Dark Rivers of the Heart

Spencer stepped to the nearby cockpit door, opened it. He was just in time to jam the muzzle of the pistol in the face of the copilot, who was starting to get up from his seat.

“Take us up,” Spencer told the pilot.

The two men appeared even more surprised than the women in the card shop.

“Take us up now—now! — or I’ll blow this asshole’s brains out through that window, then yours!” Spencer shouted so forcefully that he sprayed the crewmen with spittle and felt the veins in his temples popping up like those in a weight lifter’s biceps.

He thought he sounded every bit as frightening as Ellie.

* * *

Just inside the shattered glass wall of the supermarket, beside the wrecked Range Rover, in a drift of dog food, Roy and three agents stood with their weapons aimed at a tall man with a flat face, yellow teeth, and coal- black eyes as cold as a viper’s. The guy clutched a semiautomatic rifle in both hands, and although he wasn’t aiming it at anyone, he looked mean enough and angry enough to use it on the baby Jesus Himself.

He was the driver of the pickup. His Dodge stood abandoned in the parking lot, one door hanging wide open. He had come inside either to seek vengeance for whatever had happened on the highway or to play the hero.

“Drop the gun!” Roy repeated for the third time.

“Says who?”

“Says who?”

“That’s right.”

“Are you a moron? Am I talking to a blithering idiot here? You see four guys holding heavy weapons on you, and you don’t understand the logic of dropping that rifle?”

“You cops or what?” asked the viper-eyed man.

Roy wanted to kill him. No more formalities. The guy was too damn stupid to live. He’d be better off dead. A sad case. Society would be better off without him too. Cut him down, right there, right now, and then find the woman and Grant.

The only problem was that Roy’s dream of a three-minute mission, in and out and away before the nosy locals showed up, was no longer achievable. The operation had gone sour when the hateful woman had driven into the market, and it was getting more sour by the moment. Hell, it was past sour into bitter. They were going to have to deal with Cedar City cops, and that was going to be more difficult if one of the residents they were sworn to protect was lying dead on a mound of Purina Dog Chow.

If they were going to have to work with locals, he might as well show a badge to this fool. From an inner jacket pocket, he withdrew an ID wallet, flipped it open, and flashed his phony credentials. “Drug Enforcement Administration.”

“Well, sure,” the man said. “Now, that’s all right.”

He lowered the gun to the floor, let go of it. Then he actually put one hand to the bill of his baseball cap and tipped it at Roy with what seemed to be sincere respect.

Roy said, “You go sit in the back of your truck. Not inside. In the open, behind the cab. You wait there. You try to leave, that guy outside with a machine gun will cut your legs off at the knees.”

“Yes, sir.” With convincing solemnity, he tipped his cap again, and then he walked out through the damaged front wall of the store.

Roy almost turned and shot him in the back.

Peach in. Green out.

“Spread out across the front of the store,” he told his men, “and wait, keep alert.”

The team coming in from the back would search the supermarket exhaustively, flushing out Grant and the woman if they tried to hide anywhere inside. The fugitives would be driven forward and forced either to surrender or to die in a barrage of gunfire.

The woman, of course, would be shot to death whether she tried to surrender or not. They were taking no more chances with her.

“There’ll be employees and customers coming through,” he called out to his three men as they deployed across the store to both sides of him. “Don’t let anybody leave. Herd them over near the manager’s office. Even if you think they have no resemblance to the pair we’re looking for, hold them. Even if it’s the Pope, you hold him.”

Outside, the helicopter engine went from a low idle to a loud roar. The pilot revved it. Revved it again.

What the hell?

Frowning, Roy clambered through the debris and went outside to see what was happening.

The agent posted in front of the market was looking toward the Hallmark shop, where the chopper was lifting off.

“What’s he doing?” Roy asked.

“Taking off.”

“Why?”

“Must be going somewhere.”

Another moron. Stay calm. Peach in. Green out.

“Who told him to leave his position, who told him to take off?” Roy demanded.

As soon as the question was put, he knew the answer. He didn’t know how it was possible, but he knew why the chopper was taking off and who was in it.

He jammed the Beretta into his shoulder holster, wrenched the submachine gun out of the surprised agent’s hands, and charged toward the ascending aircraft. He intended to rupture its fuel tanks and bring it to the ground.

Raising the weapon, finger on the trigger, Roy realized there was no way he was ever going to be able to explain his actions to the satisfaction of a straight-arrow Utah cop with no appreciation for the moral ambiguity of federal law enforcement. Shooting at his own helicopter. Jeopardizing his pilot and copilot. Destroying a hugely expensive piece of government machinery. Perhaps causing it to crash into occupied stores. Great, fiery gouts of aviation fuel splashing everything and anyone in their path. Respected Cedar City merchants transformed into human torches, running in circles through the February morning, blazing and shrieking. It would all be colorful and exciting, and nailing the woman would be worth the lives of any number of bystanders, but explaining the catastrophe would be as hopeless as trying to explain the fine points of nuclear physics to the idiot sitting in the back of the Dodge pickup.

And there was at least a fifty-fifty chance that the chief of police would be a clean-cut Mormon who had never tasted an alcoholic drink in his life, who had never smoked, and who would not be tuned in properly to the concepts of untaxable hush money and police-agency collusion. Bet on it. A Mormon.

Reluctantly, Roy lowered the submachine gun.

The chopper rose swiftly.

“Why Utah?” he shouted furiously at the fugitives that he could not see but that he knew were frustratingly close.

Peach in. Green out.

He had to calm down. Think cosmically.

The situation would be resolved in his favor. He still had the second chopper to use as a pursuit vehicle. And Earthguard 3 would find it easier to track the JetRanger than the Rover, because the chopper was larger than the truck and because it traveled above all sheltering vegetation and above the distracting movement of ground-level traffic.

Overhead, the hijacked aircraft swung east, across the roof of the card store.

* * *

In the passenger cabin, Ellie crouched beside the opening in the fuselage, leaned against the door frame, and looked down at the shopping center roof that passed under her. God, her heart was booming as loud as the rotor blades. She was terrified that the chopper would tip or lurch and that she would fall out.

During the past fourteen months, she had learned more about herself than in the entire previous twenty- eight years. For one thing, her love of life, her sheer joy in being alive, was greater than she had ever realized until the three people she had loved most had been taken from her in one brutal, bloody night. In the face of so much death, with her own existence in constant jeopardy, she now savored both the warmth of