Blind Pursuit (30 page)

“Goddammit, Oliver,
talk to me!
”

The fire cast a ruddy, wavering glow on his face. He stood motionless, gazing transfixed at what he had done, what he had finally brought himself to do after so many years.

His eyes were wide and glassy. The sparse hairs of his head rustled in the fire’s hot wind.

Flames reached the first of the rafters, caught hold, then hopped from beam to beam. Churning fumes collected along the ceiling, forming a noxious mushroom cloud.

The smoke was what would kill her and Annie. That, or the stinging heat, or the collapse of the roof.

“
Oliver!”
She had to make him hear her. “Oh, Jesus, Oliver, don’t leave us here, please
don’t
, for God’s sake,
don’t
!” Each breathless shout seemed to jerk the chain tighter around her midsection, the wicked links chewing hungrily at her stomach, her lower ribs. “Don’t let us burn, it’s not the way to solve anything,
it’s not the way!
”

The noise around her was thunderous, the Niagara roar of the flames competing with the moans of tortured wood, the pops of metal fixtures springing free of bolts and screws, the sizzle of sparking wires, the whoosh and howl of eddying air currents that spun pinwheels of soot and embers across the room.

Oliver shambled backward, still watching spellbound.

“
Oliver!”
she called for the last time.

Abruptly he turned, and then he was running, running into the night.

Gone.

Erin struggled with the chain, knowing she could not free herself, knowing she would be dead very soon, as the lethal heat pulsed around her and the roof beams began to groan.

58

 “I did it.”

Gund spoke the words between gulps of air as he sprinted to the barn.

He threw the double doors wide, climbed into the Astro, started the engine.

As he backed out into the open, as he swung the van toward the open gate, as he pulled out onto the side road, he felt strange tics and twitches in his face, peculiar muscular contractions at the corners of his mouth—and in his eyes, beads of dampness, blurring his world.

In the sideview mirror, the receding ranch house glowed with a red, feverish light.

Another ripple of his facial muscles, and the shape of his mouth changed. It took him a moment to understand that he was smiling, really smiling—the first smile he had worn in years, decades—almost the first he could remember.

This, then, was happiness. That word he so often had heard and never comprehended.

“I did it,” he said once more as he eased his foot down on the accelerator pedal.

The smile remained fixed on his face even while the water in his eyes spilled over, warm droplets tracking slowly down his cheeks.

* * *

Walker led the three backup units off the freeway at Houghton Road. He headed north, maintaining a steady speed of seventy.

Behind him, the patrol cars switched on their light bars, red and blue dome lights pulsing. The sirens stayed silent.

Ravine Road must be directly ahead. Walker pumped the brake pedal, slowing in preparation for a sharp right turn.

* * *

Gund reached Houghton Road, and abruptly the newfound smile faded from his face.

To his left, three squad cars, rooftop flashers twinkling, with an unmarked Ford Mustang in the lead.

Arrest.

Punishment.

No
.

With a snarl of rage he steered the van hard to the right.

As the Chevy swung onto Houghton, Gund reached under the dashboard with one hand and released the sawed-off Remington from its mounting.

* * *

Walker had run an M.V.D. check on Harold Gund during the drive to the ranch. He drove a Chevrolet Astro van.

The same make and model as the van that now squealed out onto the road, directly ahead.

“That’s our guy,” he said over his walkie-talkie.

Three sirens blared at his back.

He sped up, closing on the van.

* * *

Gund thrust the shotgun out the driver’s-side window, muzzle pointing backward.

Under these circumstances he couldn’t possibly aim. Fortunately, he didn’t have to. The wide spray of shot would cut apart anything in its path.

He spun the steering wheel, barreling onto the shoulder, leaving the Mustang completely exposed in the middle of the road.

A single blast would tear the driver to pieces. With luck, the careening coupe would wreck one or more of the other pursuit cars in a deadly pileup.

He wedged the shotgun’s stock against the windshield pillar and pulled the trigger.

* * *

Walker saw the van slide to the right, glimpsed a flash of metal near the driver’s window.

Gun barrel.

He swerved onto the shoulder as the gun bucked with a booming report.

His windshield starred but didn’t shatter.

Shotgun. He’d caught only a couple of stray pellets.

Accelerating, he rammed the rear of the van.

* * *

Damn.

The other driver had been too quick for him.

Now Gund couldn’t see the unmarked car. It was directly behind the van’s windowless cargo compartment, out of the side mirrors’ field of view.

He released the steering wheel momentarily to pump another shotgun shell into the chamber.

Impact. From the rear.

The wheel spun crazily, the van skidding out of control.

He dropped the gun in his lap. Seized the wheel.

Too late.

The Chevy screamed off the shoulder, through a waist-high wire fence, and plunged down, the front end tilting almost vertically, the lone headlight beaming into a sandy pit ten feet below.

The arroyo.

He was a hundred yards north of Ravine Road, at the point where the dry wash passed under Houghton. With the fence ruptured, there was nothing to stop the van as it plummeted headfirst into the gully.

Rushing up at him, a dry parcel of ground, pitted and whorled like the surface of some wind-scoured alien planet. For a timeless moment there was no sense of distance—the scarred landscape might be a yard away or a mile—and he was conscious only of inertia shoving him roughly against the seat as a high, keening protest escaped his open mouth.

With a howl of metal, the front of the van met the ground and crumpled in a mist of sparks and sudden smoke, the windshield exploding, the dashboard popping free as the lights of the gauges went dark, steering wheel wrenched loose, horn jammed, its blare ear-splitting and continuous.

Gund waited for the van to tip over, to crash down on its roof or on its side.

Nothing happened.

Dimly he understood that the chassis still leaned on the roadway above, propped against the overpass like a ladder against a wall.

He coughed. Something harsh and foreign scratched his throat.

Smoke.

Clouds of it. All around.

Red glow from the ruined engine. Heat underneath the floor.

The van was on fire.

“Hell,” he whispered dully. He groped for the door handle, turned it, but the door wouldn’t open.

Wedged shut.

He remembered how the door frame had buckled slightly in last night’s crash, how he’d had to hammer it back into shape. This new trauma had undone his work, sealing the door again.

Out the window, then, or through the shattered windshield.

But he couldn’t. The dashboard, punched backward by the crash, trapped his legs.

Hotter now.

He coughed again, and this time found it hard to stop.

Smoke rose on both sides of him, billowing up from under the driver’s seat.

He had seen people burn.

Couldn’t die that way. Not him.

Wildly he pounded the dashboard, fighting to shove it free, like an animal clawing at the metal teeth of a trap.

Pain in his feet, his legs.

Downward glance. Caldron of black smoke where his lower body ought to be. Glinting in the smoke, malevolent pinpoints of fire.

The blare of the horn went on, and for a moment he didn’t even hear the new sound overlaid on it, the piercing wail of his own scream.

Get it off me, he begged without voice, as if the fire crawling up his pants were some kind of ravenous animal. Get it off, get it off,
get it off
—

He was beating his pants with both hands, trying to slap the fire down, and screaming, screaming, screaming.

Had it hurt this much for the others? Were his daughters screaming with the same agony right now?

Impossible. There never had been this much pain before, not in all the world.

He was drowning in smoke, being eaten alive by flame, and now he couldn’t scream anymore; he had swallowed too much smoke and could only wheeze, light-headed with pain and fumes, as he writhed and twisted, head whipsawing frantically, arms flapping, and then his hand touched hot steel, smooth and cylindrical, the barrel of the shotgun, thrown onto the passenger seat in the crash.

He thought of Lincoln Connor, of the real Harold Gund, their bodies sprawled together in the woods, a sawed-off Remington 870, like this one, clutched fast in Lincoln’s hands.

Clumsily he turned the gun toward his own face.

The muzzle brushed his cheek, his chin. Mouth open, he swallowed it.

Somewhere at the end of the sixteen-inch barrel was a trigger.

He groped for it as the back of his seat erupted in flame and his scalp began to crisp.

* * *

Twenty feet from the van Walker was slip-sliding down the embankment, carrying his Smith .38 and a dry-chemical fire extinguisher from his car, when he caught sight of Harold Gund.

The man couldn’t be alive, certainly couldn’t be conscious, not in that hell of folded metal and spurting flame.

But he was.

Walker saw movement. A gleam of steel.

The shotgun again.

For a wild moment he thought Gund was trying to take another shot at him. Then the barrel swung toward Gund’s own face and the muzzle disappeared into his mouth.

A sharp crack, a viscid spatter.

The fire still burned, but Gund didn’t feel it anymore.

Walker turned away from the van, then stopped, staring along the length of the arroyo toward a distant radiance.

Another fire. Larger than this one. A house or some other structure.

“Christ,” he hissed.
“Annie.”

He scrambled back up the slope to his car, praying he wasn’t already too late.

59

Annie knew what this was.

Her familiar nightmare.

Smell of smoke and gasoline. Whisper of flame. Heat on her face. The house in Sierra Springs ablaze.

She roused herself, eyelids fluttering, vision swimming into focus.

Around her, a blazing light show. Showers of sparks. Blooms of flame.

She wasn’t awake yet. Couldn’t be. The nightmare was continuing, taking a new and more vivid form....

A wave of heat pulsed over her. The stench of gasoline bit her nostrils. She choked back a cough.

No dream. Reality.

She remembered her last waking moments. Gund at the car window. Voltage coursing through her body.

Comprehension hit her like a punch in the stomach.

“
Erin?”

From directly behind her, less than a yard away: “I’m here, Annie.”

Though her sister’s voice was ragged, her tone—measured and steady—gave an impression of something close to calm control. An illusion, certainly, because no one could be calm here, calm
now
.

“What the hell’s he doing to us?” Annie heard raw terror in her own voice. “Christ,
what’s he doing?
”

“Don’t panic, Annie. Please don’t.”

The words made no sense. Panic? Of course she would panic. Who
wouldn’t
panic, for God’s sake? Didn’t Erin understand what was going on? Didn’t she
see
? Gund had set the house on fire, they were going to burn, burn to death—

No. Quit it.
Quit it.

With trembling effort she forced down her rising fear.

As a child in a blazing death trap she had yielded to terror, become hysterical; but she was not a child any longer.

Head lowered, she looked herself over for the first time and found that she was seated on the floor, chained to an appliance of some sort, a water heater or a furnace or something. Stubby metal legs, bolted in place, held the base of the contraption six inches off the floor.

Potbelly stove. That’s what it was. She remembered it from snapshots in Lydia’s photo album.

She strained against the chain links, trying to release her arms. No use.

“Isn’t there any way to get free of this thing?” she yelled.

“Chain’s wound tight. And it’s—” A spasm of coughing interrupted Erin’s reply. “It’s padlocked.”

Padlocked.

Annie blinked.

Twisting her right arm, she thrust her hand into the pocket of her skirt, and yes, there it was, the key ring she’d taken from Gund’s apartment.

As she pulled the keys free, it occurred to her that there was something funny about her having them, something that ought to disturb her, but there was no time to think about it now.

“I’ve got his keys!” she shouted.

“What?”

“Gund’s
keys
. Can you reach the padlock?”

“Think so.” Now it was Erin’s voice that quavered, not with fear but with barely suppressed hope.

“Okay,” Annie said. “I’m gonna slide ’em to you.”

“I’m ready.”

She placed the keys on the floor, took a breath, and flicked them backward, between the stove legs.

For an endless moment there was no response, and she was sure she’d blown it,
blown it,
hadn’t pushed the key ring far enough, and now it lay somewhere under the stove, out of her reach and Erin’s, useless to them both, their last chance wasted.

“Got them!” Erin called.

Thank God. “Do they work? Does one of them work?”

“Give me a second.”

Annie waited, tasting smoke, trying to be brave.

* * *

Fumbling one-handed, Erin found two small padlock keys on the ring. She wedged the first one between two fingers and lifted the key to the padlock at her waist.

Hard to keep her attention narrowed to this tight focus when everywhere the smoke was thickening, the heat rising to a murderous intensity.

Little time left. Couple of minutes at most. Combustion was entering its second, still more deadly phase.

The wood of the walls, ceiling, and floor, dried out after years in an arid climate, could not feed the flames for long; already the fire was fading in patches to a dull glow as it burrowed into the timber, snouting out the carbon still trapped inside. The heat would further weaken the cellulose and lignin that gave the wood its structure and strength, until the roof beams and wall panels simply fell apart, collapsing the house on top of Annie and herself in a cascade of burning debris.

The smoke might get them sooner. It was a witch’s brew of carbon monoxide and outgassed toxins from the walls—vaporized varnish, paint, glue, and insulating material. The fire was rapidly consuming the room’s remaining oxygen; before long there would be only poison to breathe.

Her hand shook, and she nearly dropped the key ring.

Come on, Erin. Concentrate.

The keyhole wasn’t visible from her angle; she had to stab the key at the bottom of the padlock case several times before it slid into the plug. She twisted her wrist.

Nothing happened.

Wrong key, then. Try the other one. Hurry.

She rotated the key ring, isolated the second padlock key, inserted it.

Clockwise turn, and the padlock released.

She stared at it, stunned, then tried to laugh and hacked out a ragged cough instead.

“Annie, it worked! It
worked!
”

Another spasm of coughing racked her as she kicked free of the chain. She crawled around the stove and found her sister untangling herself from the heavy links.

“This way!” Erin yelled. “Front door!”

Smoke had turned Annie’s eyes to water. “Can’t see.”

“Take my hand.”

Annie obeyed.

Erin crawled toward the doorway, guiding Annie through the inferno, just as she had led her sister through another burning house so many years ago.

Char and soot and white mineral ash whipped around them in a swirling haze. Clouds of sparks like fireflies singed their hair.

The door wasn’t far, less than twenty feet away, but it was separated from them by a river of gasoline a yard wide, its surface webbed with kinetic ripples of flame.

Have to jump across, Erin thought. If we can.

Behind them, an echoing groan.

She glanced back and saw the rafter directly above the stove splitting cleanly in the middle, raining sparks and splinters.

Close. Too close.

“
Move!”

She yanked Annie forward. At their backs the ceiling beam pitched down in a rush of charred timber.

Thunderous impact. The house shook. The rafter disintegrated into a vortex of burning brands. The last of the wood’s stored energy ignited in a monstrous shout of flame, exploding like a bomb at their backs, the pressure wave hurling Erin flat against the floor, and for a second she was certain a seething comber of fire would surge over her and Annie and consume them both.

It didn’t. The flame contracted and winked out, its fuel supply devoured in an instant, leaving only a tempest of smoke and, rising above the background roar, Annie’s screams.

Erin spun toward her sister and saw her writhing on the floor as flames crawled over her skirt and blouse.

“
Help me, oh, Jesus, help me!”

With her bare hands Erin slapped the flames, trying desperately to smother them. In her mind she was seven years old again, in the stairwell of another fiery house, beating her sister’s flaming pajamas with the stuffed bear called Miss Fuzzy.

Pain. Pain in her left arm.

Embers had drifted from Annie’s clothes to her own, setting the sleeve of Erin’s blouse ablaze.

She broke free of Annie, pawing at herself, smacking wildly at the bright blemish of flame, but even as she did, new hot spots erupted on her skirt, her blouse, her hair, and she was burning,
burning
—Oliver had won—after twenty-three years he’d had the last word, God damn him, he’d murdered them both.

Dragon hiss.

Jet of chemical spray.

An arc of aerosolized powder, soaking her and Annie in a white drizzle.

Fire extinguisher. It was a
fire extinguisher
.

Erin lifted her head, glimpsed a dark figure in the doorway—a man struggling toward them, sweeping the canister from side to side, cutting a narrow swath in the river of fire along the room’s perimeter.

“Michael?” The hoarse, whispery voice was Annie’s.

Over the threshold, a shuddering creak.

Another ceiling beam threatened to give way.

Erin grabbed her sister’s hand and pulled her upright.

Sparks rained down as the beam weakened. The man called Michael took a last step forward, reaching out to them.

Erin’s fingers locked on his wrist. He pulled her, stumbling, through the doorway. Annie clung to Erin’s hand and followed.

Inside the house, a sudden wrenching groan.

Erin looked back in time to see the rafter above the threshold plunge down in a curtain of fire, engulfing the doorway in a roaring shower of debris.

Together they staggered across the gravel court. Fifty feet from the house they stopped, safely distanced from the waves of blistering heat and the torrent of smoke.

Erin’s knees unhinged. She sank into a crouch. Annie knelt beside her, coughing weakly.

From the direction of the gate came the squeal of tires, the pulse of dome lights—police cars arriving at the scene.

Erin looked at the man kneeling beside her. “Who ... who are you?”

“Michael Walker.” He forced out the words between harsh gasps. Sweat streaked his face and neck, pasting the open collar of his shirt to his skin. “Tucson P.D.”

“Got here ... just in time.”

“Should have been sooner.” He looked at Annie. “Much sooner.”

Annie rubbed the smoke from her eyes. “Well”—she managed a smile—“better late than never.”

Walker’s startled laugh died in a wheeze.

Erin had one other question, but almost no strength to ask it. She tugged Walker’s sleeve, met his gaze, and voiced one word.

“Gund?”

“Dead.”

Slowly she looked away, toward the burning house, and nodded.

“Good.”