Dark Rivers of the Heart

She hoped to God they would all manage to get out of the way in time. She didn’t want to hurt any innocent bystanders. But she didn’t want to be gunned down by the men who would pour out of those helicopters, either.

Do or die.

The Rover was moving fast but not flat-out. The trick was to have enough speed to jump the curb onto the wide promenade in front of the market and get through the glass wall and all the merchandise that was stacked waist-high beyond it. But at too high a speed, she would crash into the checkout stations with deadly impact.

“Gonna make it!” Then she remembered never to lie to the dog. “Probably!”

Over the horns and the sound of the engines, she suddenly heard the chuda-chuda- chuda of the choppers. Or maybe she felt more than heard the pressure waves cast off by their rotors. They must be directly over the parking lot.

The front tires rammed the curb, the Range Rover leaped, Rocky yelped, and Ellie simultaneously released the horn and took her foot off the accelerator. She tramped on the brakes as the tires slammed into the concrete. The promenade didn’t seem so wide when the Rover was skidding across it at thirty or forty miles an hour, with the scared-pig squeal of hot rubber on pavement, not so very wide at all, hell, not nearly wide enough. Her sudden awareness of the Rover’s oncoming reflection was followed instantly by cascades of glass, ringing down like shattered icicles. They plowed through big wooden pallets, on which were stacked fifty-pound bags of potatoes or some damn thing, and finally took a header into the end of a checkout station. Panels of fiberboard popped apart, the stainless steel grocery chute buckled like gift-wrapping foil, the rubber conveyor belt snapped in two and spun off its rollers and rippled into the air as if it were a giant black flatworm, and the cash register almost toppled to the floor. The impact wasn’t as hard as Ellie had feared, and as if to celebrate their safe landing, gay foulards of translucent plastic bags blossomed briefly, with a flourish, in midair, from the pockets of an invisible magician.

“Okay?” she asked, releasing the buckle on her safety harness.

He said, “Next time, I drive.”

She tried her door. It protested, screeching and grinding, but neither the brush with the Dodge nor the explosive entry into the market had jammed the latch. Grabbing the SIG 9mm that was trapped between her thighs, she clambered out of the Range Rover.

Spencer had already gotten out of the other side.

The morning was filled with the clatter of helicopters.

* * *

The two choppers appeared on the computer screen because they had entered the boundaries of Earthguard’s two-hundred-foot look-down. Roy sat in the second of the craft, studying the top of that very machine as it was photographed from orbit, marveling at the strange possibilities of the modern world.

Because the pilot was making a straight-on approach to the target, neither the porthole on the left nor the one on the right gave Roy any view. He stayed with the computer to watch the Range Rover as it strove to elude the pickup truck by weaving back and forth across the shopping-center parking lot. As the pickup tried to get back up to speed after making a bad U-turn, the Rover swung toward the central building in the complex — which was, judging by its size, a supermarket or a discount store like Wal-Mart or Target.

Only at the last moment did Roy realize that the Rover was going to ram the place. When it hit, he expected to see it rebound in a mass of flattened and tangled metal. But it disappeared, merged with the building. With horror, he realized that it had driven through an entrance or a glass wall and that the occupants had survived.

He lifted the open attache case off his lap, put it on the cabin deck, in the aisle beside his seat, and bolted to his feet in alarm. He did not pause to go through the back-out security procedures with Mama, didn’t disconnect, didn’t unplug, but stepped over the computer and hurried toward the pilot’s cabin.

From what he’d seen on the display, he knew that both choppers had crossed over the power lines at the street. They were above the parking lot, easing toward touchdown, making a forward speed of only two or three miles an hour, all but hovering. They were so close to the damn woman, but now she was out of sight.

Once out of sight, she might quickly be out of reach as well. Gone again. No. Intolerable.

Armed and ready for action, the four strike force agents had gotten to their feet and were blocking the aisle near the exit.

“Clear the way, clear the way!”

Roy struggled through the assembled hulks to the head of the aisle, jerked open a door, and leaned into the cramped cockpit.

The pilot’s attention was focused on avoiding the parking lot lampposts and the parked cars as he gentled the JetRanger toward the blacktop. But the second man, who was both copilot and navigator, turned in his seat to look at Roy as the door opened.

“She drove into the damned building,” Roy said, looking out through the windshield at the shattered glass along the front of the supermarket.

“Wild, huh?” the copilot agreed, grinning.

Too many cars were spread out across the blacktop to allow either chopper to put down directly in front of the market. They were angling toward opposite ends of the building, one to the north and the other to the south.

Pointing at the first craft, with its full complement of eight strike force agents, Roy said, “No, no. Tell him I want him over the building, in back, not here, in back, all eight of his men deployed in back, stopping everyone on foot.”

Their pilot was already in radio contact with the pilot of the other craft. While he hovered twenty feet over the parking lot, he repeated Roy’s orders into the mouthpiece of his headset.

“They’ll try to go through the market and out the back,” Roy said, striving to rein in his anger and remain calm. Deep breaths. In with the pale-peach vapor of blessed tranquility. Out with the bile-green mist of anger, tension, stress.

Their chopper was hovering too low for Roy to be able to see over the roof of the market. From the Earthguard look-down on his computer, however, he remembered what lay behind the shopping center: a wide service alley, a concrete-block wall, and then a housing development with numerous trees. Houses and trees. Too many places to hide, too many vehicles to steal.

North of them, just as the first JetRanger was about to touch down on the parking lot and disgorge its men, the pilot got Roy’s message. Rotor speed picked up, and the craft began to lift into the air again.

Peach in. Green out.

* * *

A carpet of brown nuggets had spilled from some of the torn fifty-pound bags, and they crunched under Spencer’s shoes as he got out of the Rover and ran between two checkout stations. He carried the canvas bag by its straps. In the other hand, he clutched the Uzi.

He glanced to his left. Ellie was paralleling him in the next checkout lane. The shopping aisles were long and ran front to back of the store. He met Ellie at the head of the nearest aisle.

“Out the back.” She hurried toward the rear of the supermarket.

Starting after her, he remembered Rocky. The mutt had gotten out of the Rover behind him. Where was Mr. Rocky Dog?

He stopped, spun around, ran back two steps, and saw the hapless canine in the checkout lane that he himself had used. Rocky was eating some of the brown nuggets that hadn’t been crushed under his master’s shoes. Dry dog food. Fifty pounds or more of it.

“Rocky!”

The mutt looked up and wagged his tail.

“Come on!”

Rocky didn’t even consider the command. He snatched up a few more nuggets, crunching them with delight.

“Rocky!”

The dog regarded him again, one ear up and one down, bushy tail banging against the side of the cashier’s counter.