Skeleton Canyon (37 page)

She needed to keep him from gaining that advantage, but how? Maybe she could use Dick’s shotgun to put a hole in the monster Hummer’s metal-shrouded radiator, but she wasn’t sure that would work. Besides, she couldn’t risk taking a head-on shot at a vehicle that might have a hostage imprisoned inside.

At that moment, Joanna had no way of telling whether or not Dennis Hacker was still alive. Nevertheless, if there was even the smallest possibility he was, Joanna had to do her best to rescue the man without putting his life in even more jeopardy.

Clutching the shotgun in the crook of her arm, Joanna scrambled up the bank. She ducked behind another boulder. She was just raising the shotgun into firing position when the Hummer’s huge engine rumbled to life. Headlights flashed on in her eyes. Joanna had surfaced slightly to the left of where the Hummer was parked. Now, with the headlights temporarily blinding her, Joanna heard rather than saw the Hummer come straight at her. Convinced the driver had somehow caught sight of her and was going to try to run her down, Joanna hunkered back down behind the rock.

In the process of dodging back, the shotgun somehow slipped from her sweaty grasp and went skittering down the rocky slope. The Hummer roared past Joanna within bare inches of her face. There was no time to go searching for the fallen shotgun. Instead, she fumbled inside her jacket and drew the Colt. Without making any pretense of staying under cover, she scrambled out from behind the rock and assumed a two-handed shooting stance. She fired off three shots in rapid succession. The first two missed their marks entirely. One ricocheted off metal and the second zinged off a nearby rock. The third one, though, scored a direct hit on the Hummer’s right rear tire.

Joanna’s slender hope was simply to puncture a tire. She knew in advance that it wouldn’t put the Hummer out of business, but she thought that it might at least slow the driver down and give the backup team a chance to catch up. Instead, the tire decompressed so quickly that it made the truck lurch sharply to the right. First the back passenger wheel and then the front one slipped off the edge of the ridge. With the engine whining in protest and with all four wheels spinning uselessly in the air, the Hummer slowly pitched over on its side and went tumbling down the mountain, following almost the exact same path taken minutes earlier by the falling Blazer.

Joanna waited until the clatter of sheet metal on rocks grew still. Realizing with horror that there were now only a matter of feet separating the gunman from the still helpless Dick Voland, she went slipping and sliding back down the mountainside herself. By then, drawn by flashes of gunfire, the helicopter was moving into position directly overhead. A searchlight came on, illuminating the whole area, making it almost as bright as day. The light was welcome, but the ungodly noise of the chopper drowned out everything else.

Clambering down over rocks and through skin-shredding clumps of bear grass, Joanna made for a spot directly between the two wrecked vehicles. The Hummer and the Blazer had come to rest less than twenty yards apart. There was no sign of movement in either vehicle. Almost sickened by the thought of it, Joanna wondered if Dick Voland was still alive. The unwelcome notion snaked into her head, but she didn’t allow it to stay there.

Kneeling on the ground, she steadied her gun hand with the other one and strained to see and hear through the darkness. With the noisy chopper hovering above her, it was hard to tell for sure, but every once in a while, Joanna thought she heard the sound of voices or maybe just a single voice.

Rising to a crouch, she scrambled a few feet closer to the Hummer. “Come out,” she ordered, counting on the clattering echo of the noisy helicopter engine to help disguise her exact position. “Give up and come out with your hands up.”

This time she definitely did see movement in the Hummer. Slowly, a male figure materialized out of the shadowy wreck-age. As the wandering searchlight once again flooded the area with artificial light, Dennis Hacker’s bloodied face was thrown into stark relief. He took two or three tentative steps away from the Hummer and then sank to the ground, cradling his face in his hands.

Heedless of her own safety, Joanna hurried to his side. “Are you all right?” she shouted over the helicopter’s roar.

Hacker nodded wordlessly. The man didn’t seem badly hurt. He was dazed and confused, but the blood on his face seemed to be coming from what looked to be a superficial scalp wound.

“And the gunman? Where’s he?”

The injured man pointed a shaky finger toward the Hummer. “He’s in there,” Hacker managed.

‘‘One or two?” Joanna demanded.

“What?” Hacker returned uncomprehendingly.

Joanna shook her head. There wasn’t time for explanations. “Stay low,” she warned him, pushing Hacker down far enough that he was protected by an outcropping of rock. “Stay there until I give you the all-clear.”

With that, she turned her attention back to the Hummer. Suddenly the helicopter beat a retreat. In the silence left be-hind, Joanna heard a pitiful voice call to her from the darkness.

“Help,” a man’s voice begged. “Please help me. I’m trapped. My arm is stuck, and I can’t get it out.”

Realizing the very words themselves might be a trap, Joanna stayed where she was. “Throw out your weapons,” she ordered.

“I don’t have any weapons,” the man whined. “Please. It’s my arm. It’s caught between the truck and the ground or some-thing. You have to help me. Please.”

Warily, Joanna crept forward. The driver’s side of the Hummer had come to rest against the unmoving trunk of a sturdy scrub oak. She was squinting in the darkness, and it looked to her as though the man’s left arm really was caught between the tree and the side of the truck.

“It hurts so bad.” He moaned. “Please help me.”

Joanna moved closer, but she stopped when a voice she recognized as Adam York’s called to her from higher up the ridge. “Joanna! Where are you?” he called. “Are you okay?”

“Please,” the man insisted again. “If you don’t help me, I’ll lose my arm.”

Joanna Lathrop Brady had always regarded herself as the softhearted type—as the kind of person who was a sucker for a sob story, who unerringly fell for stray dogs and injured cats. In the past, she might have helped the injured man first and thought about it later. This time she realized she was dealing with someone who resembled an injured rattlesnake rather than an injured dog. And she knew that anyone foolish enough to go to the aid of an injured rattler had a more than even chance of being bitten herself.

“Be still,” she said, keeping her distance. “Help’s on the way.”

“It’ll be too late. My arm. What’s going to happen to it?”

“Hold on, Sheriff Brady,” Ernie Carpenter called from some-where above them. “We hear you. We’ll be right there.”

Beams of light danced around her as at least two people, carrying flashlights, clambered down the steep hillside. Then the helicopter resumed its previous position, hovering directly over the wrecked cars and bathing the whole area in a wide halo of brilliant light.

Staying safely out of reach, Joanna circled around to the front of the Hummer until she was high enough that she could peer in the front windshield. From that vantage point, she saw the man’s pale face. She would have recognized Alf Hastings on sight, so this had to be the other one—Aaron Meadows. Not only did she see his face and the crushed arm, she saw something else as well. In his other hand, almost invisible between his tightly clenched thighs, was the handle of a knife.

Joanna felt a wave of momentary weakness. If she had given in to her life-long need to help others—if she hadn’t stifled her natural inclination to step forward and administer first aid—he would have had her. What was it that had held her back?

“Thank you, God,” she whispered, aiming her heartfelt prayer at the sky far above her. Then she turned both her eyes and her Colt back on the man in the Hummer.

“All right, Meadows,” she ordered. “Throw the knife out the rider’s window. Do it now! I want to see your right hand behind your head.”

“But my arm ...”

“First the knife,” she said. “We’ll worry about your arm later.”

After ten seconds or so, he finally gave in and threw the knife outside. Joanna, watching to see where it landed, caught sight of something that looked like a dollar bill fluttering on the ground between her feet and the fallen knife. She hurried over, reached down, and picked up a piece of currency. Expecting to see George Washington’s portrait, Joanna was surprised to find herself staring at Ben Franklin’s bloated picture. This was no dollar bill. It was a brand-new hundred-dollar bill.

Ernie Carpenter reached her right then. “Joanna,” he panted. “Are you okay? Is anybody hurt?”

“He is,
^”
Joanna said, pointing at the Hummer. “I’ve got this guy covered, but I need you to go over to the Blazer and check on Dick Voland.”

“He’s okay. Maybe not completely okay. It looks to me like he’s got a mild concussion, but I’m sure he’ll be fine.” “How do you know that?”

“Because we found him up there on top of the ridge, running around like a chicken with his head cut off, looking for you and asking what the hell happened. By the way, what
did
happen?”

Joanna’s knees really did go weak then—weak with relief rather than fear. Dick Voland was okay. So was Dennis Hacker. And so, amazingly, was she.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Once Ernie Carpenter had applied a tourniquet to Aaron Meadows’s mangled left arm, they handcuffed his other wrist to Adam York’s left one. While the DEA helicopter ferried the pair off to University Hospital in Tucson, Ernie used the still-working radio in the wrecked Blazer to summon assistance.

“Where’s Hastings, then?” Ernie asked Joanna.

“Beats me. The bad guy I saw was Meadows, and I’m stumped as to motive for Brianna’s death.”

Fortunately, despite having suffered a multiple rollover, the sturdy Hummer still seemed to be driveable. With a bloody bandage wrapped around his head, Dennis Hacker was busy changing the bullet-flattened tire when Ernie put almost the same question to him. “Where’s the other guy?”

“What other guy? I only saw one.”

Ernie shook his head. “I guess we’ll find him eventually.”

“Look at this,” Hacker said, shoving the damaged tire in Ernie’s direction before the detective walked away. “That blown sidewall is enough to make me a believer in exit wounds.”

With the tire changed, Hacker climbed into the battered vehicle, started it up, and drove it right back up the bank, which probably was one of those commercially touted 60 percent grades. When the Hummer was back topside, Joanna loaded the walking wounded into it, ordering both Dennis Hacker and Dick Voland to belt themselves into the backseat. Assured of their grudging compliance, Joanna took it upon herself to drive them out of the war zone.

In the darkness, retracing the path they had followed earlier took longer than she expected. For one thing, because Joanna was taking casualties into consideration, she perhaps drove slower than necessary. She eased the Hummer over dips and bumps both vehicles had taken far too fast earlier when they had been racing in the opposite direction. Joanna found that driving the cavernous growl-and-go Hummer was different from driving either the low-slung Crown Victoria or her old Blazer. In fact, the experience made Joanna miss her Blazer that much more. Months earlier an insurance adjuster had declared it totaled. She wondered if there was any way to get it back.

Here and there along the way the sketchy road became virtually invisible in the dark. Joanna was relieved when the moldering ruins of the ranch house materialized in the wavering glow of her headlights. From then on, the dim path turned into a more well-defined road.

As they traveled, Dennis Hacker related his version of the events of the afternoon—telling how, while he had been on the telephone with Angie, a gun-and-knife-wielding, half-naked, and blood-spattered madman had burst into his camper. He told how they had struggled briefly before Hacker had knuckled under to Aaron’s superior firepower. He told how, while being held at gunpoint, he had struggled to free a wrecked Suburban from the flood-swollen stream while on the bank his captor had fumed and raged. And he told how, once the Suburban was on dry land, he had been ordered to open up the secret storage compartments and to remove a hoard of hidden cash and documents.

“He kept telling me to hurry because somebody was after him.”

Dick Voland, making notes despite the inconvenience of the bouncing truck, stopped writing then. “Did he give a name?”

“Marco,” Hacker said. “I’m sure that’s the name he mentioned, but I couldn’t tell if that was a Christian name or a family name.”

“Neither,” said Joanna. “The man’s name is Marcovich. Stephan Marcovich. He’s an air-conditioning contractor up in Phoenix. Unless I’m sadly mistaken, he’s also Adam York’s big-fish Freon smuggler.”

“That’s all, then?” Voland asked Dennis Hacker.

“As far as I’m concerned.”

Voland closed his notebook and flipped off the reading lamp. “All I can say is, you’d better thank your lucky stars for a young woman named Angie Kellogg. She’s the one who came busting into Sheriff Brady’s office yelling that something was up. If it hadn’t been for her, there’s no telling what would have happened.”

Out of sight of both her passengers, Joanna smiled to herself. She found it amusing that her chief deputy had neglected to make any mention of his initial reluctance to believe Angie’s story.

“I know what would have happened,” Dennis Hacker said grimly. “As soon as that Meadows guy no longer needed me, I would have been history.” He paused. “Where is she, by the way? Angie, I man. Is she still in Bisbee? We should call and let her know I’m okay.”

Guiltily, Joanna stole a look at her watch. Almost four hours, had passed since she and Dick Voland had left Angie alone at the Cottonwood Creek Cemetery with orders to stay there, out of sight, and wait for them. At the time, the sun had still been shining. The idea of Angie’s waiting all that time alone in a dark, deserted cemetery seemed like a cruel joke.