Jeffery Deaver - A Maiden's Grave

This was true. But if Arthur Potter knew anything about his profession it was that the negotiator was the closest thing to God in a barricade and that every death fell on his shoulders and his only. What he'd learned – and what had saved his heart over the years – was that some of those deaths simply weigh less than others.

They drove another three miles and Potter realized he'd grown hypnotized, staring at the moon-white wheat. Budd was talking to him once again. The subject was domestic, the man's wife and his daughters.

Potter looked away from the streaming grain and listened to what the captain was telling him.

In the tiny jet Arthur Potter slipped two sticks of Wrigley's into his mouth and waved goodbye to Charlie Budd, who was waving back, though the interior of the plane was very dim and Potter doubted that the captain saw him.

Then he sank down into the spongy beige seat of the Grumman Gulf-stream. He thought of the flask of Irish whisky in his briefcase but found himself decidedly not in the mood.

How 'bout that, Marian? No nightcap for me and I'm off-duty. What do you say about that?

He saw a phone on a console nearby and thought he should call his cousin Linden and tell her not to Wait up for him. Maybe he'd wait until they were airborne. He'd ask to speak to Sean; the boy would be thrilled to know that Uncle Arthur was talking to him from twenty thousand feet in the air. He gazed absently out the window at the constellations of colored lights marking runways and taxiways. Potter took from his pocket the still-damp note Melanie had written him. Read it. Then he crumpled the paper, stuffed it into the pocket of the seat in front of him.

The jets whined powerfully and with a sudden burst of thrust he found the plane not racing down the runway at all but streaking straight into the sky, almost from a dead stop, like a spaceship headed to Mars.

They rose up and up, aiming for the moon, which was an eerie sickle in the hazy sky. The plane pointed itself at the black disk surrounded by the white crescent. Uncharacteristically poetic, Potter thought of this image: the icy thumb and index finger of a witch, reaching for a pinch of nightshade.

The negotiator closed his eyes and sat back in the soft seat.

Just as he did, the Grumman banked fiercely. So sharp was the maneuver that Arthur Potter knew suddenly he was about to die. He considered this fact very calmly. A wing or an engine had fallen off. A bolt holding together the whole airplane had finally fatigued. His eyes sprang open and – yes, yes! – he believed he saw his wife's face clearly in the white glow surrounding the moon as it scythed past. He understood that what had joined the two of them, himself and Marian, for all these years joined them still, just as powerfully, and she was pulling him after her in death.

He closed his eyes again. And felt utterly at peace.

But no, he was not destined to die just yet.

For as the plane completed its acute turn and headed back toward the airport, dropping the landing gear and flaps, sliding down down down to the flat Kansas landscape once more, Potter clutched the telephone to his ear, listening to SAC Peter Henderson tell him in a shaking, grim voice how the real Detective Sharon Foster had been found dead and half-naked not far from her house a half-hour ago and how it was now suspected that the woman who'd impersonated her at the barricade had been Lou Handy's girlfriend.

The four troopers who'd been escorting Handy and Wilcox were dead, as was Wilcox himself – all killed in a violent shootout five miles from the slaughterhouse.

And as for Handy and the woman – they were gone without a trace.

As they drove through the fields beneath the faint moon the couple in the Nissan reflected on the evening at their daughter's home in Enid, which had been exactly as unpleasant as they'd expected.

When they spoke, however, they spoke not about the children's shabby trailer, the unwashed baby grandson, their stringy-haired son-in-law's disappearing act into the trash-filled backyard to sneak Jack Daniel's. No, they talked only about the weather and unusual road signs they happened to pass.

"We'll get rain this fall. Floodin'."

"Might."

"Something 'bout the trout in Minnesota. I read that."

"Trout?"

"Bad rains I'm talking. Stuckey's's only five miles. Look there. You wanta stop?"

Harriet, their daughter, had made a dinner that could be described only as inedible – woefully overdone and oversalted. And the husband had found what he was sure was some cigarette ash in the succotash. Now they were both starving.

"Might do that. For coffee only. Lookit that wind – whooee! Hope you shut the windows at home. Maybe a piece of pie."

"I did.'

"You forgot last time," the wife reminded shrilly. "Don't want to lose the lamp again. You know what three-way bulbs cost."

"Well," the husband said. "What's going on here?"

"How's that?"

"I'm being stopped. A police car."

"Pull over!"

"I'm doing it," he said testily. "No point in leaving skid marks. I'm doing it."

"What'd you do?"

"I didn't do nothing . I was fifty-seven in a fifty-five zone and that's not a crime in anybody's book."

"Well, pull off the road."

"I'm pulling. Will you just settle? There, happy?"

"Hey, look," the wife offered with astonishment, "there's a lady officer driving!"

"They have ' em now. You know that. You watch Cops . Should I get out or are they going to come up here?"

"Maybe," the wife said, "you oughta go to them. Make the effort. That way if they're right on the borderline of giving you a ticket they might not."

"That's a thought. But I still don't know what I done." And, smiling like a Kiwanian on Pancake Day, the husband climbed out of the Nissan and walked back to the squad car, fishing his wallet out of his pocket.

As Lou Handy drove the cruiser deep into the wheat field, cutting a swath in the tall grain, he was lost in the memory of another field – the one that morning, near the intersection where the Cadillac had broadsided them.

He remembered the gray sky overhead. The feel of the bony knife in his hand. The woman's powdery face, black wrinkles in her makeup, dots of her blood spattering her as he drove the knife downward into her soft body. The look in her eyes, hopelessness and sorrow. Her weird scream, choking, grunting. An animal's sounds.

She'd died the same way that the couple in the Nissan just had, the couple now lying in the trunk of the cruiser he was driving. Hell, they had to die, both of the couples. They'd had something he needed. Their cars. The Cadillac and the Nissan. This afternoon Hank and Ruth'd smashed the fuck out of his Chevy. And tonight, well, he and Pris couldn't keep driving in a stolen squad car. It was impossible. He needed a new car. He had to have one.

And when Lou Handy collected what he was owed, when he'd scratched that itch, he was the most contented man on earth.

Tonight he parked the cruiser, which stunk of cordite and blood, in the field, fifty yards from the road. It'd be found by tomorrow morning but that was okay. In a few hours he and Pris'd be out of the state and flying over the Texas-Mexico border, a hundred feet in the air, on their way to San Hidalgo.

Whoa, hold on tight… Damn, the wind was fierce, buffeting the car and sending the stalks of wheat slapping into the windshield with a clatter like birdshot.

Handy climbed out and trotted back to the road, where Pris sat in the driver's seat of the Nissan. She'd ditched the trooper's uniform and was wearing a sweater and jeans and Handy wanted more than anything else at the moment to tug those Levi's down, them and the cheap nylon panties she always wore, and fuck her right on top of the hood of the tinny Jap car. Holding her ponytail in his right hand the way he liked to do.