No Man's Land (22 page)

Driver forearmed the airbag flat just in time to see the car throw
its right headlight into the canyon wall. The impact shook loose
everything in the car. Harry saw it coming, got his arms up in front
of his face and let the seat belt do its job. Heidi, however, wasn’t
strapped in. The impact sent her catapulting forward, crashing into
the back of the driver’s seat with sufficient force to partially
separate her right shoulder. She came to rest on the floor behind the
driver’s seat, curled up in a ball, moaning as she checked herself
for blood.

Driver’s eyes rolled across the wrinkled hood and the dead doe,
then came to rest on a bulge in the passenger-side windshield. About
the size of a dinner plate, all cracked and looking like somebody
tried to force something hard and round through the safety glass from
the inside. Something with blood. And then he knew. As he moved his
eyes farther right, he wasn’t surprised by what he saw. Kehoe was
slumped in a heap. His body collapsed on the seat with his legs
folded beneath him, his shoulders twitching, his mouth agape and full
of blood. Although it was hard to tell in the near darkness, the
silhouette of his head seemed, at one point, to lose its arc, as if
perhaps it had been pushed in.

Driver turned the key. The grind of the starter announced that the
Mercedes was still running. He threw it into reverse and gave it some
gas. The twisted sheet metal popped and groaned as it came away from
the boulder. He pulled left as far as he could go, jammed the lever
into park and got out of the car, leaving the door hanging open.

One headlight had been completely destroyed, the other pointed up
into the sky as if searching for satellites or something. The
passenger door had been warped by the crash. It took two hands and
every bit of strength Driver could muster to pull it open. If he
hadn’t been there to get his arms under him in time, Kehoe would
have fallen out onto the ground.

Carefully, he took Kehoe beneath the arms and pulled him out onto
the road. The sheer volume of blood made it impossible to tell
exactly how bad the damage was. He carefully set Kehoe’s head down
and started to rise. Kehoe grabbed onto his forearm with a
surprisingly powerful grip. He opened his good eye and Driver could
tell he was conscious and knew what was going on. He wanted to know.
Driver could tell.

“Bad,” Driver said. “It’s real bad.” He removed Kehoe’s
hand from his forearm. “Don’t move,” Driver told him. “I’ll
be right back.”

He moved quickly. Retracing his steps back around the front of the
car, pulling the keys from the ignition, then continuing on to the
trunk, where he gathered a handful of towels together and started
back toward Kehoe.

Harry was out of the car by then, standing on the far side of
Kehoe with his hands behind his back. “Help your girlfriend,”

Driver told Harry. Driver knelt at Kehoe’s side, slipping a
folded towel beneath his head. Harry still hadn’t moved. Driver
picked up a clean towel and began to daub at the blood, trying to
wipe away enough to be able to see the wound. He didn’t get far
before Harry’s voice hijacked his attention. “Get up,” Harry
said.

Driver looked up to find Harry pointing Kehoe’s shiny Colt
revolver at his head. Kehoe grabbed his arm again. Stronger this
time. Driver looked down into his eye expecting to see a man using
the last of his strength in a death grip. Instead, in that single
blue eye, he saw Cutter Kehoe in all of his murderous rage. Felt
Kehoe release his arm. Saw the look in his eye. Watched Kehoe slip
his hand down into his pocket and, in that instant, he knew exactly
what to do. Driver got to his feet and began to mosey backward, away
from Kehoe and Harry. It worked. Harry followed along, stepping over
Kehoe. Must not have had much faith in his marksmanship. Wanted to
shoot at point-blank range.

Heidi was out of the car now, holding one arm across her chest.
She looked from Harry to Driver and back. “Honey . . . you sure you
wanna—”

“Shut up,” he said and pulled back the hammer. A smile crossed
his full lips. He aimed down the barrel at Driver. “
Adios
,
motherfucker,” he said.

And then Kehoe reached up and did what he did best, he cut him,
hard and deep across the back of the leg with that awful boning knife
of his, severing the artery and the tendon both, dropping him to one
knee in the road like a puppet with a broken string. Harry emitted a
high-pitched squeal as he pivoted on his knee, pointed the revolver
and shot Kehoe in the face. And then again and a third time, before
toppling over on his side in the road, rocking back and forth in
pain.

Driver stepped around the back of the car, keeping the trunk
between him and Harry. He watched as Heidi ran around the front and
knelt at Harry’s side. The river of blood pouring out of Harry’s
leg told her all she needed to know. “Oh baby,” she said.

“You’re hurt bad. We gotta stop the blood . . . oh baby . . .”

She lifted his head and put it in her lap. Driver followed her
footsteps around the front of the car, She was stroking Harry’s
hair when Driver reached down and plucked the gun from his fingers.
He weighed it in his hand for a moment, then heaved it as far out
into the barren field as he was able. When he looked down at the
ground, Harry was a whiter shade of pale, looking into Heidi’s big
blue eyes and mouthing silent words.

“You’re bleeding out, kid. You got something to say to your
girl, now’s the time for it,” Driver said.

Overhead, the clouds were on the march; shaded and scattered, they
moved westward across the night sky like circus elephants joined
trunk to tail. To the north, the lights of a town twinkled from the
valley floor below.

Harry died without a final word. His lower lip trembled as he
sought to speak, then he was gone, lying there in the road with his
hair all nice and neat in Heidi’s opulent lap.

“Never said a word,” Heidi said, her face darkening. “After
all we been through that son of a bitch never said a word to me. I
can’t believe it. Not a single word.”

“I’m guessing most people die without saying anything,”
Driver said. “I’ve always figured that ‘famous last words’
stuff was made up by other people afterward. Something to make the
whole thing seem more momentous than it really was.”

She pulled herself away, letting Harry’s head drop to the road
with a
thunk
not unlike the sound of a melon on a concrete
floor. She scrambled to her feet, dusted off her hands and looked
down at Kehoe.

“Sorry about your friend,” she said.

Driver shrugged. “The Cutter went out like he would have wanted
to,” he said.

“Harry always said he was gonna die in bed with his boots on.”

Driver looked down at Harry’s twisted body. “I guess he was
half-right anyway.”

Driver wrapped the remains of Kehoe’s head in a clean towel,
tied the ends in knots so it would stay in place, then picked the
body up in his arms, maneuvering it into the backseat of the
Mercedes, where he laid him out with great care, before straightening
up and returning the back of the passenger seat to the upright
position.

“What about him,” she said, pointing down at Harry’s
remains.

Driver reached down and put a finger through one of Harry’s belt
loops. He lifted hard, turning him over, setting the body to rolling
down the incline into the overgrown ditch, where he slipped among the
thick weeds and disappeared from view. When she looked up again,
Driver had the black automatic in his right hand.

“Oh please, mister,” she stammered. “I can . . . oh God I .
. .”

“Looks like your time isn’t here yet. Like maybe you get to be
more than just protein. Like maybe some of you goes on from here.”

“You can just leave me here . . . uh . . . you know, I don’t
even know your name.”

He pointed the gun at her head. She wet her pants, then her shoes,
then the road.

He snapped the safety on and returned the gun to his waistband.
“You can stay here or you can come along. It doesn’t matter to
me,” he said. “It’s not my place to interfere with the river.”

She was already in the car with the door closed by the time Driver
dropped the transmission into drive and started down the hill. They
moved slowly, running with the lights out and the radio off. Took
fifteen minutes before the road leveled out a bit. All the way down
to where they could make out a pair of church steeples at the far end
of the town.

Driver braked the car to a stop. He pointed out over the damaged
right fender.

“You see that gate there? “ he asked.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Open it up,” he said.

Took her two tries to shoulder open the door enough for her to
squeeze out. As soon as he moved the pole-and-barbed-wire gate aside,
Driver rolled the Mercedes through. She watched as he headed across
the field toward the pond on the far side. One of those man-made
farmer’s ponds. A good week’s work with a bulldozer. Probably
full of bass. The near end had a little wooden dock, with a
two-by-four ladder running down into the water. Something maybe you
could dive off in the summertime. Up at the far end, a thinning grove
of willows leaned over the water like supplicants.

Driver parked the car thirty yards uphill from the center of the
pond. He lowered the windows to half-mast, turned off the engine and
set the emergency brake. From the trunk he retrieved the pair of Nike
bags and set them on the ground behind the car, before returning to
the driver’s side, releasing the emergency brake and closing the
door, as the car began to move forward, slowly at first, then gaining
momentum as gravity pulled it toward sea level.

The Mercedes hit the water with a splash. Moving easily as the
water covered the hood and started rushing through the windows. Then
it stopped. Three-quarters of the way into the pond. Hung up on some
subterranean obstruction with its ass sticking up in the air. Driver
cursed. He walked uphill and picked up the bags. As he began to walk
off, the big car shivered and seemed to lower its head as it began to
move again, more slowly now, as if it wanted to enjoy the view for as
long as possible, until, finally, after what seemed like an eternity,
it slipped beneath the brackish water and vanished.

“What now?” she asked as she latched the gate back into place.

“Now we walk,” he said.

“You want to do the honors, this morning?” Rosen asked.
Special Agent Westerman blanched. “Me?”

“No time like the present,” he said with a smile.

“I haven’t been briefed.”

“You don’t need to be briefed. We’re not telling them
anything.”

She laughed and flicked a glance in Rosen’s direction. Half to
see if he was kidding, half to get another feel for where he was
coming from. For the past couple of days, she’d had an inkling that
Rosen was working his way up to hitting on her, then she’d had
second thoughts, wondering if perhaps her misgivings were nothing
more than a girlish interpretation of an otherwise purely
professional situation. As one of her favorite adages was “when in
doubt, trust your instincts,” she figured she’d go with the
inklings.

The offer to let her do the press conference added another straw
to her burgeoning suspicions. Agents went entire careers without ever
getting their faces on TV, let alone briefing the press on anything
as lurid as escaped convicts and multiple police officer murders.
Even better, these weren’t the type of fugitives who G.M. Ford were
going to lose themselves in the south of France. Yahoos like these
got caught or killed in fairly short order, making this the kind of
case where her face and name would be associated with a positive
outcome. No doubt about it, opportunity was rapping its knuckles on
her door. As decisions went, this was strictly a nobrainer.

“What are we telling them?” she asked.

From the corner of her eye, she saw a come-and-go smile cross his
lips.

Rosen removed a single sheet of folded paper from the inside
pocket of his suit jacket. He handed it to Westerman, then stood with
his arms folded across his chest for the ten seconds it took her to
read the three short paragraphs.

“That’s it?” she said.

Rosen stepped over and looked at the paper in her hand. He pointed
at the first paragraph. “Introduce yourself, and then just run over
the facts for them. Two officers down at Utah rest area. They were
transporting Harry Gibbs and Heidi Anne Spearbeck. Yadda yadda.
Kehoe’s fingerprints at the scene. We’re assuming they’re
together, but probably not for long. The officers’ names are being
withheld pending notification of next of kin. Subjects are considered
to be armed and extremely dangerous.”

He leaned in closer, pointing to the second paragraph, brushing
his shoulder against hers. “We’re here in Salt Lake City working
with the Utah State Police, in conjunction with the local Bureau
office.” He rolled his wrist over the top of itself as if to say
“and so forth.” “Nationwide manhunt. Judging from the direction
they’ve been moving thus far and the capital crimes they’ve
committed along the way, we’re assuming they’re trying to make
for the Canadian border, as Canada has a long history of refusing to
return anyone facing the death penalty.”

“Is that what we believe?”

“Not necessarily.”

“You think Driver’s headed for his mother.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”

“Why?”

“Because I saw her during his trial. I was Bureau liaison to
King County.” He anticipated her question. “Driver was a federal
employee, so the situation required a federal presence. By the time
it was over she’d been cited for contempt, carried out of the
building several times and eventually was no longer allowed in the
courtroom at all. She took a swing at a witness. She spit on
reporters.” He leaned in even closer. “Blood may be thicker than
water, but that lady’s support of her son was way over the top.”