Blind Pursuit (28 page)

52

At the eastern end of the side road where she’d lost Gund’s trail at nightfall, Annie found a ranch with a padlocked gate.

Brief excitement shook her. But the duplicate key marked GATE would not open the lock, and neither would any other key on the ring.

Disappointed, she doubled back to Houghton Road and continued south.

Already her quest was beginning to feel hopeless. It was one thing to assume that Gund had a ranch in this vicinity; it was quite another to search every side street, every dirt road, every unmarked lane intersecting with Houghton for miles.

For all she knew, Gund’s ranch was far south of here, perhaps south of Interstate 10 and the Pima County Fairgrounds. Or—a grimmer prospect—it might be nowhere in the area at all.

If Gund had known all along that she was following him, he might have driven out of his way deliberately, in order to give no clue to his true destination, before performing whatever mysterious maneuver had made him disappear.

There were so many possibilities, and the desert was so dark, so vast. She could very well be wasting her time.

Another side road passed by, this one on her left. Unmarked, barely visible. She nearly missed seeing it.

With a squeal of brakes she cut her speed and executed a skidding U-turn, then pulled onto the narrow dirt lane.

The Miata bounced lightly on the rutted surface. To the north, barbed-wire fencing glided by; beyond it lay the dim shapes of a house and barn.

She stiffened in her seat as a distant memory snapped into focus.

“Can’t be coincidence,” she whispered, unaware that she was voicing her thoughts. “Can’t be.”

Her headlights picked up an obstruction ahead.

A gate.

The Miata slowed to a halt. Annie sat in the driver’s seat, very still, barely breathing.

The twin circles of her halogen beams played on the gate. Unlocked, it creaked lazily on rusted hinges.

If the labels on the key ring meant anything, then the gate of Gund’s ranch was padlocked.

This couldn’t be it, then.

But she knew it was.

Because this was the old Connor place. The ranch she and Erin had tracked down on a spring day in 1985.

There had been no reason to think of that visit in years. She’d forgotten all about the ranch, forgotten its location, its very existence.

Until now.

Now she knew—she
knew
—that this was the place she was looking for.

Harold Gund owned the ranch ... and Erin was inside.

Switching on her high beams, she scanned the grounds. Part of the fence, she noticed, had been torn apart as if by a speeding vehicle. She thought of the damage to Gund’s van.

His van. If he was here, it ought to be within view. Parked in the carport or on the gravel court at the front of the house.

It was nowhere. And the house was dark.

Apparently Gund hadn’t returned. Perhaps he really had fled, as she’d hoped.

Or perhaps he was on his way here right now.

She killed the high beams, using only her parking lights. Cautiously she eased the Miata forward and nosed open the gate. The car hummed over yards of stiff brown grass and came to a stop fifty feet from the house.

When she shut off the motor, the night’s sudden stillness pressed in on her, squeezing her chest, making it difficult to breathe.

She left her key in the ignition—her experience in Gund’s neighborhood had alerted her to the advantages of a quick getaway—and got out of the car, being careful not to slam the door. The warm night wrapped itself around her, dry and dark.

Her shoes crunched loudly on the gravel, an oddly hungry sound, like the grinding of some large animal’s jaws, as she walked to the house’s front door.

It was locked. Searching the key ring, squinting at each hand-labeled tag in the starlight, she found the key marked FRONT DOOR.

Even before inserting it in the keyhole, she was irrationally certain it would fit.

It did.

The door glided open under her hand. She stepped into a spacious living room, unfurnished, empty except for a potbelly stove bolted to the floor.

No light was apparent, other than shafts of feeble

Starlight lancing through the broken windows. No sound was audible save the hum and whistle of the wind.

Annie moved forward, into the dark, and found her voice. “Erin ...?”

53

“It must have been the summer of 1965,” Erin said softly as the stun gun wavered in Oliver’s shaking hand. “You would have been fifteen.”

“Fifteen,” Oliver whispered, memory dulling his gaze.

“Maureen was twenty-one.”

“And beautiful.” The flashlight on the floor shined up at him, casting weird shadows over his face. The hollows of his eyes were deep wells of ink. “So beautiful.”

Erin squeezed more tightly into the corner. The floor under her was cold. The bricks at her back—cold. A trickle of sweat ran down her spine like an icy finger.

“How did it happen?” she asked, fighting to hear herself over the pounding of her heart.

He looked away, toward the open door, but she knew he wasn’t seeing it, wasn’t seeing anything around him.

“In July of ’65,” he said quietly, “Maureen came out from Sierra Springs, alone, to celebrate Lydia’s birthday. One afternoon she set up a lounge chair out back. I sneaked through the arroyo to where she was sunbathing. And spied on her.

“She took off her shirt. Squeezed suntan oil onto her breasts. Touched herself. I heard her moan. Skin wet with oil, legs twisting ...”

Erin felt it was wrong somehow, a violation of some ancient taboo, to picture her mother touching herself so intimately.

She blinked the thought away. “How long did you watch?”

“Until she was finished. Then I returned to the house. Lincoln saw me as I entered. And he saw the stain. On my pants. A big, dark stain.

“I didn’t even know I’d ... done that. Hadn’t felt it. Hadn’t felt anything at all.”

She understood. He must have survived the years of abuse by disconnecting himself from his emotions, even from physical sensations—and from sexual feelings most of all.

“Lincoln said he knew what I’d been up to. I’d been peeping at my Aunt Maureen. That kind of behavior demanded punishment. A boy needed to learn discipline.

“Lydia was in town, and Maureen was still outside. Nothing to stop him, so he did it right then, on the living room floor, near the potbelly stove.

“Afterward, I locked the bathroom door, scrubbed my pants and underwear. I didn’t think about Lincoln. I thought about Maureen.”

He lowered his head, the flashlight’s pale radiance brightening his face like a flush of shame.

“I wanted her. Before, it had been enough to just watch, but now I had to have ... had to prove ...”

Erin knew what he’d felt the need to prove.

“Next morning, Maureen was up before dawn; she liked to walk when it was cool. I found her by the barn. Said I’d hidden a birthday present for Lydia in the tack room.

“She went in with me. Trusted me. I was only a kid, after all. But I was taller than she was. And in my back pocket I had a knife.

“Her eyes got big when I popped the switchblade. I was going to stick something in her, I said—the knife or my cock. Her choice.

“She was crying, saying I couldn’t mean it. Good hard slap shut her up.

“We did it there, on the floor, with the knife at her throat and the horses restless in their stalls on the other side of the wall.”

On the floor. The same way Lincoln had abused Oliver. The same pattern of perfunctory violence, repeated.

The son had learned from the father, but it was not discipline that had been taught.

“Once you let her go,” Erin whispered, “she didn’t tell?”

“No. She was scared. I let her know that even if I served time, I’d be out in a couple of years. That was all I had to say.

“She left later that day, even before Lydia’s party. Made some excuse. Drove back to Sierra Springs. And not long afterward ...”

“She found out she was pregnant.”

“That’s right, Doc. I got twin girls started that morning in the barn. I gave you life.” He switched on the stun gun again. “And what I gave, I can take back.”

Erin stared at the ribbon of current as Oliver guided it slowly toward her throat.

Upstairs, the groan of a door.

Her glance ticked upward. Oliver cocked his head.

They listened, frozen, breathless, wax figures in a tableau.

Softly, footsteps.

Someone in the house.

An emotion so intense as to be unidentifiable swept through Erin and set her body shaking.

Oh, God—the words in her mind began as a plea, ended in a silent shriek—let it be a cop, please, let it be a cop!

The footsteps stopped directly overhead.

In the sudden silence, in the motionless air, a voice.

“Erin ...?”

Annie.

Recognition jerked Erin half upright. All the breath rushed out of her lungs in an urgent, warbling cry.

“
Annie, get away, he’s got a gun, he’s—”

The pincers slammed into the soft skin under her jaw, and she fell instantly into a lightless void, pursued by the echo of her scream.

54

Annie raced across the gravel court, her shoes scattering a fine spray of stones.

The echo of Erin’s scream rang in her memory. A scream from the cellar, abruptly cut off.

After that, footsteps drumming on the stairs. Gund, ascending at a run.

He was here, after all. He was here, though she hadn’t seen his van, hadn’t seen any lights in the windows of the house. He was here, and if he chased her down, he would kill her. Kill her and Erin, too. Annie was sure of that.

The Miata was just ahead, the driver’s window open, the door unlocked. She reached the car and fumbled for the door handle, Gund’s key ring slipping free of her grasp to land somewhere on the ground with a distant, barely noticed clink.

The door swung open. She threw herself into the bucket seat, cranked the ignition key, and the motor caught.

Her high beams flicked on. Gund exploded out of the ranch, loping into the headlights’ twin funnels, flashlight in one hand, pistol in the other.

Of course, Annie had not the slightest intention of fleeing.

Run away? Abandon her sister to a psychopath’s mercies?

She never would. It wasn’t a question of bravery or loyalty or commitment, but of simple self-preservation. To flee and leave Erin to die would be as good as committing suicide. She couldn’t live with herself after that.

He had a gun, all right. But a car could be a weapon, too.

Annie hunched low over the wheel and floored the gas pedal.

For a heart-freezing second the Miata’s tires spun uselessly, chewing gravel.

Gund stopped, twenty feet away, pinned in the high beams. Threw aside the flashlight. Lifted the pistol in both hands.

Annie had time to think she made a perfect target, stationary and at close range, and then with a squeal of rubber the tires caught.

Sudden acceleration punched her backward, hard against the seat.

The pistol bucked in time with a sharp crack of sound.

She jerked to one side as the windshield puckered. Crumbs of tempered glass showered her, gummy fragments seeding her hair.

She didn’t slow down. Refused to be intimidated.

Gund was ten feet from the Miata’s front end. Five.

Annie braced for impact.

At the last instant Gund leaped.

Timing the jump perfectly, he flung himself onto the hood, landing spread-eagle on his belly.

The car left the gravel court, bouncing on mounds of dirt and patches of stiff, dead grass.

Gund extended his left arm, smashed through the windshield, and thrust the gun at her face.

The blued barrel gleamed, catching the spectrum of colors from the dashboard gauges. The muzzle was a hungry, sucking hole, a lamprey’s mouth.

Annie spun the steering wheel.

Gund slid sideways, his aim thrown off as he squeezed the trigger.

The report deafened her. The bullet screamed past her face and clawed a hole in the convertible’s top. A tongue of black cloth flapped wildly over her head, inches away.

Close, Annie noted, strangely unmoved despite the nearness of death.

Gund’s pistol swung toward her again, the barrel compressed by foreshortening until it had disappeared and there was only the muzzle, inches from her right eye.

She stomped on the brake pedal.

The Miata screamed into a skid. The world blurred. The night sky, the barbed-wire fence, the ranch buildings all melted together in a giddy smear, like the view from a carousel.

Inertia yanked Gund halfway off the hood. He clung to the windshield frame a heartbeat longer, his knuckles squeezed bloodless, then let go and was gone, vanishing in the dark, rolling somewhere in the brittle grass.

The Miata pirouetted, completing a full circle, and shuddered to a stop.

Silence. Sudden and absolute.

The engine had stalled.

Annie heard a soft, plaintive whimper and realized it was her own.

The unreal calm that had armored her a few seconds earlier was gone, replaced by fear—pure, uncomplicated animal fear that choked her in a breathless stranglehold.

What to do? Start the car again. Yes. Get it moving and find Gund—injured, maybe unconscious—find him and mow him down, crush him under the wheels like roadkill, finish him, finish the bastard
now
.

Feverish thoughts and images beat like bat wings in her brain as she twisted the key in the ignition.

The motor coughed, died. Coughed, died.

“
Start
,” she hissed, tossing frightened glances at the rearview and side view mirrors.

She jerked the key again. The engine feebly cleared its throat, then expired with a chortling death rattle.

Movement on her left.

She turned, and a gasp hiccupped out of her.

Gund.

At the open window on the driver’s side.

In his hand, the pistol—or something like a pistol. Sleek and metallic and coming at her face.

Instinctively she recoiled.

Too late.

Pincers bit her neck in a vampire kiss.

Crackle of static, and pain clamped down on her, every muscle clenching.

Vision faded. Reality receded. Awareness broke up, flying into fragments like the Miata’s windshield, plans and memories and speculations shattering in a mist of crystal dust.

Erin—it was her last thought before her mind was lost in a haze of glistening white—I’m sorry.