John Sandford - Secret Prey

And this time, he hit her.

Audrey screamed and went down, and suddenly, her face was there, looking under the cars at him. And the barrel of the shotgun was pointing at him too and she was moving it toward his face. He rolled behind a tire as she fired, and the tire soaked up the blast; but he could feel the air torn apart beside him.

She’d be dealing with recoil; she might be reloading. He didn’t think it, but knew it, and pushed himself just to the right and extended his arm again, still unable to find the front sight in the shadow under the car, but he was close, and her face was there, and he was tightening his grip on the trigger and she was moving the barrel back to him…

Sherrill dropped on her like a meteor. She’d crawled over the sport-ute, and dropped from the roof. She landed with her feet behind Audrey’s neck, smacking Audrey’s head facedown into the receiver on the shotgun.

Lucas jumped up and ran around the end of the car and caught Sherrill’s hand coming up with the pistol in it. "No, no…"

"What?" Sherrill looked confused.

"We got her."

Audrey wrenched her shoulders and neck around, looked up at them, dazed, blood running down her lips and across her teeth. "Who are you?" she asked.

One of the cops outside was screaming, "Davenport, Davenport, talk to me…"

"We got her, we got her, we got her…" With his foot, Lucas pushed the shotgun under the sport-ute, out of reach. "She’s hit," he said to Sherrill. "Let’s get her outside."

"I’ll get the doors…"

Lucas got his arms under Audrey’s back and knees, and picked her up as best he could; then the three garage doors started rising simultaneously, and light flooded into the garage.

The uniformed cops were there, pistols drawn. They reholstered as they saw Lucas carrying Audrey.

"Jesus Christ," one of them said. "What was that?"

"Shotgun," Lucas grunted. "She’s hit. Get an ambulance out here."

"Put her down on the driveway, Lucas," Sherrill said. "Let’s get her flat. One of you guys, you got a blanket in your car? She’ll be going into shock…"

A cop got a blanket, spread it on the driveway, and Lucas put Audrey on it. She seemed only semiconscious, though her eyes were open. He stood up. "Damn," he said. "That was a little too close."

Audrey said something. Sherrill heard it, said, "What?"

She said something again. Sherrill said, "What?" and bent over the other woman.

And as she put her head close to the other woman’s face, Audrey lifted her hand, and despite her awkward position, hit Sherrill in the eye with her fist, knocking Sherrill flat on her butt.

"Knock that shit off," one of the uniformed cops yelled at Audrey, stepping over her, and she unballed her fist and turned her head away, her eyes softly closing. Sherrill had crawled away, one hand to her eye. "Aw, man, that hurts."

Lucas looked at it: "You’re gonna have a mouse. And a hell of a black eye."

Audrey mumbled again. They both turned to look at her, eight feet away, flat on her back, and her cobra eyes caught Lucas. And suddenly she smiled, a big, toothy smile with bloody teeth.

Lucas felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. He turned back to Sherrill, who looked up at him and shook her head once: "Fuckin’ nuts," she said.

Sherrill said, "so Krause thinks maybe she deliberately let the lineman see her so we wouldn’t suspect Wilson. And then she called to tell us about the lineman, because we were digging at Wilson."

"Smart woman," Lucas said.

"Nasty," said James T. Bone, who was just settling into Lucas’s visitor’s chair.

"I gotta go," Sherrill said. She stood on her tiptoes, black eye nearly gone, kissed Lucas on the lips, said, "See you tonight," and, "Bye, Mr. Bone."

When Sherrill closed the door, Bone looked sleepy-eyed at Lucas and said, "White fuzzy sweater and chrome revolver in a shoulder holster. My heart almost stopped."

"Wearing my ass out," Lucas said comfortably.

"I know how that goes," Bone said.

Bone said, "Audrey… is she gonna fight it?"

"Her attorney’s a friend of mine," Lucas said. "He says she’s crazy as a loon. Maybe she is. She even denies buying or firing the shotgun, even though we had four witnesses, the receipt in the car, and the gun shop guy identifying her. He says she’s having trouble remembering anything after the death of her husband. A shrink’s looking at her now."

"Is she faking?"

Lucas shrugged. "I don’t know. She’s smart, that’s pretty clear. But her whole life has been a nightmare. I think it’s possible that she never did know the difference between right and wrong."

"And if the court decides she’s nuts?"

"She’ll go off to the state hospital."

"What if she’s not nuts?"

"Then we have a trial, and we’ve got her."

"Huh." Bone looked out the window at the street. The weather had turned gray, and small flecks of snow bounced off the window. Although it was only three in the afternoon, most of the passing cars had their headlights on. A week after the fight in the garage, the world was beginning to settle down again. "I’d feel a lot better if I knew she was going away for a long time; like forever. I’d hate to see her get out of a hospital in a couple of years."

Lucas nodded: "So would I."

Bone had the bank: of the top five Polaris executives in October, only two had made it to the end of November, Bone and Robles. "I’ve got my assistant winding up O’Dell’s affairs here. I talked to her father-he’s having trouble dealing with her death."

"Death of a child," Lucas said. "Just ’cause they’re grown up, doesn’t make it any easier."

"No, I don’t expect it does," Bone said. Then, "Have you seen Damascus Isley lately?"

"Not since we had lunch together a while back."

"I saw him at the bank. We talked a little basketball… He’s on a strange diet, a Big Mac every day with popcorn."

"He told me he was thinking about it," Lucas said. "I hope he can stick it out."

"I think he will. He was on the diet for one week, he told me, and lost eighteen pounds. He knows that won’t keep up, but when he got on the scale after the first week, he said his wife went out to the bedroom and cried for fifteen minutes. Outa joy, I guess. He was freaked out. I don't see any way he'll relapse.

Bone said, "This Audrey McDonald thing has torn me up."

"Yeah?" Lucas had an archaic typewriter tray in his desk, just the right height for feet. He pulled it out and put his feet up.

"Yeah. I was gonna run a major bank someday. But it wouldn’t have come this soon, if Audrey hadn’t blown old Dan Kresge out of his tree stand."

"Won’t you be out of a job, if the merger goes through?"

"Sure. But some problems are cropping up with the merger," Bone said, showing a thin smile. "The road might not be as smooth as it looked. Even if it happens, once you’re running a place, you can usually go someplace else, and run that. It’s the breakthrough to the top that counts."

"Sloan talked to you about your relationship with Marcia Kresge… I’d think that might have been a dangerous relationship for somebody trying to get to the top," Lucas said.

"Eh… it’s easier in a private company. You don’t have to deal with elections and all your insane bureaucratic rules. I doubt Dan would have cared; he probably would have been amused. Marcia wasn’t any more of a potential problem for me than Miss Fuzzy Sweater is for you. Besides, that’s all done."

"All done?"

"Yeah." Bone seemed mildly embarrassed and turned to look out at the street again. "You met my assistant, Kerin Baki."

"The glacial blonde."

"Yeah. When the whole scramble started, after Kresge was killed, she started working to get me the top job. She did everything right: pretty much managed the whole show. And when I asked her what she wanted out of it, she said she wanted a favor from me. But she wouldn’t tell me what it was until after I got the job."