No Man's Land (20 page)

From there on, like they say, timing was everything. The second
cop arrived just as Kehoe stepped out of the men’s room door. Forty
yards away, Driver saw it come down. He wanted to shout. To tell
Kehoe to just keep walking. It happened too fast though. Way too
fast. Confronted by a pair of cops and a life-anddeath struggle,
Kehoe acted on instinct; he went for his gun.

Driver watched as Kehoe beat the cop to the draw, getting off a
single round, catching the cop square in the chest, forcing the air
from his lungs and sending him staggering backward, as if he’d been
hit in the sternum by a sledgehammer. The officer was whooping for
breath and kneading his chest with both hands as he reeled across the
pavement toward the police cruiser. Soon as Kehoe figured out the cop
was wearing a vest and wasn’t going to be dead anytime soon, he
sent a couple of rounds after the staggering lawman and started
running toward the Mercedes at full speed. Driver reached under the
towels and came out with the Mossberg twelve-gauge. He grabbed a
handful of shells and covered the distance between the Mercedes and
the State Police cruiser in a dozen quick strides, arriving just as
the wheezing policeman threw himself into the driver’s seat and
grabbed the radio.

In the instant before his thumb engaged the TALK button, some
primal instinct told the cop to take a quick glance to his right.
Must have looked like a sewer pipe, that enormous, gaping mouth of a
shotgun pointed at the side of his head in the split second before
the powder expanded and the roar and the flame followed the plastic
wads out the barrel into the air. His eyes were big as quarters. He
was reaching for his gun and calling for his savior when the thirty
or so lead pellets packed inside the shotgun shell blew his head to
mist, sending a mass of hair-covered detritus rocketing out the side
window like a scalded cat. The girl was screaming now, low down in
her vocal range, almost like a roar. Nothing you could make sense of,
but not in terror either. Something like excitement accompanied her
cries into the darkening sky, but Driver had no time to listen. Up at
the restroom, the cop had gained the upper hand and was now kneeling
on his prisoner’s back as he exchanged gunfire with Kehoe, who had
flattened himself on the ground and was using one hand to steady the
other as he squeezed off high powered rounds, several of which had
plowed irregular holes through the bathroom’s concrete-block wall.

Fighting for his life, the cop was so focused on Kehoe he lost
track of Driver. Let him get within forty feet before the boom of the
shotgun tore him apart. Last thing he saw was Driver pulling the
trigger at every stride aiming at whatever the Kevlar vest didn’t
cover. The cop fell over backward in a heap, twitched a couple of
times and was still.

By the time Driver got there, the cop was dead and the guy pinned
beneath him was squirming like a fish on a riverbank, trying to get
out from under the corpse. Driver grabbed the dead cop by the front
of his shirt and pulled him over to the side. The guy rolled over a
half turn and got to his feet.

He was young, under twenty-five, with fine almost girlish features
and a pompadour worthy of Elvis himself. Wasn’t till he reached up
to run a hand through his fancy hair . . . wasn’t till then he saw
the handcuffs were still connected to both his right arm and to the
left arm of the cop, except that arm wasn’t connected to the cop’s
body anymore.

“Holy shit,” he said, lifting the severed limb from the
ground. He stared down at the arm swinging from his wrist, turned
pale and for a moment looked like he might puke. He started to bring
his right hand to his face, thought better of it and used his left to
wipe his brow.

At that moment the girl in the cruiser began to holler.

“Harry,” she yelled. “Get me outta here, Harry.”

For his part, Harry was in something of a quandary. While his
heart was clearly with the young woman in the patrol car, his arm was
still attached to the cop’s. He took a step toward the cruiser,
decided he didn’t want to arrive with an extra appendage and
instead dropped to his knees, using his unencumbered hand to go
through the cop’s pants pockets, patting here and feeling there
until he came out with a small ring of keys. Took him three tries to
find the right one, but he finally managed to get himself separated
from the long arm of the law, just about the time both Kehoe and
Driver had reunited and reloaded their weapons.

“I’m comin’, honey,” he shouted into the gathering
darkness. Kehoe and Driver hurried along in his wake, scanning the
deserted rest area as the love birds staged a tearful reunion in the
backseat of the patrol car.

“I saw them on TV,” Driver said as they hustled along.

“Doin’ what?”

Driver filled him in on the details. The rebuffed Harry putting
one in her father’s ear. The crime spree across Texas and Oklahoma.
Extradition back to Texas. Everything he could remember from Vegas.

Kehoe gave a low whistle. “Texas ain’t no damn place to be
killin’ people, Captainman. Those crackers’ll drop the pellets on
you in a heartbeat.”

Out on the highway, an eighteen-wheeler backed down on its gears,
sounding for all the world like it was going to pull into the rest
area, before shifting up again and continuing on into the darkness.
“We better make tracks,” Kehoe said. Harry had extricated his
beloved from the backseat by then and was assuring her that
everything was going to be alright. Heidi Anne was a
high-strung-looking girl in a pair of tortoiseshell glasses and
matching hairband. While by no means classically beautiful, Heidi
Anne’s vapid blue eyes and voluptuous contours held sufficient
promise to explain a murder or two on her behalf. By the time she was
inclined to take Harry’s word for the viability of their situation,
Driver and Kehoe were approaching the Mercedes. They came sprinting
over hand in hand. Stood there like waifs at a bakery window.

“We gotta get out of here,” Harry said. “Me and Heidi, we .
. .”

“I saw you on TV. I know who you are,” Driver said.

“Then you know why we gotta get outta here.”

“Texas is a very unforgiving state.”

Kid bobbed his hairdo up and down. “So howsabout it?”

Driver shrugged. “Take the cruiser.”

“We won’t get ten miles in that thing.”

“Not your problem,” Driver said evenly. “Should have thought
of that before you wasted her father.”

“That old fuck got exactly what he deserved.”

“Sure of that, are you?”

“Damn right I am.”

Over the kid’s left shoulder, Kehoe had moved in close to Heidi
Anne and was looking her over like a lunch menu.

“What do you say, Cutter? We give ’em a ride or not?”

Kehoe gave it some consideration. “They was wanted anyplace but
Texas, I’d say leave ’em,” he said with mock sincerity.

“But . . . Texas . . . you know . . .”

“Honor among thieves and all that?”

“Whatever you say,” Kehoe said.

Driver laughed. “I’ll take that as a yes,” he said. With his
laughter still in the air and the smile lingering on his lips, Driver
put the barrel of the twelve-gauge right between Harry Gibbs’s
eyes. “I’d stay real still if I was you, boy,” Driver
whispered. Kehoe picked up on the sudden tension and tore himself
away from the lovely Heidi. “Problem, Captainman?” he asked.

“Pat our young friend here down for me will you, Cutter? Last I
saw that cop in the car over there, he had a piece. Seems it’s gone
missing.”

They found it in Harry’s boot, a nice compact little Browning
nine-millimeter.

“You’ll excuse me now, boy, if maybe you’re not the type I
want sitting behind me with a nine in his shoe.”

The kid was smart enough to keep his mouth shut.

“Her too, Cutter,” Driver said. “Make sure she’s clean.”

Kehoe reckoned it was a filthy job, but he was willing to take it
on. For the sake of modesty, he walked her around to the far side of
the Mercedes. Harry surely wanted to bend over and look through the
cars windows, but the shotgun on his forehead kept him at rigid
attention. Took four minutes and a series of giggles before Kehoe
came up with the dead officer’s Mace canister. Heidi assured
everyone it was strictly for protection. Harry told her to shut up.

The attendant scanned the car rental agreement with his little
handheld computer. A moment later, a tongue of paper emerged from the
mouth of the machine. The guy tore it off and handed it to Special
Agent Rosen, who carefully folded it and slid it into his wallet.

Special Agent Westerman stood nearby holding her briefcase in one
hand and Rosen’s in the other. The roar of jet engines hovered in
the night air. She turned her head in time to see a Southwest
Airlines passenger jet rising from the runway. They were on the roof
of the parking garage at Phoenix International Airport. Rain was in
the air, one of those desert soakers that fills the arroyos in a
heartbeat. Everyone could feel it.

“Thank you for choosing Hertz,” the attendant said as he
closed the trunk with a bang, but by that time, Rosen and Westerman
were halfway to the elevator.

“So?” Rosen said.

“So we pinpointed the information leak, sir.”

“Where?”

“The warden’s personal secretary. A woman named Iris Cruz.”

Rosen said he remembered her. The elevator car arrived; they G.M.
Ford stepped in and rode it to the bottom floor. Food and gifts.
Rosen checked his watch. “Let’s get some coffee,” he suggested.
They found a table over by the Burger King franchise, did their
little dance about who was going to Starbucks for coffee, then, when
Westerman returned, settled in.

“How do we know it’s her?” he asked.

Despite her best efforts, Westerman could feel the blood rising to
her cheeks. “She and Warden Romero had a little something going on
the side. Cruz had been telling people Romero was going to leave his
wife and marry her. Looks like it didn’t turn out that way.”

Rosen raised a thick eyebrow, sipped at his coffee. Westerman
continued.

“Once the bloom was off the rose, she peddled the stuff to
American Manhunt
for something like seventy thousand bucks,
then took Alaskan Airlines flight ninety-eight from Phoenix to
Guadalajara yesterday morning.”

“A well-earned vacation,” Rosen quipped.

“No sir. She made arrangements to have her furniture shipped.”

“Ms. Cruz had quite an eye for an exit.”

“Yes sir.”

“Not much to come back to.”

“Seventy grand goes a long way in Guadalajara.”

“Especially since Asuega and Romero got fired this morning,”

Rosen said.

“It’s worse that that, sir.”

“What’s worse than that?”

She gave him a twisted grin. “Romero doesn’t know it, but he’s
about to get served with divorce papers this morning. Seems the
scorned Ms. Cruz sent his wife a letter on her way out of town.
According to our information, Ms. Cruz thoughtfully included a number
of compromising photographs.”

Rosen blew air across the top of his coffee. “You’re right,
Agent Westerman. That’s worse. Take it from a man who’s been
thusly served. What else?”

Westerman took a deep breath. “So we’ve got our mystery, sir.
The letters come from the Prineville, Oregon, post office. We’ve
got a clerk who remembers seeing the letters and a match on the
postmark machine. Quantico ran the DNA on the stamps, compared it to
what we got from Driver’s prison blood samples. It’s either a
mother or a father or a sibling. Since the father’s dead and he’s
an only child . . .”

Rosen’s eyes were hooded. His nose was in the coffee cup.

“That leaves the mother. It’s her. Five hundred million to
one, Quantico says. No doubt about it.”

“So?” he said again.

“So she’s got somebody in Prineville mailing them for her.”

“Which tells you what?”

“Which tells me we need another field of inquiry if we’re
going to figure out where Driver’s headed.”

A couple more sips of coffee jogged something in Rosen’s mind.
“How long have the letters been coming from Pineville?”

“Prineville,” she corrected. “Hang on.” She rummaged
around in her briefcase and came out with a sheaf of papers, used her
thumb and forefinger to move through the pile backward.

“Since ninety-seven,” she said. “Before that she was like a
camp follower. Hawaii, San Diego, Bangor, Washington, Bremerton,
Washington, Long Beach, California. Wherever her son was stationed,
that’s where she moved to.”

“Some devotion.”

Westerman raised her eyebrows in agreement. “I guess.”

“Almost scary.”

When Westerman didn’t disagree, Rosen posed a question.

“Why’s a senior citizen like his mother need a mail blind?”
He was almost talking to himself. “I mean it’s not like they’re
hard to organize. We do it all the time for witnesses, for undercover
officers stuff like that. Why does somebody’s mother need one?”

“No idea,” Westerman admitted.

“And who showed her how to do it?”

Because she hated admitting she didn’t know, Westerman kept
silent.

“Shit,” said Rosen, slamming the cup down hard enough to send
coffee spilling out over the rim. “What year was it Corso wrote the
book about Driver?”

Westerman pulled yet another file from her briefcase. Then another
and a third.

“Ninety-seven,” she said. She looked over at Rosen, who was
cleaning up his mess with paper napkins. “So you’re thinking . .
.”

“Find Mr. Corso,” he said. “Don’t pick him up or anything.
Just find him. I’ll bet dollars to donuts Corso—”

He never got it all the way out. His pager went off. He pulled the
unit from his belt, eyeballed the text message, then pulled his cell
phone from his inside jacket pocket.

“Rosen here,” he said after speed dialing. He listened for the
better part of two minutes, said, “You’re sure,” and listened
again before hanging up.