Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) (20 page)

Grandpa had been staring at him by then, his head cocked. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

Owen could only shake his head. He’d never even considered what he would say if a moment like this came along.

Owen, you motherfucker, go! GO!

“Gotta use the bathroom,” Owen muttered, and ran from the pole barn. He was in the truck half a minute later, with the gun beside him, rolling fast out of the dooryard. By then the Gravel Man was talking to him again.

Get on the Lake Road near the bottom end of town and head south on it. You’re going to find someone down at the radio tower, or maybe they’ll be coming north away from there. Whoever it is, stop them and kill them.

As it’d happened, he’d damn near done that in the moment he reached the road. He’d even swerved a bit there, thinking to hit the car once he saw it—a shitload of good that’d done him.

He looked at the MP-5 again. Right there within his reach. He got a fold of his shirt between his teeth, bit down hard against the pain, and made another move for the gun.

*   *   *

Dryden was thirty feet from the truck, about to call out again, when he saw movement in the dim interior. A second later a man’s foot eased out, followed by the other. The man was up on all fours and crawling out backward.

“You alright?” Dryden asked.

No answer.

“Can you hear me?”

When it happened, it happened fast—faster than he would have guessed it could. He supposed it was the strangeness of the situation that caught him off guard. The man eased fully out of the truck, his face still pointed inward at the crushed cab. His left collarbone looked broken, and he seemed to be cradling that arm in front of him with his right. All at once he heaved himself upward into a raised kneeling position, cried out in pain, and collapsed, spinning his body. And just like that he was sitting slumped with his back against the truck bed’s wall, with an MP-5 submachine gun pointed up at Dryden.

Dryden heard a gasp, far behind him. He turned to look—Rachel was standing at the open passenger door of the Honda.

“Rachel, stay there!” he shouted. “Get behind the car. Right now.”

For a moment she remained frozen, eyes huge and scared.

“Go!” he yelled.

She nodded and slipped around behind the trunk to the far side.

Dryden turned his attention back on the gunman. The weapon was shaking in his hand, but not enough that it would miss if the guy pulled the trigger.

Judging by the way his fingertip was flattened against it, the trigger was already under a few ounces of pressure.

There was simply no chance of drawing the SIG without the man opening fire.

“Who are you?” Dryden asked him.

The man said nothing. His eyes kept going back and forth from Dryden to the Honda. The guy was injured, but not so badly that he couldn’t get on his feet. If he killed Dryden, it would be a simple matter for him to get up and go after Rachel. She might be faster, but he had the gun, and there was nothing around but a mile of empty land.

“Take it easy,” Dryden said.

The guy’s expression hardened. His finger flattened a little more on the trigger.

*   *   *

Do it. Owen, do it!

Owen watched the man who was standing nearby, but he found his eyes kept wanting to go back to the car on the road. He had crawled out of the wreck all set to do his job, to quiet the Gravel Man for better or worse, but then—

The little girl. Lord in heaven, what could she be, ten or twelve?

The Gravel Man had sent him to kill a pretty little thing like that?

I will hurt you. I will make it hurt like you’ve never imagined. I won’t stop no matter how hard you beg.

“Please,” Owen whispered.

You know what to do. So do it.

Owen took a deep breath and let it ease back out. He felt the familiar—awful, but familiar—calm sink over him. What was the big word for that?
Acceptance,
he thought.

*   *   *

Dryden thought about going for the SIG anyway. He would be shot if he did it, no doubt about that, but he would probably have time, even after taking his hits, to bring the pistol around and get in at least a torso shot of his own. Enough to leave the guy right there, bleeding out where he sat, instead of chasing Rachel. It would probably work.

Probably.

Unless the MP-5 was set to full auto. Then a dozen rounds would leave its barrel within the first second. If even one of those caught Dryden in the head, then forget the whole plan. Rachel would be left defenseless.

Dryden watched the machine gun’s barrel. Watched it sway through tiny arcs in the man’s shaking hand. Waited for it to sway just far enough—

“I don’t got a choice,” the man said softly. “It ain’t that I mean it.”

There was a trace of pity in the guy’s eyes, though it seemed to Dryden the man was mostly feeling it about himself. But that was the least of what Dryden noticed about him. What struck him the most was that his early impression—even in that first glimpse as the pickup slid across the road—had been dead on. This man’s intelligence could hardly be above that of a child. Even taking into account that he might’ve been dazed by the crash, there was no mistaking the signs.

It was, in its own way, the strangest thing about the situation: Why would Gaul—or whoever had sent the man—trust critical work to a guy like this?

Dryden had found himself at gunpoint before, and many more times he’d faced adversaries who at least had weapons close at hand. Every one of those men, no matter his ideology or his coldness or his rank in whatever pecking order, had been smart. Not just smart—animal sharp and quick. You could always see it in the eyes. Hired guns lived a Darwinian life. You didn’t meet many stupid ones; they didn’t last.

“I don’t mean it,” the man in the overalls said again.

“You’ve got the safety on,” Dryden said.

The man didn’t exactly fall for it. His reaction was nothing as dramatic as turning the gun sideways and peering at the thing. All that happened was a twitch of his wrist. A reflexive move, so-called muscle memory, in the instant before he caught himself. The MP-5’s barrel turned maybe five degrees aside from Dryden, aiming itself at the desert floor ten feet behind him, but almost at once it began to pivot right back to where it had been. The whole flinch opened up no more than a third-of-a-second window of opportunity.

That was enough.

Dryden’s hand moved. The action was as practiced and unconscious as flipping the light switch in his own kitchen. He drew the SIG from his rear waistband, leveled it, and fired twice.

Both shots took the man in the forehead. The first was centered, and the second was an inch to the left. The double exit wound blew the back of the guy’s head open, the explosive force of it actually causing the head to jerk forward toward Dryden, as if the guy were trying to head-butt the space in front of him. He flopped face-first onto his own shins and lay still.

Dryden fell back two steps, then turned and sprinted for the Honda as fast as he could.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Some impulse, maybe just good old-fashioned paranoia, told Dryden to steer clear of the town. He took the Honda off-road over the hard scrubland and went east for two miles until they came to a county two-lane running north; it had signs for an on-ramp to U.S. 50. Five minutes after that they were on the freeway again, eastbound. They’d said almost nothing since the moment they left the pickup behind.

“I don’t know,” Dryden said at last. “I don’t have the first clue what that was.”

*   *   *

He didn’t start to relax for another hour or more. By then they were on I-70, on the east side of the state. They came to a small town called Sumner; from the freeway it looked just big enough to have a library somewhere in it. When they found it, on Main Street across from a school, its parking lot was close to empty. That boded well for the place not being full of potential eyewitnesses. All the same, Dryden wondered just how effective the Oakleys and baseball hat really were.

The thought of sending Rachel in by herself went against all his instincts, but sometimes instinct was wrong. If someone spotted him, if they simply picked up a phone and dialed 911—

“A girl my age by herself might raise eyebrows, too,” Rachel said. Then, softer: “I don’t want to be alone again.”

*   *   *

There was a single librarian at the checkout desk, just inside the entry. She offered a professional but friendly greeting. Dryden answered with a nod, keeping his face in profile to her. Rachel gave her an energetic wave and a smile; it drew the woman’s attention like a magnet.

Pretty smart,
Dryden thought.

“Thanks,” Rachel said, when they’d gone by.

“Anything in her thoughts like
Is that the guy on TV?
”

Rachel shook her head.

They found a counter with three computer terminals in the back corner, all of them deserted. So far as Dryden could see, the only other visitor in the library was a kid of maybe fourteen, sitting alone in a sunlit reading area at the opposite corner of the huge room.

They pulled up two chairs and woke one of the computers from its sleep mode.

The obvious first move was a Yellow Pages search for Holly Ferrel in Amarillo, Texas.

No results.

Dryden tried the same search for all of Texas; maybe Holly lived outside of town and commuted.

No results.

He opened a Google map, zoomed in on Amarillo, and searched for hospitals. There were three large ones and a number of smaller practices, almost all of those simply named for a doctor working privately. None of the private doctors was Holly Ferrel.

Dryden checked the Web sites for each of the three big hospitals and navigated to the staff pages. The third one yielded an interesting result: a doctor named Holly Reese, whose bio was conspicuously missing a photograph. Every other doctor working in that hospital had included a face shot.

For the sake of being thorough, Dryden navigated through every page on the hospital’s site that might contain photos of its staff, promotional stills of doctors at patients’ bedsides or working in labs. He was on the next-to-last such page, about to click the
BACK
button, when Rachel’s hand shot out and stopped him from touching the mouse.

“What?” he asked.

Her finger went to the screen. In a photo at the bottom, an EMT crew and a few ER docs were rolling a stretcher in off a rooftop helipad. The chopper was visible in the background, bright red and filling most of the frame.

Rachel was pointing to a woman standing just inside the corridor, half turned away from the camera. Because the camera’s aperture had adjusted to deal with the sun-washed helipad, the hallway in the foreground appeared very dark. It would’ve been easy to look right at this photo and not even see the woman.

“Is it her?” Dryden asked.

Rachel leaned closer to the screen. She narrowed her eyes.

“I’m sure of it,” she said.

Dryden stared at the woman’s face a second longer, running the implications through his head. It wasn’t unheard-of for a relocated person to hold on to a first name; the risk was minimal, and it made the transition easier, psychologically.

Holly Ferrel.

Holly Reese.

Different last name, and no photo on her bio page.

She wasn’t just in danger. She was hiding from it.

At least she believed she was hiding.

Dryden went back to the Yellow Pages and searched for Holly Reese in Amarillo.

One entry. Complete with address.

Dryden found it on the Google map ten seconds later, the photographic overlay showing a marker right above the house.

Holly lived close to downtown, on a street of narrow homes jammed together. Dryden opened Street View and got a look at the place from eye level, out front. It was the Texas equivalent of a town house like you might see in Brooklyn or Georgetown. Others of the same size lined the street on both sides, most of them adjoining their neighbors, a few with narrow alleys in between.

“If she’s still alive, you think Gaul’s people are watching her,” Rachel said. Not asking.

Dryden nodded. “Have to assume it.”

“So how do we contact her?”

“I want to know more about her before we do that,” Dryden said. “I believe you when you say she’s someone who cared about you, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to go introduce ourselves.”

He studied the layout of the street, his thoughts going to the eavesdropping equipment he’d used so often in his time with Ferret. A good laser microphone would be useful; it could be pointed at one of Holly’s windows from down the block and pick up sound from inside by measuring vibrations on the glass. It was decades-old technology, very reliable.

Very hard to come by, too. You couldn’t get it at RadioShack or Best Buy.

Rachel put her hand to the screen again. She pointed to the narrow homes on either side of Holly’s. “Do you think we could get inside one of those? Maybe if no one was home?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible. A lot of buildings like that are broken up into apartments. If we got lucky, there might be a vacant one.” He turned to her. “What are you thinking?”

“How wide are those houses?”

Dryden shrugged. “Twenty-five, thirty feet.”

Rachel turned and stared on a diagonal across the library, to the young boy reading alone. “How far away do you think he is?”

Dryden considered the distance. “Sixty feet, maybe a little more.”

Rachel faced forward again and shut her eyes. She took on the expression of someone trying to make out a just-audible voice over a bad phone line. Then she spoke as if she were reading from a page. “Well, he’s dead now hisself. He knows the long and short on it now. And if ever a rough hand come to port, it was Billy. Right you are, said Silver. Rough and ready. But mark you here, I’m an easy man. I’m quite the gentleman, says you. But this time it’s serious. Duty is duty, mates. I give my vote. Death.”

She seemed about to continue, then let it go. She opened her eyes and met Dryden’s.