The Collective (42 page)

Hate raged in her. They still wanted Leyla. It had been the very worst thing they could have said.

“She’s
all
I think about,” Cait whispered, starting back into the shelter. “This way.”

Voss ran to a patrol car, her gun aimed at the sky. Turcotte slammed up against the vehicle beside her and leveled his own weapon, taking aim over the police car’s roof.

“Goddamn bus stop,” Turcotte snarled. “Nobody’s gonna have a clear shot.”

“Yeah,” Voss agreed, but she didn’t see that as a bad thing. She wanted an opportunity to talk to Cait McCandless and if that meant through the open door of the bus shelter with the woman and her friends still armed, that was all right.

She unclipped the radio from her belt. “Hold all fire,” she said. “Repeat, hold all fire. Anyone puts a bullet anywhere near that baby, I’ll shoot you myself!”

The whole street took a breath. Car engines rumbled and the Wendy’s sign buzzed with electricity. The Cadillac that had brought McCandless and her baby here was completely hemmed in. This was good.

Voss turned to a police sergeant with a bullhorn and held out her hand. He gave it to her and she toggled the switch, getting a burst of feedback, then moved around beside the car to get a clearer view of the bus shelter, and to make sure that McCandless could see her.

She lifted the bullhorn to her lips, and a gunshot cracked the night sky. The bullhorn smashed into her mouth just as something slammed into her left shoulder and spun her around. Voss sprawled on the ground, blood quickly filling her mouth, and bright pain blossomed in her shoulder.

As shock began to set in, she tried to make sense of it all—the angle, the impact—and she knew the shot had not come from the bus shelter. Someone on the roof across the street had pulled the trigger on her, aiming for her head, not anticipating the bullhorn. The shoulder wound was a ricochet.

Tried to kill me
, she had time to think, just before shock overwhelmed her and she sank into darkness.

The instant she heard the gunshot, Cait knew they had to run. If she was going to die, she would die trying her best to protect her baby girl, not standing still waiting for a bullet.

“Your car!” she snapped at Jordan. “Go!”

Lynch didn’t hesitate. He darted out the back entrance of the bus shelter and ran low across the lot toward a small stand of trees. Cait held tightly to Leyla as a volley of shots rang out.

“Cait!” Ronnie said, drawing the gun he’d worn strapped to his leg. “Don’t!”

She took aim at his left eye. “If my baby dies, you as good as killed her.”

Jordan grabbed her arm. “Leave him. Run.”

But before they could follow Lynch, Ronnie shouted Jordan’s name. Cait thought he might shoot, but instead he tossed something to Jordan.

“You’ll need these, dumbass,” he said, a world of sorrow in his voice.

They were his keys. The car they’d arrived in had been Ronnie’s. Cait looked at him, saw that he realized what a mistake he’d made, and then he made a break for it, racing out the front of the shelter onto the sidewalk and into the street. He took aim at the sharpshooters on the roof across from them and started firing. Before it even happened, Cait could see his death in her mind’s eye.

She bumped Jordan and then the two of them were running, following Lynch, who raced from the trees toward Ronnie’s pristine Ford Mustang. Leyla woke and started wailing in Cait’s ear and her chest tightened at the sound as it always did. A Hartford cop ran out to try to stop them and Lynch shot him in the leg. The officer shouted as he fell, dropping his gun. Bullets flew, plinking the hood and sides of the Mustang, but by then Lynch had flung open the door and climbed into the back.

Cops and FBI agents came running. They hadn’t blocked in the Mustang—presumably because Ronnie had been the one to call them—and now they were learning what a mistake that had been. Cait fired twice in the air, not willing to randomly kill people when she couldn’t be sure who among them was an enemy. They fired at Jordan but no one even took aim at her. A bullet grazed Jordan’s shoulder blade and he staggered forward, barely managed to keep his feet under him, and then dove into the Mustang through the door Lynch had left open. As Cait followed, Leyla screaming in her arms, Jordan scrambled into the driver’s seat, jammed the key into the ignition, and the engine gave a lion’s roar. He slammed it into gear and turned the wheel, spinning in a half circle that
nearly threw Cait and Leyla out onto the street. The door swung wide. She had to throw her gun on the floor in order to reach out and grab the door to slam it shut, and then she snagged the seat belt and tried pulling it around them both.

“No. Get on the floor!” Jordan yelled.

“Screw that.”

One of the back windows blew in, safety glass scattering everywhere. Lynch fired through the broken window and then rolled the other down. As he did, Cait strapped herself and Leyla in and plucked her gun from the floor.

By the time she glanced around, gun at the ready, looking for someone to fire at, Jordan had aimed the Mustang at a cluster of police cars blocking off the street west of the Wendy’s. He jerked the wheel to the left and floored it, and she saw his target—the place on the corner where the curb had been cut and graded for wheelchair access. Half on the sidewalk, they shot past the cordon, the front right quarter of the Mustang slamming into the rear of a police car. The shriek of metal gave way to Leyla’s shrieks, but they were through, tearing through the intersection and headed away from the scene. Unmarked cars—maybe FBI, maybe police—gunned out of parking spaces, but Jordan veered around them to cut himself a path, and a dozen police cars tried to navigate through the mess he left behind.

Gunshots chased them, plinked the trunk. A bullet came through the rear windshield, splintering it with cracks, and lodged in the dashboard in front of Cait. She glanced back and saw Lynch bleeding from a wound in his side. He’d caught one back there and the crimson stain on his shirt was spreading, but he looked all right for the moment.

Sirens blared. Engines roared. They were coming.

Jordan cut the wheel and as the Mustang shot into a narrow side street, she saw a sign that made her want to cry.

“Dead end, Jordan! It’s a dead end!”

“I got it,” he said, hands gripped tightly to the wheel. He glanced at her, eyes full of fear and love, and she understood for the first time that this sweet, shy man was not just her friend, that he cared deeply for her, and maybe always had.

It didn’t help.

“Jordan—”

“I got it!” he said again.

The old apartment houses and duplexes were dark. A kid’s tricycle lay overturned on the sidewalk. Cars too nice for the neighborhood were parked nose to nose with rusting heaps. But as they rounded a curve, she saw the dark, sprawling silhouette of an elementary school ahead. Its parking lot was the dead end.

Blue lights flashed way behind them, but the cops had not missed the Mustang’s turn. They were following.

Jordan raced the car past the school and across the baseball field behind it, toward a chain-link fence. But just as she was about to speak again, she saw the opening in the fence, a path that came in from a neighborhood on the other side of the baseball field. The Mustang barely fit between two concrete pylons, which scraped the sides of the car as Jordan steered between them, and then they were past the fence and into a warren of old brick townhouses, narrow streets, and turns. Jordan took a right, floored the accelerator, and just when blue lights should have appeared behind them, he turned left and went down a hill, underneath some kind of highway overpass, and up into a road construction site on the other side.

Cait could barely breathe as she ran her hands over her crying baby, searching for any sign of injury.

Less than a minute later, the Mustang crawled along an alley running behind a pool hall, a liquor store, and a small Irish pub. Jordan’s aged but well-loved Mercedes sat parked by a loading dock behind the liquor store. He pulled up next to it and killed the engine, exhaling with relief.

Cait felt a moment of almost hysterical elation. A car the cops hadn’t seen. No broken glass. No bullet holes. She wondered how far they would get, if they could make it to the place where Lynch’s associates, his Resistance, would be waiting.

And then she thought of Ronnie.

“I’m so sorry I got you into this,” she said, taking Jordan’s hand. “You and Ronnie.”

He hid his grief poorly, but made the effort, squeezing her
fingers. “Don’t be sorry. I promised you a long time ago I’d always be there when you needed me. And here I am. Ronnie … he thought he was helping.”

“I know.”

“It was stupid,” Jordan said. “He should have trusted you more.”

She searched his eyes, their gazes locked for a lingering moment.

“Let’s get moving,” Lynch muttered behind them, a hand pressed over his wound. “I try not to get shot more than once a night.”

Somehow his gravelly voice seemed to comfort Leyla, who ceased her wailing. Cait looked at Lynch and realized what he had done for her—for them—and knew they would live or die together from this moment on.

She nodded at Jordan, and they all abandoned the Mustang. At some point they would have to stop and deal with the wounds Lynch and Jordan had sustained—the latter just a graze off his clavicle—but not here.

It occurred to Cait as she climbed into the Mercedes that she had nothing for Leyla now. No milk, no bottle, no car seat … nothing. They had the clothes on their backs and their guns. Until they could stop somewhere safely, that would have to be enough.

Voss woke up cursing, wanting to throttle the paramedic who was putting pressure on her wound. The copper stink of her own blood filled her head and she stared at him, this handsome blond kid forcing his weight onto her shoulder to staunch the bleeding.

“That
really
hurts,” she rasped.

He smiled. “Pain means you’re alive.”

Smart-ass. But he turned to his partner and called for a needle full of something that sent a wave of blissful relief cascading through her in what seemed like seconds. They kept working, bandaging her, setting up a drip, and now that the pain had abated some, she saw that she was in the back of an ambulance, but it didn’t feel like they were moving.

“What’s going on?” she asked, licking her lips, which felt swollen, like she’d had Novocain or too much to drink.

The blond paramedic—the guy looked barely old enough to vote—shot her a worried look. “You were shot, Agent Voss. Do you remember?”

Her hand fluttered up, brushing the question away. “I got that part, junior. What happened to … McCandless?”

Motion at the rear doors drew the attention of the paramedics, the first time Voss had noticed the doors were still open, and she glanced over and saw Turcotte poking his head inside.

“You were supposed to tell me if she came around,” Turcotte said.

“Give us a second,” Blondie said, making sure the gurney wasn’t going to be moving during transport. His partner climbed out to make room for Turcotte, who hoisted himself into the ambulance, drawing a dark look from Blondie. “You’ve got thirty seconds, Agent. Then you can follow us to the hospital if you want.”

Turcotte gave him a look suggesting he get out and leave them alone to talk, but Blondie wasn’t having it. Voss wanted to kiss him, but maybe that was the painkillers. It was nice to have someone watching over her, especially tonight.

“Someone took a shot at me,” she said as Turcotte knelt beside her gurney.

“A pretty good shot,” Turcotte replied, trying to sound lighthearted despite the glint of rage in his eyes.

“Better than that. If he hadn’t hit the bullhorn, he’d have put that bullet through my face.”

The bullhorn. Right. That’s why my mouth is so swollen
. She searched her teeth with her tongue and found a bloody vacancy, with a jagged fragment of tooth still jutting from the gum.

“You gonna live?” Turcotte asked.

“For now. Can you dig out my phone? I’ve got to call in. Does my voice sound funny?”

Turcotte nodded. “Like you had a stroke, but it’s the drugs. Listen, Rachael, I called ICD already, spoke directly to Theodora Wood. She wants an update as soon as you’re out of surgery, but otherwise, the case is going to your partner—”

“Josh,” Voss muttered, the drugs thickening her tongue even further. “Thass good. Tell him … thissis a clusterfuck. Norris and wassisname, Arsenault, weren’t even here. FBI shot me.”

Turcotte flinched. “You think one of my people shot you on purpose?”

Even as fuzzy as her brain had become, she managed to narrow her eyes and glare at him. “Don’t be an asss. You think so, too. They had … orders not to shoot. And when someone pulls the trigger, instead of at McCann … McCandless, the bullet’s aimed at my fuggin skull? Thass not a accident.”

Unconsciousness flowed in at the edges of her mind again. She blinked and when she opened her eyes, Turcotte had started to rise to depart.

“Ed …”

“I need to talk to Hollenbach,” he said.

“Yeah. You do.” She closed her eyes, then struggled to open them again. “One lasst thing.”