'I don't know,' Lucas said. 'She's smart, and she had nine or ten years to figure out how to hide. She could be here in the U.S., up in Canada, Australia,
India, the Caribbean, and with her Spanish, anywhere in South America. God only knows how much money she had by the end.'
'We put her out of business, anyway. I just wish I'd been here for the shootout with Carmel.'
'Really? Why?'
'I mean, if I coulda gotten wounded like you did… you know, not too bad, but go to the hospital…'
'Excuse me, but I think you left your brain out in the hall,' Lucas said.
'You're just an ignorant local cop,' Malone said. 'You know what it's worth to be an FBI agent wounded in the line of duty? And if you're a woman? My God, I'd be up there.'
'Like an under-assistant deputy director, or something.'
'At least,' she said. 'So… how're you feeling?' 'Not bad. I could probably manage a foxtrot, if somebody pressed me on it.'
'Consider yourself pressed,' she said.
On Monday, Sherrill went to the FBI office to make a statement. When she came back, she dropped into Lucas' visitor's chair and said, 'I just talked to
Malone.'
'Yeah?' He was peering into the thick black volume of the Equality Report. He was on page five-twenty-nine, less than a hundred to go. Pushing a boulder up a hill would have been a snap compared to the Report. 'Does she still think she's gonna catch Rinker?'
'I don't know exactly what she thinks,' Sherrill said. 'When I talked to her
Friday afternoon, she was like really quick, incisive. Executive – maybe that's the word I was looking for. Really tightly wound, you know?'
Lucas turned the page, kept reading.
'But this morning, I mean, she was a lot looser. Hair was a little messed up, you know – she actually giggled once. Lipstick wasn't quite straight.'
Now Lucas looked up. 'What?'
'Giggled. Like, girly-giggled. In fact, she looked like somebody who'd had her brains foxtrotted loose.'
'Detective Sherrill, aren't you in the middle of a case? I mean, I've got to read this report.'
'That's what I thought,' Sherrill said.
The commission had nine members: the chairman, a desperately fading politician named Bob, once known in the State House for his fine ethics, and viciously ridiculed in the same institution after he lost his seat to a twenty- six-year old spitballer; seven members of affected constituencies; and Lucas. After the routine Roberts Rules of Order opening, the meeting devolved into a nasty fight about whether adding to the list of minority or disability statuses would dilute the authority of prior assertions of those statuses… or that's what Lucas thought somebody said.
He wasn't sure. Passing through a bookstore earlier in the day, he'd discovered that Donald Westlake had revived the 'Richard Stark' Parker novels, and Lucas had Backflash buried in the pages of the Report. By the end of the meeting, he was more than halfway through, just finishing a chapter that ended with the word
Asshole. He agreed.
The night was straight out of a country-and-western song, one of those smooth warm evenings made for rolling around in a hay mow with a farm girl. Even the traffic seemed subdued, as though people had abandoned their cars to walk.
Lucas' neighborhood was quiet, with only occasional cars rolling along the boulevard between his house and the bluff that dropped to the Mississippi. As he pulled into the driveway, he realized that he needed milk and cereal, if he wanted to eat at home the next morning; and he'd noticed a slight puffiness around the waist that needed to be trimmed away, and eating in a diner wouldn't help that. He thought about it, and decided to leave the car in the driveway. He popped the door, swivelled, reached back to pick up the copy of the Report and the novel, started to climb out of the car…
And saw her coming.
She was coming fast, from the corner of the garage. And though it was dark and late, he knew exactly who she was. He could just make out her height, and the smooth way she moved, a small woman, like a dancer. She was handicapped by the car: she had to clear around it. She had expected him to drive inside, and then she would have had him trapped between the Porsche and the big Chevy Tahoe parked on the other side of the garage. But she was ready and he could see her hand up with her gun and he reached desperately for his. 45 and at the same time threw up the Report in front of his face and the explosions started, the night flashes.
He was going down as the Report came up, and the Report flew out of his hand of its own will and he concentrated on clearing his holster, which wasn't made for fast draws, concentrated on jacking the slide, and he triggered the first shot blindly. The shot went into the car at an upward angle and punched through the windshield. He hit the ground and rolled, fired again, still half-blindly, just trying to slow her down, to shake her, saw another flash, felt a slug pluck at his suit, fired at the flash, rolled back toward the car and fired under it at where he thought she was, sensed that she was moving, fired again…
She was running.
He could feel it, maybe hear it – later doubted that he could hear it; the gun blasts, which he hadn't heard at the time, must have been deafening – and he fired in the general direction she was running, the slug going through the front of the house.
Then he was after her, running through the wonderful warm night. She was dressed all in black, but he could see her, in the lights of the house windows and the porches, running crazily across his back yard, crashing through bushes, over a chain-link fence. He was running as hard as he could, handicapped by his loafers; one of them came off as he cleared the fence. She swivelled as she ran and fired two more quick shots at him, wildly, but he ducked away, purely by instinct, lifted the pistol but saw window lights behind it and held off, still running… She crossed another fence, a higher one, and now he was only a hundred feet back, and then…
She ran up a ladder that was leaning against the back of a low rambler, kicked the ladder sideways and ran up the roof. He risked the shot this time – it should hit the Mississippi or the far river bank – but it was a bad shot and then she was over the ridge of the roof and out of sight. He tried to run around the side of the house, but hit a garbage pail and went down, got up, ran another few feet and hit a lawn mower and went down again, got up and ran out onto the lawn…
She was gone.
The homeowner was at the door yelling, and Lucas screamed, 'Call the cops.
There's been a shooting, call 911.'
He had to pick a direction and he picked north, since that had been her tendency. He ran hard for a hundred feet, kicked off the second shoe, stopped at the street corner, looked wildly up and down, started to run west, turned back. ..
Nobody there.
She was gone.
The St. Paul cops arrived three minutes later.
Malone, looking businesslike again, in a light tweed jacket and carefully ironed, pleated-front blouse, said, '… valuable information. We know she's still in the States, which suggests to me that she wasn't planning to leave.
We'll get her.'
'Maybe,' Lucas said. He was fiddling with a yellow No. 2 pencil; since the crime lab had taken the Report away, he didn't have anything to fiddle with.
'Have some faith,' Malone said. 'After all, you're the only guy who ever survived her.'
'Ah, it was a complete fuck-up,' Lucas said. 'I fired five shots, and never hit her. She fired more than that, and never hit me. We must've been five feet apart for a couple of seconds..'
'You're complaining about her bad shooting?'
'Well…'
'She would have put a couple right through your brain if you hadn't had that
Report, and hadn't managed to throw it up in time.'
