He went down. Out of sight. She turned and ran.
Sprinting now, across the lawn, she hurdled over the edge of the ravine and slid through the bushes, past the chain-sawed trunk of a large cottonwood that had fallen.
The cottonwood’s upper branches were still intact, the foliage wilted and dead. But it tangled up the bottom of the ravine with irregular lines that broke up her shape. Under the tree’s cover, she hunted for the sewer grate.
Her hands found the slanted steel bars among the branches. She slipped off the pack, pushed it through the grate, and squeezed through herself.
Inside, underground, dank, with sand and debris left by the last bad storm weeks ago, before the hot spell. All black where she was. No flashlight. Basically, it was a big concrete pipe that ended in a catch pond at Second Street. Every one hundred yards there was a steel ladder leading up to a manhole opening.
She could hear them ganging up out there. Think. They’d block the other end, seal her in.
She wiggled back out of the grate, took off the pack, and used one of the latex gloves to remove the makeshift silencer. She tossed it in through the grate.
Then, very carefully, stepping on rocks where possible, she backed away from the sewer entrance and slowly crawled up the far slope through the thick brush. Behind her she heard the cops moving down into the ravine from the street.
Very slowly, she emerged from the ravine and slipped across a dark dead-end street and went through another yard. The controlled panic of being hunted gave way to a warm sweat of elation. As she started down the bluff toward Main Street, she took in deep breaths of the sweet hot air.
It was time to call it quits. Maybe after she was gone, someone else would take up the cause.
Not her. She was done.
But if she was finished, she intended to have some control over the way her life ended. She wasn’t going to be snared like a rat in a. . sewer.
She had thought about this in great detail. And now she knew exactly what she had to do.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Men and women in uniforms, barefoot civilians in shorts, men without shirts, kids-they all came out from the dark houses to see the cops cordon off the entire North Hill around the ravine.
They hoped. Broker leaned forward, forearms planted on a steel rail running along the limestone wall that overlooked the ravine. Not far away, Lymon sagged against a car. There was never a good time for a situation to totally unravel, but the heat definitely made it worse. The adrenaline jag of the chase had blown back on them, and now a knot of cops sulked around the woman Lymon had pursued through the woods. Freed from her handcuffs, she stood with her arms crossed, listening to an officer who took great pains to explain the murder, the description of the suspect. .
“We’re really sorry about the mix-up,” the patient cop said.
“I know my rights. I want everybody’s badge numbers,” she said.
Another group of cops was talking to a teenage boy with a skateboard under his arm. Benish was with that group, scribbling notes in a pad in the bad light.
Down the wall from Broker, flashlights played over an old limestone sewer spillway. The newer underground storm sewer intake was located about thirty feet farther down into the ravine. Cops had strung crime scene tape and were searching the area around the sandy apron in front of the intake grille. The branches of a fallen cottonwood obscured the grille and made it hard to see.
The shouts went back and forth.
“There’s this clay-type dirt. We got a fresh cleat pattern from a running shoe. She crawled in here.”
Another cop gingerly fished a green pop bottle out from inside the sewer intake and held it with a pen stuck through the neck. “What do you make of this? It’s got punctures and duct tape. .”
And: “She definitely slipped into this sewer intake. We got people blocking the other end.”
Mouse-arm up, neck scrunched to the side in cell-phone silhouette-walked up to Broker. “Somebody has to go in there,” Broker said.
“Yeah, somebody young. And that ain’t you or me,” Mouse said. He gestured with the phone. “We got it sealed. SWAT’s on the way. We’ll watch this end, and the manholes on top. They’ll go in on Second and push through. If she’s in there, we got her.”
The cops fanned out along the length of the ravine and waited for the SWAT team. Broker sat down and adopted a wait-and-see attitude; he did not directly think of Gloria hunkered down under the ground gripping a pistol. And he didn’t revisit the experience of being shot at point-blank in the dark less than half an hour ago.
He was past the adrenaline spike of the chase, coming down. He fingered the deputy’s badge in his pocket. He tried to stay in the moment. And at the moment he smelled like tomato plants and fresh dirt.
Then the tension cranked up again when the SWAT members went into the sewer. The radios cracked, and everybody leaned forward, waiting. . and. .
“Get ready, something’s coming. Ready, ready. .”
Hisses and chittery growls came from the sewer, and then three raccoons scrambled between the bars of the grille and raced through the blocking force.
One of the SWAT guys popped his head out of the intake and said, “She ain’t here.”
The gathered cops dispersed in a wider search pattern. Broker accompanied Mouse, who went over to Benish and told him to locate Gloria Russell and find out where she was tonight.
“Where’s she live?” Benish said.
“How the fuck do I know?” Mouse said. “You’re a cop, find her. Take Lymon. Hey Lymon, c’mere.”
Lymon walked over to them, then stopped, plucked his Palm Pilot from his pocket, and hunched over to read something off the tiny screen. His face tightened; then he reached out and grabbed Benish’s arm so hard Benish said, “Ow.”
Broker and Mouse joined closer with Lymon and Benish. Lymon thrust the small screen up for them to read: LYMON, I’M SO SORRY. GLORIA.
“Go, go!” Mouse shouted, pounding Lymon on the shoulder. He grabbed Broker, held him back. “John just arrived at the victim’s house on Beech. I ran it down about Harry and Gloria. He wants to talk to both of us.”
One of Sheriff John Eisenhower’s favorite maxims was that nothing good happens at the end of a car chase. He arrived at the address on Beech Street to find cops, paramedics, and some citizens already openly discussing the Saint.
Broker and Mouse parked down the block and walked toward the lights.
The medical examiner was there and the Stillwater mayor with his police chief. The state crime lab van from BCA had backed up to Carol Lennon’s gated yard, an area that was now as brightly lit and tightly secured as a space shuttle launch.
The crowd of citizens swelled, some of then grinning the kind of rubbernecking smiles that reminded Broker of old photographs of gawkers at a lynching. At least one Saints baseball jacket was being worn in the impossible heat.
It was starting.
Sally Erbeck moved swiftly toward the sheriff. As she passed Broker she gave him a quick wink. It was truly amazing to see the way the lines of her face streamlined forward; it was a fresh kill, and she was on the scene. Broker wondered if she had a police scanner surgically implanted in her ear.
John Eisenhower held up a hand to halt Sally, signaling with his fingers that he’d talk to her in five minutes. He detached from a knot of coppers and walked over to Broker and Mouse.
“Mouse told me,” John said. “What a mess. You had to go round and round with Harry. And she took a shot at you-could you ID her?”
Broker shook his head. “Too dark.” He took the deputy’s badge and ID card from his pocket and handed them to John.
