Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer

She had a sudden urge to talk to Rhyme, to see if he’d found anything. She could hear him saying, “If I’d found something I would’ve called you, wouldn’t I? I said I’d check in.”

No, she didn’t want to wake him, but she doubted he was asleep. She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and clicked it on before she remembered Marshal Franks’s warning to use only the secure line in the living room.

As she was about to shut the phone off, it chirped loudly.

She shivered – not at the jarring sound, but at the thought that the Dancer had somehow found her number and wanted to confirm she was in the compound. For an instant she wondered if somehow he’d slipped explosives into her phone too.

Damnit, Rhyme, look how spooked I am!

Don’t answer it, she told herself.

But instinct told her to, and while criminalists may shun instinct, patrol cops, street cops, always listen to those inner voices. She pulled the antenna out of the phone.

“Lo?”

“Thank God…” The panicked tone of Lincoln Rhyme chilled her.

“Hey, Rhyme. What’s -”

“Listen very carefully. Are you alone?”

“Yeah. What’s going on?”

“Jodie’s the Dancer.”

“What?”

“Stephen Kall was the diversion. Jodie killed him. It was his body in the park we found. Where’s Percey?”

“In her room. Up the hall. But how -”

“No time. He’s going for the kill right now. If the marshals’re still alive, tell them to get into a defensive position in one of the rooms. If they’re dead, find Percey and Bell and get out. Dellray’s scrambled SWAT, but it’ll be twenty or thirty minutes before they’re there.”

“But there’re eight guards. He can’t’ve taken them all out…”

“Sachs,” he said sternly, “remember who he is. Move! Call me when you’re safe.”

Bell! she thought suddenly, recalling the detective’s still posture, his head slumped forward.

She raced to her door, threw it open, drew her gun. The black living room and corridor gaped. Dark. Only faint dawn light filtering into the rooms. She listened. A shuffle. A clink of metal. But where were the sounds coming from?

Sachs turned toward Bell’s room and trotted as quietly as she could.

He got her just before she got to his room.

As the figure stepped from the doorway she dropped into a crouch and swung the Glock toward him. He grunted and slapped the pistol from her hand. Without thinking, she shoved him forward, slamming his back into the wall.

Groping for her switchblade.

Roland Bell gasped, “Hold up there. Hey, now…”

Sachs let go of his shirt.

“It’s you!”

“You scared the everlivin’ you-know-what outta me. What’s -”

“You’re all right!” she said.

“Just dozed off for a minute. What’s going on?”

“Jodie’s the Dancer. Rhyme just called.”

“What? How?”

“I don’t know.” She looked around, shivering in panic. “Where’re the guards?”

The hall was empty.

Then she recognized the smell she’d wondered about. It was blood! Like hot copper. And she knew then that all the guards were dead. Sachs went to retrieve her weapon, which was lying on the floor. She frowned, looking at the end of the grip. Where the clip should have been was an empty hole. She picked up the gun.

“No!”

“What?” Bell asked.

“My clip. It’s gone.” She slapped her utility belt. The two clips in the keepers were gone too.

Bell drew his weapons – the Glock and the Browning. They too were clipless. The chambers of the guns were empty too.

“In the car!” she stammered. “I’ll bet he did it in the car. He was sitting between us. Fidgeting all the time. Bumping into us.”

Bell said, “I saw a gun case in the living room. A couple of hunting rifles.”

Sachs remembered it. She pointed. “There.” They could just make it out in the dim light of dawn. Bell looked around him and hurried to it, crouching, while Sachs ran to Percey’s room and looked in. The woman was asleep on the bed.

Sachs stepped back to the corridor, flicked her knife open, and crouched, squinting. Bell returned a moment later. “It’s been broken into. All the rifles’re gone. And no ammo for the sidearms.”

“Let’s get Percey and get out of here.”

A footstep not far away. A click of a bolt-action rifle’s safety going off.

She grabbed Bell’s collar and pulled him to the floor.

The gunshot was deafening and the bullet broke the sound barrier directly over them. She smelled her own burning hair. Jodie must have had a sizable arsenal by now – all the sidearms of the marshals – but he was using the hunting rifle.

They sprinted for Percey’s door. It opened just as they got there and she stepped out, saying, “My God, what’s -”

The full body tackle from Roland Bell shoved Percey back into her room. Sachs tumbled in on top of them. She slammed the door shut, locked it, and ran to the window, flung it open. “Go, go, go, go…”

Bell lifted a stunned Percey Clay off the ground and dragged her toward the window as several high-powered deer slugs tore through the door around the lock.

None of them looked to see how successful the Coffin Dancer’d been. They rolled through the window into the dawn and ran and ran and ran through the dewy grass.

Hour 44 of 45

SACHS STOPPED BESIDE THE LAKE. Mist, tinted red and pink, wafted in ghostly tatters over the still, gray water.

“Go on,” she shouted to Bell and Percey. “Those trees.”

She was pointing to the nearest cover – a wide band of trees at the end of a field on the other side of the lake. It was more than a hundred yards away but was the closest cover.

Sachs glanced back at the cabin. There was no sign of Jodie. She dropped into a crouch over the body of one of the marshals. Their holsters were empty, of course, their clip cases too. She’d known Jodie had taken those weapons, but she hoped there was one thing he hadn’t thought of.

He is human, Rhyme…

And frisking the cool body she found what she was looking for. Tugging up the marshal’s pants cuff she pulled his backup weapon out of his ankle holster. A silly gun. A tiny five-shot Colt revolver with a two-inch barrel.

She glanced at the cabin just as Jodie’s face appeared in the window. He lifted the hunting rifle. Sachs spun and squeezed off a round. Glass broke inches from his face and he stumbled backward into the room.

Sachs sprinted around the lake after Bell and Percey. They ran fast, weaving sideways, through the dewy grass.

They got nearly a hundred yards from the house before they heard the first shot. It was a rolling sound, echoing off the trees. It kicked up dirt near Percey’s leg.

“Down,” Sachs cried. “There.” Pointing to a dip in the earth.

They rolled to the ground just as he fired again. If Bell had been upright the shot would have hit him directly between the shoulder blades.

They were still fifty feet from the nearest clump of trees that would give them protection. But to try for it now would be suicide. Jodie was apparently every bit the marksman that Stephen Kall had been.

Sachs lifted her head briefly.

She saw nothing but heard an explosion. An instant later the slug snapped through the air beside her. She felt the same draining terror as at the airport. She pressed her face into the cool spring grass, slick with dew and her sweat. Her hands shook.

Bell looked up fast and then down again.

Another shot. Dirt kicked up inches from his face.

“I think I saw him,” the detective drawled. “There’re some bushes to the right of the house. On that hill.”