Charles Butler was the first out of the Mercedes. The Volkswagen convertible had flipped over and the passengers hung upside down, held in place by seat belts. The ragtop was badly damaged, but the roll bar had held. Mallory and Riker still had their heads. As Charles wrenched a door open, Kronewald’s hands were reaching inside to undo Riker’s seatbelt, and the unconscious man was eased out in Charles’s arms and then laid upon the ground.
Running to Mallory’s side of the car, Charles heard Kronewald sing out, “Riker’s still breathing, but his arm’s broken and he’s out cold.”
Mallory’s door hung open, and she was working her own belt loose as Charles reached inside to cradle her body and keep her from falling head first. When she was on her feet again, she looked around at the cows milling about on the road. Kronewald was doing traffic control, his arms spinning, his screams full of obscenities to move the animals away from Riker’s prone body.
“Somebody opened a gate,” she said.
“It would seem so.” Charles was staring at the damage her convertible had done to the barbwire fence that lined the road. “Or maybe another car had a mishap.” He returned to the road, where Riker lay motionless and wheezing with one arm bent at an unnatural angle. “I think his ribs are bro- ken, too.” When Charles looked up again, he saw Mallory wandering off, preceded by the beam of her flashlight.
Kronewald held up his cell phone, saying. “The ambulance is on the way from Kingman, but there’s a wreck on the interstate, and it might take a while.” He turned to see the back of Mallory. “Where does she think she’s going?”
“You might keep an eye on her-in case she’s in shock.”
“Got it.”
A few minutes later, the Chicago detective returned. “Mallory sent me back. Says our perp’s got an infrared sight on his rifle. He won’t wanna see her with company.” The old man held up one hand. “Hold on, Charles. He’s not gonna shoot her. You know he didn’t d rag Mallory all the way out here for that.” The detective paced near a ditch on the other side of the road. “There’s some rusty metal piled up here. Same stuff the fence posts are made of. She needs that car back on the road.” The detective climbed down into the ditch and lifted a length of pipe, yelling, “Give me a hand!”
A short way up the road, Mallory found the source of the wandering cows. She stood before an open gate and faced a dirt road leading off across flat open land in the direction of distant foothills. It was the gate that held her interest. Two strong metal poles supported a high crossbar that displayed the name of the ranch and its brand. But was the crossbar welded on? She looked down at the ground, wondering if the supporting poles were footed in cement. Her flashlight picked out loose lengths of well casing piled up on the other side of the gate, but these were obviously meant for mending fences. She turned back to the gate posts. No shorter section of pipe would do. Back down the road, she had tools for this job-and Charles Butler was one of them.
She turned her eyes upward to consider the problem of a welded crossbar, and the flashlight dropped from her hand. So surprised was she to see her father’s million stars in the sky above-just as he had promised and right where he had left them, his “-brilliant stars and lesser ones, millions beyond counting, beautiful-mesmerizing.”
A child was waiting.
Mallory picked up her flashlight.
Down the rancher’s road far past the gate, twin points of light blinked twice. The cell phone in her knapsack was beeping, but she had no intention of answering it. That would surprise her adversary. She was in control now-not him. And he would learn that soon enough; nothing would happen as he had planned. She ran down the road. The grade was dropping, and soon she would be out of his rifle sights.
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.
She raised her gun a little higher, aiming for his face. “I think you know I like you well enough to shoot you.”
He understood at once, and he believed her, but he would not let go.
She dropped the gun and threw her knapsack at his head. Reflex made him release the pipe to catch the sack, and-that quickly-she was gone.
His heart was banging on the run as he reached the rise in time to see her car poised once again on the rancher’s road, her headlights flashing twice, then steady. Charles ran faster, legs churning, chest burning. He was so close. Mallory revved her engine to a roar. The car lurched forward. In seconds only, she had closed the distance, and in the duel of clashing headlights, horizontal stalks of brilliant light blended into fusion-with the breaking of glass and the crash of metal on metal. Each vehicle was blinded by one lost headlight and married together by Mallory’s lance. The running man stumbled when he saw her body in silent flight, shooting upward in an arc that ended behind the obstacle of the ruined silver car.
Dodie, unharmed, was still standing in front of the pickup truck. Her harness leash had come loose, and yet she was slow to move away from the one unshattered headlight. Charles ran past her, past the wreckage where Mallory’s right fender was joined to one side of the truck’s twisted grille. Following the beam of her surviving headlight, he found her body broken on the ground.
Mallory had counted on Newton’s first law: the pickup truck, the vehicle at rest, had remained at rest, despite the impact of her car. She had stayed on course long enough to send her lance through the other windshield, and she had turned hard left, but one bumper had crashed into the truck. The swerve had saved Dodie, but there had been no time for Mallory to save herself.
No need to look inside the cab of the pickup truck. Surely there was a headless corpse behind the wheel. Charles was busy staunching the blood flow from Mallory’s wounds to the tune of a musical fragment, eight notes hummed in a child’s voice. Dodie Finn was lost in the dark of some interior landscape with no moon or stars or ken of pain.
The strangled sound of crying… that came from Charles.