She plowed off the pavement at the Paxton Springs turnoff through eight inches of snow, and bumped her way to the waiting chopper. The wash of the slow-moving propeller blades dusted snow off the tall pine trees, creating eddies that puffed and then disappeared in the wind.
Applewhite gave the pilot orders while two men in fatigues loaded a drugged, rubbery Charlie Perry into the backseat of the car.
The pilot nodded, put a hand to his headset, and said, 'The target is moving.'
'Let's do it,' Applewhite replied.
Bobby Sloan lost sight of Applewhite on the curves through the mountains. When she'd switched to Perry's car in the APT Performa parking lot, he'd been forced to maintain visual contact. He put the Bronco into low four- wheel drive and pushed it to the max to make up ground. Wheels spun snow and tires whined as he hit ice. He pointed the Bronco down the middle of the road, fishtailing through curves, downshifting on short straightaways, until he made it through the pass and had a clean line of sight down the empty road. Nothing.
Where the hell was she? She couldn't have been moving that fast. With no homing devices on Charlie Perry's car, he had no way to track her.
A helicopter came out of the mountains, flying low, gaining altitude, moving toward Ramah. It changed course, came straight back at him, and flew overhead.
He watched in the rearview mirror as it cleared the mountain and disappeared from view.
He slowed, made a cautious U-turn, and went looking for Applewhite.
She had to be somewhere behind him. But where? He crawled along at ten miles an hour looking for car tracks off the road. At the Paxton Springs turnoff Applewhite's car almost sideswiped the Bronco as she slid onto the highway.
She careened by, steering into a slight spin before straightening the wheels.
Bobby took a quick look, ducked his head, and kept moving in the opposite direction. When she was out of sight he pulled to the side of the road.
Applewhite had left Santa Fe alone, of that Sloan was certain. But he was just as certain he'd seen a head bob up in the backseat when she passed him.
He swung the Bronco around, hoping he hadn't been made, wondering what in the hell was going on.
The tape across his mouth didn't keep Charlie Perry from giggling.
Although the blindfold kept him from seeing things, the helicopter ride had been exciting.
For a while they'd gone up and down like a bumpy roller coaster with the blades thud, thud, thudding, and the wind swoosh, swoosh, swooshing outside. It had been lots of fun.
Now he was swishing along in a car. This was better than Disneyland, where his father had taken a picture of him pulling Donald Duck's tail.
Charlie tried to grin. The tape across his mouth made it impossible, his ankles and wrists were hurting a little bit, and he wished someone would take the blindfold off. He wondered if he'd done something bad, and what was going to happen next.
Muddy slush from the ranch road splat ted the truck windshield. Kerney turned on the wipers while Sara weighed in with her take on the Straley interview. Hamilton Terrell had been the point man for the operation since day one. He'd married Phyllis Terrell to position himself favorably with Proctor Straley, and then used Straley to wangle his way onto the Trade Source board. After that it had been just a matter of swaying the board with the promise of a lot of easy money from the public coffers.
Kerney agreed it had all been a setup to mask SWAMI and set the stage for Terrell's secret trade mission. Both had to be tied together, otherwise all the killing made no sense. But proving anything still remained highly remote, getting to Terrell wouldn't be easy, and time was running out.
Most of the tire tracks on the snow-covered road gave out when they reached the Pine Hill Navajo Reservation cutoff. They passed the snow-tinged butte of El Moro National Monument. The powerful, beautiful presence of it made Sara want to stop and play tourist. She wistfully thought about asking Kerney to bring her down on a weekend jaunt, and quickly nixed the idea. There might be no weekend jaunts with Kerney if she didn't stay alert and focused.
The vehicle tracking Kerney reported in. He had a five-minute ETA to Applewhite's location. She asked about road traffic. No vehicles other than Kerney's were traveling east. She told the surveillance driver to keep it that way.
Applewhite had spotted Detective Sloan when she'd passed him at the Paxton Springs cutoff. She got confirmation from the chopper pilot that she was still being followed.
'Keep him out of my zone.'
'Affirmative,' the pilot said.
'Are you authorizing deadly force?'
'Do whatever it takes,' Applewhite said, as she eased to a stop along a straight stretch of road.
'Is anything else moving toward me?'
'Negative,' the pilot said.
'Close the road behind me,' she said.
Applewhite staged a one-car accident. She drove the car at an angle off the road, turning the wheels to put it into a skid. She backed up and adjusted the car's position so that a raised front hood would keep Kerney from seeing in as he approached. She pulled Perry out of the backseat, put him behind the steering wheel, took off the blindfold, ripped the tape from his mouth, locked him inside the vehicle, and popped the hood.
Charlie gave her an insipid smile through the car window. She got a rifle and ammunition out of the trunk, moved over a fence into tree cover, and waited.
The cop in Kerney would force him to stop and investigate.
Taking him out would be another enjoyable hit. But the prospect of whacking Sara Brannon made Applewhite break into a big smile.
Bobby Sloan saw the helicopter land on the pavement and went cross-country through the trees to get around it. He caught a glimpse of the pilot watching him and talking rapidly into his headset as he bounced by. He ground the Bronco through a snowbank to get back on the road and the front wheels bottomed out in a ditch. He slammed the gearbox into reverse and the back tires screamed as he inched his way out.
Just as the rear wheels gripped solid, Sloan heard the chopper. He geared into low, took the ditch at an angle, and spun rubber down the road. Before he could make the curve, the chopper dropped down sideways in front of him. The door on the chopper slid open, and the windshield exploded in Sloan's face as he took fire.
He felt a nick on his neck as he gunned the Bronco back into the trees.
The back window blew out and he could hear rounds slamming into the tailgate. He redlined the engine, bounced off a tree, topped a rise, and barreled down to the highway.
He could see Applewhite's car in the distance and the tiny outline of a vehicle coming from the opposite direction.
He downshifted and waited for the chopper to come at him again. Cold air whistled through the vehicle, freezing his face as he punched the accelerator. He felt tired, woozy, unable to focus. He looked down and saw his blood-soaked shirt. He put his hand up to his neck and felt wet spurts as his heart pumped his arteries empty.
Realizing he was a dead man, he tried to squeeze the wound closed anyway. His foot found the brake and the Bronco did a quick three-sixty before tilting on its side and spinning into a tree. Just before impact Bobby Sloan passed out.
Kerney saw the stranded car two hundred yards ahead and slowed. He touched the brake, scanned the vehicle for damage, and couldn't see any.
'What do you think?' he asked Sara.
'I can't tell from here.'
He caught a flash of light at the edge of some trees off the south side of the road. He touched the brake again.
'I saw it,' Sara said, opening the glove box. She grabbed Kerney's 38, checked the rounds in the cylinder, and emptied a box of ammunition in her coat pocket.
'Do you think it's a setup?'
Kerney unsnapped his holster.
'It may be nothing.'
