Dark Rivers of the Heart (54 page)

Armed and ready for action, the four strike force agents had gotten to their feet and were blocking the aisle near the exit.

“Clear the way, clear the way!”

Roy struggled through the assembled hulks to the head of the aisle, jerked open a door, and leaned into the cramped cockpit.

The pilot’s attention was focused on avoiding the parking lot lampposts and the parked cars as he gentled the JetRanger toward the blacktop. But the second man, who was both copilot and navigator, turned in his seat to look at Roy as the door opened.

“She drove into the damned building,” Roy said, looking out through the windshield at the shattered glass along the front of the supermarket.

“Wild, huh?” the copilot agreed, grinning.

Too many cars were spread out across the blacktop to allow either chopper to put down directly in front of the market. They were angling toward opposite ends of the building, one to the north and the other to the south.

Pointing at the first craft, with its full complement of eight strike force agents, Roy said, “No, no. Tell him I want him over the building, in back, not here, in back, all eight of his men deployed in back, stopping everyone on foot.”

Their pilot was already in radio contact with the pilot of the other craft. While he hovered twenty feet over the parking lot, he repeated Roy’s orders into the mouthpiece of his headset.

“They’ll try to go through the market and out the back,” Roy said, striving to rein in his anger and remain calm. Deep breaths. In with the pale-peach vapor of blessed tranquility. Out with the bile-green mist of anger, tension, stress.

Their chopper was hovering too low for Roy to be able to see over the roof of the market. From the Earthguard look-down on his computer, however, he remembered what lay behind the shopping center: a wide service alley, a concrete-block wall, and then a housing development with numerous trees. Houses and trees. Too many places to hide, too many vehicles to steal.

North of them, just as the first JetRanger was about to touch down on the parking lot and disgorge its men, the pilot got Roy’s message. Rotor speed picked up, and the craft began to lift into the air again.

Peach in. Green out.

A carpet of brown nuggets had spilled from some of the torn fifty-pound bags, and they crunched under Spencer’s shoes as he got out of the Rover and ran between two checkout stations. He carried the canvas bag by its straps. In the other hand, he clutched the Uzi.

He glanced to his left. Ellie was paralleling him in the next checkout lane. The shopping aisles were long and ran front to back of the store. He met Ellie at the head of the nearest aisle.

“Out the back.” She hurried toward the rear of the supermarket.

Starting after her, he remembered Rocky. The mutt had gotten out of the Rover behind him. Where was Mr. Rocky Dog?

He stopped, spun around, ran back two steps, and saw the hapless canine in the checkout lane that he himself had used. Rocky was eating some of the brown nuggets that hadn’t been crushed under his master’s shoes. Dry dog food. Fifty pounds or more of it.

“Rocky!”

The mutt looked up and wagged his tail.

“Come on!”

Rocky didn’t even consider the command. He snatched up a few more nuggets, crunching them with delight.

“Rocky!”

The dog regarded him again, one ear up and one down, bushy tail banging against the side of the cashier’s counter.

In his sternest voice, Spencer said,
“Mine!”

Regretful but obedient, a little ashamed, Rocky trotted away from the food. When he saw Ellie, who had stopped halfway down the long aisle to wait for them, he broke into a sprint. Ellie resumed her flight, and Rocky dashed exuberantly past her, unaware that they were running for their lives.

At the end of the aisle, three men rushed into sight from the left and halted when they saw Ellie, Spencer, the dog, the guns. Two were in white uniforms: names stitched on their shirt pockets, employees of the market. The third—in street clothes, with a loaf of French bread in one hand—must have been a customer.

With an alacrity and sinuosity more like that of a cat, Rocky transformed his headlong plunge into an immediate retreat. Eeling around on himself, tail between his legs, almost on his belly, he waddled back toward his master for protection.

The men were startled, not aggressive. But they froze, blocking the way.

“Back off!”
Spencer shouted.

Aiming at the ceiling, he punctuated his demand with a short burst from the Uzi, blowing out a fluorescent strip and precipitating a shower of lightbulb glass and chopped-up acoustic tiles.

Terrified, the three men scattered.

A pair of swinging doors at the back of the market was recessed between dairy cases to the left and lunch-meat-and-cheese coolers to the right. Ellie slammed through the doors. Spencer followed with Rocky. They were in a short hallway, with rooms to both sides.

The sound of the helicopters was muffled there.

At the end of the hallway, they burst into a cavernous room that extended the width of the building: bare concrete walls, fluorescent lights, open rafters instead of a suspended ceiling. An area in the center of the chamber was open, but merchandise in shipping cartons was stacked sixteen feet high in aisles on both sides—additional stock of products from shampoo to fresh produce.

Spencer spotted a few stockroom employees watching warily from between the storage aisles.

Directly ahead, beyond the open work area, was an enormous metal roll-up door through which big trucks could be backed inside and unloaded. To the right of the shipping entrance was a man-size door. They ran to it, opened it, and went outside into the fifty-foot-wide service alley.

No one in sight.

A twenty-foot-deep overhang sprouted from the wall above the roll-up. It extended the length of the market, jutting nearly halfway across the alley, to allow additional trucks to pull under it and unload while protected from the elements. It was also protection from eyes in the sky.

The morning was surprisingly chilly. Though the market and stockroom had been cool, Spencer wasn’t prepared for the briskness of the outside air. The temperature must have been in the mid-forties. In more than two hours of breakneck travel, they had come from the edge of a desert into higher altitudes and a different climate.

He saw no point in following the service alley left or right. Both ways, they would only be going around the U-shaped structure to the parking lot out front.

On three sides of the shopping center, a nine-foot-high privacy wall separated it from its neighbors: concrete blocks, painted white, capped with bricks. If it had been six feet, they might have scaled it fast enough to escape. Nine feet, no way in hell. They could throw the canvas bag across, easy enough, but they couldn’t simply heave a seventy-pound dog to the other side and hope he landed well.

Out at the front of the supermarket, the pitch of engines from at least one of the helicopters changed. The clatter of its props grew louder. It was coming to the rear of the building.

Ellie dashed to the right, along the shaded back of the market. Spencer knew what she intended. They had one hope. He followed her.

She stopped at the limit of the overhang, which marked the end of the supermarket. Beyond was that portion of the back wall of the shopping center belonging to neighboring businesses.

Ellie glowered at Rocky. “Stay close to the building, tight against it,” she told him, as if he could understand.

Maybe he could. Ellie hurried out into the sunshine, heeding her own advice, and Rocky trotted between her and Spencer, staying close to the back wall of the shopping center.

Spencer didn’t know if satellite surveillance was acute enough to differentiate between them and the structure. He didn’t know if the two-foot overhang on the main roof, high above, provided cover. But even if Ellie’s strategy was smart, Spencer still
felt
watched.

The stuttering thunder of the chopper grew louder. Judging by the sound, it was up and out of the front parking lot, starting across the roof.

South of the supermarket, the first business was a dry cleaner. A small sign bearing the name of the shop was posted on the employee entrance. Locked.

The sky was full of apocalyptic sound.

Beyond the dry cleaner was a Hallmark card shop. The service door was unlocked. Ellie yanked it open.

Roy Miro leaned through the cockpit door to watch as the other chopper rose higher than the building, hovered for a moment, then angled across the roof toward the back of the supermarket.

Pointing to a clear area of blacktop just south of the market, for the benefit of his own pilot, Roy said, “There, smack in front of Hallmark, put us down right there.”

As the pilot took them down the last twenty feet and maneuvered to the desired landing point, Roy joined the four agents at the door in the passenger cabin. Breathing deeply. Peach in. Green out.

He pulled the Beretta from his shoulder holster. The silencer was still fitted to the weapon. He removed it and dropped it in an inside jacket pocket. This wasn’t a clandestine operation that required silencers, not with all the attention they were attracting. And the pistol would allow more accuracy without the trajectory distortion caused by a silencer.

They touched down.

One of the strike team agents slid the door out of the way, and they exited rapidly, one after the other, into the battering downdraft from the rotor blades.

As Spencer followed Ellie and Rocky through the door into the back room of the card shop, he glanced up into cannonades of sound. Silhouetted against the icy-blue sky, straight overhead, the outer edges of the rotors appeared first, chopping through the dry Utah air. Then the glide-slope antenna on the nose of the craft eased into view. As the leading edge of the downdraft hit him, he stepped inside and pulled the door shut, barely in time to avoid being seen.

The deadbolt had a brass thumb turn on the inside of the door. Although the hit squad would focus first on the back of the market, Spencer engaged the lock.

They were in a narrow, windowless storeroom that smelled of rose-scented air freshener. Ellie opened the next door before Spencer had closed the first. Beyond the storeroom was a small office with overhead fluorescents. Two desks. A computer. Files.

Two more doors led out of there. One stood half open to a tiny bathroom: toilet and sink. The other connected the office to the shop itself.

The long, narrow store was crowded with pyramidal island displays of cards, carousels of more cards, giftwrap, puzzles, stuffed toys, decorative candles, and novelties. The current promotion was for Valentine’s Day, and there was an abundance of overhead banners and decorative wall hangings, all hearts and flowers.

The festiveness of the place was an unsettling reminder that regardless of what happened to him and Ellie and Rocky in the next few minutes, the world would spin on, unheeding. If they were shot dead in Hallmark, their bodies would be hauled away, the blood would be expunged from the carpet, a rose-scented air freshener would be employed in generous sprays, a few more potpourri might be set out for sale, and the stream of lovers coming in to buy cards would continue all but unabated.