Blind Pursuit

by Michael Prescott

  Not the pistol. The stun gun.

  Her jaws clamped shut. The handset fell from her grasp.

  A buzzing roar rose in her brain, and she was gone.

  27

  “Ma’am?”

  The voice on the other end of the line repeated that word insistently.

  “Ma’am? Are you there, ma’am? Hello?”

  Gund ripped out the handset and cord, dropping both items on the ground.

  He had to hurry. Every 911 call was instantly traced. No doubt a sheriff’s department cruiser was being dispatched to the area at this moment.

  Erin lay unconscious at his feet. The Ultron had done its job. She would be out for ten to fifteen minutes, long enough to get her back to the ranch.

  If he could get away at all.

  He’d meant to kill her when she fled the ranch. The pistol shot fired at her car had targeted her head.

  Even after the crash he would have shot her, had she not used the wrecked sedan as cover.

  Now he was glad he hadn’t ended her life with a bullet. He knew another way, a better way, to punish her for disobedience.

  A stitch jabbed at his ribs as he ran to his van. He reached it, then paused with a muttered curse.

  The front tire on the passenger side was slowly going flat. A nail was imbedded in it. The bitch’s work.

  With the hole largely plugged by the nail, the tire wasn’t losing air too fast. It should stay partially inflated for a few minutes longer.

  It would have to. He had no time to change the tire now.

  He climbed in through the passenger doorway, slid over to the driver’s seat. The door frame on the left side had been slightly bent in the collision; he would have to hammer the damn thing back into shape. Later.

  Twist of the ignition key, and the engine let him hear its reassuring growl.

  In reverse, he pulled free of the wrecked Ford, then parked directly in front of it. Removed the towing equipment from the van. Secured the bar and chains.

  A noise down the road. Patrol car? No, only the wind. Next time it would be a cruiser, though. Move.

  Shifting into low gear, he hauled the sedan out of the roadside ditch. The crushed saguaro lifted the car like some oversized speed bump.

  Towing the Taurus, he drove to the side of the Exxon station, where Erin lay unmoving near the rained pay phone. The glare of his one remaining headlight washed over her as he pumped the brake pedal.

  Out of the van, quickly. The motor idled, purring like a large somnolent animal, as he threw open the Astro’s side door, then hoisted Erin in his arms and dumped her roughly inside.

  Time to go.

  No, wait. An idea.

  From his glove compartment he removed a black felt-tip marker. Spent a couple of seconds leaning over the phone, pen in hand.

  Behind the wheel again. At the rear of the building he executed a wide U-turn, the captured Ford rattling and jouncing, and then he was back on Houghton Road, heading north, punching the accelerator pedal, speeding away from the scene.

  * * *

  Deputies Davis and Smoke arrived at the Exxon station at precisely eleven o’clock.

  They found the lights on, a situation unusual but hardly unheard of. Foster Tuttle, the station’s owner, was getting on in years. He was known to be absent-minded about such details.

  The pay phone had been torn apart. The handset and cord lay in the dirt.

  Davis beamed his flashlight at the phone assembly and saw fresh graffiti scrawled over its metal casing.

  COPS SUK ME.

  He worked up a goodly mouthful of saliva with the help of the wad of Bubblicious he was chewing, then threw back his head and hawked a shining gob of spit into the night.

  “Kids,” he said in disgust.

  Deputy Smoke nodded. “Kids.”

  For no particular reason Davis retrieved the handset. The armored cord dangled from his hand like a dead snake, the plating bright in the starlight.

  “This damn town’s getting more like L.A. every damn day,” Davis muttered.

  “More like.” Smoke had learned never to argue with his partner. Besides, it was true, what with the gangs and the drugs and the Mexicans.

  “Every damn day,” Davis said for emphasis as they sauntered back to their car.

  Before pulling away to resume patrol. Deputy Davis added another stick of Bubblicious to his growing wad, and Deputy Smoke got on the radio to report an act of vandalism and a phony 911 call.

  28

  The pianist was playing “For Sentimental Reasons,” the rippling chords occasionally overlaid with his hacking smoker’s cough. Behind the bar a color TV, volume muted, showed basketball highlights; a game-winning three-point shot elicited a listless sigh of approval from a row of patrons nursing drinks.

  Walker leaned back in the corner booth, settling into the imitation-leather banquette, and checked his watch.

  Eleven o’clock. Gary should arrive at any minute.

  Sipping his scotch, letting his gaze wander from the TV to the pianist and back, he thought about Annie Reilly.

  Her sister obviously had left town on a whim. No doubt she’d get in touch with Annie before long, clear everything up. None of that was what preoccupied him.

  It was the small glitch in their conversation, the moment when she said, “Lydia’s husband ... died.”

  Why the hesitation?

  She’d asked if he had ever heard of Lydia Connor. Peculiar thing for her to say. There was no reason for him to have heard of her. So what if she had been a local resident? The population of the Tucson metropolitan area was roughly three-quarters of a million the last time he checked.

  No, Annie was hiding something. The mystery intrigued him.

  Then he smiled at himself, amused by his self-deception. Impersonal curiosity alone would hardly have prompted him to call Gary with a request for information, or to respond so eagerly to his friend’s invitation, a half hour ago, to meet at this tavern and review what he’d learned.

  He was ... interested in Annie Reilly. True, he barely knew her, had hardly seen her at her best, and probably hadn’t come off too well in her eyes, either. Even so, he was interested.

  The date of birth in her M.V.D. file was March 12, 1966. She had just turned thirty. Could pass for twenty-five.

  Walker himself was thirty-five, and he was aware that he came off as older than his age; cops often did.

  No particular reason to think it could work between them.

  Still ...

  In the photo portrait she had been smiling. She did have a lovely smile. And her green eyes, mischievous and alert—he much preferred them to Erin’s cool gray gaze.

  He supposed he’d agreed to look into Erin’s disappearance a little more deeply for the simple reason that he wanted to see Annie again.

  Most cops were extroverts, but he had always been rather shy around women, especially women he found attractive. Shy and slow to act. Sometimes too slow.

  Rotating his glass, watching chips of ice twirl like glass fragments in a kaleidoscope, he thought back to a party he’d attended last year. In the crush of people, mostly strangers to him, he’d bumped into a dark-haired woman with a quick smile and an intensely perceptive gaze. Her name was Caroline.

  They talked for a while, first shouting above the din of conversation, then retreating to a quieter part of the house. Walker was reasonably sure she wanted him to ask her out, but something made him hesitate. Then they got separated, and later in the evening she left with another man.

  He heard nothing further of her for months, until the friend who’d thrown the party reported casually that Caroline—You remember her, don’t you, Mike?—had gotten married. She meets the guy at my party, and next thing I know, I’m watching them exchange vows at the altar. Go figure.

  Sometimes in the lonely post-midnight hours, Walker thought of Caroline. He wondered what would have happened if he’d been quicker to act on his feelings that night.

  Nothing, probably. I
t was ridiculously romantic, an adolescent delusion, to think that if she’d left the party with him, she would be his wife today.

  But how many similar opportunities had he missed? How many relationships had failed because he hadn’t stated his feelings, hadn’t risked intimacy, hadn’t said I love you when the words were clearly called for?

  He didn’t want to make that mistake with Annie. Didn’t want to add her name to the roll of lost chances and might-have-beens. Didn’t want to think of her, with regret, on sleepless nights alone.

  “Hey, Mike.”

  He looked up from his drink and saw Gary Kendall slide into the banquette opposite him.

  “Gary.” Walker reached across the table to shake hands. “Hope this hasn’t inconvenienced you too much.”

  A sunny shrug. “No problem, my man.”

  As usual, Gary looked like a recent arrival from L.A.—chinos, baggy Lakers T-shirt, mirrored sunglasses tipped back on his forehead. People sometimes mistook him for a tourist.

  In fact, however, he had never lived in L.A.—or anywhere outside of Tucson, for that matter. He talked of relocating to The Coast, as he called it, but there was no chance of that; he liked his job too much to leave it.

  For the past two years he had been associate metro editor of the Tucson Standard, and though the stories he covered rarely involved more than car accidents and labor disputes and the endless controversy over the quality of the city’s water supply, he seemed to regard himself as a true journalistic crusader, some mythical amalgam of Woodward and Bernstein or, better yet, Redford and Hoffman.

  “Truth is,” Walker said, “it’s probably not that important. I’m not even sure why I thought it was worth pursuing.”

  “A hunch, maybe? The kind that TV cops are known for?”

  “Could be.”

  “Well, if so, good buddy, you just may have qualified for your very own series.”

  Walker blinked at him. He was about to ask what that meant when the waitress stopped at the table.

  “Get you something?” she asked Gary.

  “Beer.”

  “We got Bud, Coors, Heineken, Amstel Light—”

  “Corona.” He’d heard they drank a lot of that in L.A.

  When the waitress was gone. Walker leaned forward. “You were telling me my hunch paid off.”

  “Big-time.” Gary removed two folded sheets of paper from his pants pocket. “I visited the morgue, looked up the relevant articles. All that stuff is on microfilm, natch. I mean, we’re going back a long way.”

  “How long?”

  “Nineteen sixty-eight. That’s when Lincoln Connor offed himself.”

  “Lydia’s husband?”

  “Right. They lived in the area. Look, I’d better start at the beginning.”

  Before he could, the waitress returned with a bottle of Corona and a glass. Gary paid with a bill. “Keep the change.”

  Pouring the beer, then sipping it, he told the story. Across the room, the pianist played “How High the Moon” and soothed his sore throat with a cigarette.

  “Lincoln and Lydia had a son, Oliver Ryan. In 1968, at age eighteen, Oliver ran away from home. It made the paper because he stole a neighbor’s car to do it. His parents confirmed there’d been a family fight. That was in July.

  “Few days later, stolen car turns up in the mountains near Prescott. Still no word on Oliver. But three weeks after that, a Tucson dentist, friend of the Connor clan, is in the Prescott area on vacation, and he spots Oliver. Kid’s joined up with a tribe of hippies camping near Granite Mountain.

  “The dentist goes up to Oliver, tells him his mom’s worried sick and he ought to come home. Oliver gives what the Standard described as an unprintable reply.”

  “Wasn’t the kid wanted for auto theft?” Walker interrupted.

  “Yeah, but the dentist is hardly in a position to make a citizen’s arrest while surrounded by hostile anti-Establishment types in the woods. Once he makes his report, some local deputies go looking for Oliver, but by then the counterculture crowd has cleared out.

  “Now here’s the interesting part. Four days later, Lincoln disappears.”

  “The father?”

  “Right. Turns out the dentist wasn’t exaggerating when he said Lydia was worried sick; she had a nervous breakdown right after Oliver ran off, has been recuperating at Tucson Medical Center for nearly a month. Friends say Lincoln’s irrationally angry at Oliver. He blames his wife’s condition on the boy, says Oliver’s brought disgrace on the Connor family. So the supposition is that Lincoln’s gone off to find his son and drag him home to face the music.

  “Finally, the climax of our little drama. I printed out this article. Read for yourself.”

  He unfolded one sheet of paper and pushed it across the table. Walker picked it up.

  MURDER-SUICIDE IN PRESCOTT NATIONAL FOREST

  Prescott—The bodies of two individuals tentatively identified as Lincoln Connor, 46, of 100 E. Ravine Road in the Tucson area, and his son, Oliver Ryan Connor, 18, were found yesterday in an isolated part of Prescott National Forest near Iron Springs, local authorities said.

  Edward Winslow, chief deputy coroner of Yavapai County, said that both victims apparently died of shotgun blasts to the head. A Remington Model 870 12-gauge shotgun with a sawed-off barrel, a weapon known to belong to the elder Connor, was found in Lincoln Connor’s hand, he added.

  “It appears that Lincoln Connor first killed his son, then turned the gun on himself,” Mr. Winslow said. “No suicide note has been recovered.”

  Friends of the family report that Lincoln Connor had expressed hostility and rage toward his son since Oliver ran away from home on July 10, allegedly stealing a neighbor’s 1962 Buick Roadmaster.

  The exact reason for Oliver’s disappearance is unknown, though Mr. and Mrs. Connor acknowledged having an argument with their son on the night he left.

  Oliver’s departure reportedly contributed to a rapid deterioration of his mother’s health. Lydia Connor remains under medical care at Tucson Medical Center.

  A hospital spokesman declined to state whether or not Mrs. Connor had been informed of the loss of her husband and son.

  Walker looked at the article for several minutes, long after he had absorbed its contents. He thought of Annie and Erin, orphaned in a fire at the age of seven, adopted by their Aunt Lydia.

  How long had it been before they learned of the ugly tragedy in their foster mother’s past? Did Lydia hang photos of Lincoln and Oliver around the house? Did she display keepsakes of them on the shelves? Were the girls forced to hear stories of the foster brother who’d died when they were two years old, and had they justifiably concluded that the whole world was insane?

  No wonder Annie clung so tenaciously to her sister ... and jumped instantly to the worst conceivable explanation for her disappearance.

  He had told her that Erin had just run off, he reflected grimly, draining his glass. Had she remembered Oliver when he’d said that? Oliver, who ran away on impulse—and never returned?

  Sure, Annie was being paranoid. But it looked as if she had every right to be.

  “Thanks, Gary,” he said finally. “This is ... helpful.”

  Gary shrugged. “As you can see, it was a big local story at the time. I was too young to know about it, but if you’d been living here, you would have heard.”

  “That’s why she thought the name Connor would mean something to me,” Walker mused. “Probably took me for a native. Everybody else does.”

  “Just like everybody takes me for an Angeleno. And I’m a Tucsonan born and bred. Go figure.” Gary’s smile faded. “There’s one loose end I didn’t mention.”

  “In the Connor case? What?”

  “Well, the police tracked down those hippies and asked them when was the last time they’d seen Oliver. They said he went for a walk in the woods one evening with a friend from the camp, and neither of them ever came back.”

  “The friend vanished?”

  “
That’s right. Never turned up. The other kids couldn’t help much. Gave a pretty vague description—you know how it was, they were stoned most of the time. They didn’t even know his full name. First name only.”

  “Which was?”

  “Harold.”

  “You think Oliver and Harold were together when Lincoln showed up?”

  “Could have been,” Gary said. “Maybe Harold got away and was so scared he just kept running.”

  “Or maybe he was shot, too, and for some reason his body wasn’t found.” Walker shrugged, dismissing the issue. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter now.”

  “I suppose not.”

  Walker noticed the other slip of paper still folded in Gary’s hands. “Got something else?”

  “One last item. Not directly relevant. Doesn’t involve Lincoln Connor or Oliver, just Lydia.”

  “What about her?”

  “In 1973 she took in two young nieces, named, let’s see ... Erin and Anne Reilly. Her sister’s kids, seven-year-old twins, originally from Sierra Springs, California.”

  Walker nodded. He tipped the glass and let a piece of ice slide into his mouth, then pushed it around his cheek with his tongue.

  “I knew that part,” he said. “They’d been orphaned in a fire.”

  Gary frowned. “A fire, yeah. But not just a fire.”

  Walker chewed the ice and swallowed it. “What does that mean?”

  “You don’t know the story.”

  “I guess not. Can’t be as bad as the first one, though.”

  Gary shook his head slowly. “You’re right. It’s not as bad. It’s worse.”

  Walker set down the glass with a soft clunk.

  “Tell me,” he said softly.

  Gary told him.

  Even after Gary was done speaking, Walker remained silent. The waitress stopped to ask if he wanted a refill of his scotch, and Gary had to answer for him, because he didn’t hear.

  29

  Erin surfaced from unconsciousness to the sound of hammering.

  Blinking, she focused her vision. Above her hung a brilliant scatter of stars, bracketed by steep embankments tufted with ocotillo and mesquite.