If she’s crouched against the farther flank of the vehicle, rather than inside it, that’s all right, too, because what he’s about to do is likely to move her to act and, by acting, make a target of herself.
Approaching the driver’s side, before there’s a chance she can see him from in there, he squeezes off three quick shots, shattering the window into the rear seat, blowing out the window on the farther side. He’s a little jumpy and in pain and totally pissed off, so one round is off the mark and shatters the glass in the driver’s door.
If she’s in there, she should have been startled into returning fire. Nor does she rise from the farther side of the Rover to cut him down.
Ivan scans the witchy trees, the shadowy north slope, the south slope beribboned with fire, but there is no sign of her.
Expecting a bullet in the back of the head or straight on in the face, using his throbbing left hand, he fumbles with the handle and opens the driver’s door. The interior light comes on. He can see into both the front and back seats, and Jane isn’t in either.
He sits behind the wheel and, wincing in pain, pulls the door shut. All it’s about now is getting out of here faster than fast.
The electronic key is in his pocket. The Range Rover has a push-button ignition. He doesn’t put down the pistol, but holds it ready, using his bad hand to start the engine.
Born off the sloped south wall of the glen, phantom snakes of smoke serpentine through the shot-out back window on the passenger side, and a fit of coughing racks Ivan. For a moment, he forgets how to release the emergency brake, fumbling for a lever that he recalls from a previous vehicle.
Fire is seething close on the south slope. Burning debris has ignited the layers of leaves on the floor of the glen directly ahead of him. Suddenly he’s more concerned about being trapped by fire than he is about Jane Hawk.
Which is a mistake.
When he looks away from the south slope to remind himself where the brake release can be found, he is at once aware of a presence rising beyond the imploded window in the driver’s door.
It’s her.
She’s got the Taser XREP 12-gauge. Before Ivan can bring his Colt .45 around and kill her, she fires point-blank.
The four electrodes on the nose of the cartridge hook the side of his bare neck, and the first charge, the localized charge, stings as though he’s thrust his head into a wasp nest. He’s aware of the pistol falling out of his hand. When the chassis separates from the nose of the Taser projectile, he doesn’t grasp the wire by which it dangles, but then a second set of longer electrodes deploys. He’s slammed by the primary charge, vision dazzled into brief blindness by internal fireworks as colorful as any Independence Day display, his teeth chattering until his jaws lock, pain coursing from his scalp to the soles of his feet, every fascicle of nerve fibers short-circuiting. Paralysis.
34
FOR A MOMENT, Ivan Petro is a child again, shaking with pain, cowering in the shadow of his father, gagging on the refluxed acid that burns up his throat and forms a bitter pool in his mouth, as it had so often during those years lived in nervous expectation of the old man’s violence. Ivan is too weak to run, too confused to hide, clenching his jaws to keep from expressing the raw ferocity of his hatred, which will only earn him more hard slaps, more punches, more cruel pinches.
He tries to swallow, but he can’t, so he hangs his head and lets the acid drool from his mouth into his lap. When he raises his head, he thinks their house is on fire, and he is bewildered as to the cause of this disaster. Then he realizes that he’s a grown man who has put the things of childhood far behind him. He is sitting in a vehicle, his wrists zip-tied to the steering wheel, and the truth of time and place returns to him.
He turns his head to his left. She’s standing a few feet from the missing window, her face reflecting the firelight from the south slope, that perfect face radiant like the face of a goddess, one eye brown, the other blue.
His speech is thick at first. “Your eyes are two colors. You lost a contact. I know which is true. Blue is true. Jane Hawk’s eyes are blue.”
“And you’re Ivan Petro.”
“You took my wallet.”
She tosses the wallet through the open window. It strikes his face and falls into the stomach acid on his pants.
The air smells of smoke. There’s a haze of it in the Rover. Leaf fires and weed fires burn low throughout the glen.
“Where did you first make me?” she asks.
Because his mind isn’t yet as clear as it needs to be, he says, “Placerville. You came out of some market with a deli bag.”
“Where is it?” she asks.
“Placerville? You know where it is. You’ve been there.”
“Don’t jerk me around. Time’s running out. Where did you plant the transponder?”
He shouldn’t have mentioned Placerville. “You were sleeping, so I put it up your pretty ass.”
She raises a pistol, a Heckler, and points it at his face.
He smiles scornfully. “You think I buy that crap about how you’re a cold-blooded killer? Spare me your evil eye.”
“I’ll kill a hundred of you to save my boy.”
“He’s dead already. They filmed it for you. Slit his belly open and let him scream to death.”
She only stares at Ivan. One blue, one brown, plus the round black eye of the gun muzzle.
A bead of sweat passes between his eyes and down his nose.
She lowers the pistol. “You’re parked in dead leaves. Fire under the gas tank soon. Maybe it’ll do the job for me.”
The engine isn’t running. She switched it off. Ivan can drive with his hands bound to the steering wheel, but even if she didn’t take the electronic key, he can’t reach the push-button ignition or the emergency-brake release.
His pistol is still on the passenger seat, where he dropped it.
He wheezes as if the smoke has gathered in his lungs. He fakes a coughing fit while he strains to strip the teeth of the zip-tie on his right wrist, which is cinched low on the steering wheel, not in her line of sight. It’s a ratchet latch; straining against it draws it tighter; it can’t be loosened once snug; it can only be cut. He coughs and strains nonetheless, because his wrists are as thick as ankles, and he is 275 pounds of hard-trained muscle and bone, and his hatred for this bitch is more intense than ever it was for his father. No power on Earth is greater than hatred, for it can destroy nations and fuel genocides in which millions die. He is empowered by hatred so virulent and implacable that no binding can restrain him.
She moves back a step or two. “The transponder. Quick now. Or I’ll go search for it myself, leave you to burn.”
He can’t pretend to be racked by coughing forever. Continuing to strain against the zip-tie, he buys time by telling her what she wants to know. “The kid hasn’t been killed, not even been found yet.”
“Then maybe you have a chance.”
“Transponder’s attached with epoxy. Can’t remove it.”
“If you want to live, tell me true.”
“True. You’ve got to hammer. Hammer it apart.”
The white-hot pain in his right hand now exceeds that in his left, the plastic tie cutting into his flesh, his fingers slick with blood. But he thrives on pain, eats it and is nourished by it; he has grown from child to man on a diet of pain.
“It’s in the back wheel well. Passenger side.”
“Who’ve you told about my Explorer, the license number?”
“No one. Those bastard poachers would take you, take all the credit, and keep me down.”
He can smell his hot blood dripping from his hand. A blackness pulses around the perimeter of his vision. The pain is so terrible that it brings into his throat another flood of bitter acid, which he swallows hard to repress.
“What’s wrong with you?” she wonders.
“You twisted, crazy bitch. You. You’re what’s wrong with me.”
“You’re sweating more than it’s hot.”
“Makes me sweat bullets, telling me I’ll be left to burn.”
“You’re doing something there.” Having backed away, she approaches again. “What’re you doing?”
He chokes on another rush of acid, and it foams from his nose, and his breath stinks as if it is the exhalation of a corpse.
35