Carol O’Connell - Find Me

Another surprise.

And he could do nothing about it but wait for her return. All his threats to the contrary, Mallory knew that he could not start without her.

Charles Butler counted to three, then put all his muscle into pushing the metal lever upward in order to roll the small car. Kronewald’s contribution was more puffing and wheezing than muscling his own section of the long pipe.

Mallory came up behind them, asking, “Where did you get that well casing?”

“Is that what it’s called?” Charles nodded toward the ditch on the far side of the road. “Over there.”

She crossed the pavement, pausing only a moment to look down at the unconscious Riker. She could hear his breathing; it was ragged-but air was life. The beam of her flashlight played over the selection of long pipes in the ditch. She had a good eye for measurements and estimated the longest section at twenty-five feet. Long enough. She would not need to tear down the rancher’s g ate after all.

Kronewald stood in the middle of the road, watching for the ambulance with one hand pressed to his aching back. Charles had finished the job of righting the car by himself, and now he leaned on the frame of the battered and torn ragtop. “I understand this killer is armed with a rifle?”

“Not a problem.” She raised the hood, and pulled out a tool kit.

“Equipped with an infrared sight,” added Charles, “the better to shoot people in the dark.”

While rummaging through her duffel bag, she said, “It isn’t his rifle, and he doesn’t know the sight is off. You can’t hit a moving target with another man’s g u n. He’s just using the rifle sight like binoculars.” She held up a pair of opera glasses. “Remember these?”

Yes, he did. He had given them to her one Christmas, and he was gratified to see that she had found a use for them-since she missed that performance of the opera, and every one since.

Charles was still grappling with the idea of the rifle. “But he could shoot if he-”

“No reason for it.” She turned her key in the ignition and the engine purred to life. The automatic control of the roof would not function, and she tried to force it back manually, but it would not budge. “I won’t have a clear target behind the truck’s headlights. I’ve only got one chance to take him down.”

Charles held up one hand. “Allow me.” And now he pushed the convertible’s tattered top back into the boot. “So, obviously, you have a plan.”

She held up a cutting tool from her kit. “I’ll get the wire we need. You load the pipe.”

While she cut through sections of barbed wire, he picked up the one she liked the best, the longest one, and carried it to the car. “I gather you’re not planning to shoot out his headlights, anything like that?”

“No, Charles, not with a handgun.” She laid three sections of wire on the hood. “But even if I could make those shots, it only takes a second to slit a little girl’s throat. So I don’t plan to give him that much warning time.”

A beeping sound came from her knapsack. “That’s him now, isn’t it?”

“Pretend you don’t hear it, Charles.”

Following her direction, he jammed one end of the pipe into the steel skeleton of rolled-back ragtop. Then he tore his hands on pieces of wire to secure it. The rest of the pipe was angled across the center of the roll bar, and Mallory lashed it down on top of the windshield frame, twisting the barbed wire to make it tight. And now there was blood on her hands, too. The twenty-five feet of pipe remained straight, no sag, no bowing, though at least two thirds of its length was unsupported, stretching far beyond the nose of the car-and aiming upward.

Charles stood back from their handiwork to see what they had done, and it chilled him. The upward angle of the pipe fit so well with the higher windshield of a pickup truck met head on. Mallory had designed a lance for a one-sided joust. For a fraction of a second, the pipe might be visible in her opponent’s headlights, but it would appear to him as a small round dot-and then-

“That’s right,” said Mallory, reading all of this in his face. “I plan to kill him. I’ll take his head off if I can.”

Kronewald was down the road, herding cows and clearing the way for the ambulance. He came back to them, cell phone in hand. “It’ll be a few more minutes.”

“Did you tell them it was an officer down?” she asked.

“Hell, no. They would’ve sent cops.”

“Good job.” Mallory got behind the wheel. “You two stay with Riker.”

“Not so fast.” Charles climbed over the dented passenger door to settle in beside her. And they were off. She tested her highbeams then killed the lights, rolling, creeping forward in the dark.

Charles’s eyes were on her face when he said, “If you crash into that truck-”

“No crash,” said Mallory. “His pickup truck is sitting still. Nobody can judge the speed of an oncoming car, and he has no idea what this one can do.”

“But there’s a child in that truck.”

“A tap, Charles. That’s all it’ll take to send this pipe through his window-and his face. I can kill him without even setting off his air bag.”

Mallory positioned her car just beyond the gate and facing down the rancher’s road. She blinked her lights twice, and, in the distance, another set of headlights turned on. “Check out the window on the driver’s side. You see the rifle?”

“No,” said Charles Butler, holding the opera glasses to his eyes.

“Then he’s not using the infrared scope. There’s not enough room inside that-”

“You have another problem.” Charles handed her the opera glasses. “Better take a look.”

She fixed the lenses on the pickup truck, where Dodie Finn was harnessed and tethered to the grille between the headlights.

“Sorry,” said Charles. “You weren’t counting on that. So what’s next?”

“Same plan.”

“You’re mad.”

“I don’t have a lot of options here,” she said. “He’ll sit tight until I get closer. He wants me to watch when he kills Dodie.”

Charles was more than mildly disturbed. Mallory found it too easy to slip inside the mind of a serial killer. “You can’t go ahead with this,” he said. “Not with Dodie standing in front of the truck.”

She cut her lights and backed out of the ranch road, then reversed down the paved highway below the rise. “That’ll make him nuts for a few minutes. If this is going to work, I’ll need a slight adjustment in the pipe.”

“I’m sure you’ve done the math.” Charles climbed out of the car and began to undo the wires that bound the pipe to the frame of the broken windshield. “Speed and distance, that sort of thing.” Of course she had. Mathematics was her gift. At the risk of annoying her by stating the obvious, he said, “So you realize that if we go full out, you won’t have time to brake before we crash. Even you can’t alter the laws of physics.” He was close to smiling, though he shredded his fingers on the barbed wire, winding it, changing the angle to suit her and saying, “Well, this should give us more clearance on the left side of the truck.” Almost done. “I gather we’re going to miss the truck altogether.”

“Something like that.”

It was the tone of her voice that set off all his internal alarms, but nothing could have prepared him for the sight of Mallory pointing her gun at him. And his crime? He was holding onto the pipe, holding on tight, for this was his only means of preventing her from going anywhere without him.

“Time to let go, Charles. You’re not coming along.”

Though he loved his life, he shook his head, badly frightened now, for he was staring at her seat belt and it was undone.