REGAN WAS WAITING IN HER Jeep when flowers called again. He gave it to her in a nutshell. The burning buildings, the stranded SWAT team, his belief that there might be a back way out.
“And he’s got a rifle. I think he couldn’t let the rifle burn, because we’d still be able to check it, and he doesn’t know we never found a slug when Cain was shot.”
“I’m going,” she said. “No way is he getting out of here.”
“Careful,” Flowers said. He made no effort to talk her out of it, though she’d be one-on-one with Drake. “Don’t forget the rifle. He’s armed.”
She didn’t know of a back road out but knew if there was one, Drake couldn’t go east because of the river and the bluff on the far side. He’d have to go west, sooner or later, to cut the highway, and it probably wouldn’t be far.
She cranked up the Jeep and wrestled it around onto the road, tromped on the accelerator, and sped off. By the time she burned past the dude ranch she was doing sixty. She hit the highway and turned right, skidding around the corner, not caring, then rolled to the top of the nearest ridge, and waited.
She thought about the implications of all that fire. No fingerprints, no DNA, no knotty pine. Thoughts swirled. Adrenaline pumped.
To hell with the feds.
Again, she thought of the innocent kids, of the pictures she’d seen, the images she could never erase from her mind. Then her own kids, the older two when they were in elementary school, the baby.
Her back teeth ground together and she heard a rushing in her ears, her own blood pumping through her veins. For a second, everything went dark with the insidiousness of it all.
She blinked again. Focused. Amped up.
No way would she let that sick fuck get away.
She had her window down, listening for the sound of an engine. She squinted and smelled smoke. Although the sky was bright, the woods were getting darker, and Drake had to turn on his headlights to plow out of the timber road. She saw him coming when he was still fifty feet back, and then he bounced out of the trees, down through the roadside ditch and up on the highway. He turned right, as she had, and sped away from her. She followed, staying back for a minute, then hit her flashers and dropped the hammer. She knew these roads, that was her advantage, that and a bigger engine in her Jeep.
Drake made a run for it.
Speeding through the ever-closing night, his taillights burning bright.
She drove faster, feeling the tires hum and her heart pound as images of those innocent kids played through her mind.
On a straightaway, heading to a sharp corner, she roared up behind the older, overmatched Jeep until she was no more than six feet behind him. At the corner he swung wide, hit gravel on the far shoulder, a tire catching on the edge of the asphalt. As she slowed she watched his Jeep spin back across the road, headlights arcing, cutting through the night.
“Die, you bastard,” she said, hitting the brakes.
Drake’s Jeep slid off the side of the road, the front-right headlight smashing against a pine, the hood crumpling with a groan, an axle breaking.
Her vehicle slid to a stop on the shoulder.
Service weapon in her hand, she stepped onto the asphalt and screamed at his vehicle.
“Get out. I want to see your hands, and I want you out.”
He didn’t move.
“Now! Get out.”
She advanced, crouching, wishing she was wearing a vest.
He kicked open his door, then slowly, hands over his head, he emerged from the Jeep. He was dressed in black from head to toe. Black dress shirt, black slacks, black shoes.
“What’s this about?” he called out. “You nearly killed me. You some kind of psycho cop?”
“It’s about all those children,” she said, her throat raw. “Keep your hands over your head, and back away. I want you out in the headlights, or, I swear to God, I’ll shoot you.”
“I don’t know anything about any children,” he called to her, but did as he was instructed, and backed away. “I got a bad fire up there, my phone doesn’t work, I was going to get the volunteer fire department. Could you call them for me?”
“Shut up,” she said.
She was at the back of his Jeep and saw through the plastic window the rifle stacked up between the two front seats, ready to use.
“You were going to shoot your way out, if you didn’t get clear, weren’t you?”
So why hadn’t he tried to shoot her? Something wasn’t computing.
“I wasn’t going to shoot anybody,” Drake said, hands still over his head. “I’ve never committed a crime in my life. The worst thing I’ve ever done is let that fire get out of control, and I don’t even have insurance. I think that goddamn Weeks started it, I found out he was doing something in my cabin while I wasn’t here.”
“That’s not what Phillip Weeks told me,” she said.
She pushed the Jeep’s door open, switched hands on her pistol, and used her right hand to fish the rifle out of the Jeep.
“Phillip Weeks is a crazy, drug-addled boy,” Drake shouted. “His old man has fed him opiates since he was ten years old. Nobody’s going to believe a doper like him.”
She looked at him and said, “You’ve almost got me convinced. You might walk.”
“Might, bullshit. I’ve got the best attorneys in California. You’re going to be lucky to have your job when they’re finished with you. The best thing you could do right now is forget all this.”
She looked down at the rifle.
Large-caliber bolt action, like the gun that had killed Cain. She pulled the bolt back an inch, then shut it, seeing the brassy flash of the cartridge going back into the chamber.
“You know, you killed the wrong guy down in the river. The guy who saw the girl in the RV. He’s still back there.”
In a split second Drake reached behind his back and pulled out a pistol.
She fired.
He went down, his handgun flying from his grasp.
The rush in her ears was overpowering, the anger flooding through her veins nearly blinding her. Without thinking, she turned and using one hand, brought the rifle up and fired a single shot through the windshield of her Jeep.
Glass shattered.
“What are you—” Drake began, sputtering as he watched, white-faced, bleeding. “No. Wait. I didn’t do anything.”
She wiped down the stock and trigger with the bottom of her shirt.
“Wait,” Drake said as the sound of sirens cut through the night. “Those kids. They were better off with me. They wanted to do it. I gave them a place to live and food and made them movie stars. They lived like kings and queens.”
Rage swelled.
Blackness pulled at her vision.
Her finger curled over the trigger of her service weapon.
“For Christ’s sake.” Drake scrambled for his gun.
She shot him twice in the chest.
VIRGIL SHOUTED DOWN AT THE Feds, “He’s gone up the gravel road, away from the county road.”
The SWAT team, in the light of the fires, started jogging up the road toward Weeks’s cabin.
“He’s not there anymore,” Johnson muttered.