Dark Rivers of the Heart

by Dean Koontz

  Every member of the strike force, including Roy, was protected by a bullet-resistant body vest under his clothes and was carrying Drug Enforcement Administration ID that could be produced quickly to placate the local authorities if necessary. If they were lucky, however, they would be back in the air three minutes after touching down, with Spencer Grant in custody, with the woman’s body, but with no wounded of their own.

  The woman was finished. She was still breathing, still had a heartbeat, but in fact she was already stone dead.

  On the computer in Roy’s lap, Earthguard 3 showed the target drastically slowing. Then the Rover passed another vehicle, perhaps a pickup, on the shoulder of the highway. The pickup increased its speed, too, and suddenly a drag race seemed to be under way.

  Frowning, Roy squinted at the display screen.

  The pilot announced that they were five minutes from the target.

  Cedar City.

  There was too much traffic to facilitate their escape, and too little to allow them to blend in and confuse Earthguard. She was also hindered by being on streets with gutters instead of on open highways with wide shoulders. And traffic lights. And that stupid pickup jockey insistently pounding, pounding, pounding his horn.

  Ellie turned right at an intersection, frantically surveying both sides of the street. Fast-food restaurants. Service stations. Convenience stores. She had no idea exactly what she was looking for. She only knew that she would recognize it when she saw it: a place or situation that they could turn to their advantage.

  She had hoped for time to scout the territory and find a way to get the Rover under cover: a grove of evergreens with a dense canopy of branches, a large parking garage, any place in which they might evade the eyes in the sky and leave the Rover without being spotted. Then they could either buy or heist new wheels, and from orbit they would again be indistinguishable from other vehicles on the highway.

  She supposed she would earn a bed of nails in Hades for sure if she killed the creep in the Dodge pickup—but the satisfaction might be worth the price. He hammered on the horn as if he were a confused and angry ape determined to beat the damned thing until it stopped bleating at him.

  He also tried to get around them during every break in oncoming traffic, but Ellie swerved to block him. The passenger side of the pickup was badly scraped and crumpled from when she had bashed into it with the Rover, so the guy probably figured that he had nothing to lose by pulling alongside and forcing her to the curb.

  She couldn’t let him do that. They were quickly running out of time. Having to deal with the ape would consume precious minutes.

  “Tell me it’s not,” Spencer shouted above the blaring horn.

  “Not what?”

  Then she realized that he was pointing through the windshield. Something in the sky. To the southwest. Two large executive-style helicopters. One behind and to the left of the other. Both black. The polished hulls and windows glistened as if sheathed with ice, and the morning sun shimmered off the whirling rotors. The two craft were like huge insects out of an apocalyptic 1950s science fiction movie about the dangers of nuclear radiation. Less than two miles away.

  She saw a U-shaped strip shopping center ahead on the left. Skating on the fragile ice of instinct, she accelerated, hung a hard left through a gap in traffic, and drove into a short access road that served the big parking lot.

  Near her right ear, the dog was panting with excitement, and it sounded uncannily like soft laughter: Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh!

  Spencer still had to shout, because the horn-blower remained close behind them: “What’re we doing?”

  “Got to get new wheels.”

  “Out in the open?”

  “Only choice.”

  “They’ll see us make the switch.”

  “Create a diversion.”

  “How?”

  “I’m thinking,” she said.

  “I was afraid of that.”

  With only the lightest application of the brakes, she turned right and then sped southward across the blacktop lot, instead of approaching the stores to the east.

  The pickup stayed close behind them.

  In the southwest sky, the two helicopters were no more than one mile away. They had altered course to follow the Range Rover. They were descending as they approached.

  The anchor store in the U-shaped complex was a supermarket in the center of the middle wing. Beyond the glass front and glass doors, the cavernous interior was filled with hard fluorescent light. Flanking that store were smaller businesses, selling clothing and books and records and health foods. Other small stores filled the two end wings.

  The hour was still so early that most of the shops had just opened. Only the supermarket had been doing business for any length of time, and there were few parked cars other than the twenty or thirty clustered in front of that central enterprise.

  “Gimme the pistol,” she said urgently. “Put it on my lap.”

  Spencer gave the SIG to her, and then he picked up the Micro Uzi from the floor between his feet.

  No obvious opportunity for creating a diversion awaited her toward the south. She did a hard, fishtailing U-turn and headed back north toward the center of the parking lot.

  That maneuver so surprised the ape that he put his pickup into a slide and almost rolled it in his eagerness to stay behind her. While regaining control, at least, he stopped blowing his horn.

  The dog was still panting: Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh!

  She continued to parallel the street on which they had been traveling when she had spotted the shopping center, staying away from the stores.

  She said, “Anything you want to take with you?”

  “Just my suitcase.”

  “You don’t need it. I already took the money out.”

  “You what?”

  “The fifty thousand in the false bottom,” she said.

  “You found my money?” He seemed astonished.

  “I found it.”

  “You took it out of the case?”

  “It’s right there in the canvas bag behind my seat. With my laptop and some other stuff.”

  “You found my money?” he repeated disbelievingly.

  “We’ll talk about it later.”

  “Bet on it.”

  The ape in the Dodge was on her case again, blowing his horn, but he was not as close as he had been.

  To the southwest, the choppers were less than half a mile away and only about a hundred feet off the ground, angling down.

  She said, “You see the bag I mean?”

  He looked behind her seat. “Yeah. There past Rocky.”

  After clashing with the Dodge, she wasn’t sure if her door would open easily. She didn’t want to have to wrestle with the bag and the door at the same time. “Take it with you when we come to a stop.”

  “Are we coming to a stop?” he asked.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  A final turn. Hard right. She swung into one of the center aisles in the parking lot. It led directly east, to the front of the supermarket. As she approached the building, she put her hand on the horn and held it there, making even more noise than the ape was making behind her.

  “Oh, no,” Spencer said, with dawning awareness.

  “Diversion!” Ellie shouted.

  “This is nuts!”

  “No choice!”

  “It’s still nuts!”

  Across the face of the market, sales banners were taped to the big sections of plate glass, advertising Coke and potatoes and toilet tissue and rock salt for home water softeners. Most were along the top half of those tall panes; through the glass, below and between the signs, Ellie could see the checkout stations. In the fluorescent light, a few clerks and customers were looking out, alerted by the strident horns. As she shot toward them, the small ovals of their faces were as luminously white as the painted masks of harlequins. One woman ran, which startled the others into scattering for safety.

  She hoped to God they would all manage to get
out of the way in time. She didn’t want to hurt any innocent bystanders. But she didn’t want to be gunned down by the men who would pour out of those helicopters, either.

  Do or die.

  The Rover was moving fast but not flat-out. The trick was to have enough speed to jump the curb onto the wide promenade in front of the market and get through the glass wall and all the merchandise that was stacked waist-high beyond it. But at too high a speed, she would crash into the checkout stations with deadly impact.

  “Gonna make it!” Then she remembered never to lie to the dog. “Probably!”

  Over the horns and the sound of the engines, she suddenly heard the chuda-chuda-chuda of the choppers. Or maybe she felt more than heard the pressure waves cast off by their rotors. They must be directly over the parking lot.

  The front tires rammed the curb, the Range Rover leaped, Rocky yelped, and Ellie simultaneously released the horn and took her foot off the accelerator. She tramped on the brakes as the tires slammed into the concrete. The promenade didn’t seem so wide when the Rover was skidding across it at thirty or forty miles an hour, with the scared-pig squeal of hot rubber on pavement, not so very wide at all, hell, not nearly wide enough. Her sudden awareness of the Rover’s oncoming reflection was followed instantly by cascades of glass, ringing down like shattered icicles. They plowed through big wooden pallets, on which were stacked fifty-pound bags of potatoes or some damn thing, and finally took a header into the end of a checkout station. Panels of fiberboard popped apart, the stainless steel grocery chute buckled like gift-wrapping foil, the rubber conveyor belt snapped in two and spun off its rollers and rippled into the air as if it were a giant black flatworm, and the cash register almost toppled to the floor. The impact wasn’t as hard as Ellie had feared, and as if to celebrate their safe landing, gay foulards of translucent plastic bags blossomed briefly, with a flourish, in midair, from the pockets of an invisible magician.

  “Okay?” she asked, releasing the buckle on her safety harness.

  He said, “Next time, I drive.”

  She tried her door. It protested, screeching and grinding, but neither the brush with the Dodge nor the explosive entry into the market had jammed the latch. Grabbing the SIG 9mm that was trapped between her thighs, she clambered out of the Range Rover.

  Spencer had already gotten out of the other side.

  The morning was filled with the clatter of helicopters.

  The two choppers appeared on the computer screen because they had entered the boundaries of Earthguard’s two-hundred-foot look-down. Roy sat in the second of the craft, studying the top of that very machine as it was photographed from orbit, marveling at the strange possibilities of the modern world.

  Because the pilot was making a straight-on approach to the target, neither the porthole on the left nor the one on the right gave Roy any view. He stayed with the computer to watch the Range Rover as it strove to elude the pickup truck by weaving back and forth across the shopping-center parking lot. As the pickup tried to get back up to speed after making a bad U-turn, the Rover swung toward the central building in the complex—which was, judging by its size, a supermarket or a discount store like Wal-Mart or Target.

  Only at the last moment did Roy realize that the Rover was going to ram the place. When it hit, he expected to see it rebound in a mass of flattened and tangled metal. But it disappeared, merged with the building. With horror, he realized that it had driven through an entrance or a glass wall and that the occupants had survived.

  He lifted the open attaché case off his lap, put it on the cabin deck, in the aisle beside his seat, and bolted to his feet in alarm. He did not pause to go through the back-out security procedures with Mama, didn’t disconnect, didn’t unplug, but stepped over the computer and hurried toward the pilot’s cabin.

  From what he’d seen on the display, he knew that both choppers had crossed over the power lines at the street. They were above the parking lot, easing toward touchdown, making a forward speed of only two or three miles an hour, all but hovering. They were so close to the damn woman, but now she was out of sight.

  Once out of sight, she might quickly be out of reach as well. Gone again. No. Intolerable.

  Armed and ready for action, the four strike force agents had gotten to their feet and were blocking the aisle near the exit.

  “Clear the way, clear the way!”

  Roy struggled through the assembled hulks to the head of the aisle, jerked open a door, and leaned into the cramped cockpit.

  The pilot’s attention was focused on avoiding the parking lot lampposts and the parked cars as he gentled the JetRanger toward the blacktop. But the second man, who was both copilot and navigator, turned in his seat to look at Roy as the door opened.

  “She drove into the damned building,” Roy said, looking out through the windshield at the shattered glass along the front of the supermarket.

  “Wild, huh?” the copilot agreed, grinning.

  Too many cars were spread out across the blacktop to allow either chopper to put down directly in front of the market. They were angling toward opposite ends of the building, one to the north and the other to the south.

  Pointing at the first craft, with its full complement of eight strike force agents, Roy said, “No, no. Tell him I want him over the building, in back, not here, in back, all eight of his men deployed in back, stopping everyone on foot.”

  Their pilot was already in radio contact with the pilot of the other craft. While he hovered twenty feet over the parking lot, he repeated Roy’s orders into the mouthpiece of his headset.

  “They’ll try to go through the market and out the back,” Roy said, striving to rein in his anger and remain calm. Deep breaths. In with the pale-peach vapor of blessed tranquility. Out with the bile-green mist of anger, tension, stress.

  Their chopper was hovering too low for Roy to be able to see over the roof of the market. From the Earthguard look-down on his computer, however, he remembered what lay behind the shopping center: a wide service alley, a concrete-block wall, and then a housing development with numerous trees. Houses and trees. Too many places to hide, too many vehicles to steal.

  North of them, just as the first JetRanger was about to touch down on the parking lot and disgorge its men, the pilot got Roy’s message. Rotor speed picked up, and the craft began to lift into the air again.

  Peach in. Green out.

  A carpet of brown nuggets had spilled from some of the torn fifty-pound bags, and they crunched under Spencer’s shoes as he got out of the Rover and ran between two checkout stations. He carried the canvas bag by its straps. In the other hand, he clutched the Uzi.

  He glanced to his left. Ellie was paralleling him in the next checkout lane. The shopping aisles were long and ran front to back of the store. He met Ellie at the head of the nearest aisle.

  “Out the back.” She hurried toward the rear of the supermarket.

  Starting after her, he remembered Rocky. The mutt had gotten out of the Rover behind him. Where was Mr. Rocky Dog?

  He stopped, spun around, ran back two steps, and saw the hapless canine in the checkout lane that he himself had used. Rocky was eating some of the brown nuggets that hadn’t been crushed under his master’s shoes. Dry dog food. Fifty pounds or more of it.

  “Rocky!”

  The mutt looked up and wagged his tail.

  “Come on!”

  Rocky didn’t even consider the command. He snatched up a few more nuggets, crunching them with delight.

  “Rocky!”

  The dog regarded him again, one ear up and one down, bushy tail banging against the side of the cashier’s counter.

  In his sternest voice, Spencer said, “Mine!”

  Regretful but obedient, a little ashamed, Rocky trotted away from the food. When he saw Ellie, who had stopped halfway down the long aisle to wait for them, he broke into a sprint. Ellie resumed her flight, and Rocky dashed exuberantly past her, unaware that they were running for their lives.

&nb
sp; At the end of the aisle, three men rushed into sight from the left and halted when they saw Ellie, Spencer, the dog, the guns. Two were in white uniforms: names stitched on their shirt pockets, employees of the market. The third—in street clothes, with a loaf of French bread in one hand—must have been a customer.

  With an alacrity and sinuosity more like that of a cat, Rocky transformed his headlong plunge into an immediate retreat. Eeling around on himself, tail between his legs, almost on his belly, he waddled back toward his master for protection.

  The men were startled, not aggressive. But they froze, blocking the way.

  “Back off!” Spencer shouted.

  Aiming at the ceiling, he punctuated his demand with a short burst from the Uzi, blowing out a fluorescent strip and precipitating a shower of lightbulb glass and chopped-up acoustic tiles.

  Terrified, the three men scattered.

  A pair of swinging doors at the back of the market was recessed between dairy cases to the left and lunch-meat-and-cheese coolers to the right. Ellie slammed through the doors. Spencer followed with Rocky. They were in a short hallway, with rooms to both sides.

  The sound of the helicopters was muffled there.

  At the end of the hallway, they burst into a cavernous room that extended the width of the building: bare concrete walls, fluorescent lights, open rafters instead of a suspended ceiling. An area in the center of the chamber was open, but merchandise in shipping cartons was stacked sixteen feet high in aisles on both sides—additional stock of products from shampoo to fresh produce.

  Spencer spotted a few stockroom employees watching warily from between the storage aisles.

  Directly ahead, beyond the open work area, was an enormous metal roll-up door through which big trucks could be backed inside and unloaded. To the right of the shipping entrance was a man-size door. They ran to it, opened it, and went outside into the fifty-foot-wide service alley.