Blue Steele - Box Set - Captures 1-6 (10 page)

A tentative knock came at the door. I opened it to find an elderly woman wearing a pink robe. In the hallway behind her were other people in their sleepwear.

“I heard a shot. Is Deanna all right?”

I sighed.

“No ma’am, please call the police.”

The old woman began to cry.

“I already called.”

***

A
lthough Ramón might be irresistible, Deanna Andrews took him home that night because he was roughly Harmody’s height and size. They had planned to lure someone to her apartment and then murder them.

Afterward, they would place the corpse in Harmody’s car and then set them both on fire, in an attempt to fake Harmody’s death, and to then start a new life together.

Instead, Deanna was dead and Harmody was going to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

***

R
amón insisted on bringing wine because, as he put it, “That’s what real people do, right?”

When Becca answered the door with Richie, Amy pushed her way out between them and jumped up into Ramón’s arms.

“Ramón, I missed you.” Amy said, and then she gave him a big smooch on the lips.

Ramón smiled at me.

“Maybe normal life isn’t so bad after all,”

Then, we entered the house and had dinner with our friends.

I
was in East Texas, deep inside the Piney Woods.

The Piney Woods are fifty thousand square miles of forest that stretch across parts of four states. I was there looking for a bail skip named Tanner Harlow. Harlow was a doctor, forty-nine, long divorced and, judging by his picture, would appear to be younger than his years.

Dr. Harlow had embezzled over two million dollars from the medical facility he was employed at after learning that they planned to sever ties with him. That same night, he was arrested for driving while intoxicated.

He managed to bail himself out on the drunk driving charge just in time to be arrested for the embezzlement. Two days later, he skipped on an eighty thousand dollar bond and left Fort Worth.

After asking around, I discovered that Tanner was an avid hiker and often hiked in The Piney Woods while on vacation.

Seven hours of driving got me to the woods and after talking to dozens of people, I came across a man who knew Tanner slightly, and he told me that he had spotted the doctor earlier that day, hiking along a trail that led into Louisiana.

That made sense; Tanner was from Louisiana and still had family there.

I contacted the local cops and let them know who I was and who I was after and I soon met with a Forest Ranger named Doug Selby. Selby met me with a smile and a tip of his cap and then told me to hop into his yellow jeep.

Selby was about my age, wore a wedding band and had a full head of reddish blond hair that seemed to go in all directions at once.

After we chatted up some people at a campsite, we learned that a man fitting Tanner’s description had been seen hiking along a trail less than a mile from where we were.

Selby and I hopped back into the jeep and drove parallel to the trail for about five miles, and then parked the jeep amid a copse of trees. After I put my backpack on, we then walked northwest along the trail and hoped to run right into Tanner.

As we tramped along, Selby and I talked quietly.

“Is this guy supposed to be dangerous?” He said.

“No, he’s a doctor, an obstetrician, but then, you never can tell.”

“I hear you, so how long have you been a bail enforcer?”

I opened my mouth to answer him when Tanner Harlow came walking out from behind a bush while zipping up his fly. I grabbed the cuffs off my belt and walked over to him.

“Tanner Harlow, you are under arrest for the crime of—”

And that’s when he turned and ran back into the woods.

Selby and I shared a look of frustration and then we went after him. Harlow was in good shape, but he was still twenty years older than either Selby or me and within five minutes we ran him down and I cuffed his hands behind his back.

Thank God Selby was along. Harlow’s attempt at escape had taken us deep into the woods and now I could only guess where we’d left the jeep, but Selby pointed north and began guiding us back to the trail.

While walking back, we heard a noise that sounded like someone digging. Selby motioned for me to stay put with Harlow, and then he walked quietly toward the sound to take a look; a few seconds later, I heard him shouting.

“You! Drop that shovel and put your hands in the air. Now!”

The next thing I knew, several shots were fired from two different guns.

With my gun in my hand, I ran toward the sound of the shots while dragging Harlow along by the belt. He tripped and fell on his face just as I spotted the man reloading his weapon.

He was six feet tall, with a thirty-something face and prematurely white hair. He stood over Selby, who was wounded and writhing in pain on the ground.

Twenty feet to the Selby’s left, was the body of a naked girl, lying in the dirt. One look at her lineless, bloodless face and I knew two things. One: she was dead, and two: she had never made it beyond fourteen years of age.

I told the man to drop his weapon just as he finished loading. He raised his gun and I shot at him three times, but missed, and he turned and ran into the trees.

I rushed over to Selby and saw that he had been struck once in the abdomen, but that there was no exit wound. As Selby gritted his teeth against the pain, I grabbed the radio from his belt and reached the dispatcher at his headquarters. It was only then that I realized I had little idea how to tell them where to find us. I’m no city slicker, but The Piney Woods were unfamiliar to me, a fact that was the main reason Selby was along in the first place.

He must have realized this too, because he motioned for me to place the radio near his mouth so that he could talk.

It took over a minute, but between moans and gasps of pain, Selby let his fellow Rangers know where we were, and that his attacker was extremely dangerous.

Harlow!

I had forgotten all about him. I turned my head and found that he was still lying where he fell, eyes wide and staring at the dead girl with a look of horror on his face.

I rushed over to him, helped him to stand, and took off the cuffs.

“Ranger Selby’s been shot, help him.”

“What?”

“You’re a doctor, help him.”

“I don’t do gunshots; I deliver babies.”

I shoved him towards Selby.

“Help him!”

A scream.

It was followed by two shots and then silence.

I picked Selby’s gun up from the ground before taking my backpack off and tossing it to Harlow.

“I know it’s not much, but there’s a first-aid kit and bottled water in there. You do what you can to help him, and when the other Rangers arrive, tell them that there may be more casualties west of here.”

I was thirty feet away when he called to me.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going after the killer,”

I headed toward the place where the screams came from while praying that Harlow would help Selby and not run away again.

The woods were thick with fallen branches and I soon gave up any attempt at stealth. Every step cracked and crunched fallen twigs and leaves and so I relied on my eyes to keep me safe.

If anything moved, I would be ready to kill it.

I found the source of the scream lying at the side of a trail with a gaping wound in the back of her head, beside her lay an older man with features much like her own, probably her father, he had been shot in the heart and must have died instantly.

As I moved past them, I noticed blood on the man’s right fingertips, a closer look revealed what looked like flesh.

Good!

He had marked the son of a bitch even as he died and when I caught the monster, he wouldn’t be able to deny the DNA evidence under the nails of his victim.

From my right and below, I heard the sound of someone traipsing through the woods and I headed that way.

A few minutes later, I came upon a dirt road that was nearly hidden by foliage and heard an engine start a hundred yards to my left.

I cursed. Of course he had a car nearby. He couldn’t very well have walked the dead girl in here on foot.

A moment later, I saw the car. It was a black BMW and it was picking up speed. I ran into the road and fired a shot into the air, before sighting in on the windshield.

He ducked down just as he floored the car and I leaped aside and waited. When he was even with me, I fired my gun’s two remaining shots at the right front tire and watched as the car swerved toward the trees.

He hit a stand of saplings with a resounding
CLUNK!
that caused steam to rise from under the hood, but a moment later, he was out of the car and sprinting away.

He was fast. Faster than me by far and as we reached a treeless field of weeds, he was nearly a city block ahead of me.

My gun was empty, but I still had Ranger Selby’s
Colt Python
. I checked the cylinder, three bullets left.

I fell to one knee, arms extended, and sighted down the six-inch barrel.

My first shot missed, but the sound of it halted him and he stared back at me.

Big mistake,

I fired a second shot and watched him jerk his head back with a start. Then, he reached up to the right side of his head and even from where I was, I could see the blood on his fingers.

He shouted a string of obscenities and began firing at me in a frenzy.

I hit the ground hard and, as cliché as it sounds, I actually heard the bullets whiz above my head.

Click, Click, Click,

He was empty. I raised my head and, for just a moment, we locked eyes, before he dropped the now useless gun and ran away.

I followed, with one bullet and one thought, to stop this walking nightmare before he hurt anyone else.

The field ended at a small stream and as I reached it, I saw him on the opposite bank. I splashed my way across while keeping him in sight, but when I was halfway to the other side my foot landed on something slimy and I went down on one knee. I felt an immediate jolt of pain as my right knee landed on a jagged rock and cut through my jeans. When I reached the shore, I was wet up to my waist and had a scraped, bloody knee, but the pain was fading and I was still able to run.

I looked around for my prey and just when I thought that I had lost him, I spotted a shock of white hair running away to my right. His hair was so white that it was brilliant and seemed to sparkle whenever the sun hit it.

I then followed him as best as I could. It was a losing proposition though, as he was just faster than I was and soon I lost sight of him amidst the thickening trees.

I slowed, listening for footfalls, for movement, for anything.

When the silence broke, it was so loud and so close that I nearly leapt out of my skin.

“What the hell are you doin’ there son?”

The question came from an old man sitting up in a tree, in a deer blind. He was looking down at a tree ten feet in front of me. My white-haired quarry stepped out of his hiding place and threw something up at the old man.

I saw a glint of metal, a flash of blood and then the old man tumbled twenty feet to the ground with a knife in his throat.

I fired my last remaining shot at White Hair as he reached down to pull the rifle off the dying old man.

White hair screamed in pain and I watched as he hobbled off into the woods. I ran to the old hunter to see if I could help, but he had already bled out from the punctured artery in his neck.

Four dead bodies and a seriously wounded Ranger in less than an hour, White Hair needed to be stopped, and he needed to be stopped now.

I relieved the dead hunter of his rifle and was happy to see that it had a scope. It was a Weatherby with a twenty-eight inch barrel. My daddy had one just like it when I was growing up and I’d shot it enough to know how to use it.

I followed after White Hair and was pleased to see an intermittent blood trail amongst the grass. Within a minute, I was in sight of him as we came upon a hill that sloped down to what sounded like a road, as the sound of tires on pavement came and went sporadically.

My last bullet had slowed White Hair down, and as he reached the rim of the slope, I was less than a hundred feet behind him.

He went down the tall hill in an uncontrollable slide and hit bottom hard before tumbling out into the road. A green Mercedes braked with a long squeal and just avoided running him over. When it finally stopped, he was laying halfway beneath it.

The driver of the car, a well-dressed, middle-aged woman with short red hair exited the car, and as I cried out to warn her, White Hair leaped up and punched her in the face.

The woman fell to the ground, unconscious, and White Hair ran around to the driver’s side door. He stared up at me then with a maniacal grin on his scratched and bloody face as he sent me an obscene gesture.

As he sat in the driver’s seat, I dropped flat, rifle up, and sighted down at him.

Before I could take the shot, he floored the gas pedal and drove over the woman lying in the road. He deliberately aimed for her head, and he hit it.

I dropped the rifle in revulsion as I fought not to vomit at what the car had done to her.

Then, rage overcame repulsion and I grabbed the rifle again.

By the time I took the first shot, he was a quarter of a mile away, moving fast, and it was a downward angle.

I missed, not even close.

The second shot brought the sound of breaking glass to my ears, but the car stayed on the road and was approaching a curve.

Time was running out.

I had three cartridges left and I let all three fly.

My reward was the sight of a splattered, bloody window and the beautiful vision of the car swerving into a ditch and flipping over, end over end.

I laid the rifle down on the grass and cried.

I was still lying there when I heard the police and ambulance arrive below, and a few moments later, a helicopter appeared overhead.