Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer

Sachs breathed a trio of fast breaths. Then she rolled five feet to the right, poked her head up fast, ducked again.

Jodie chose not to shoot this time and she’d gotten a good look. Bell was right: the killer was on the side of a hill, targeting them with the telescopic deer rifle; she’d seen the faint glint from the ’scope. He couldn’t quite hit them where they were if they stayed prone. But all he had to do was move up the hill. From its crest he could shoot down into the pit they were hiding in now – a perfect kill zone.

Five minutes passed without a shot. He’d be working his way up the hill, though cautiously – he knew Sachs was armed and he’d seen she was a good shot. Could they wait him out? When would the SWAT chopper get here?

Sachs squeezed her eyes closed, smelled the dirt, the grass.

She thought of Lincoln Rhyme.

You know him better than anybody, Sachs…

You never really know a perp until you’ve walked where he’s walked, until you’ve cleaned up after his evil…

But, Rhyme, she thought, this isn’t Stephen Kall. Jodie isn’t the killer I know. It wasn’t his crime scenes I walked through. It wasn’t his mind I peered into…

She looked for a low spot in the ground that might lead them safely to the trees, but there was nothing. If they moved five feet in either direction, he’d have a clean shot.

Well, he’d have a clean shot at them any minute now, when he got to the crest of the hill.

Then something occurred to her. That the crime scenes she’d worked really were the Dancer’s scenes. He may not have been the one who fired the bullet that killed Brit Hale or planted the bomb that blew up Ed Carney’s plane or swung the knife that killed John Innelman in the basement of the office building.

But Jodie was a perpetrator.

Get into his mind, Sachs, she heard Lincoln Rhyme say.

His deadliest – my deadliest weapon is deception.

“Both of you,” Sachs called, looking around. “There.” She pointed toward a slight ravine.

Bell glared at her. She saw how badly he wanted the Dancer too. But the look in her eyes told him that the killer was her prey and hers alone. No debate and no argument. Rhyme had given this chance to her and nothing in the world could stop her from doing what she was about to.

The detective nodded solemnly and he pulled Percey after him into the shallow notch in the earth.

Sachs checked the pistol. Four rounds left.

Plenty.

More than enough…

If I’m right.

Am I? she wondered, face against the wet, fragrant earth. And she decided that, yes, she was right. A frontal assault wasn’t the Dancer’s way. Deception…

And that’s just what I’m going to give him.

“Stay down. Whatever happens, stay down.” She rose to her hands and knees, looking over the ridge. Getting ready, preparing herself. Breathing slowly.

“That’s a hundred-yard shot, Amelia,” Bell whispered. “With a snub-nose?”

She ignored him.

“Amelia,” Percey said. The flier held her eyes for a moment and the women shared a smile. “Head down,” Sachs ordered and Percey complied, nestling into the grass.

Amelia Sachs stood up.

She didn’t crouch, didn’t turn sideways to present a more narrow target. She just slipped into the familiar two-hand target pistol stance. Facing the house, the lake, facing the prone figure halfway up the hill, who pointed the telescopic sight directly at her. The stubby pistol felt as light as a scotch glass in her hand.

She aimed at the glare of the telescopic sight, a football field away.

Sweat and mist forming on her face.

Breathe, breathe.

Take your time.

Wait…

A ripple passed through her back and arms and hands. She forced the panic away.

Breathe…

Listen, listen.

Breathe…

Now!

She spun around and dropped to her knees as the rifle jutting from the grove of trees behind her, fifty feet away, fired. The bullet split the air just over her head.

Sachs found herself staring at Jodie’s astonished face, the hunting rifle still at his cheek. He realized that he hadn’t fooled her after all. That she’d figured out his tactic. How he’d fired a few shots from the lake, then dragged one of the guards up the hill and propped him there with one of the hunting rifles to keep them pinned down while he jogged up the road and circled behind.

Deception …

For a moment neither of them moved.

The air was completely still. No tatters of mist floating past, no trees or grass bending in the wind.

A faint smile crossed Sachs’s face as she lifted the pistol in both hands.

Frantic, he ejected the shell from the deer rifle and chambered another round. As he lifted the gun to his cheek again Sachs fired. Two shots.

Both clean hits. Saw him fly backward, the rifle sailing through the air like a majorette’s baton.

“Stay with her, Detective!” Sachs called to Bell and sprinted toward Jodie.

She found him in the grass, lying on his back.

One of her bullets had shattered his left shoulder. The other had hit the telescopic sight straight on and blown metal and glass into the man’s right eye. His face was a bloody mess.

She cocked her tiny gun, put a good ration of pressure on the trigger and pressed the muzzle against his temple. She frisked him. Lifted a single Glock and a long carbide knife out of his pocket. She found no other weapons.

“Clear,” she called.

As she stood, pulling her cuffs out of the case, the Dancer coughed and spit, wiped blood out of his good eye. Then he lifted his head and looked out over the field. He spotted Percey Clay as she slowly rose from the grass, staring at her attacker.

Jodie seemed to shiver as he gazed at her. Another cough then a deep moan. He startled Sachs by pushing against her leg with his uninjured arm. He was badly hurt – maybe mortally – and had little strength. It was a curious gesture, the way you’d push an irritating Pekinese out of your way.

She stepped back, keeping the gun trained squarely on his chest.

Amelia Sachs was no longer of any interest to the Coffin Dancer. Neither were his wounds or the terrible pain they must be radiating. There was only one thing on his mind. With superhuman effort he rolled onto his belly and, moaning and clawing dirt, he began muscling his way toward Percey Clay, toward the woman he’d been hired to kill.

Bell joined Sachs. She handed him the Glock and together they kept their weapons on the Dancer. They could easily have stopped him – or killed him. But they remained transfixed, watching this pitiable man so desperately absorbed in his task that he didn’t even seem to know his face and shoulder had been destroyed.

He moved another few feet, pausing only to grab a sharp rock about the size of a grapefruit. And he continued on toward his prey. Never saying a word, drenched in blood and sweat, his face a knot of agony. Even Percey, who had every reason to hate this man, to sweep Sachs’s pistol from her hand and end the killer’s life right here, even she was mesmerized, watching this hopeless effort to finish what he’d started.

“That’s enough,” Sachs said finally. She bent down and lifted the rock away.

“No,” he gasped. “No…”

She cuffed him.

The Coffin Dancer gave a horrifying moan – which might have been from his pain but seemed to arise more out of unbearable loss and failure – and dropped his head to the ground.

He lay still. The trio stood around him, watching his blood soak the grass and innocent crocuses. Soon the heartrending call of the loons was lost in the whup whup whup of a helicopter skimming over the trees. Sachs noticed that Percey Clay’s attention slipped immediately away from the man who’d caused her so much sorrow, and the flier watched in rapt attention as the cumbersome aircraft eased through the misty air and touched down lithely on the grass.