Her attention snagged on a long driveway that led up to the house between rows of whitewashed wooden fence. She followed it with her eyes. She couldn’t see where it intersected with the road, but in the distance she could see a piece of the road itself. Cars, other farms, other people… all she had to do was get to the road. It had to be closer than the farmhouse. And the boundary fence paralleled the driveway, just follow the fence.
She hobbled along it, holding on to Lauren with both hands now, straining to hear over the blood-pound in her ears. Wherever Lemoyne was, it couldn’t be too near… there were no sounds of pursuit. A berry thicket forced her away from the fence, back among and through the trees. Sharp-thorned suckers scratched her bare legs, caught at her skirt. Twigs snapped and crackled under her shoes, loud, loud. But nothing happened, she didn’t see or hear Lemoyne, and when the berry thicket ended and she veered back to the fence, she was near enough to the road to see the driveway gate next door, longer pieces of the road. Empty pieces, but somebody might come along any minute. Wasn’t far now, less than fifty yards.
Long, dragging seconds… minutes… she’d lost all track of time. Follow the fence, just keep picking her way along the fence.
The trees thinned again ahead. Through them she could see part of the road directly in front of her.
A little farther… and out of the trees finally, onto a grassy verge, onto the road itself.
Made it!
ROBERT LEMOYNE
From behind one of the pines that edged his driveway he saw her stagger into sight a hundred yards away. Watched her limp out onto Old Stovepipe Road, turn in the direction of Brannigan’s place. Just what he’d figured. He ran to where he’d left the Suburban, engine idling, just far enough back on the drive so it couldn’t be seen from down the road. The Saturday night special was on the seat. He put the car in gear, swung fast out of the driveway.
Dark Chocolate heard him coming, but by then it was too late for her to get away again. She took a couple of lurching steps toward the woods on the other side, stumbled back when he veered over that way to cut her off. When she tried to run, her hurt leg gave out and she fell down, almost fell on the little girl that wasn’t Angie. He hit the brakes, twisted the wheel, rocked to a stop a few feet from them, and jumped out with the gun in his hand.
She looked up at him, angry and scared. The blanket had pulled away from the little girl’s head; she looked scared, too. He felt sorry for them both, but not too sorry. They were strangers. His head hurt so much and they were strangers and the only thing that mattered was taking them back and putting them where they had to be put, so he could go home and start looking for Angie again.
29
Timing.
Everything we do in this world, everything that happens good and bad, planned and unplanned, expected and unexpected, is ruled by it. Right place or wrong place, right moment or wrong moment, salvation or disaster. Runyon’s intervention in last night’s gay bashing and his capture of one of the perps had been a matter of timing. And now, this morning We went into a turn on Old Stovepipe Road, nobody around, hadn’t been another car since we passed through Rough and Ready, and we started to come out of the turn and it was going down smack in front of us, less than a hundred yards away. All three of them there on the road-Tamara, the kidnapped child, a middle- aged man who had to be Robert Lemoyne. Tamara sprawled on one hip, half on and half off the pavement, clutching the blanket-wrapped little girl protectively against her body. Lemoyne hovering over them with a gun in his hand. The Chevy Suburban was there, too, slewed at an angle across two-thirds of the road surface.
The shock of it was like a blow to the eyes. I humped forward so fast I nearly cracked my head on the windshield. “Jake!”
He punched the gas, leaned hard on the horn at the same time. The blatting noise and the sudden awareness of our approach had opposite effects on Tamara and Lemoyne. She scrambled away from him, onto the grass-furred verge. He stood as if paralyzed, still in a half crouch, looking up at us out of a rictus of confusion.
Runyon braked the car to a sliding stop on the side away from where Tamara and the little girl were. Both of us were out before it quit rocking. Lemoyne straightened with his weapon pointed downward at a forty-five-degree angle to his body, and when he saw that we were both armed he stayed that way, his mouth open and his eyes bulging. I went to one knee, the. 38 straight-armed out in front of me. Runyon yelled something that had no effect on Lemoyne; he kept on standing there, gawping. If he’d lifted that piece of his any higher, made any movement to cap off a round, I’d have shot him and so would Runyon. He didn’t, but even so I came close to squeezing off anyway, shooting one of his legs out from under him or worse. The only thing that stopped me was the knowledge that Tamara and the child were alive and not seriously injured.
What Lemoyne did was fling the gun down clattering and skidding onto the road, the way you’d throw something that was burning your hand, and then turn and run away.
I was up and after him almost instantly. Behind me I heard Tamara calling out something, Runyon telling her to get into the car and lock the doors. Then he was running too.
Lemoyne fled straight up the road fifty yards or so, then veered off onto a rutted driveway. He had fifteen years on me and he was in better shape; he should’ve been able to outdistance me from the get-go. But it didn’t happen. Anger and adrenaline gave me speed I wouldn’t normally have had, but the main reason was the way he ran. Splay-legged, stiff-backed, both hands clamped down hard on top of his skull and elbows jutting out at right angles, as if he were trying to keep his head from flying off his shoulders. It was the weirdest gait I’d ever seen, like a comic character being chased in a Mack Sennett two-reeler. But there was nothing funny about it. It was as if he were in the throes of an uncontrollable frenzy that had thrown his motor responses out of whack.
I dogged him up the driveway, gaining with each step. He veered sideways onto a grassy clearing with an old Silver Stream trailer at the far end, and that was where I caught him, about halfway along. I grabbed a handful of his jacket and brought us both up short, jerked him around to face me. He lashed out with one hand, the other still clutching his head. I ducked away from it and slammed the flat of the. 38 across the side of his face.
The blow knocked him down, flopped him over on his back grunting and moaning. I could hear Runyon coming; I didn’t need the weapon anymore. I threw it to one side, threw my body down on top of Lemoyne’s. He flopped again, flailing with his arms, but I got both hands on his neck and lifted his head and slammed it on the ground.
It tore a scream out of him, a high-pitched animal sound threaded with too much pain for the amount of force I’d used. His body convulsed and he bucked me off; rolled over a couple of times clenching his head again, his back arched and his legs kicking. Sweat and spittle came flying off his face, glistening in the sunlight. His eyes were rolled up so far you couldn’t see the whites; something that looked like foam crawled out of one corner of his mouth.
Runyon moved into my line of sight, gave me a hand up. He said, staring at Lemoyne, “Some kind of fit.”
“Looks like it. Better get him off his back before he swallows his tongue.”
Together we rolled him over, pinned him facedown in the grass. I loosened his belt and stripped it off and we used it to tie his hands. When we let go of him, he twisted over on his side and lay there twitching, his irises showing again but in an unfocused stare, foam still dribbling out of his mouth.
Runyon said, “I’ll get the car.”
“Tamara?”
“Okay. But looks like the little girl’s pretty sick.”
“Call nine-eleven.”
“First thing.”
It took me another couple of minutes to get my breathing back under control-too much exertion for an incipient senior citizen. Lemoyne didn’t need much watching, so while I waited I scanned around the property. Trailer in the woods. Yeah. The rust-flecked Silver Stream, a barn, a wellhouse, a child’s playset-it all looked ordinary enough. But it wasn’t ordinary. Some places give off bad vibes, and I’ve always been sensitive to that kind of thing. This was one. I could literally feel faint shimmers of evil, like something crawling on my skin.
