Dead Run (25 page)

And that made Sharon start laughing, too, because she'd seen hysterical, and this wasn't it. Hysterical was when your mother raced stark-naked through the house, wailing at the top of her lungs, wringing her hands, settling briefly in this chair and that, until finally the chair she chose was the one behind the desk with the big, ugly gun in the center drawer.That was hysterical. And then there was the ten-year-old daughter crouched on the floor, legs scrambling as she tried to push herself into the wall she was leaning against, her mouth open in a silent scream, her eyes fixed on her mother's blood and brains sliding down the plate-glass window behind the desk.That was hysterical, too. But not this.

She took a deep breath that erased everything. Displacement behavior, she remembered, was the body's defense against stress. People laugh at funerals. Cats stop fighting and spontaneously groom themselves. Cats licked, people laughed.

Annie and Grace were letting out the last long, shaky exhales, letting it all go, and then Grace was passing out bottles again, and it was as if the laughter had never happened.

They started upstairs to leave the house by the front door-not outthrough the basement and into the backyard. The perimeter was out there, in the woods but closer than they'd thought. Deputy Lee had proven that. There was less chance that they would be seen with the protection of the buildings between them and the trees.

Grace was in the lead, shining the flashlight down on the risers, making the climb easier.

It's the flashlight, Sharon thought as she followed. Whoever has the flashlight is automatically the leader, as if light was some kind of royal scepter, even more powerful than a gun. Maybe in the Bible, she thought wryly.

In the feverish religion that her mother had practiced, plowshares were mightier than swords, and things like light and goodness and mercy always won out over the lesser weapons, like atomic bombs.God's sword will not be beaten, Sharon. Man's weapons are puny in theface of the Word of God. . ..But in the end, her mother hadn't stuck a Bible in her mouth and blown her brains out, now had she?

"Wait a minute," she whispered, thinking of something as Grace prepared to open the door at the top. "We don't have a lighter, or matches."

"There are matches in the glass display case at the gas station," Grace said.

Christ, Sharon thought. She sees everything. The tiniest detail. And never forgets it. Like a really excellent cop. She saw all the things that you should have seen, drew all the conclusions that you should have drawn, and that's how she knew that this town was wrong before we ever walked into it. You're not just a good cop scared off the street by a bullet in the neck-you were never that good to begin with. And Grace isn't the leader because she's carrying the flashlight- she's the leader because she just is. Something big and dark seemed to open a little in Sharon's head, and her next breath felt like the first one she had taken in a very long time. It almost made her smile.

Grace opened the door to the upstairs and turned off the flashlight, and they were all lost in a black void. They felt their way to the front door and slipped outside. The moon was below the tree line now, and the darkness seemed to have texture, it was so impenetrable. Grace could barely identify shapes more than ten feet distant. This must be what it's like to be blind and deaf, she thought-no sound, no light, no motion, not even a breath of air stirring in the hot, still night.

The hulking outlines of the cafe and gas station were barely visible, but the outside air had that sweet, wet, predawn smell that seems to gather in the last hours before sunrise on a hot summer night. We have to hurry, Grace thought.

They carefully crept across the broken asphalt between the house and the gas station-this was the one place they would be fully exposed to any line of sight from the woods. Once inside the gas station, Grace felt around the display case until she found the matches, tucked them into her jeans pocket, and they all moved into the adjacent garage bay. There were no windows in here; even the narrow back door was solid, and it was safe for Grace to turn on the flashlight.

Ten minutes gone, six hours left.

Grace found a red gas can with a gooseneck nozzle next to the hydraulic lift, checked it and found it nearly full, then swept the walls with the beam of light. "Can't see it."

"Give me the light," Sharon said. "They're usually somewhere near the counter." She found the master switches that turned the pumps on and off under a shelf near the register that held about a decade's worth of dusty Veterans Day poppies. She pushed the two levers to the off position and hoped they worked.

When she came back to the garage bay, she shined the light on Annie and Grace, who were filling the Coke bottles with gas by touch. The smell was cloying in the closed space. Grace looked up at her. "Pumps off?"

"Yes."

"There's a box of disposable rags on the bench behind you. I couldn't find them in the dark."

"Got 'em," Sharon said after a few seconds with the light.

Annie gave up crouching after a few minutes and sat down on the filthy garage floor, fat legs crossed, expertly twisting and stuffing rags into the bottles. "Haven't done this since I tried blow up Cameron DuPuy's BMW convertible sophomore year in Atlanta. Remember, Grace?"

"No. I had nothing to do with it. I wasn't there."

Annie chuckled softly and kept stuffing, and Sharon wished for a moment that she had been there, committing a felony with these two women. Maybe life would have been different then.

When the bottles were ready, they moved out to the pumps. Sharon removed the nozzles and locked them open, watched the trickle of gasoline that remained in the hoses seep out onto the concrete, then stop. The shut-off switches had worked.

Annie started laying a trail of rags from where the nozzles lay on the concrete back to the big garage bay door. Grace followed, soaking the rags with gas from the can. Back inside, they cracked the big garage door, then Grace continued the flammable trail, sloshing gas over cases of motor oil and cans of solvent stored inside the garage. She felt the cold, slimy wetness on her hands as she continued the trail out the back door, through the junked cars behind the station. They piled more rags there, and then all three of them stood, looking down at the pathetic pile of dirty, pale blue.

"No way we are ever going to hit that little bitty pile," Annie said worriedly, glancing over her shoulder at the woods behind them.

"Softball," Sharon murmured. "All-state pitcher, three years in a row."

"Honey." Annie gave her a soft punch in the shoulder. "Way to go."

It was too dark to see her face-they didn't dare use the flashlight out here-but Sharon thought she might have been smiling.

While Grace soaked the pile of rags with gasoline, hoping it wouldn't evaporate too fast, Annie and Sharon collected the Coke-bottle Molotov cocktails from the gas station and carried them back to the edge of the woods. The reek of gasoline was in their mouths, their noses, bathing their sinus cavities, and by the time they were finished, it seemed that there was no fresh air left in the world. But they were ready.

Carefully, carefully, but hurrying now, graceless and more daring in their haste, they skittered back to the house, in the front door, and on to the kitchen.

They clustered around the big, old four-burner gas stove, the fumes from the pilot lights mingling with the gasoline stench in their nostrils. Sharon thought it was probably a miracle the three of them didn't just burst into flames.

Grace lifted two heavy skillets off hooks behind the stove and placed them on the burners. "Cast-iron," she murmured. "Makes the best hash browns in the world."

Sharon pulled her one and only spare clip out of her blazer pocket, fingers tight around it, reluctant to let go. God, what were they doing? What if they needed these to save their lives? "Are you sure this is going to work?"

Annie felt for the clip, tugged it away from Sharon, then expertly started ejecting bullets into the two skillets. They made tiny, clinking sounds. "Don't ask me, darlin'. I haven't cooked bullets in years."

Sharon half believed her.

"Lord, we must look like the three witches inMacbeth." Annie turned on the burners, and there was asoft poof as blue flames sprang to life beneath the skillets, warming all the little bullets inside. "Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble."

"Let's get the hell out of here," Grace said, glancing at her watch.

Five and a half hours left.

GRACE AND ANNIE waited at the open door of the gas station while Sharon went in with the flashlight to turn the pumps back on. Before she came outside, the sound of liquid hitting concrete broke the silence of the night, and the smell of gas polluted the sweet air.

"Lord, that sounds like it's coming out fast," Annie whispered.

"It's a lot of gas," Grace said. "It's going to hit the woods."

Great, Annie thought. Even if we do manage to get out of here, they'll slap us in Federal prison for setting a forest fire. Unless, of course, we burn to a crisp first.

Grace was squinting into the dark, trying to pick out the rag trail that led from the pumps to the garage bay. How long for a fire to follow that trail? Two seconds? Two minutes? Would it take too long, or move too fast?

By the time they all had crept back to the edge of the woods where they'd stashed the Molotov cocktails, Annie was beginning to understand the truth of the old saw about it being darkest before the dawn. As a rule, she was seldom up this late, and never up this early unless she was in Vegas, and they didn't have any windows there anyway, but this was ridiculous. She was staring right down at her feet and couldn't even see the white trim on the purple high-tops. Not that the trim was all that white anymore. Not after crawling through that ditch and crouching in that filthy lake with that positively disgusting dead cow .., the memory made her shudder, but it also took her back to the paddock where the real heart of this godforsaken town lay buried under four inches of manure, and that was good. It was a reminder of why she was huddled in the dark woods like a barbarian, next to a row of IIDs, as Sharon called them back in the garage.

"What the hell is an IID?"

"Improvised Incendiary Device."

"Don't talk in initials. You sound like a man. Drives me crazy the way they make up acronyms for everything. It's exclusionary, that's what it is, little boys talking in code. For heaven's sake, it's just a gas-filled Coke bottle with a rag stuck in the top, and they've got to put initials on it so it sounds like some technological marvel. Damn, now look what you've done. You got me all riled up. Let's just get out there and KSA."

Grace was staring into the darkness, eyes wide open in a futile search for light. She couldn't see the rag pile. It was too dark, and the pile was too small and too far away. Sharon's collegiate softball career seemed like a very fragile thing to carry the entire weight of what they intended to do, but there weren't a lot of choices.

They'd decided to risk the flashlight once, just to spot the pile and give Sharon something to aim at. When the time was right, Grace would hit the rags with the light, Annie would strike a match to one of the bottle wicks, then Sharon would hit the gas-soaked pile on the first throw and they'd all live happily ever after.Yeah, right.

But first the bullets had to work.

It was a simple plan, really. Primitive. First, the diversion. Bullets exploding in the house, soldiers running in from the perimeter to see what was going on, getting distracted by the fire in the garage before they realized it was following a trail that would make it a hell of a lot bigger, giving the women enough time to run out the way the men had run in.

Simple,If the bullets went off.If the men ran in.IfSharon could hit that pile with one of the bottles. Grace closed her eyes. For a woman who left nothing to chance, this was agony. Too many ifs, and this time, there were no contingency plans.

The three of them waited there in the dark, breathing through their mouths, hoping for noise and hearing nothing but silence. It was taking too long. Grace felt a trickle of sweat roll from her hairline down her cheek as she revisited the argument Annie had made at the lake, back when they were putting all this together.

"Why mess with the bullets at all? Why not just open the pumps right away, let the gasoline fill the whole damn town, and then light it up?"

"Would you run into a burning town? If the fire starts too big, they'll just sit out there on the perimeter and wait for us."

Sharon and Annie were both on the edge of panic. Sharon was holding out a bottle toward Grace in question. Grace shook her head strongly. No. The bullets had to go off first. They had to.

Back in the kitchen of the dark house, there was no noise save for the soft, breathy sound of flame. They'd turned the burner under one skillet higher than the other, hoping to prolong the noise, and ever since that moment, the immutable laws of physics had been at work, transferring heat from flame to skillet to bullets. When the proper temperature had been reached, the primer and powder so tidily contained within each bright, brassy casing ignited and then exploded.

Popcorn! Annie thought instantly, jumping at the sharp crack that split the silence. The second crack seemed louder than the first, but it didn't really sound like the shots Annie fired off at the range-more like the explosion of a small firecracker, which was just fine with her.

The louder the better. Another one went off, then a short, chattering salvo, like stuttering, and then nothing.

One skillet down.

Annie opened the matchbook and peeled off the tiny cardboard strip with the sulfur tip. Her hands were shaking.

Sharon crab-walked a few steps out of the sumac thicket that sheltered them and held a bottle at arm's length, back toward Annie. Grace pointed the flashlight like a gun, her thumb on the switch.

The seconds ticked by as their ears hummed in the silence. Then the first bullet in the second skillet did what it was supposed to do, and Annie struck the match and leaned forward to touch it to the cloth wick. It exploded into flames instantly, with a foul stench and an accompanying puff of oily smoke. Grace turned on the flashlight and trained it on the rags as Sharon jumped to her feet and flung the bottle toward the gas station in a panic. It hit the dirt, bounced, then rolled, but it didn't shatter and it didn't explode. Gasoline spilled out through the cloth into a puddle of fire that made a soft whooshing sound, a good ten feet from the pile of rags. It burned merrily on the ground, harmlessly contained by the bare dirt around it. "Shit," Sharon hissed, grabbing another bottle.