angle at which the car rested on the steep slope, defeated me. In frustration, I looked out the hole where my own window once had been, hoping that some of the drivers who had seen what had happened might have stopped to help.
What I saw, instead, was the Suburban backing into view up on the shoulder of the road above us and then stopping. In a second, the driver came around the back and began a sliding descent down the side of the embankment toward us. The driver, I saw, was Dell Curl, and as he came in our direction, he pulled out a gun. With which he obviously planned to finish the job on me, and with which he also probably would kill Lansing.
It wasn’t my own life I saw flashing before my eyes, although I do remember being angry that I was going to die just as it looked like I might have found somebody to spend at least a large part of that life with. Instead, it was David’s life I saw, and his future. A future without his mother or his father. I saw him and his father again in the kitchen, with David happily stirring the pot of spaghetti under Lansing’s supervision, and I knew I couldn’t let that be taken away from him.
There was only one thing to do. Expecting Curl to start firing at us at any moment, I reached over to get the gun Lansing wore. It took a second of struggling to pull it out of the holster since Lansing’s weight was pressing against it, but I finally managed it. I said a prayer of thanks for the story I had done the year before on the firearms training that area police receive. My hours at the firing range with several Fairfax County Police officers meant that I now knew at least enough to find the safety and flip it off so the 9 mm pistol would fire. With the gun in my hand, I turned back toward my window while still trying to shield Lansing’s body with my own.
Later, when I had time to run the movie through my head again, I decided that Curl’s delay in shooting at us could have been due to one of several things. His footing coming down most of the steep embankment probably was too precarious for him to try to fire at us and keep his balance. Or, perhaps because Lansing and I both were slumped down in the front seats, Curl had to get much closer to us to see if we were still alive. Or he might not have trusted his aim from farther away. Whatever it was, when I turned back toward my window, Curl had made it within thirty feet of the car and was coming fast. Regardless of what had kept him from shooting at us until now, I thought, he certainly was about to see, if he hadn’t already, that at least one of us was alive and conscious. And that would be it for me. I knew that that split second was the only chance I had.
I sat up abruptly, gripping the gun in both hands and holding it straight out in front of me. My movement apparently took Curl by surprise and he faltered for a second in his effort to stop his forward motion and raise his own gun. Aiming as best I could at Curl’s middle, rather than going for anything fancy such as trying to shoot him in the head (another bit of advice for civilians that the police had given me), I pulled the trigger. And I kept pulling the trigger, shooting until the gun would no longer fire.
The observer part of my mind noticed the noise as one bullet after another exploded out of the gun’s barrel, saw the blue flame, followed by the puffs of dust that shot up from the embankment behind Curl as most of the bullets went wide, and by the smell of cordite. That part noted the gun’s kick in my hands and took note of the red splotches that blossomed on Curl’s body, first on his left arm and then on his abdomen. It also registered the look of surprise in Curl’s eyes when the first of the two bullets that I later was told had found their target, hit him. But the other part of my mind, the part that didn’t want to die, the part that had decided I wasn’t going to die or let Curl kill Lansing without putting up a fight, all that part knew was to hold onto Lansing’s gun for all I was worth and to keep shooting until Curl either killed me or I shot him.
Even then, it wasn’t over. Though Curl didn’t seem to be moving, and though his gun was lying beside him on the ground where it had dropped from his hand at some point, I knew I couldn’t take a chance that he would manage to retrieve his gun and get up from where he lay. I had to get the gun out of his reach.
I tried to open the car door, but it was jammed shut, apparently by the force of the accident. Holding Lansing’s now-empty gun as nothing more than a visual threat, I crawled uphill out the empty window instead, still trying to keep my eyes on the unmoving Curl who lay in a rapidly spreading pool of blood on the grass and bush-covered embankment. Still in the grip of my adrenaline but made clumsy by my fear, I more or less fell out the window, dropping Lansing’s gun in the process. I scooped it back up and in a thoroughly inelegant crawling and stumbling motion, crossed the few feet of ground to where Curl lay, and kicked his gun away from his hand. Then, scrambling to one side after it, I snatched it up and backed rapidly away in the same awkward manner until I bumped into the car behind me. From my half crouch, I reached up my right forearm and draped it over the windowsill, then levered myself into a standing position.
And then my legs turned to water and gave out from under me. I slid back down the side of the car to sit down hard on the ground. Above me, several people, who probably had stopped to help when they saw the accident, were standing in a row, apparently frozen in their tracks at the sight of the wrecked car against the tree and the clearly crazed woman who was sitting in the middle of all of it with a gun in each hand and a body at her feet.
I put the guns down on the ground, but not so far away that I couldn’t retrieve Curl’s gun if he showed any signs of reviving.
“Call 911,” I shouted up to the people on the hill, though I wasn’t certain just how loudly my voice carried. “Get us some help. And get the police.”
One man broke away from the group and ran toward his car. No one else moved, probably reluctant to come down the hill for fear their own lives might be in danger, in their uncertainty over exactly what it was that had taken place below them. Curl lay unmoving as well, though his blood continued to pour out. Inside the car, I heard Lansing groan once and then go silent again. At least, I thought, he isn’t dead, although God only knew what kind of shape he was in. I sat where I was, trying to look the car over and detect any sights, sounds, or smells of gasoline or fire. It would be the height of irony, I thought, if the car exploded and killed me, given that that was what Curl had intended for me from the first. But the car showed no signs of leaking fuel or of fire, and for that I was grateful, since I wasn’t certain I could stand up again, even if I’d had to.
Don’t you know you’re supposed to avoid direct involvement in your stories? Obviously, my obnoxi
ous little friend had survived the accident as well.
Don’t you know, I asked in return as the last of the adrenaline began to drain away and my hands started to shake, that I still have a loaded gun here?
Later
Twenty-six
The only thing I wanted to know when the first cops showed up was whether Dell Curl was going to get up and try again to kill me.
“Is he dead? Is he dead?” I kept asking over the orders and questions the cops were shouting to me as they came down the embankment with their guns drawn. At Curl’s body, one of them reached down long enough to check for a pulse and tell me that yes, Curl was dead.
The question I should have been asking—and eventually did, once Lansing and I made it to the trauma center at Fairfax Hospital and the doctors concluded from the CAT scan that he had a concussion rather than a fractured skull—was how Curl had managed to find me at Joe’s Hole in the Wall Café.
I had watched my rearview mirror religiously all the way out to Fairfax from the District, and while I didn’t claim to be as good at picking up a potential tail as Lansing, I was certain I would have noticed something as large and distinctive as the black Suburban if it had been behind me all the way out to the shopping center. But I didn’t remember seeing it even once.
“So how,” I asked Rob Perry on the phone as soon as I could get a moment alone on my emergency room stretcher to get my cell phone out of my purse and determine that it was still in working order, “did Curl know where I was going to be? We’re not talking about one of the in places, you understand.”
“Who besides me knew you were going out there?” Rob asked. He had been willing to change the subject from the question of my physical condition only after I had my nurse come in and confirm that I basically was uninjured, except for bruises and scrapes, from which, she said, I could expect to be sore as hell the next day.
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