John Sandford - Escape Clause

“I already went by Highway 12, I got a left turn coming up pretty quick that I could take down to 27 and back to 12 and circle around past the airport and bring it back, but she’s gaining on me, man, she’s way faster through the corners…”

“Take the turn,” Virgil said. “Don’t let her pass you, it’s hard to shoot out of a moving car, take it back to 12. We’ll come down 12 the other way, so we’ll meet you.”

“Aw, shit, here I go…”

Strait must have dropped the phone or tossed it on the passenger seat, Virgil thought, because he could hear the bumping of the truck and what might have been a round of cursing from Strait, then the roaring sound of the truck engine being overstressed.

Virgil and the New Ulm cop car were coming up on Highway 12, and Virgil slowed and took the turn and headed on south, the cop car right on his tail. A minute later Strait was back on the phone. “We’re both on whatever this road is and they’re still closing up on me. I lost some yardage going around the corner.”

–

Maxine Knowles was in the Subaru, but she wasn’t driving it. What she was doing was crouching on the passenger seat, trying to get her rifle out the open sunroof without dropping it. She was using a cheap but accurate.223, with a twenty-round magazine. The first time she shot Strait, she’d done it with a Remington.243, and she much preferred that rifle and that caliber, but the cops had the gun.

Now she screamed down at the driver, “Get in the middle of the road where it’s smoother. Where it’s smoother. Smoother. This ride is rattling me around too much, I can’t get a decent sight picture.”

“I’m trying, I’m trying. I don’t see the cop,” the driver shouted back.

“Don’t worry about the cop. I’m going to try to stand up now. Stay in the middle…”

She was too thick to fit easily through the sunroof, but once up, the tight fit helped brace her upright. She lifted the rifle, clicked off the safety, and aimed at Strait’s truck, which was a hundred yards or so ahead of her and bouncing even more violently than her car.

The front gun sight wobbled wildly over the back of the truck, but she took a breath, softened her stance as much as she could to absorb the bumps, and opened fire. She worked through the first twenty rounds in ten seconds, pulled the mag, dropped it into the car, and the driver handed her a second magazine.

Up ahead, the back panel on Strait’s camper-top seemed to be showing some holes, but it was hard to tell: she was aiming at the window on the back, and what could be bullet holes could also be reflections and dust. Strait, in the meantime, had put his right tires onto the shoulder and was kicking up dust and gravel, which started hitting Knowles in the face. She squinted into the dust, slammed the second magazine into place, and emptied it at the fleeing truck.

–

Strait shouted into the phone, “She’s shooting at me, man, she’s shooting at me, I can hear the slugs hitting the back of the truck…”

“We’re on 12, we’re coming fast, stay ahead of her, get down in your seat as far as you can…”

Strait did that, which cramped up his right leg, and so he missed the brake when he tried to make the turn onto Highway 27, and he lost the road and crashed through a ditch and out the other side and tried to switch his foot over and sideswiped a tree, and then another one, and the steering wheel seemed to rise up and hit him in the lower lip, slicing his lip on his upper teeth, and then he was in a dense windbreak, rolling over brush, and then his car stopped, involuntarily: he was jammed up between trees and thought maybe he’d lost a tire.

He didn’t take the time to worry about that, but grabbed the Beretta and crawled out the passenger-side door, which was away from the road, and a burst of gunfire rattled through the sides and top of the truck. Strait peeked around past the grille, saw Knowles standing on the side of the road near the back of the Subaru. A couple more shots rattled off the top of the truck and through the side windows, shattering them, and he took a chance, poked the Beretta around the front of the truck, and unloaded all fifteen rounds in the general direction of the Subaru and Knowles.

–

Virgil couldn’t get Strait on the phone, but he heard the gunfire and with no other way to call the cop behind him, thumbed through his directory for the New Ulm police department, called it, and yelled at the cop on the other end. “Me and one of your guys are in pursuit of a woman we think is trying to shoot a guy.”

“Yeah, we heard. We’re talking to Ross; he says he’s right behind you.”

“He is, but I can’t talk to him. Tell him we’ve got gunfire up ahead; he’s got to be careful. I don’t know what happened, but I’m hooked up to the victim and he says the attacker is shooting up his truck and now I’m hearing what sounds like him shooting back… Tell your guy to be careful.”

“We’re telling him; we got a couple sheriff’s cars headed your way, and two more from us, but we’re all way back.”

“Gotta go…” Virgil said, and he made the turn onto Highway 27, and far ahead, saw the gray car stopped on the side of the road, and a person-he couldn’t tell whether it was a man or a woman-standing behind the car.

With a gun, he saw, as he got closer, firing into the ditch. Strait had run off the road. If that was Knowles, she had a rifle, and all he had was a weak-ass nine, and not only that, the nine was locked in the safe behind the seat.

Given all that, Virgil got as close as he dared, which was perhaps fifty yards, close enough to recognize Knowles. She paid no attention to him, his siren or his flashing lights, or to the cop car behind him, but slapped another long magazine into her rifle and kept shooting into the ditch.

–

Strait realized that Knowles was focused on the truck and was punching a hundred holes in it, and he slipped backward and got behind a tree, and then another one, always keeping a tree trunk between himself and the other gun. When he was behind the second tree, he stretched out on the ground, reloaded his gun-his second and last magazine-and waited to see if she’d try to sneak around his truck.

He’d been so focused on staying down, out of the line of fire, that he hadn’t heard the police sirens. He heard them now, and they were close.

–

Virgil got the 4Runner sideways on the highway, kicked open his door, opened the back door, and got his gun and two magazines out of the safe.

As he did that, the New Ulm cop ran up beside him, carrying a shotgun.

“Want me to nail her?”

“Let me yell at her first,” Virgil said. He shouted, loud as he could, “Maxine! Stop!”

She heard him, because she turned her face toward him and then she stepped behind the Subaru, apparently kneeling out of sight, and kept firing. Then an older man slipped out of the Subaru, lifted his hands over his head, and wobbled into the ditch on the other side of the road and sat down in the weeds.

The cop said, “I could take out her window glass.”

“Yeah, maybe you better do that,” Virgil said. The cop popped up and fired the twelve gauge four times. As far as they could tell, nothing happened-the buckshot either bounced off the car, or the deputy had missed it.

“I can guarantee I didn’t miss,” he said.

“See if you could bounce a shot under her back tire,” Virgil suggested.

The cop stood up and fired a couple of quick shots at the back of the Subaru, low, and forward of the back tire. No response.

“I’ve got to reload,” the cop said.

Then, suddenly, there was no more noise. No more shooting. A few seconds later, Maxine was waving her gun over her head and shouting, “I give up. I give up.”