Max Collins - Girl Most Likely

And he hadn’t been able to raise Krista on her cell. More damn voice mail.

He didn’t have a weapon. He’d maintained his conceal-and-carry permit, but without a gun on his hip, he might as well not have renewed the damn thing. He should have gone back to his old habit of carrying even when he was off duty, only retirement had seemed the end of that — when Krista brought him on to this case, though, with a crazy goddamn killer loose, he should have been smart enough to use his gun for something other than self-pitying thoughts of suicide.

The hell of it was, he didn’t know whether to drive fast or slow. His daughter was in danger and all he could do was swiftly scan the road and the left and right, and try to think through the pounding of his heart in his ears.

Then there it was.

Up ahead, at right, on the wrong side of the road, parked at a half-ass angle, a white Ford Edge. Keith pulled over, the two cars nose to nose, and got out and came around.

Banged-up some at the bottom of the ditch was the Toyota — had it rolled and landed upright? Nobody was on the steep downward slope, then perhaps a hundred yards leading to, and into, the trees, a thickness of forest made thin by winter. The ground was mottled with snowy remnants, but until the moon took hold of the cloud-streaked sky, and lighted the earth up for him, Keith hadn’t seen the footprints — two sets of them.

Wide-spaced — running.

Closer-together — striding.

The tracks took him to the brink of the trees, where he stopped to call it in.

“Officer in trouble,” he told the sheriff’s department dispatcher.

Tucked behind a tree now, her back to it, she used her left hand, her good hand, to pat her pockets for the cell phone; but it wasn’t there — she’d lost it in the rollover.

Never mind, she told herself. The gun. The gun is the thing.

She worked her left hand over and released the locking hood on the holster, which took pushing down on the gun butt and rotating the weapon to release — not easy with the left hand for a Glock holstered on the right hip.

But she managed it.

Breathing hard, yet in control, she turned to face the tree trunk. She peeked around. She listened.

She heard nothing.

Was he gone? Had he given up? Was he the fleeing one now? Surely Stock knew killing the cop looking for him would serve no rational purpose.

Or was rationality even a factor now?

Was he, as her father had put it, devolving and accelerating? Was madness all he had now? Or did he think by stopping her that he might buy himself a few hours to make a better escape?

She listened.

Could she risk moving out of these woods?

She thought of another poem, about deep, dark woods, and promises to be kept before sleep could come...

Now that was a poem Mr. Stock would have approved.

She listened for footsteps, heard nothing, nothing, nothing... then a crunch of snow and snapped twigs and she spun and there he was, his expression as blank as the blade he raised at her, unchanging as it came down.

She moved to her right, protecting her chest but sacrificing her left arm, somewhat, the blade catching mostly her thermal jacket, though she felt the wetness of the wound. The shock of it, though, had sent her arm reflexively to the right and the Glock flew somewhere, thunking in the night.

She ran, barely keeping her balance.

She could hear her pursuer behind her now, crunching along in the stocking feet she’d glimpsed. He’d taken his shoes off to creep up on her.

The better to see you with, my dear.

She ran now, back the way they’d come, some logical part of her mind saying rescue might be on the way by now, her car in the ditch, the parked Ford on the wrong side of the road... maybe help would come from that direction... but help might not come, so her route included where she’d unintentionally tossed the Glock...

Keith could hear the movement.

Feet on frozen clumps of snow, branches snapping, leaves crinkling, and he was so close now he could hear the heavy breathing, like an obscene phone call, two people participating, his daughter and the man after her.

He thought he’d misjudged but then finally saw Krista and the teacher, and found he was coming at them at an angle. His daughter seemed to be leading her attacker back toward the ditch and the road. Stock didn’t discern the difference between the footsteps of stalked and stalker until Keith was almost on him.

Stock’s blank expression distorted into rage and the knife was raised very high when Keith tackled him, taking him down between two trees onto brittle snow that cracked like little bones. Bigger bones within Keith, that busted rib and its bruised brothers, proved they could push their demands through even the best painkillers and he was screaming when the son of bitch squirmed out of his grasp.

Then Stock was on his feet, Keith on the ground, a few yards separating them. The killer, butcher knife high, began to close the distance.

Krista almost tripped over the Glock.

She knelt, grabbed it up into her left-handed grasp. That arm was slashed, not bad maybe, gashed at the bicep, and her other hand was a useless thing.

But when she turned, through the spaces between barren oaks, she could see Stock with the blade raised, moving toward Pop, who was on the ground, trying to get up.

“Stay down!” she yelled.

She fired, fired again, again, the shots irregular, her unsteady arm doing her no favors, carving chunks of bark from trees and missing her favorite teacher, who turned and with a ghastly grin charged toward her, circling a tree to do so, and the moon through the witchy branches let that high-held blade wink at her one last time.

She fired again and took off a chunk of his ear.

That froze him.

He stood wide-eyed, hand going to the mangled flesh hanging from the left side of his head, getting blood all over his fingers, his expression telling her that Ken Stock experiencing pain had never been part of the plan.

She had a millisecond before he could compose himself enough to complete his murderous onslaught and she fired one more time.

The bullet entered his forehead — not in the dead center, but close enough — the metal projectile emerging from the back of his skull in a stew of blood, bone, and brains. He tottered, not feeling anything, already as dead as the leaves under his stockinged feet, and then he fell flat on his back, between a pair of trees that didn’t notice him at all.

She went over to Pop and helped him up.

He grimaced and groaned and said, “This pro bono work is hard.”

She laughed. He did, too. She hugged him. Gently. She hadn’t forgotten his broken rib. They looked at each other. Smiling. Tears streaming.

“Not exactly ambidextrous, huh?” she asked.

“You got the job done, honey. Right, Mr. Stock?”

But Stock — on his back, eyes and a dime-size hole in his forehead staring sightlessly up through a skeletal filigree of forest, under a ghostly galleon of a moon — had not a thing to say.

My thanks to Police Chief Lori Huntington of the Galena Police Department, who welcomed my wife Barb and me into her office, answering many questions and giving us a tour of the station. Throughout the writing of Girl Most Likely , Chief Huntington responded to my ongoing questions about procedure and other Galena matters. Her help and her patience went above and beyond the call of duty. But liberties have been taken and any inaccuracies are my own.

I should also note that Chief Huntington is not the basis of Krista Larson — the plot and characters for Girl Most Likely were already developed when research revealed the happy coincidence of Galena’s actual chief being a young woman who had risen through the ranks.