'Gotta get back, gotta get…' Bruun groaned. Weather, sensing the speed, pushed herself up in the seat. The side window was gone, but the mirror was still there. The rider was on the sled, coming after them, and she flashed to the night of the murders, the sled running in the ditch…
They were passing a tree farm on the road back to the hospital parking lot, the straight, regimented rows of pine flashing by like a black picket fence.
'No, no,' she said. Heart in her throat. Looked into the mirror, the sled closing, closing…
'Gun coming up!' she shouted at Bruun.
Bruun put his head down and Weather slid to the floor. Two quick shots, almost lost in the roar of the engine, pellets hammering through the shattered back window into the cab, another shot crashing through the back window into the windshield, ricocheting. Bruun groaned again and said, 'Hit, I'm hit.'
But he kept his foot on the pedal and the speed went up. The shotgun was silent. Weather sat higher, looking out the shattered side window, then out the back.
The road was empty. 'He's gone,' she said.
Bruun's chin was almost on the hub of the wheel. 'Hold on,' he grated. He hit the brake, but too late.
The entrance to the hospital parking lot was not straight in. The entry road went sharply right, specifically to slow incoming traffic. They were there-and they were going much too fast to make the turn. Weather braced herself, locking her arms against the dashboard. A small flower garden was buried under the snow where they'd hit. There was a foot-high wall around it…
The truck fishtailed when Bruun hit the brake, and then hit the flower-garden wall. The truck bounced, twisting, plowing through the snow, engine whining…
There were people in the parking lot.
She saw them clearly, sharply, frozen, like the face of the queen of hearts when somebody riffles a deck of cards.
Then the truck was in the parking lot, moving sideways. It hit a snowbank and rolled onto its side, almost as if it had been tripped. She felt it going, grabbed the door handle, tried to hold on, felt the door handle wrench away from her, fell, felt the softness of the deputy beneath her… Heard Bruun screaming…
And finally it stopped.
She'd lost track of anything but the sensations of impact. But she was alive, sitting on top of Bruun. She looked to her left, through the cracked windshield, saw legs…
Voices. 'Stay there, stay there…'
And she thought: Fire.
She could smell it, feel it. She'd worked in a burn unit, wanted nothing to do with burns. She pulled herself up, carefully avoiding Bruun, who was alive, holding himself, moaning, 'Oh boy, oh boy…'
She unlocked the passenger-side door, tried to push it open. It moved a few inches. More voices. Shouting.
Faces at the windshield, then somebody on top. A man looked in the side window: Robbie, the night-orderly body-builder, who she'd not-very-secretly made fun of because of his hobby. Now he pried the door open with sheer strength, and she'd never been so happy to see a muscleman. He was scared for her: 'Are you all right, Doctor?'
'Snowmobile,' she said. 'Where's the man on the snowmobile?'
The body-builder looked up over into the group of people still gathering, and, puzzled, asked, 'Who?'
Weather sat on the edge of the hospital bed in her scrub suit. Her left arm and leg were bruised, and she had three small cuts on the back of her left hand, none requiring stitches. No apparent internal injuries. Bruun was in the recovery room. She'd taken pellets out of his arm and chest cavity.
'You're gonna hurt like a sonofagun tomorrow,' said Rice, the GP who'd come to look at her, and later assisted in the operation on Bruun. 'You can bet on it. Take a bunch of ibuprofen before you go to bed. And don't do anything too strenuous tonight.' His face was solemn, but his eyes flicked at Lucas.
'Yeah, yeah-take off,' Weather said.
'Does everybody know?' Lucas asked when Rice had gone.
'I imagine there're a few Christian-school children that the secret's been kept from,' Weather said.
'Mmmm.'
'So what'd you find?' she asked.
'Just that you oughta be dead. Again. You would be if Bruun hadn't kept the truck rolling.'
'And the asshole got away.'
'Yeah. He waited in the trees by the stop sign until he saw you coming. After he fired the first shots, he followed you down the road to the spot where the power line cuts through the tree farm and then cut off through the trees. There was no chance of following him unless we'd been right there with a sled. He must've counted on that. He did a pretty good job setting it up. If Bruun had stuck the truck in the ditch, he'd of finished you off, no problem.'
'Why didn't he shoot me through the door?'
'He tried,' Lucas said. 'Sometimes a double-ought pellet will make it through a car door, but most of the time it won't. Three went all the way through. One hit Bruun and the other two hit the dashboard. And we think Bruun got the arm hit through the broken window.'
'Jesus,' she said. She looked at Lucas. He was leaning against an exam table, his arms folded across his chest, his voice calm, almost sleepy. He might have been talking about a ball game. 'You're not pissed enough,' she said.
Lucas had come in just before she'd gone into the operating room, and waited. Hadn't touched her. Just watched her. She got down from the examination table, winced. Rice was right. She'd be sore.
'I was thinking all the way over here that I'm just too fuckin' vain and it almost caught up to me,' Lucas said. He pushed away from the exam table and caught a fistful of hair at the back of her head, squeezed it, held her by the hair, head tipped up. 'I want you the fuck out of here,' he said angrily. 'You're not gonna get hurt. You understand that? You're…'
'Why are you vain?' She'd grabbed his shirtfront with both hands, held on. Their faces were four inches apart, and they rocked back and forth.
He stopped, still holding her hair. 'Because I thought he was coming after you because of me. I thought he went after the Mueller kid because of me.'
'He didn't?'
'No. It's you he wants. You know him or you know something about him. Or he thinks you do. You don't know what it is, but he does.'
She said, 'Another snowmobile ran alongside my Jeep when I was coming back from the LaCourts' house, on the first night. I thought he was crazy.'
'You didn't tell me.'
'I didn't know.'
He let go of her hair and put his arm around her shoulder, squeezed her, careful about her left arm. She squeezed with her right arm, then Lucas stepped back, took out his wallet, unfolded the photograph he'd stuck there.
'You know this fat man,' he said. 'He tried to kill you again. Who is he?'
'I don't know.' She stared at the photo. 'I don't have the foggiest.'
CHAPTER 17
The priest said, 'I'm okay, Joe. Seriously.'
He stood in the hall between the kitchen and the bedroom. He was grateful for the call and at the same time resented it: he should be doing the ministering.
'I had a decent day,' he said, his head bobbing. 'You know all the talk about me and the LaCourts-I was afraid to say anything that might make it worse. It was driving me crazy. But I found a way to handle it.'
His tongue felt like sandpaper, from sucking on lemon drops. He'd gone through two dozen large sacks the last
