Shoot Don't Shoot

by J. A. Jance

  Realizing the man was somewhat disturbed, Joanna had tried to drop off her literature and leave. At the prospect of her walking away, however, the man had become highly agitated. Jim Bob had gone on to two more houses before he realized Joanna was still stuck at the first one. He had come back to retrieve her. Between the two of them, Jim Bob and Joanna had effected a reasonably graceful exit.

  From then on, however, a rubbed earlobe had meant that whoever Joanna was involved with at the time was trouble in one way or another. In addition to the tugged earlobe, both the Bradys and Joanna knew that Andy had served a two-year hitch in the army—not the navy.

  “Is that so?” Jim Bob put down his packages and then offered a hand to Larry Dysart in greeting. “Did you say navy? Glad to meet you, Larry,” Jim Bob said, then the old man turned and focused his eyes on Joanna’s face.

  A dismayed Eva Lou looked back and forth between them, but she was familiar enough with the Willcox story to say nothing and follow her husband’s lead.

  “And what did you do in the navy?” Jim Bob asked cordially, sitting down and leaning back as if settling in for a genial chat. “Andy was involved in communications.”

  “Me, too,” Larry said. “That’s how Andy and I met.”

  The lie seemed to come easily. He played along, all the while looking daggers at Joanna with the same hard-edged stare he had used on Leann Jessup at the end of the candlelight vigil.

  “Anyone care for a drink?” a cocktail waitress asked.

  “Sure,” Jim Bob said. “If you don’t mind, the wife and I will join you. We’ll both have coffee, black.”

  “You’d better get back to your friend on the phone,” Larry said. “She’ll think you’ve forgotten all about her. Tell her to come here and we’ll talk.”

  Joanna walked back to the phone. “What took you so long?” Carol demanded.

  “My in-laws showed up. They’re sitting there chatting with us. They’ve ordered coffee.”

  “Get rid of them,” Carol said, repeating verbatim the same thing Larry had said. “I’ve called for backup. The SWAT team is gearing up, but it’ll take a little while to get everybody in place. They’ll take up strategic positions outside the hotel. Cars should be on the scene within two minutes. I told them no lights, no sirens. Nobody’s to try going inside until I give the word, and I’m leaving my office now. Can you tell if he’s armed?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t tell for sure, but most likely.”

  “That’s my guess, too. Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good girl. Hang in there, Joanna. Believe me, everybody here’s on top of this thing. We’re getting a search warrant for both his house and vehicle. And don’t worry. No matter what happens, we’ll find those girls.”

  “You’d better,” Joanna said, but it was a hollow threat, fueled by desperation and hopelessness and nothing else.

  25

  Joanna hung up the phone and started back toward the congenial-looking group gathered in front of the poinsettia-banked fireplace. As she walked, the physical weight of the Colt under her jacket was almost as heavy as the terrible weight of responsibility pressing against her heart.

  This time it was no dream. Wide awake now, she was back in her worst shoot/don’t shoot nightmare—with Jenny in danger and with people she loved sitting directly in the line of fire. Carol Strong and her backup officers were riding to the rescue, but none of them knew this lobby layout as well as Joanna did. And if Dysart caught a glimpse of cops taking up positions outside, he might turn a gaily decorated hotel lobby into a killing zone.

  While Joanna had been on the phone, a school bus had pulled up outside the hotel entrance. Now with whoops of laughter, a crowd of thirty or so teenagers, all of them carrying luggage, swarmed into the lobby. At the sight of all those kids, something came together in Joanna’s heart—an urgency and a determination that hadn’t been there before. As a police officer and as a parent, she had a moral obligation to do something to prevent a gun battle from erupting in a room packed with other people’s innocent children. Ready or not, the way to do that was to stop the battle before it ever had a chance to start.

  Joanna was almost back at her chair when the cocktail waitress arrived carrying cups, saucers, and a pot of coffee on a tray. Seeing an opening, Joanna paused, letting the waitress step in front of her.

  “Carol’s coming,” she said to Larry, carefully establishing and maintaining eye contact with him as she continued forward. “She’ll be here in just a few minutes.”

  As Joanna stepped around the waitress, she reached out and snagged the coffeepot’s handle. With one smooth movement, Joanna shoved the waitress out of the way and sent the glass coffeepot and its steaming contents hurtling past Jim Bob’s startled face. It landed, upside down, in Larry Dysart’s lap.

  He screamed and lurched to his feet, shattering the pot as well as his cup and saucer into a thousand pieces on the brass-and-glass coffee table in front of him. While Joanna fought the Colt out of its holster, Jim Bob sprang to his feet as well. The older man made a flying tackle, grabbing for Larry’s knees. Leaping almost three feet straight up in the air, Larry managed to dodge out of the way.

  “Stop or I’ll shoot,” Joanna ordered.

  Instead of stopping, Larry sidestepped both Jim Bob and the chair. As the waitress scrambled to her knees, he grabbed her arm and yanked her toward him. With his forearm angled across her throat, he pinned the struggling woman to his chest, using her as a living shield between his body and Joanna’s deadly Colt.

  Behind them in the lobby, horrified hotel customers started to scream. “Oh, my God,” someone wailed. “She’s got a gun. Somebody call the cops.”

  “I am a cop,” Joanna shouted over her shoulder, but without taking her eyes off Larry. “Everybody down.” To Larry Dysart, she said, “Let her go!”

  “You bitch,” he snarled back, his face distorted with unreasoning rage. “You goddamned, interfering bitch!”

  Pressing his forearm against the terrified waitress’s throat, he held her captive against his chest while his other hand sought to retrieve something from his jacket pocket.

  “Watch it, Joanna,” Jim Bob warned. “He’s going for a gun.”

  Then, disregarding any possible danger to himself from Joanna’s drawn Colt, Jim Bob rose to his knees and lunged at Dysart a second time. Because the second tackle was launched from below waist level, Dysart never saw it coming. Jim Bob’s unexpected weight pounded into the waitress’s wildly flailing knees. In what seemed like slow motion, Dysart toppled over backward toward the fireplace, pulling the struggling waitress and Jim Bob with him.

  All three of them hit the floor in a writhing heap of arms and legs. Before the tackle, Dysart must have managed to pull his handgun—a small-caliber pistol—loose from his pocket. The force of Jim Bob’s blow knocked it from his grip. The revolver clattered to the floor and then came skidding past Joanna’s feet, spinning across the polished surface like a deadly Christmas top. Joanna turned and knelt to retrieve it. By the time she regained her feet, Larry Dysart had rolled behind Eva Lou’s chair. When she saw him again, he was on his feet and halfway across the room, sprinting toward the door to the pool area.

  The lobby erupted in a chorus of yells and shouts. A woman’s high-pitched scream rent the air. Joanna barely heard it. She paused only long enough to press Larry Dysart’s .22 into Jim Bob’s hand, then she raced after the fleeing man. By the time she threw open the gate to the wrought-iron fence to the pool, Dysart was already beyond the deep end, pushing his way past a startled gardener and scrambling over the six-foot stucco wall that separated the pool from the hotel’s back parking lot.

  With the gardener standing right there, Joanna couldn’t risk a shot. She was enough of a marks-man that she probably could have hit Dysart, even from that distance, but what if the terrified gardener dodged into the bullet rather than away from it?

  The sore muscles she had strained during physical training earlier i
n the week screamed in protest as she pounded down the pool deck after him. When she reached the wall, she found it was too high for her to pull herself up.

  Holstering the semiautomatic, she turned to the gardener for help. “I need a boost.”

  Without a word, the man knelt down in his freshly planted petunias and folded his hands together, turning them into a stirrup. His strong-armed assist raised Joanna high enough to pull herself up onto the wall. She dropped heavily onto the other side, hitting the ground rolling, the way she’d been taught. Even so, the graceless landing knocked the breath out of her. Gasping for air, she scrambled to her feet just as Larry Dysart disappeared behind a huge commercial garbage bin.

  Hoping for help, Joanna looked around. There were no cop cars anywhere in sight. If Carol Strong’s reinforcements were on the scene, where the hell were they? But Joanna knew the answer to that. Based on what she had told Carol about where they were, the cops were focused on the front of the building—on the lobby not on the loading dock.

  Fueled by adrenaline, Joanna took off after Dysart. She stopped at the corner of the building long enough to reconnoiter. Peering carefully around the stuccoed wall, she caught sight of him and knew that his back was toward her before she stepped into the clear. Instead of waiting for her in ambush, Larry Dysart was still running.

  Joanna ran, too. Past the back of the kitchen where a cook and a dishwasher stood having a companionable smoke; past the open door of the overheated laundry with its heavy, damp air warmed with the homey smell of freshly drying linens. Halfway down that side of the building, Dysart veered sharply to the left and headed for Grand Avenue. Half a second later, Joanna saw why. An empty cop car, doors ajar, sat parked at the front corner of the building. The reinforcements had arrived, all right, but they had been sucked into the lobby by the panicked uproar there.

  Realizing she was on her own, Joanna despaired. Dysart was headed for the street. She was running flat out behind him. Even so, she was still losing ground.

  This way, Joanna wanted to shout to the invisible cops in the lobby. Come out and look this way.

  But there wasn’t yet enough air in her tortured lungs to permit yelling and running at the same time. And there was no one to hear her if she had. Instead, straining every muscle, she raced after him.

  Dysart burst through a small landscaped area that bordered on Grand Avenue and then paused uncertainly on the shoulder of the road. A moment later, he darted out into traffic. Horns honked. Brakes squealed. Somehow he dodged several lanes of oncoming traffic. Making it safely to the other side, he disappeared down an embankment.

  Joanna, too, paused at the side of the road. She looked both ways, across six lanes of traffic. Then, taking advantage of a momentary lull in vehicles, she too plunged across Grand. Halfway to the other side, she heard the unmistakable rumble of an approaching train.

  Her heart sank. By then, Dysart had gained so much ground that if he managed to cross the tracks just ahead of the train, he might be able to disappear behind the seventy-five or so freight cars in the train before Joanna or anyone else would be able to come after him.

  When she finally reached the far shoulder of Grand Avenue, Joanna looked down in time to see Larry Dysart climbing over the barbed-wire-topped chain-link fence that separated railroad right-of-way from highway right-of-way.

  “Stop or I’ll shoot.” She screamed the warning over the roar of the approaching train. And he must have heard her, because he turned to look. But he kept on climbing. And when he hit the ground, he kept on running, straight toward the tracks, less than fifty yards ahead of the rumbling southbound train.

  He was out in the open now, with nothing but open air between him and Joanna’s Colt 2000. She dropped to her knees and held the semiautomatic with both hands. A body shot would have been far easier. His broad back would have offered a far larger target, but she didn’t want to risk a body shot. That might kill him. Instead, she aimed for his legs, for the pumping knees that were carrying him closer and closer to the track.

  Joanna’s first shot exploded in a cloud of dirt just ahead of him. It had no visible effect on Dysart other than making him run even faster. Gritting her teeth, Joanna squeezed off a second round and then a third. The fourth shot found its mark. Larry Dysart rose slightly in the air, like a runner clearing a curb. When he came back down, his shattered leg crumpled under him. He pitched forward on his face.

  Giddy with relief and triumph, Joanna stumbled down the rocky incline from the roadway. By then the train was bearing down on the injured man. She had him. All she had to do now was wait for help. With a broken leg, he’d never be able to cross the tracks before the train reached him. And even if he did, the leg would slow him down enough that someone would be able to catch up with him.

  “Hold it!” she yelled, running toward the fence with her Colt still raised. “Hold it right there!”

  He must have heard that, too. He raised up on both elbows long enough to look back at her, then he started crawling toward the track, dragging the damaged leg behind him. By the time Joanna realized his intentions, there was nothing she could do.

  “Stop!” she screamed. “Please! Don’t do it.”

  But without a backward glance, Larry Dysart threw himself under the iron wheels of the moving train. He disappeared from sight while behind him a single severed foot and shoe flew high in the air. Spewing blood, it landed in the dirt thirty feet from the tracks.

  Joanna stopped and stared in utter horror and disbelief at the place where he had disappeared. The train rumbled on and on, not even slowing. By then the lead engine had almost reached the next crossing. Totally unaware of the terrible carnage behind him, the engineer sounded his whistle.

  To Joanna’s ear, that terrible screech sounded like the gates of hell swinging open to swallow her alive. She dropped to her knees. “Please, God,” she prayed. “Don’t let him be dead.”

  But of course, he was.

  Moments later, before the last car clattered by, Joanna felt a steadying hand on her shoulder. “Are you all right?” Carol Strong asked.

  Joanna nodded. “But…”

  “I know,” Carol said. “I saw it happen. Let me have your weapon. You’ll get it back after the investigation.”

  Without a word Joanna handed over the Colt. Carol helped her up. “Stay here,” she ordered. Joanna nodded numbly and made no effort to follow when Carol walked away.

  Standing there alone, Joanna dusted off the knees of her pants. She didn’t look at the track. Whatever was left of Larry Dysart, she didn’t need to see it. Behind her, she heard sirens as emergency vehicles left the hotel and screamed across the intersection to reach the northbound lanes of Grand Avenue. They pulled up on the shoulder, lights flashing, feet thumping on the dirt as a group of uniformed officers followed by an intent aid crew jogged down the embankment. They came to an abrupt stop when they reached the spot by the fence where Joanna was standing.

  While the emergency crew milled around her, Joanna was only vaguely aware of them. Larry Dysart was dead. By his own hand. Crushed to pieces beneath the iron wheels of an onrushing train.

  All Joanna Brady could hear right then, in both her head and her heart, was his voice—his chilling, humorless voice—saying the awful words over and over, repeating them again and again like a horrific broken record.

  “If anything happens to me, the girls will die…the girls will die…the girls will die.”

  A uniformed man appeared at Joanna’s side. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  She neither heard nor comprehended the question until the second time he asked. Only then did she realize that he was a medic worried about her condition.

  “I’m fine,” she said, brushing him aside. “I’m okay. I’m okay.”

  “No, you’re not,” Carol said, coming back to Joanna. “Come on. I’ll get you a ride back to the hotel. We’ll have officers there for the next several hours taking statements, yours included. And I’ll—”

  �
�What are you going to do?” Joanna asked.

  “As soon as I get you back to the hotel, I’m going to go search Dysart’s house on Monroe,” Carol Strong answered. “Somebody should have the search warrant in hand by now. I told Detective Hansen I’d meet him there. And I’ve already called for Search and Rescue. They’ll be bringing dogs. When I go, I’ll need to take along something that belongs to Jenny, and to Ceci, too, if you have anything available.”

  Barely aware of her legs moving, Joanna allowed herself to be led to a patrol car and driven back to the hotel. Blindly, she made her way through the lobby without even pausing long enough to talk to Jim Bob and Eva Lou. In the room on the eighth floor, it was easy for Joanna to find something of Jenny’s—her well-worn denim jacket. But once the piece of faded but precious material was in Joanna’s hand, it was almost impossible for her to hand it over to Carol Strong. After that, a careful search of the room revealed absolutely nothing that belonged to Ceci Grijalva.

  “That’s all right,” Carol said. “We’ll make do with the jacket for right now. I’ll send someone out to Wittmann to pick up something of Ceci’s from her grandparents’ house.”

  “I should do that,” Joanna said. “If anyone goes to talk to the Duffys, it should be me. After all, I’m the one who picked her up this morning. They entrusted her to my care.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Carol Strong returned. “I’ll send an officer out to notify them. You’re going to go back down to the lobby and give your statement to the sergeant I’ve left in charge. That way you’ll be right here so I can find you at a moment’s notice once we locate the girls.”

  Joanna could see there was no sense in arguing. “All right,” she agreed reluctantly. “All right.”

  At Carol’s insistence, Joanna returned to the lobby. She had no idea how many officers worked for the Peoria Police Department, but the place was alive with cops, both in and out of uniform. A young uniformed officer was huddled with Jim Bob and Eva Lou Brady. A plainclothes detective was questioning the waitress.