Middle of Nowhere (49 page)

He cautioned LaMoia, “You’ve got to keep them reporting their movement. If you step on it,” he said, indicating his crudely drawn map, “we beat them to the drop an hour before he expects to see us.”

“And
we
get the jump on
him,”
LaMoia said gleefully.

“Maybe,” Boldt said, grabbing for the dash as they skidded through the next turn, the burning rubber crying out its complaint.

“Y
ou need to focus on what Davie would think of all this,” Daphne advised.

“I warned you to shut up!” he reminded angrily.

“Yes, you did. It’s true. And maybe I’m just delirious from blood loss,” she suggested, “but I want to help you if I can.”

“Fuck you.”

She said, “Does the name Maria Sanchez mean anything to you?”

“I seen the news,” he said.

“Was that you? The Sanchez place?”

He scoffed. “Cops are all the same. If it’s easy, then that’s your man.”

“What if they’d put this on Davie?”

“Davie didn’t have nothing to do with it!”

“But you did?”

“According to the news.”

“I’m asking you,” she said. “I’m trying to tell you that that’s the primary reason we wanted to collar you: Sanchez. We need answers. I’ve gotta believe,” she said, trying her best to keep her brain functioning, to use vernacular capable of establishing a rapport, “that Davie wouldn’t want you going down for something you didn’t do.”

“You don’t know nothing about Davie. What he did for me.”

He didn’t complete the thought, but Daphne’s mind raced ahead looking for answers.
“What he did for
me. . . .” Suddenly she saw it, she understood what he was talking about. Psychologically, it changed everything. Davie was a martyr. She said to Flek, “The robbery he went down for, he confessed to. . . . It was
yours.
He let slip about a delivery coming into the store, and you pounced. But you were about to get caught. Sitting on two convictions, with a third looming, you’re fifteen to twenty without parole. Three strikes. And so Davie takes the fall for you, and big brother picks up bags and splits for Seattle.” It was Flek who suddenly looked wounded. “But big brother can’t leave well enough alone. He hears about little brother’s work in the private commerce program—a program his brother has qualified for because he’s such a model prisoner—and here comes another scam, and little brother can’t say no.”

Flek glanced over at her with a look of crestfallen failure. The truth could soothe, or the truth could aggravate, and Daphne had taken a huge chance trying it out on him, but for the first time since climbing into this car in the belly of the ferry, she felt progress. She just wasn’t sure she could retain consciousness long enough to take advantage of it.

“We couldn’t find any record of Davie having worked the phone solicitation on Sanchez. All your other burglaries were on his list.
That
is why we wanted to question you, Abby. Granted, our Burglary division would have heralded the arrest. You’d have gone away for five to twelve. But we’re overcrowded, and with the crime being nonviolent, you’d be out in two. But breaking the neck of a policewoman and kidnapping another? You want to think about that for a minute?”

“That’s a bullshit charge, and you know it.”

“The kidnapping?” asked the hostage.

“Sanchez,” he said.

“Do you have an alibi?”

“What if I do?”

“Then I shot myself in the foot. It’s my gun—it’ll fit. It happens more often than you think.” She added, “Besides, I’m a woman. None of these guys think a woman can handle a sidearm.”

“You’d lie through your teeth to save yourself right now.”

“You’re missing the point, Abby. What would Davie want you to do? That’s got to be your focus. You want his name linked to this assault? Does he deserve that? He was a good kid, Davie was. He stepped up when others would have walked away. But now you’re dragging him through it, and there’s nothing
he
can do about it. But you—”

“Shut up!”

“He’s dead,” she said bluntly, knowing this was the button that had set him off. “He’s dead and gone, all through a string of mistakes.
Your
mistakes, Abby. And if he’s looking down right now, then his soul is tortured. Is that what you want? Did he take the fall for you to have it end up like this? Him dead. You a cop killer?” She let this sink in. “That’s what you have in mind, isn’t it? Kill Boldt. Or me? Or both of us? Put the blame onto Boldt instead of yourself? Do you see that’s all you’re doing? Do you realize it won’t do anything to take away the voices?”

He snapped his head toward her as if she’d poured salt on a wound.

“You hear voices. They started right after your brother’s death.” She said, “You think they’re bad now? You’ve never killed a man, have you, Abby? It’s not something you forget. It’s not something you walk away from and all is forgiven. You blame Boldt for Ansel— but you’ve got that wrong.”

His eyes burned into her as he turned the car right onto a street marked Sid Price. A damp and dark narrow lane. Enormous trees. Close quarters. She couldn’t be sure he’d even heard her.

He drove down a small dirt track, a dead-end driveway that led down to a muddy patch of lawn and a boat launch into Miller Bay. The narrow waterway was only fifty yards wide at this point. Flek parked the car up from the boat ramp. He lowered both windows, shut off the car and turned off the lights. Daphne could smell the low tide and mud flats. It smelled like death.

“Don’t do this,” she pleaded. “I can still get you out of most of this. But if you go through with it. . . .”

Paying little attention to her, he leaned over awkwardly and reached under the seat and worked to untwist some hidden wire. If she was to have a chance to fight back, it was then, with his head lowered. But she couldn’t summon the strength, nor the courage. She could barely keep herself conscious. She had lost great quantities of blood. Perhaps she was dying. She had heard Flek mention one hour and she no longer believed she could or would make it that long, certainly not conscious.

“Please,” she said.

He sat up, the Chinese assault rifle in hand. The German scope. He had wired it high under the seat, so that even a thorough check under the seat by a traffic cop might not have revealed it. He said, “Cops lie, lady. They lie about me doing that other woman, and now you lie to save your ass. They’ll lie about anything, if it makes their job easier.”

He sought out the oily rag and gagged her again, a man going about his business. He turned on the car’s interior light and met eyes with Daphne. “If I get Boldt, I’ll spare you. If I don’t, it’s you who’s gonna pay. Say your prayers.” Then he was gone, down toward the water, the rain and the darkness absorbing him.

“G
aynes says the signals have stopped moving,” LaMoia reported.

“Then that was them,” Boldt said, his attention fixed on the entrance to the street marked Sid Price. The Crown Vic was parked down a muddy lane, called Quail, from which they had an unobstructed view across Miller Bay Road. A big monster of a car had turned through the rain only a few minutes before, its taillights receding. LaMoia had guessed it was an Eldorado.

“Shit, Sarge,” LaMoia complained. “He could lay in wait for you anywhere down there. We gotta rethink this.”

“We’re at least a half hour ahead of when he expects us,” Boldt reminded. “That’s in our favor. We need to move while it still means something.”

“We may have the jump on him, but he’s got the sniper’s rifle. Our peashooters are good at ten to thirty feet, Sarge. He’s dead on the money at two hundred yards.”

“We had his sight recalibrated,” Boldt informed the man, who knew so little of the investigation to this point. “He wanted a hundred and fifty yards. Manny Wong gave him seventy-five.”

“No shit? And you’re counting on that? What are you smoking? If he’s tried the thing out on a range— which you can bet your ass he has—then everything’s back on target. I wouldn’t put a hell of a lot of faith in this guy missing, Sarge. I’d be thinking about shooting him first. That usually has the more desired effect.”

“His first shot will miss,” Boldt said confidently. “You have to hit him before he throws that second shot.”

“Me and who else?” LaMoia complained. “I got me a peashooter here. I got to know where he is if I’m to be useful. And I won’t know until
after
that first shot.”

Boldt cupped his penlight so the light barely shone down onto his open notebook, but it was enough to see by. He had sketched in the information provided by Dispatch and analyzed by Patrick Mulwright, head of Special Ops, who volunteered to help out. Intelligence, a division where Boldt had been lieutenant for a year, provided high-resolution military satellite images of Miller Bay. Within fifteen minutes of Boldt’s request, Mulwright had come back to him with three likely sniper points: rooftops; either of two high-tension electric towers that strung four hundred thousand volts suspended across Miller Bay; and a marina, directly across the water.

Boldt and LaMoia ruled out the nearby rooftops. Shooting a cop from the roof of a neighborhood house left too great a possibility of witnesses.

“It’s one of the two towers,” LaMoia said confidently.

“Across the water,” Boldt added. “It gives him the distance for the scope, and the water gives a natural break to slow down or prevent any pursuit on our part. He escapes while we’re attempting to catch up.”

“And what,” LaMoia asked skeptically, “he goes on foot from there?”

“Osbourne confirmed he’d been over here at least twice. He could have anything planned. He could have friends on the reservation. He could have left a car or a bike for himself.”

LaMoia agreed. “That tower over there makes sense.”

“So you take the car,” Boldt said. “I’m on foot.” He had rearranged the vest to sit beneath his sport coat, his weapon at the ready.

“The advantage of the towers,” LaMoia said, pointing out through the windshield, “is that he can see over the houses. He can see
us
if he’s looking.” Boldt quit the flashlight. “Not that he’s up there yet. But he could be any minute now.”

“He can see you coming,” Boldt warned. “And if he does, he’ll take out Daffy. If he can’t get me, he’ll take her.”

“Now you’re getting the point,” LaMoia fired back. “And he wants you coming alone. He’ll want to see a car drive up with one person inside. If there’s backup, he’ll see it.”

“But I’ve still got that half hour.”

Faint light from cars passing out on the main road cast enough light for LaMoia to trace a finger across Boldt’s notepad. Boldt could now clearly understand the man’s awkward speech patterns caused by his wired jaw. “You drop me over here. Right now. Believing he’ll be facing this direction, I come up from behind. You drive back and park someplace with no view of either tower. You give me a good ten minutes because you’re right: I’m a little slow. You can’t scout it, Sarge, as much as you want to. He could see you. Even now, he could see you, and that blows it for Matthews. Who knows what he has planned for her? Maybe the car’s rigged. Maybe the first bullet is meant for her if he smells a double-cross. At the appointed time, you drive in and see what you see. If my phone worked, I could call you, but it doesn’t, so we do this blind.” He added, “You hear a couple guys throwing shots, you’ll know I’m onto something.”

Boldt wouldn’t give up. He didn’t want to drive into the drop blind. Protecting Daphne meant knowing the layout. He wanted a first look. Pointing to his crude map, he said, “I could make for this tower now, after I drop you off, and at least provide cover if he spots you—”

“As if you could hit him at that distance.”

“He doesn’t know what I’m shooting,” Boldt protested. “Providing there aren’t any shots thrown, then there’d be plenty of time for me to still arrive by car. If Mulwright described this right, this closer tower is far enough above the drop site that it wouldn’t really be in the direction he’s facing.”

LaMoia didn’t like it, but he said, “Okay, so I agree. Is that what you want to hear?”