Ridley Pearson - Middle Of Nowhere

LaMoia checked and awaited an answer. "That's affirm, Sarge."

Boldt flipped open his phone, pulled his notepad from his jacket and dialed a number, all with one hand. LaMoia maintained the open line to Gaynes. They crossed the bridge at Agate Passage. Still on the phone, Boldt pulled the car over in a park and ride just ahead of the signage for the turn to Suquamish-Indianola.

He listened more than he talked, and then hung up the call. "You know how I feel about coincidence," he told LaMoia.

"What's up?"

"Poulsbo PD never made contact at the restaurant, but they have this nine-eleven call reporting a taillight of an old Eldorado sending SOS out its right blinker."

"Son of a bitch."

"They observed our request for radio silence, but still alerted their cars via their MDTs," mobile data terminals. "Nobody caught sight of the Eldorado. But the caller reported that it turned off three-oh-five here," he said, pointing to the intersection not a hundred yards down the road. "North, toward Suquamish." Boldt added, "I say we trust this one. If it's right, it buys us a hell of a lot of time over running out to Poulsbo and back." Boldt looked out at the dark road. "If it's wrong information, or if it's Flek trying to mislead us, then we lose any possibility of a jump on him."

"Old Indian saying," LaMoia replied, his jaw wired, his words sounding drunken. "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

"That certainly helps a lot," Boldt said sarcastically. But it did help; it briefly lightened the moment.

"I can see her doing that, Sarge. The SOS. You know? Who else but Matthews? You know her better than anyone. What do you think?"

Boldt pushed down the accelerator and turned right at the intersection. North, toward Suquamish.

" This thing is out of hand. Does it feel that way to you?" Daphne asked. He didn't know handcuffs. He'd clamped the left cuff way too tightly to her wrist so that her hand felt cold and her wrist felt broken. She winced with pain every time the car bumped, which on the dirt road was every few yards.

"No talking." He said this, but lacked the authority of his earlier insistence. She knew he wanted to talk, needed to talk. It was the only way for him to build his confidence.

"Have you thought about why we've pursued you?" she asked.

"To fry my ass," the driver answered.

"You see? It is out of hand. That's not it at all."

"Right," he snapped. He reached for a beer. It was his fourth.

"Have you thought about how Davie would play this?"

"Don't you talk about him!"

"He wouldn't know how to play it, would he, Abby? Because Davie wasn't like you. Davie took the straight road. Davie was doing fine until you talked him into letting you hit that delivery."

"Shut up!"

"There's a tower," she said, pointing through the windshield. Sweet and sour-she needed to be both for him, play both roles herself, one moment the accuser, one moment the accomplice.

Flek slowed, but kept driving. He tried the phone and once again nearly lost his patience. He reached over the backseat and fished in her purse and came out with her phone. Same reaction to his attempt with it.

Daphne didn't believe in coincidence-Boldt had trained her not to, along with every other detective with whom he'd worked over the years. If the circuit was busy, then that was Boldt's doing. And if that was Boldt's doing, then she still had hope.

"What the fuck am I thinking?" Flek said. He sped up the car. It had finally occurred to him, she realized, to use a pay phone. She had wondered how long it might take him to see this. Get him into town-Boldt was on the same page as she.

The clock continued running in her head. Osbourne had said triangulation took time. Did they have a location on her? Was there a radio car waiting around the next corner, and three more coming up their tailpipe?

"My guess is Davie would encourage you to work it out, not get yourself killed."

"I told you to shut up!" He shoved the beer can onto the dash so that it wedged tightly between glass and vinyl. He tugged the gun from his waist and extended his trembling arm toward the floor of the car.

"No!" she hollered.

But Flek pulled the trigger, shooting her left foot. The bullet traveled through her and out the floor of the car. "That's one!" he shouted madly, saliva spraying from his wet

lips. "I got eight more in here, and I'll use every damn one before I bother to finish you. NOW YOU SHUT UP!"

For a moment she felt no pain whatsoever, her brain frozen with shock. But then the burning began. It raced up her leg, through her gut, and she vomited.

"You disgusting bitch!" he screamed at close range, beating her with the butt of the gun, directly on the wound he'd caused with the bottle.

Her head swooned, but she struggled for consciousness and managed to sit herself upright and turn her head slowly to face him. The burning in her left foot was now an inferno. She could barely hear her own voice as she spoke. "What now, Abby?"

"Shut the fuck up!"

"You're going to have to bandage that, or pull a tourniquet, or I'm going to bleed out on you. And then what? Then I'm a dead cop, and Boldt isn't going to deal with you. You're damned if I die, Abby." She needed to speak but could barely find the strength. "You… know.. that, don't you?" Her words were long strings of stretched taffy, her mouth disconnected from her brain. The purple goo loomed at the edges of her eyes, pulsing with each tick of her heart. She pushed it back, but it consumed her, determined to shield her from this pain. For a moment she maintained consciousness. She thought she saw a phone booth up ahead. A streetlight in the rain. But then the black hood of unconsciousness slipped over her head, and all hope was lost.

The fix on the transmission point for Flek's first call came only moments after Boldt turned right off 305 and onto Suquamish Way NE, a minute or two after Daphne had been shot.

Reading from the back of his hand where he'd scribbled notes, LaMoia said, "The exact fix is North 47 degrees 45.45 minutes, West 122, 36.2 minutes. Give or take forty feet."

"In English," Boldt requested.

"A couple hundred yards east of something called Stottlemeyer Road NE. It's in the north end of the Indian Reservation." LaMoia fished the official SPD road atlas from the glove box where it was required to reside, and leafed through the nearly three inches of pages at a blistering speed. "You know what, Sarge?"

"It isn't in there."

"Correctomundo," LaMoia answered.

"Dispatch!" they said, nearly in unison.

"What do you want to bet they can track us from there?" Each and every SDP vehicle now carried a GPS location transmitter, enabling Dispatch computers to monitor location. On radio cars that carried MDT terminals, this same technology allowed patrol officers to monitor their GPS position on a moving map, and follow computer-generated directions for the fastest possible route, taking into account reported traffic delays. Boldt's unmarked car lacked the MDT, but still possessed a GPS transmitter in the trunk.

"The system goes out wireless," Boldt instructed his sergeant. LaMoia never paid any attention to in-house memos. "As long as our phones are working, so's the GPS."

"It's ringing," LaMoia said. Less than a minute later Boldt turned left on Totten Road, following LaMoia's instruction. Precise directions followed, as a woman twenty-three miles away, on the other side of Puget Sound, stared at a computer screen tracking Boldt's car to within a margin of error of forty feet.

Right on Widme Road, and straight through the dark woods, Boldt driving twenty miles an hour over the posted limit and nearly rolling the car on a sharp right that appeared out of nowhere. The road bent immediately left and continued to its conclusion at Lincoln, where LaMoia pointed left and the driver followed.