The Lawless Kind (8 page)

Ahead of her loomed two massive boulders. Unlike the spectral blue of the moonlit sands, these boulders were the red of copper, or dried blood. A narrow gap offered flight between the towering columns and she rushed towards them. In her peripheral vision the shadows flickered as her stalker gained on her. If she could make it through that narrow gap surely the shadow man would not pursue her, because on that side assistance was waiting. There was blackness between the boulders, yet weirdly she could see through it, all the way to the beckoning figure at the far end. She did not know who her saviour was, couldn’t make out his face, but his beckoning arm was enough to tell her he was her lifeline. A ragged cry tore from her throat and she ran on, her feet slipping and sliding now in mud that had no place in this terrain.

She tripped and fell.

To save the baby she twisted, and went down on one side, sliding in the deepening quagmire. She floundered to get up and in her haste the swaddled child flew from her grasp. Kirstie bit down on her bottom lip, straining to reach the child. Unable to grab the trailing blanket, she went to her hands and knees and scrambled forward, the mud now baked-hard clay as she toiled up an incline towards the sanctuary of the boulders. Almost as if the baby was attached to a line and the distant figure between the boulders reeled it in, the blanket continued to slide away from her grasp. She lunged and grabbed it, pulling the bundle tight to her chest.

Distantly a voice called to her.

The figure continued to urge her forward. In the swirling shadows she could make out eyes, at once blue, green and brown as though the colours shifted like the desert sand. She recognised those eyes, and she felt the burgeoning of hope.

She stumbled on, and now the rocks rose up on both sides. Yet the gap between them was too narrow, and so black she feared she’d been struck blind by fear.

But that didn’t last.

Eyelids flickered open in the dark wedge where light failed to exist. The irises were the same pale grey as her own and those of the baby in her arms, a family trait. Kirstie stepped backwards; more afraid of this than anything that had gone before. The blanket was moving now against her body, and she looked down, hoping to find her baby boy squirming in her grasp. The baby was as inert as the desert around her. Naked, it was cold and hard to the touch. She stared at a porcelain face, the painted features cracked and crumbling to dust.

No, no, no . . .

The eyes in the darkness moved towards her, and the shadows formed and solidified around the knife it held. She opened her arms and the porcelain doll fell and shattered at her feet, as she invited in the blade that plunged towards her. Her cry of terror was not that she was about to die, but that she had failed her boy.

She continued to scream as her son, Benjamin, grown to manhood under his father’s tutelage, rammed the blade deep into her throat, again and again.

Chapter 10

Reaction made me reach for the gun in my waistband, but after a few seconds of mild panic I pushed back the fog of sleep and realised that Kirstie had merely cried out in her dreams. I noted the sweat pasting her auburn hair to her face, the rapid flicker of her eyelids as she continued to endure some horrendous nightmare. It was a second or so before I realised she was slumped across my lap, my left arm draped protectively over her.

‘I didn’t want to disturb you,’ Rink said from the driving position, ‘seeing as you were both so comfortable.’

‘Jesus, Rink . . .’ I slowly extricated my arm.

‘Both of you sleeping like babies. Well, you were until something seemed to upset the lady.’

Whether it was our subdued conversation or some final dramatic act in her dream, Kirstie snapped awake. She was looking at my knees, and it was as if she wondered where the hell her nightmare had taken her now. She shot bolt upright and stared at me from the opposite corner of the car.

‘Oh my God! I’m so sorry!’

‘Hey, no problem,’ I reassured her. ‘If it’s any consolation, I didn’t even know you’d fallen asleep on me until a few seconds ago.’

Kirstie glanced accusingly at Rink, but my buddy merely grinned. Her scrutiny went back to me, and in particular my thighs. A dark patch stained the denim near my right knee.

‘Oh, God! I drooled all over you.’ She batted at the side of her face, embarrassed all to hell, as she sought to wipe away any incriminating evidence.

‘That’s a novelty for Hunter . . . women drooling over him.’

‘Glad you find it funny, Rink,’ I grumbled.

‘Now you know what it’s like to be me.’ He broke into a loud crack of laughter.

The joke helped bring any further embarrassment to a stop, for both of us. I shook my head in mock disbelief. ‘You’ll get used to Rink soon enough, Kirstie. He has this inflated impression of his looks. When I look at him I see a bulldog chewing a wasp, but some women seem to find the rough-and-ready look attractive.’

‘Don’t confuse “rough-and-ready” with “rugged”,’ Rink said, still laughing.

‘Or “rugged” with “conceited”?’

‘No harm in believing in yourself, brother,’ he countered.

To Kirstie I said, ‘That’s why he never wears a hat. He can’t find one big enough for his head.’

The banter was serving its purpose. It alleviated Kirstie’s embarrassment, but also pushed away the lingering memory of her dream. She tucked back her hair and reached for the cap that had fallen on the floor between my feet. As she leaned close I experienced a mild flutter of electricity that rode my body all the way to my throat, and my senses were filled with her closeness and the scent of her perfume. It was an intimate moment. Kirstie was staring at me, and I looked enquiringly.

‘You OK?’

‘You were in my dream.’

‘I was?’

‘Yes. But not like that.’ She gently shoved Rink’s shoulder with the heel of her palm. ‘I was being chased.’

‘By me?’

‘No . . . someone else . . .’ She didn’t expound, but I noted a flicker of horror dart across her features again. ‘But you were there. You were leading me to safety, but, well, I didn’t make it.’

‘Want to tell me who was chasing you?’

‘I . . . I don’t remember.’

Kirstie was lying, that was obvious, but I wasn’t about to press her. My attention was drawn by Rink’s soft hiss. I looked past him to lights in the road ahead. They were red lights, strobing off and on, interspersed by a blazing white that cut harshly into my retina. Someone stepped away from a car, waving a flashlight up and down, then directly on the front of our car. The torch bleached the windscreen; trail dust and dead bugs fogging the glass.

‘Fucking inept cops,’ Rink growled. ‘You’d think they’d know better than blinding a goddamn driver. What does he want to do . . . run me off the goddamn road?’

Yeah, I thought, even an inept cop should be more careful than that.

I checked the position of my gun, ensuring that the tail of my shirt concealed it.

Chapter 11

Having dozed for who knew how long, I had no clue where we were, other than it was somewhere remote. Still dark, with a patchwork of stars amid low cumulus clouds, the horizon was a meandering wave of hills and valleys, where only a few pinpoints of light showed habitation. On the opposite side sheer cliffs pushed for the heavens, broken fingers of stone interspersed by large and forbidding bulwarks. There were certainly no streetlights to illuminate the car sporting the gumball lights. Our headlights were countered by the strobing red and white, making the figure moving towards us appear to stutter in his stride with each flickering beam.

‘What the hell is this all about?’ Rink swayed uneasily as he applied pressure to the brake pedal.

‘Whatever it is, I don’t like it.’ I pressed a button on my cell phone, sending a prearranged signal to Harvey a few miles back.

Kirstie looked fraught.

‘Don’t worry, just keep your head down like before and let me do the talking. Here . . . pull your cap down.’ I eased the peak round so that it covered much of her face, even as she settled into the corner as if deep in slumber. The cop would have to lean down on my side to see Kirstie, and I’d do my best to block his view.

The flashlight beam stroked the windscreen, sending daggers of light inside.

‘Asshole,’ Rink said. ‘He’s deliberately trying to blind us.’

‘Playing the big man, trying to intimidate us,’ I muttered.

I ignored the approaching figure, peering into the deep shadows between the buttresses of rock nearby. Nothing.

‘Son of a bitch!’ Rink transferred his foot to the gas and pushed the car forward.

Immediately I snapped to battle mode, grabbed Kirstie and shoved her down into the space in the well behind Rink’s seat. In the next instant I slipped out my SIG and racked the slide. Then I snatched a look to see what the fuss was all about.

The figure approaching us
was
deliberately blinding us, to conceal the shotgun he held braced to his shoulder with his opposite hand. As Rink pushed the car towards him, he had to move out of the way, drop the torch in order to get full control of the gun. He was wearing a uniform, I noted, but this was no random police stop. He fired the shotgun, and flame jetted through the air currents a full foot in length from the muzzle. Thankfully he was off balance and his shot ill-aimed. The lead pellets struck the top right of the windscreen, starring it, but the angle and velocity of the car helped redirect the shot up and away.

Rink yanked down on the wheel, aiming the car sideways at the cop, who had to leap for his life. He went down on his knees, but then twisted quickly and fired off another wild shot. Hitting the window button, I swung my SIG to cover him but was loath to shoot him. Despite firing on us, he was still a cop and out of bounds where my codes of practice were concerned. In the dark I caught only brief details of his uniform, but it appeared official – though I wasn’t familiar with the local police dress code. Then again, his approach – not to mention his choice of weaponry, which I now recognised as a sawn-off pump-action shotgun – wasn’t regular police tactics.

We tore away from him as Rink trod on the gas.

The cop fired another load of shot after us, and the dull concussion echoed through the car as the pellets struck the trunk. I checked Kirstie was unhurt. Her face was a pale oval, her eyes large and startled, but there was no hint of pain. Up close a sawn-off is a devastating weapon, but not much use against a car moving at speed.

Then we were flashing past his parked car, and there was nothing that marked it as an official police vehicle. It was a bottle-green pick-up truck, the wheel arches corroded. The rack of lights on top looked jerry-rigged, fed by a cable running through the open driver’s window, probably to the cigarette lighter inside.

‘That was no cop,’ Rink said.

‘What the hell was he then?’

‘Carjacker? Robber? Beats me.’

‘Probably not alone in that case.’

My words proved prophetic. A hundred yards ahead of us another pick-up truck burst from hiding in a ravine that cut like a knife slash through the cliffs. The headlights were dead, but only until the truck hit the highway and swung towards us. Then they flicked to high beam.

‘Bastard!’ Rink cried as the harsh light invaded our car.

Quickly checking behind, I saw the first man running for his vehicle, even as a third truck burst from concealment in our wake and accelerated after us.

‘We should’ve expected something like this,’ Rink growled. ‘Especially after what happened at the border.’

Even though the cameras at the checkpoint had observed us, it didn’t follow that an ambush should have been laid for us here. I trusted that Harvey or one of the others would have spotted an obvious tail, so there was no way anyone could have known where we were heading. This had to be random: robbers lying in wait for the unwary. Yet something about the scenario troubled me more than the prospect of fighting off armed thieves.

Rink ducked just as the windscreen exploded as a bullet struck the upper left corner. Chunks and slivers of glass rained over me, and out of instinct I squeezed my lids tight to avoid injury. When I looked again, the truck in our path was weaving side to side, attempting to block all lanes of the road. What did the driver think we were going to do? Stop?