Lowball: A Wild Cards Novel (19 page)

“Can you control them?” he asked.

“Not control,” she said. “But I can fill their minds with happy thoughts.”

“Um, good,” Gordon said. His limbs twitched, wanted to run. “What do we do now?”

“Go to the car. But slowly. You don’t want to run, because that might activate the pack instinct to chase you down.”

“Okay,” Gordon said. He began easing backwards toward the Volvo. Dina moved with him.

Lightning sizzled overhead. In the sudden searing brilliance, Gordon saw two men walking out of the
IDS
gate. One of them had a rifle, the other a pistol. They moved forward onto the floodlit driveway. “You stop there!” one of them called. He was the man Gordon had spoken to earlier, and he wore a cowboy hat against the rain. He brandished his rifle. “We’ll shoot!” he warned.

“Uh,” Gordon said, uncertain. “Do we run now?”

He heard steel enter Dina’s voice. “Not … just … yet,” she said.

The dogs’ ears pricked up, and they turned to look at the two advancing men. One of the dogs rose from its sitting position and took a few steps toward the two, and paused in a hunting posture, leaning forward, one forefoot raised.

“Nobody move!” said the man in the cowboy hat. He raised the rifle to his shoulder as he and his comrade advanced. Neither of them seemed to have noticed their dogs’ uncharacteristic behavior.
Maybe,
Gordon thought,
Dina isn’t filling their minds with happy thoughts any longer.

All three dogs were on their feet now, moving low to the ground as they advanced on the two armed men. And then one of them gave a savage growl and hurled itself at the throat of the man with the rifle.

There was a shot that went nowhere and the man went down. The other two dogs were bounding to their prey, and the man with the pistol started shooting.

“Now we run!” Dina said, and she and Gordon both turned and began racing for the car. Dina’s legs were a lot shorter, but she was fast, and pulled ahead.

There were more shots, followed by an agonized canine howl. Dina gasped and pitched forward onto her face.

Gordon’s nerves gave a jolt. He splashed to a stop, turned, bent over Dina, looked for the bullet wound, asked if she was all right. Her eyes were open and staring. Her face was blank. He could hear her breathing heavily but there was no response.

Gordon shuddered as more shots cracked out. He gave a desperate glance in the direction of the gate, and through the rain beading his spectacles saw that both men were on the ground. Two dogs lay stretched out on the driveway, and one of the men wrestled with the third.

Gordon grabbed Dina by the jacket collar and began hauling her toward the car. He was all too aware that he was underweight and not very strong, and was thankful that she was so small. He was dragging her headfirst over the ground, and he realized he could injure her neck, so he tried to support her head with his forearms.

He was gasping for breath by the time he got her to the Volvo. He groped behind him for the door handle, found it, and swung the door open. The dome light flashed on, silhouetting them perfectly for any shooter taking aim.…

Actinic light flashed from the heavens. Thunder roared. Gordon took a deep breath, bent his knees, and heaved Dina’s head and shoulders up onto the passenger seat. Hot pain shot through his back. He grabbed Dina’s hips and tried to shove her center of gravity up into the car.

Normally he had help moving limp bodies around. Normally it was from slab to gurney, or gurney to slab. Normally he didn’t have to wrestle someone into a bucket seat, or avoid slamming her into the stick shift or getting her jammed against the console.

“Give me some help here!” he told Dina. “Just pull yourself into the car!”

Dina’s eyes stared blankly from her lolling head. He seized her feet and tried to shove them up into the Volvo.

A shot jolted Gordon’s nerves, and he heard the bullet hit pavement nearby. Shoving the limp body was clearly not working, and Gordon dropped Dina’s feet and ran around to the driver’s side. He threw himself into the station wagon, grabbed Dina’s collar with both hands, and tried to haul her toward him. Pain lanced through his back again as he heaved her over the central console. Her head hung in his lap in a swirl of wet, curly hair.

Another shot cracked out. There was an urgent bang somewhere in the car as the bullet struck home.

Gordon reached under Dina’s shoulder and shoved the gearshift lever into drive, then stomped on the accelerator as he cranked the wheel hard over. The Volvo made a screaming U-turn on the highway, and Gordon steadied the vehicle as a flash of lightning showed him the way home.

The car’s acceleration had swung the passenger door closed onto Dina’s feet, which were still dangling out of the car. He switched the dome light off to make himself a poorer target, then put his fingers on Dina’s throat. Her pulse was strong, just a little elevated. He could hear her respiration. He hadn’t seen or felt any blood.

But there had been shots, and she’d collapsed. That was pretty good evidence that she’d been hit somewhere. He drove to his cabin, opened the gate on the road, drove through, and locked the gate behind him. He despaired of dragging Dina into the house, so he drove behind the house, unlocked the barn door, and drove into the barn.

At least he’d have a dry place to make an examination.

Gordon took some of the plastic sheeting he’d draped over his rocketry gear and laid it on the ground next to the passenger door. Then he pulled Dina out of the car and laid her on the sheet. He performed a careful examination and could find no wound.

He had a medical bag in the cabin in case there was an accident with rocketry material. He unlocked the cabin’s rear door, fetched the bag, and returned.

Pulse stable. Blood pressure normal. Respiration normal. Pupils responded normally to light. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with Dina other than catatonia. Which, it had to be said, was really, really wrong.

She’d been in mental contact with the dogs, he thought. She’d been getting them to attack their trainers. And then the shooting had started. The dogs, he thought. The dogs had been shot, presumably killed. And Dina had been in their heads when that happened.

Maybe the shock had been too much.

He put the blood pressure cuff back in his bag, then touched her throat. The skin was chill and clammy. He should get some blankets and insulate Dina against hypothermia.

Then call an ambulance. Then call Franny and the state police and get a warrant and go crashing into
IDS
to free the captives. Officer down. It was one of those calls which would result in immediate action by the authorities. And Dina certainly was down.

He unlocked the rear door of the cabin and went into the hall closet for the scratchy wool trade blankets he kept there. Returning with the blankets under his arm, he saw headlights flash across the front windows.

Gordon walked across the darkened room to the living room window and peered past the drawn curtain. He saw a large panel van parked by his gate, and a man silhouetted against the headlights peering at the house.

Gordon’s heart lurched. He remembered that one of the
IDS
people had seen his car when he’d surveilled the compound the previous day, that they probably had his license number and
ID
by now.

They might have recognized his car, even in the rain. They might have just come straight here. Gordon backed away from the curtain and went to the back door. He locked the door behind him and sprinted to the barn.

Dina was as he’d left her. He put a pair of blankets over her, and her head rolled as, for a moment, her eyes fluttered open and seemed to focus. “Doc…?” she said in a hoarse whisper, and then her head fell back and her eyes closed again.

Gordon knelt and opened one eyelid. The pupil narrowed in the light, but it didn’t focus. She’d lapsed into coma again.

Gordon’s nerves leaped as he heard a roaring engine, followed by the crash of his gate going down in front of the panel van. He stood, looked down at Dina, looked at his car. It seemed futile to try to drag her into his car again, especially as all that he could hope for would be a car chase that he could well lose. He bent again, felt under the blanket, and took Dina’s gun and holster from her belt. He looked at it for a moment as the faint scent of gun oil floated to him, and then he put the holster on his own belt, feeling foolish as he did it.

What was he going to do, start a Western gunfight? These were professional bad guys, kidnappers. They’d shoot him down.

He looked again at his car. He had to draw the pursuit away from the barn.

And he knew exactly where to take them.

He went to the steel cabinet where he kept rocketry supplies and opened it. He took a battery, a set of a half-dozen igniters, a wireless receiver, and his controller. Then he turned off the lights in the barn and got in his car. He put the rocketry gear on the passenger seat.

He waited till he heard a crash as the front door of the house went down, and then he started the Volvo, gunned the engine, and backed out of the barn in a storm of power. Gravel rattled against the car as he swung around, snapped on the lights, and put the transmission in drive. Gordon stomped the accelerator again, wove through a line of evergreen, and took off down the two-rut trail that led across the meadows.

He figured there was no way the bad guys could avoid seeing his departure.

He’d gone a quarter mile before he saw the lights of the van coming after him. Lightning illuminated the rolling terrain, helped him chart his course. The Volvo bucketed up and down as it leaped along the trail, brush beating on the grille, rocks cracking against the floorboards.

The station wagon slithered down a slope and hit what seemed to be a shallow pond between it and the next slope. The tail kicked out, and the wheels spun as Gordon tried to correct. Forward motion died in mere seconds. Gravel hammered against the rear panels as the wheels spun uselessly.

Gordon grabbed his rocket gear and bolted from the car. Rain drummed on his skull as he splashed through standing water and began to run up the nearest slope. Brush clawed at his legs.

The van crowned the slope behind him and dove toward his stalled car. Gordon panted for breath. The van splashed into the same lake as the Volvo and came to a halt, wheels spinning. Two men jumped out and charged the Volvo, finding no one inside.

A flash of lightning turned the scene into day as Gordon crowned the slope, and Gordon heard a pair of shouts as he was spotted. But the flash had illuminated something else—the berms that surrounded the shed filled with rocket fuel.

Gordon dragged himself forward. He dragged himself up the nearest berm, then ran down the steep slope and slammed to a tooth-clattering halt against the steel door of the shed. Breath heaved in and out of his lungs. He wasn’t used to running. He wasn’t used to panic, or to fighting, or being soaked to the skin.

Better use his brains then, he decided.

He fumbled at his belt for the key to the padlock on the door, then opened the lock and threw it over his shoulder. He tore open the door, ran inside, and reached for the tank that held the syntin, the Soviet liquid rocket fuel. He opened the valve and the fuel began to drain, filling the shack with a rich hydrocarbon scent. Gordon dropped an igniter into the fuel, put the battery on the concrete floor nearby, twisted wires around the terminals, and ran back into the open. He left the door invitingly ajar, ran around the building, and scrambled up the far berm. At the top he tripped and fell, and as he lay sprawled in the grass at the foot of the berm he heard an accented voice say, “He’s in there!”

Gordon got to his feet and felt pain shoot through his right ankle. He lurched toward the grove of hawthorn at the far end of the meadow.

As he ran he looked at the remote control in his hand and pushed the rocker switch to
ON
. The
LED
s flicked from Safety to Armed. He heard the door to the shed go booming back on its hinges as the intruders stormed inside, and he heaved in a sobbing breath and pressed the Fire button. He was faintly surprised to find that the berms worked exactly as they were supposed to.

“The perps were blown into their constituent atoms,” Gordon told Dina two nights later. “The crime scene guys weren’t able to find a single piece of remains.”

Dina seemed impressed. “I have to say that once you make up your mind to do something,” she said, “you’re damned thorough.”

“You’ll have to speak up,” Gordon said. “I’m still a little deaf.”

The shed had exploded and then kept exploding, going on for several minutes at least. Gordon had watched from the shelter of the hawthorns as one blast after another rocked the peaceful meadow and sent flame reaching toward the low clouds overhead.

It had to be admitted that he’d put a lot of oxidizer in that shed.

For their dinner Gordon had taken her to Au Pied de Cochon, the New York incarnation of a well-known Parisian brasserie. The linen was crisp, the waitstaff efficient, and the tulip-shaped lights cast a fine mellow glow over the dining room with its dark wood paneling. The restaurant offered proteins in substantial quantities, which given Dina’s carnivore instincts seemed appropriate.