Ridley Pearson - Middle Of Nowhere

His eyes burned into her as he turned the car right onto a street marked Sid Price. A damp and dark narrow lane. Enormous trees. Close quarters. She couldn't be sure he'd even heard her.

He drove down a small dirt track, a dead-end driveway that led down to a muddy patch of lawn and a boat launch into Miller Bay. The narrow waterway was only fifty yards wide at this point. Flek parked the car up from the boat ramp. He lowered both windows, shut off the car and turned off the lights. Daphne could smell the low tide and mud flats. It smelled like death.

"Don't do this," she pleaded. "I can still get you out of most of this. But if you go through with it…"

Paying little attention to her, he leaned over awk wardly and reached under the seat and worked to untwist some hidden wire. If she was to have a chance to fight back, it was then, with his head lowered. But she couldn't summon the strength, nor the courage. She could barely keep herself conscious. She had lost great quantities of blood. Perhaps she was dying. She had heard Flek mention one hour and she no longer believed she could or would make it that long, certainly not conscious.

"Please," she said.

He sat up, the Chinese assault rifle in hand. The German scope. He had wired it high under the seat, so that even a thorough check under the seat by a traffic cop might not have revealed it. He said, "Cops lie, lady. They lie about me doing that other woman, and now you lie to save your ass. They'll lie about anything, if it makes their job easier."

He sought out the oily rag and gagged her again, a man going about his business. He turned on the car's interior light and met eyes with Daphne. "If I get Boldt, I'll spare you. If I don't, it's you who's gonna pay. Say your prayers." Then he was gone, down toward the water, the rain and the darkness absorbing him.

" Gaynes says the signals have stopped moving," LaMoia reported.

"Then that was them," Boldt said, his attention fixed on the entrance to the street marked Sid Price. The Crown Vic was parked down a muddy lane, called Quail, from which they had an unobstructed view across Miller Bay Road. A big monster of a car had turned through the rain only a few minutes before, its taillights receding. LaMoia had guessed it was an Eldorado.

"Shit, Sarge," LaMoia complained. "He could lay in wait for you anywhere down there. We gotta rethink this."

"We're at least a half hour ahead of when he expects us," Boldt reminded. "That's in our favor. We need to move while it still means something."

"We may have the jump on him, but he's got the sniper's rifle. Our peashooters are good at ten to thirty feet, Sarge. He's dead on the money at two hundred yards."

"We had his sight recalibrated," Boldt informed the man, who knew so little of the investigation to this point. "He wanted a hundred and fifty yards. Manny Wong gave him seventy-five."

"No shit? And you're counting on that? What are you smoking? If he's tried the thing out on a range- which you can bet your ass he has-then everything's back on target. I wouldn't put a hell of a lot of faith in this guy missing, Sarge. I'd be thinking about shooting him first. That usually has the more desired effect."

"His first shot will miss," Boldt said confidently. "You have to hit him before he throws that second shot."

"Me and who else?" LaMoia complained. "I got me a peashooter here. I got to know where he is if I'm to be useful. And I won't know until after that first shot."

Boldt cupped his penlight so the light barely shone down onto his open notebook, but it was enough to see by. He had sketched in the information provided by Dispatch and analyzed by Patrick Mulwright, head of Special Ops, who volunteered to help out. Intelligence, a division where Boldt had been lieutenant for a year, provided high-resolution military satellite images of Miller Bay. Within fifteen minutes of Boldt's request, Mulwright had come back to him with three likely sniper points: rooftops; either of two high-tension electric towers that strung four hundred thousand volts suspended across Miller Bay; and a marina, directly across the water.

Boldt and LaMoia ruled out the nearby rooftops. Shooting a cop from the roof of a neighborhood house left too great a possibility of witnesses.

"It's one of the two towers," LaMoia said confidently.

"Across the water," Boldt added. "It gives him the distance for the scope, and the water gives a natural break to slow down or prevent any pursuit on our part. He escapes while we're attempting to catch up."

"And what," LaMoia asked skeptically, "he goes on foot from there?"

"Osbourne confirmed he'd been over here at least twice. He could have anything planned. He could have friends on the reservation. He could have left a car or a bike for himself."

LaMoia agreed. "That tower over there makes sense."

"So you take the car," Boldt said. "I'm on foot." He had rearranged the vest to sit beneath his sport coat, his weapon at the ready.

"The advantage of the towers," LaMoia said, pointing out through the windshield, "is that he can see over the houses. He can see us if he's looking." Boldt quit the flashlight. "Not that he's up there yet. But he could be any minute now."

"He can see you coming," Boldt warned. "And if he does, he'll take out Daffy. If he can't get me, he'll take her."

"Now you're getting the point," LaMoia fired back. "And he wants you coming alone. He'll want to see a car drive up with one person inside. If there's backup, he'll see it."

"But I've still got that half hour."

Faint light from cars passing out on the main road cast enough light for LaMoia to trace a finger across Boldt's notepad. Boldt could now clearly understand the man's awkward speech patterns caused by his wired jaw. "You drop me over here. Right now. Believing he'll be facing this direction, I come up from behind. You drive back and park someplace with no view of either tower. You give me a good ten minutes because you're right: I'm a little slow. You can't scout it, Sarge, as much as you want to. He could see you. Even now, he could see you, and that blows it for Matthews. Who knows what he has planned for her? Maybe the car's rigged. Maybe the first bullet is meant for her if he smells a double-cross. At the appointed time, you drive in and see what you see. If my phone worked, I could call you, but it doesn't, so we do this blind." He added, "You hear a couple guys throwing shots, you'll know I'm onto something."

Boldt wouldn't give up. He didn't want to drive into the drop blind. Protecting Daphne meant knowing the layout. He wanted a first look. Pointing to his crude map, he said, "I could make for this tower now, after I drop you off, and at least provide cover if he spots you-"

"As if you could hit him at that distance."

"He doesn't know what I'm shooting," Boldt protested. "Providing there aren't any shots thrown, then there'd be plenty of time for me to still arrive by car. If Mulwright described this right, this closer tower is far enough above the drop site that it wouldn't really be in the direction he's facing."

LaMoia didn't like it, but he said, "Okay, so I agree. Is that what you want to hear?"

"That's what I wanted to hear," Boldt agreed.

Boldt dropped LaMoia on a dead-end lane on the opposite side of Miller Bay, about a half mile from the high-voltage tower and the flashing red light that topped it. He crossed back to the west side and parked the car well off Miller Bay Road where it could not be seen by passing traffic.

He crouched as he walked through the tall grasses and marsh plants, the high-voltage tower dominating his view. It rose a hundred feet or more on four interlaced steel legs, looking like an incomplete version of the Eiffel Tower, its four outreaching struts supporting six high-voltage lines, each the thickness of a man's forearm, that drooped lazily before rising again to the tower on the opposite shore. The sign hung on the chain link fence surrounding its base warned of the lethal electricity, punctuating its message with yellow lightning bolts. Boldt climbed over the fence and dropped to the other side, arching his back to look up and take in the enormity of the tower and the gray night sky that cried down its rain.