Chuck Logan - Vapor Trail

“Now what?” Terry said.

“We wait and listen, maybe-” Broker was cut off by a yell about one hundred yards ahead of them.

“Halt. Police. Halt. Police.”

A flashlight stabbed the darkness. Immediately, Broker and Terry started into the broken ground, feeling their way toward the commotion.

“No, no.” A gasping hysterical female voice.

“They got her,” Terry said; then he switched on his flashlight and crashed forward into the dark. Broker followed at a much more cautious pace.

The ground was hilly, eroded, and thick with impassable brush. Bits of tense conversation drifted in the night.

“On the ground, facedown.”

“No!” Gasping. “He’s chasing me. Him back there.”

Then Broker heard Lymon yell, “You got her?”

“We got her, but we ain’t got a gun. Must have ditched it.”

A blond-haired woman dressed in running gear thrashed in the flashlight beams as she was being handcuffed. “Ow, shit, what are you doing?” she screamed. “If I have scars. . ”

“Calm down.”

“Not me, you moron. This black guy just chased me through the fucking woods . Call the fucking cops!”

The cops exchanged looks by flashlight.

Someone said, “Uh-oh.”

She heard the sirens, the neighborhood dogs barking in their yards, and realized the cops could have dogs too. Angel ran in a blind panic for half a block, then ducked, panting, behind a parked car to think.

Get yourself straightened out. Get a plan. .

First she’d have to get off the streets and get under cover. The cops would own the streets.

A swarm of sirens was building in the night. Most of them up ahead, in the direction she’d been running. Instinctively she got up and moved in the opposite direction, away from the sirens. Off the street now, she picked her way through the dark yards. . weaving around hedges and fences.

She reached the end of the block and burst into the open to cross the intersection. And nearly collided with some damn kid on a skateboard doing solo routines. The boy immediately grabbed his board and stepped back.

But he’d glimpsed her. The light was not good enough to see her face, but Angel realized she was running with a pistol in one hand and her makeshift silencer in the other.

She ducked back into the yards, praying she didn’t encounter dogs. Twice she had to backtrack when she ran into six-foot fences.

Angel darted across a street and ran toward a trio of houses with dark windows. Three blocks to the west, a circular wind of red flashers lashed at the motionless trees and rooftops. But here it was still dark.

They were concentrating on the direction in which she’d initially run.

But that damn skateboard kid. .

Okay, right now, hide; catch your breath. She scrambled up a limestone retaining wall into a yard and crouched behind a dwarf lilac hedge. She wiggled the backpack from her shoulders and stuffed the silencer and her latex gloves into it. Put it back on. Her bare knees tickled in the night dew collecting in the grass. She was dizzy. More than fear. The scent of foliage and humid earth made her head swim.

She could hear snatches of staccato disembodied traffic from the cop radios. And still the sirens were coming. They were cordoning the streets, but still to the west.

Then a cop car roared past her in a scream of sirens and whooping red lights and pulled a screeching U-turn almost right in front of her.

Angel’s heart started to count down to implosion in her chest. The cop car stopped. A man jumped out and ran into the shadows about a hundred yards from her. The cop in the car turned on a searchlight. The long beam swung across the facades of the dark houses; it played across the porch behind her.

Her hand closed over the pistol. I won’t be taken alive.

The idea of putting the filthy barrel in her mouth repelled her. Better to put it to the temple.

Won’t be taken.

Won’t.

Angel may not have been invisible anymore, but she was the next best thing: absolutely motionless. Several minutes passed, and the cop car, with its probing light, moved away. She was instantly up, running in a low crouch through the shadows. Then another light barred her path.

She ducked down and made herself small under a wide juniper as the police car searchlight swung back and forth like a white lantern down the street.

She watched the curve of her ankle pulse red as flashers atop police squad cars passed down the next block. Everywhere, she heard the static squawk of the radios.

Time to move.

“Lady, the guy chasing you is a cop .”

Broker and Terry could see them now: two officers, one in Stillwater blue, the other in county tans. They were pulling the handcuffed woman to her feet. She was lean, sun browned, and pissed off in the weaving flashlight beams. She wore black shorts and a green halter that passed for gray in the dark. Her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Her trophy legs were cut and bleeding from thrashing through the brush.

Lymon Greene walked in circles, hands on hips, chest heaving, trying to catch his breath. His left knee was banged up, and a string of blood twisted down his shin.

“Bag. . her. . hands,” Lymon said, gulping for air.

“Right,” one of the arresting cops said. Then he jogged toward the street.

“So where’d you throw the gun?” the other cop asked her.

“The gun?” Her eyes widened, flashing white. “Oh you poor, dim fucking moron,” she snarled. “My husband is a lawyer .”

Broker approached Lymon and put a hand on his shoulder. Lymon’s T-shirt was drenched with sweat. But he was grinning. “Man, jogging around the neighborhood doesn’t even start to get you ready for this kind of steeplechase.”

Broker studied him, glad that this chase had ended without bullets finding flesh. “Did Benish get ahold of you?” Broker said.

Lymon shook his head. “No. I was on my way to the grocery store and heard the radio call and came running.”

“You don’t know about Harry?” Broker said.

Lymon shook his head, blinking; distracted, still into the drama of the chase, he watched the two cops who’d cuffed the protesting woman walk her toward the street. Then his grin froze when an urgent voice came over the mobile radio mike clipped to a Stillwater cop’s epaulet.

“All units, we have a problem. She’s going east, toward the river. .”

“Say again.”

“We got a boy on a skateboard who saw a woman with a gun her hand running east through Everett and Maple.”

“One hundred. All units copy?”

Aw, shit. They piled into cars and converged on the North Hill. Immediately, it all felt wrong to Broker: the cops were road-bound; the suspect was working through the yards in the dark.

“Lemme out,” he yelled. “We gotta comb through the backyards.” He jumped from the rolling cruiser and jogged into the shadows.

Angel held her breath as the cop car shone its light into the yards on either side. The officer stopped two blocks away, got out of his car, took a handheld flashlight, and shone it into the overgrown ravine that abutted the street. Then his radio squawked. He turned off the light, got back in the car, and drove away.

Shaking, she took a fast inventory. Okay. They’d talked to the skateboard kid, figured out she’d doubled back, and now they would start cordoning these streets.

But the cop had given Angel an idea.

She was a Stillwater girl. It was a hill town, and in between the hills lay wooded ravines. She struggled to get her bearings and realized she was two blocks from a ravine that had a storm sewer running down its length. If she could slip into the intake grate at the bottom of the ravine, she could scurry underground and wiggle out on the bluff overlooking Battle Hollow. She’d come out close to her car, parked downtown.