Dead Run (28 page)

Another moment, and the driver's door opened and a man slid out to crouch behind it. She could see his eyes over the window frame and not much more. Good cop, she thought. Careful cop.

"Both hands over your head, ma'am!" he shouted. "Higher!"

Sharon complied, holding rock-still as he rose slowly and moved toward her. His weapon was drawn and in both hands, pointed straight at her.

"Now step forward, put your weapon on the hood, please, then step well back."

Sharon did exactly as she was asked, careful to point the gun away from the man.

Back in the trees, Grace had a bead on the man's forehead, hoping like hell this was a seasoned, steady cop who was just taking precautions and not the kind who got nervous, got twitchy, and sometimes made tragic mistakes, like shooting a fellow officer who'd been running for her life all night from other men with guns.

He took a look at Sharon's 9mm, then tucked it into his belt. "Thank you, ma'am. You can put your hands down now."

Grace saw Sharon frown for a moment, then lower the hand that held her badge very, very slowly to hook it back on her jacket pocket. Both the cop and Sharon moved around to the driver's side of the car and had a rapid conversation that Grace couldn't quite make out.

Sharon darted around to the side of the car that faced the woods and shouted down, "Come on, hurry!"

Grace looked at her. She looked a lot different than she had a few minutes ago. Still filthy, still exhausted, still like a woman who'd been through hell, but. . , happy. For Sharon Mueller, a cop carwas the cavalry. One of her own had come to take her home.

Grace stood up slowly, and when the man walked around the front of the car and approached her, she automatically raised the Sig. Sharon scowled down at her. "Damnit, Grace, put that down. He's one of us."

No, he's one of you. Not me, not Annie, not us.

"He's a cop, Grace, just like me. Missaqua County Deputy."

Grace never took her eyes off the man. He'd spotted her almost the second she'd stood up, and stopped dead when he'd seen her weapon, his hands up, palms out. But he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and cowboy boots that looked like they'd seen a lot of wear. He looked

like anybody. Put him in a patrol car, instant cop; put him in camouflage, instant soldier. "Where's his uniform?"

Sharon actually rolled her eyes. "He was off duty, at home, when a call came through on the fire."

Grace kept the gun steady, her lips folded inward.

"Come on, Grace, give me some credit. I asked him all the right questions; he had all the right answers."

So why is your heart beating so fast, Grace? What are you afraid of? Well, that's pretty simple: Everything. Everyone. Just life always.

Annie remained hunkered down in the bushes, looking up at Grace's face, waiting. She didn't have Grace's instincts about certain people and situations, and she knew it. If Grace was nervous, there was probably a damn good reason.

"Uh, ma'am?" the man called to Sharon. "Your friend there seems a little nervous. We've got a lot of units on the way. You all want to just sit tight here 'til you're feeling better about things, that's just fine, but I've got to get to the staging area and report for duty." He took a couple hesitant steps backward, hands still up, harmless, which finally eased Grace's mind a little-that he was willing to drive away without them.

Sharon raised an impatient brow. "We started a goddamned forest fire, Grace. Get out here and take a look. And for God's sake, holster your weapon. Cops don't like civilians pointing guns at them."

Grace thought about it. He had his gun holstered, and even if he went for Sharon's, an easier draw from the belt, she could still put him down.

She slipped the Sig back in the holster but didn't fasten the snap, released a long breath, and started forward. Annie rose out of the bushes to follow her, a fat, wild-looking woman in a tattered dress, and the man's eyes widened to see a third.

"Jesus," he breathed in an aside to Sharon as he watched Grace and Annie approach. "Your partner looks pretty wired. This must be some case you're working."

Grace stopped two feet away, enough room to get at her weapon, close enough to use her hands if she had to. "You don't look like a cop."

That irritated him. "Deputy David Diebel. Missaqua County Sheriff's Department. And as far as that goes, you don't look much like arsonists, either. But if you really did start this thing, you've got a lot of explaining to do."

Grace and Annie looked back toward Four Corners and saw what Sharon already had. Black billows of smoke stained the morning sky, and tongues of orange flame rose above the trees and pixellated into sparks that swirled in a vortex overhead. And now they heard it, faintly-a low, distant roaring sound, like an enormous animal just coming awake.

"Oh, dear Lord," Annie murmured, thinking that Smokey the Bear was going to be really pissed. She stepped out of one of the high-tops and felt the burn when the air hit her heel. The blistering had bled a little into the shoe. Sharon was going to be pissed, too.

"Listen, ladies, we're in a bad spot here, and I need to get moving. You can call whoever you need to from the staging area, and while you're there, you can explain your involvement in this fire to Sheriff Pitala."

"Sheriff Pitala?"

"My boss.. ."

Grace glanced quickly at Sharon, who gave her an almost imperceptible nod.

".., and my guess is, he'll be mighty interested in whatever you have to say. We've got a town right in the middle of that fire, and you better pray to God that everybody who lives there got out."

His voice was a little shaky now, with understandable rage, Grace thought. This is his county, and those were his people in Four Corners, and he thought they set the fire that might have killed some of them. Something inside her that had been tight since the car broke down finally loosened. Let it go, she told herself. He's a cop. For God's sake, he's a cop. It's over. You're safe. You're all safe now.

The sound of an explosion made the deputy look up in alarm. "Shit, the big pines are going. That thing is moving fast. Get in the back, now."

"I need my weapon, Deputy," Sharon said.

"Later," he said, running to the car and opening the back door.

Sharon stopped at the open car door. "I'm a Federal officer, Deputy. Cops don't take guns from cops."

He hesitated for an instant, then pulled her 9mm out of his belt and handed it over, grip first. "Sorry. Holster that. We're going to be moving, and the roads are rough."

Sharon crawled all the way across the backseat, moving the deputy's hat up to the back window ledge so they didn't smash it. Halloran would climb all over me for blocking the window, she thought in a sudden pang of nostalgia. Actually, Halloran would have given Deputy Diebel an even more serious dressing down for storing his hat in the backseat in the first place. Things must be a lot more relaxed in Missaqua County.

Annie clambered in next to her, feet splayed on either side of the hump, one of them bare. "Shit, my shoe . . ." But by that time, Grace was already slamming the door, the deputy was behind the wheel, stomping on the accelerator, and the rear tires were squealing.

It was a frantic sound, a sound of panicked haste, and Grace felt her stomach knot as she stared straight ahead at the cage between the front seat and back, then at the doors without handles. Being locked in your own tiny, safe place was one thing; being locked in someone else's was altogether different.

She leaned forward, closer to the cage. "We need to get patched through to a landline as fast as you can."

"We're in a dead zone," he snapped back. "Radios and cells don't work. But the staging area's less than five miles from here, and like I said, there's landlines there. You better buckle up. Another mile or so and we have to take a farm road. It's straight washboard."

Grace sat back and buckled the lap belt, and felt the wind from the deputy's open window buffeting against her face, lifting her hair away from her ears. Relax, she told herself. There's not a single thing you can do for five more minutes anyway. She glanced at her watch. Dear God. Only four hours and forty-five minutes left. Was that enough time to find two particular trucks out of the millions across the country? And even if they found them, was it enough time to disarm them?

Suddenly, the weight of a thousand lives came down on her, and five short minutes seemed like a lifetime. She tried to look forward to the end of it, when they'd get to the staging area and a phone. . . . Her thoughts stuttered to a halt. Who were they going to call? Who did you call to report something like this? She went through all the possibilities, starting with Magozzi, the one and only cop she really trusted, and she smiled when she ended up at the only real choice they had. She'd run from the FBI for ten years, maligning them every chance she got, hating them almost constantly for what a few bad agents had done to her once, and now she was sitting next to one of them, planning to call the rest in for help.

And the wheel goes round and round, she thought, rolling her head to look at Annie. The woman was going to kill herself the minute she got a look in a mirror. She didn't do disheveled. But Grace envied Annie's ability to disconnect instantly, to throw back her head and close her eyes and go from total terror to total relaxation in the space of a few minutes.

Sharon was a different story. She was buckled in but sitting straight up, her back nowhere near the seat, and that surprised Grace. Of all of them, she should have been the most relaxed in a police car with a fellow officer. Then again, maybe she was never caged in the backseat before, or maybe she was as screwed up after getting shot last fall as Grace was after Atlanta. Maybe the two of them were more alike than Grace knew.

The deputy braked suddenly and cranked the wheel to the right.

Annie's eyes flew open as she felt herself thrown forward, and her heart pounded.God, take it easy, fat woman, you're going to have a heart attach- He just made a turn, that's all.

"It's going to get bumpy now, ladies," Deputy Diebel called over his shoulder as he turned sharply off the highway and onto a dirt road carved into the forest. "Hang on."

The car's axles tap-danced over the washboard surface, jostling the women against one another in the back. Annie had her arms folded under her breasts to support them. Stupid things were about to pop out of their sockets, or whatever the hell held them in there, and theyhurt.

The car jittered over another series of bone-jarring washboards and something hard and narrow stowed under the front seat poked at Sharon's toes. She moved her foot and looked down as her eyebrows crept toward one another.

There was a ghastly scraping sound as the car suddenly bottomed out on a hard ridge of dirt, and the deputy's hat bounced off the ledge and slid down between Annie and Sharon. Sharon grabbed it automatically and set it in her lap, but her eyes were on the fields and woods and great clouds of dust flashing by the window.

Another minute, and they turned off the dirt road onto a highway. "Another mile, ladies, and we're there."

Annie patted Sharon's knee. "Relax, honey, it's almost over."

Sharon nodded slowly, turning the deputy's hat over and over on her lap, fingering the familiar rigid brim, finding an odd sort of comfort in this small piece of a uniform just like the one she used to wear. It looked just like the one sitting on her hall closet shelf, waiting for the day she might return to her job in Kingsford County, except for the size, of course, and the name on the inside label. She took a very deep breath and let it out slowly. Her hands were shaking.

"These are the last bumps now," the deputy said as he turned onto another farm road. "We set up in a machine shed at the back of this field. Only place close enough to the fire with a phone line."

The machine shed was corrugated steel, large enough to house a lot of farm equipment, and it looked old and faded and uncared for. Cars were jammed in the long grass off to the side, but there were no people in sight.

Grace was leaning forward against her seat belt. "Where is everybody?"

Deputy Diebel actually gave her a smile over his shoulder. He was where he wanted to be now, and considerably more relaxed. "A few of them are inside running communications, but most everybody is out fighting the fire. We drop our personal vehicles here, load up in an emergency unit, and take off."

He pulled to a stop next to the other cars, turned off the ignition, unfastened his shoulder harness, and reached down to unsnap his holster. It was an absolutely normal thing for him to do. You make enough road stops when you ride solo, unsnapping your holster before you got out of the car to confront God knows what becomes a habit.

Grace glanced over just as Sharon was raising her 9mm to the back of Deputy Diebel's head.

And then she pulled the trigger.

SHERIFF ED PITALA had forcibly pulled Dorothy away from the dispatch desk and sent her home at twoA.M., a full three hours after her shift had ended. Trying to pry her loose any earlier had met with about as much success as trying to get her to retire for the past ten years.

Dorothy had a face like a topographical map of the Rockies, a body like Aunt Bea, and a voice like a blowtorch. Her pictures hung on the wall with three previous sheriffs, all of whom she'd outlasted and outlived. Sheriff Pitala figured that if she ever up and died, he'd just slap a "closed" sign in the window and nail the door shut, because this place sure as hell couldn't run without her.

She was back by 5:30A.M., shoving a plate of ham, eggs, and biscuits under his nose. "Get away from my desk."

"Lord almighty, Dot, now I know how all my predecessors died. You scared them to death."

"You were sleeping on the job."

"Dozing. It's been quiet since you left, except for the boys checking in by phone. And before you ask, there's no sign of Doug yet, or those women the Minneapolis cops are looking for. And what the hell are you doing here? I just sent you home."