Ballencoa came at her from her left, his face twisted with rage, spewing obscenities. The hunting knife had come out of his hand as they had tumbled to the ground, but he had recovered it, and he came at her with it now.
They were both too close. If she backed up any more, they would have her trapped against the van.
She bolted like a cornered horse, banging hard into Hewitt. He careened sideways, losing his balance, and they went down in a heap of tangled legs and arms. He lost the screwdriver but grabbed at her with his one good hand as Lauren scrambled frantically to get away from him.
He snatched hold of her ankle, yanking her leg out from under her. Lauren kicked and struggled like a drowning swimmer to free herself, getting first one foot under her, then the other.
She hadn’t taken two strides when Ballencoa was on her. He hit her hard between the shoulder blades, knocking the breath from her, and she hit the ground hard, rocks biting into her flesh.
The hammer came out of her hand. She grabbed at it, fingernails breaking as her fingertips hit nothing but dirt and stone.
This wasn’t what she’d had in mind, she thought dimly as her vision blurred and darkened around the edges. How many times had she imagined having Roland Ballencoa on his knees, begging her for his life? A thousand? A million?
In her dreams he told her where Leslie was before she shot him dead.
Leah saw her mother try to run. She saw her fall. She could hear nothing but the pounding of her pulse in her head and the pounding of her feet against the earth as she ran. She had never run so hard or so fast in her life, and still terror gripped her throat at the idea that she couldn’t run fast enough to get to her mother in time.
Ballencoa had a knife. The light flashed off the blade as he brought it up, and flashed off it again as he brought it down and plunged it into her mother’s back.
“NO!!!!” Leah screamed.
She launched herself at his back, slamming into him so hard she almost knocked the wind from herself. She struck at him with the steel pick in her hand over and over and over. Like a giant claw, it tore at him, ripping hair and flesh from the back of his head, from the back of his neck.
His body twisted and bucked beneath her as he tried to fling her off. Leah clung to him like a limpet, sobbing and stabbing at him with the hoof pick until he finally shook free of her and flung her into the dirt.
Then he was on his feet and he had hold of her, his hands crushing her arms to her sides as he picked her up. He lifted her and turned and threw her into the back of the van like a sack of trash.
Leah cried out as she landed hard. Then Ballencoa was over her, and his hands were around her throat. He was screaming at her, but she couldn’t hear him. His face was twisted and dark like a demon from a dream.
Lauren struggled to turn over. Ballencoa’s weight was gone, but her own body felt as heavy as lead. It seemed to take every ounce of strength she had to lift a foot, to move a hand. The world had gone to slow motion, black and white, no sound.
She saw him lift Leah off the ground and hurl her into the back of the van. In her mind she screamed
She moved a hand . . . a foot . . . She bent a knee . . .
Hewitt lay on the ground where she had tripped over him. He might have been dead. She hoped so.
She struggled to suck in a breath, to get up on one knee.
She had a clear view of the back of the van. Ballencoa had one hand at Leah’s throat, the other tearing at her breeches.
This was what he had done to Leslie. He had stolen her off the side of the road. He had brought her to a place like this and stolen her innocence in the most vile and violent way he could.
Lauren hadn’t been there to stop him.
She was here now.
In her blindness to gain justice for one daughter, she had put the other in exactly the same brutal, horrible place to face the same brutal, horrible death.
Lauren didn’t know if the sound came out of her or exploded only in her brain. It didn’t matter. It came from the deepest part of her and brought with it a wave of strength.
She grabbed the hammer as she got to her feet and turned it in her hands.
She brought the hammer up with both hands.
His attention was on Leah. He turned too late.
Lauren brought the hammer down, claw side first, with every last ounce of strength she had.
The claw caught him between the temple and the ear, driving into flesh and bone and brain. The force of the blow knocked him sideways away from Leah, away from the van. The look on his face was one of stunned horror.
He stuck out his arms, flailing like a blind man to break his fall as his legs buckled and he went down, the hammer still embedded in the side of his skull.
The look in his eyes was both wild and blank, and the sounds coming from him were guttural alien babble. His body began to jerk and jump as the electrical system of his brain shorted out and seized.
Lauren leaned hard against the van, watching him die even as she felt her own life slipping out of her, running out of her with the blood that flowed from the knife wound in her back.
“Mommy!” Leah cried, hysterical, flinging herself into her mother.
Lauren wrapped her arms around her daughter and held her as tightly as she could.
“It’s over, baby,” she whispered again and again. “It’s over. It’s over.”
61
Like flies to carrion, the local media had already begun to arrive on Old Mission Road outside the gates of the home Lauren and her daughter had been taken from.
Mendez had set up a roadblock of two cruisers and four deputies to keep the media well back from the scene.
They were losing daylight. The sun had slipped over the far side of the western ridges, turning them purple and casting the valley into a light that was neither day nor night. In Santa Barbara, tourists would be sitting on the wharf, watching it float like an orange balloon above the Pacific horizon.
The county chopper had gone up to start a grid search above the hills to the west of town. They had already turned on the spotlight, but Mendez knew those hills as well as anyone, and he knew they would be fighting a futile battle as the shadows filled the steep canyons.
For the first time since he and Hicks and Tanner had arrived at the house, he was still, leaning back against the car, trying to quiet his mind and find a useful thought as Dixon addressed the media out on the road.
Tanner came and stood beside him. She looked as worried and grim as he felt.
“I hope she shot that asshole somewhere it hurts,” she muttered.
