Jeffery Deaver - Praying for Sleep

In his own case, Kohler reflected as his car accelerated to eighty, they were quite real.

Like a quarter horse cutting cattle from a herd, Emil would wheel and swerve, crossing back and forth through brush or over scrub grass until he picked up the scent once more.

The dog found the spot where Hrubek had tangled with the orderlies then returned to the road. Now, he leapt off the asphalt again and charged back into the brush, the Labradors following his lead.

The searchers trotted through this field for a few minutes, heading generally east, away from the hospital, and parallel to Route 236.

At one point as they were making their way through tall, whispering grass, Heck jerked the lead and growled, “Sit!” Emil stopped abruptly. Heck felt him shivering with excitement as if the track line were an electric wire. “Down!” Reluctantly the dog went horizontal. The bitches wouldn’t respond to Charlie Fennel’s similar command; they kept tugging at their lines. He pulled them back once or twice and shouted several times for them to sit but they wouldn’t. Wishing that Fennel, as well as the dogs, would keep quiet, Heck managed to ignore this bad discipline and strode ahead, playing a long black flashlight over the ground.

“Lookit what I turned up,” Heck said. He shone the light on a fresh bare footprint in the earth.

“God double damn,” Fennel whispered. “That’s size thirteen, if it’s an inch.”

“Well, we know he’s big.” Heck touched the deep indentation made by the ball of a huge foot. “What I’m saying is, he’s sprinting.”

“Sure, he’s running. You’re right. That Dr. Adler at the hospital said he’d just be wandering around in a daze.”

“He’s in some damn big hurry. Moving like there’s no tomorrow. Come on, we’ve got a lot of time to make up for. Find, Emil! Find!”

Fennel started the other dogs on the trail, following the footprints, and they ran ahead. But curiously Emil didn’t take the lead. He rose on his muscular legs but stayed put. His nose went into the air and he flared his nostrils, swiveling his head from side to side.

“Come on,” Fennel called.

Heck was silent. He watched Emil gazing right to left and back once more. The hound turned due south and lifted his head. Heck called to Fennel, “Hold up. Shut your light out.”

“What?”

“Just do it!”

With a soft click the two men and three dogs were enveloped in darkness. It occurred to Heck, as it must have to Fennel, that they were totally vulnerable. The madman might be downwind, ten feet away, with a tire iron or broken bottle.

“Come on, Trenton.”

“Let’s don’t be in too big of a hurry here.”

Fifty yards north they could see the slow convoy of the squad car and Heck’s pickup. Emil paced, his head wagging back and forth in the air. Heck studied him intently.

“What’s he doing?” Fennel whispered. “The track’s here. Can’t he tell?”

“He knows that. There’s something else. Airborne scent maybe. It’s not as strong as the track scent but there’s something there.”

It was possible, Heck considered, that Hrubek, huge and sweating, had given off masses of scent, which would eddy and gather here like smoke, remaining for hours on a humid night like this. Emil was probably scenting on the cloud of these molecules. Still, Heck was reluctant to pull the hound away. He had faith in the cleverness of animals. He’d seen raccoons dexterously unscrew the lids of jam jars and had once watched a cumbersome grizzly bear (the same one that had eyed him so voraciously) carefully poke not just one but two delicate claw holes in the top of a 7-Up can then drink down the soda without spilling a drop. And Emil, in his master’s informed opinion, was ten times smarter than any bear.

Heck waited a moment longer but neither heard nor saw anything.

“Come, Emil.” He turned and started away.

But Emil would not come.

Heck squinted into the night. There was a faint glow from the sky but most of the moonlight was now obscured by cloud. Come on, boy, he thought, let’s get back to work. Our reward money’s jogging east at about five miles an hour.

But Emil dropped his nose and pushed into the grass. He quivered. Heck lifted his pistol in front of him and swung aside a thick whip of green and beige shoots. They continued a few feet farther into the maze of grass. It was there that they found what Emil had been seeking.

The dog was no setter but he was as good as pointing at the quarry-a scrap of paper in a plastic Baggie.

Fennel had come up slowly. He put his back to Heck and scanned the grass nervously, his service automatic sweeping left to right. “Bait?”

This had also occurred to Heck. Felons accustomed to being hunted by dogs sometimes leave a pungent article of clothing or spray of urine in a tactical place on the trail. When the tracker and his hound stop to examine the spot, the fugitive attacks from behind. But Heck studied Emil and said, “Don’t think so. He was still around, Emil’d smell more of him.”

Still, as he picked up the bag, Heck kept his eyes not on the plastic but on the wall of grass surrounding him, and there were several pounds of pressure on the stiff German trigger of his gun. He handed Fennel the bag and they stepped into a clearing, where they could read without fear of immediate attack.

“From a newspaper,” the trooper said. “Tore it out. One side’s part of an ad for bras, the other’s a, hey, lookie… A map. Downtown Boston. Historical sites, you know.”

“ Boston?”

“Yep. We call the highway patrol? Tell ’em to keep the main roads to Massachusetts covered?”

And Heck, who saw his precious ten thousand dollars vanishing before him, said, “Let’s hold off for a bit on that. Maybe he left this here to lead us off.”

“Naw, Trenton. If he’d’ve wanted us to find it, he would’ve left it in the road, not in man-high grass.”

“Maybe,” Heck said, very discouraged. “But I still think-”

Crack…

A fierce noise like a gunshot sounded next to Heck’s ear and he swung around, heart pounding, pistol raised. The volume on Charlie Fennel’s walkie-talkie had been full on when he received the transmission. Fennel turned down the squelch and volume knobs and palmed the unit. He spoke softly into it. In the distance, on the road, the red-and-blue roof lights on the Boy’s squad car started spinning.

“Fennel here. Go ahead.” He lowered his head as he listened.

What are they doing? Heck wondered.

Fennel signed off and put the walkie-talkie back on his belt. He said, “Come on. They’ve found him.”

Heck’s heart fell. “They got him? Oh, damn.”

“Well, not quite. He got himself all the way to a truck stop in Watertown -”

“ Watertown? That’s seven miles from here.”

“-and tried to hitch a ride up to, guess where, Boston. The truck driver told him no so Hrubek took off on foot heading north. We’ll drive over there and pick up the trail. Man, I hope he’s winded. I myself don’t feel like a half-hour run. Don’t go looking so sorrowful, Trenton, you’ll be a rich man yet. He’s not but a half hour away.”

Fennel and the bitches bounded back toward the road.

“Come, Emil,” Heck called. The hound hesitated just a moment longer and slowly followed his master, clearly reluctant to forsake the grassy fields, damp and cold though they were, for the slippery plastic bench seat of an old, smelly Chevrolet.

When she heard the deliberate footfalls coming up from the basement stairs, the heavy steps, the dull clink of metal, Lis Atcheson understood immediately, and the mood of the night at once turned icy.