Dark Rivers of the Heart (53 page)

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.