The man clicked off.
Tom could hardly drive, hardly see the road. Almost immediately, the phone rang again. It was Wilier.
'Mr. Broadbent? We're at your place, in the living room, and I'm afraid we've got a problem.'
Tom swallowed, unable to find his voice.
'We got a round in the wall here. The SOC boys are on their way to take it out.'
Tom realized he was veering all over the highway, his foot to the metal, the car going almost a hundred and ten. He slowed the car and made an enormous effon to concentrate.
'You there?' came Willer's distant voice.
Tom found his voice. 'Detective Wilier, I want to thank you for your trouble, but everything's fine. I just heard from Sally. She's fine.'
'She is?'
'Her mom's sick, she had to go to Albuquerque.'
'Jeep's still in the garage.'
'She took a cab, that car doesn't work.'
'What about the F350?'
'That's only for hauling horses.'
'I see. About this round-'
Tom managed an easy laugh. 'Right. It's... that's an old one.'
'Looks fresh to me.'
'Couple of days ago. My gun went off accidentally.'
'Is that so?' The voice was cold.
Right.
'Mind telling me what make and caliber?'
'Thirty-eight Smith & Wesson revolver.' There was a long silence. 'As I said, Detective, I'm sorry to have bothered you, I really am. False alarm.'
'Got a spot of blood here on the rug, too. That also 'old'?'
Tom didn't quite find an answer to that. He felt a wave a nausea. If those bastards had hurt her ... 'A lot of blood?'
'Just a spot. It's still wet.'
'I don't know what to tell you about that, Detective. Maybe someone . . . cut himself.' He swallowed.
'Who? Your wife?'
'I don't know what to tell you.'
He listened to the hissing silence in the phone. He had to make that flight and
he had to deal with the man himself. He never should have left Sally alone. 'Mr. Broadbent? Are you familiar with the term 'probable cause'?'
Yes.
'That's what we've got here. We entered the house with your permission, we found probable cause that a crime had been committed-and now we're going to search it. We don't need a warrant under those circumstances.'
Tom swallowed. If the kidnapper was watching the house and saw it full of
cops . . .
'Just make it quick.'
'You say your plane lands at seven-thirty?' Wilier asked.
'Yes.'
'I'd like to see you and your wife-sick mother or not-tonight. At the station. Nine o'clock sharp. You also might want to bring that lawyer you mentioned. I have a feeling you're going to need him.'
'I can't. Not at nine. It's impossible. And my wife is in Albuquerque-'
'This is not an optional appointment, Broadbent. You be there at nine or I'll get a warrant for your arrest. Is that clear?'
Tom swallowed. 'My wife has nothing to do with this.'
'You don't produce her and your problem will get worse. And let me tell you, pal, it's bad already.'
The phone went dead.
PART THREE
PERDIZ CREEK
She stood twenty feet at the shoulder and was fifty feet long. She weighed about six tons. Her legs were more than ten feet long and packed with the most powerful muscles that had ever evolved on a vertebrate. When she walked, she carried her tail high and her stride was twelve to fifteen feet. At a run she could attain a speed of thirty miles per hour, but raw speed was less important than agility, flexibility, and lightning reflexes. Her feet were about three and a half feet long, armed with four scimitar like claws, three in the front and a dewclawlike spur in back. She walked on her toes. A single well-aimed kick could disembowel a hundred-foot-long duckbill dinosaur.
Her jaws were three feet long and held sixty teeth. She used the four incisorlike teeth in the front for stripping and peeling meat off bone. Her killing teeth were located in a lethal row on the sides, some as long as twelve inches, root included, and as big around as a child's fist. They were serrated on the backside, so that after biting she could hold her prey while sawing and cutting backward. Her bite could remove more than ten cubic feet of meat at a time, weighing several hundred pounds. A warren of windows, holes, and channels in her skull gave it enormous strength and lightness, as well as flexibility. She had two different biting techniques: an overbite that cut through meat like scissors; and a 'nutcracker' bite for crushing armor and bone. Her palate was supported by thin struts that allowed the skull to flatten out sideways with the force of a bite, and then stretch to allow massive chunks of meat to be swallowed whole.
With her overlapping jaw muscles, she could deliver a biting force estimated in excess of one hundred thousand pounds per square inch, enough to cut through steel.
Her two arms were small, no larger than a human's, but many times stronger. They were equipped with two recurved claws set at a ninety-degree angle to maximize their gripping and slashing capability. The back vertebrae, where the ribs attach, were as large as coffee cans, to support her belly, which could be carrying more than a quarter ton of freshly consumed meat.
She stank. Her mouth contained bits and pieces of rotting meat and rancid grease, trapped in special crevices in her teeth, which gave her bite an added lethality. Even if her victim escaped the initial attack, it would likely die in short order of massive infection or blood poisoning. The bones she expelled in herfeces were sometimes almost completely dissolved by the potent hydrochloric acids with which she digested her food.
The occipital condyle bone in her neck was the size of a grapefruit, and it allowed her to turn her head almost 180 degrees so that she could snap and bite in all directions. Like a human being, her eyes looked ahead, giving her stereoscopic vision, and she had an excellent sense of smell and of hearing. Her favored prey were the herds of
