Critical Conditions

Twenty-three

Once the three cops drew their guns, every solitary second seemed to linger like a summer cold.

Beside me on the passenger seat of my car, Sunny Hasan was breathing deeply through barely parted lips, her expelled air sounding like a breeze whistling through a narrow canyon. Her wide eyes were fixed on the barn door, and she hadn’t said a word to me since she had perched herself primly on the seat. If I gave her a tub of popcorn and a Pepsi she would appear to be somebody’s date caught up in Bruce Willis’s latest extravaganza at the drive-in.

CR-ACK.

My instinct told me that the shot came from the barn, but I was so stunned by the fierceness of the explosion that I couldn’t be sure.

Sunny screamed and turned toward me. Roughly, I forced her head to her knees and threw myself on top of her. I wondered if the cops were wearing bulletproof vests. I thought of Lucy’s Donna Karan and I knew she wasn’t. I thought of little Simon Purdy, and I hoped his daddy was.

My heart jumped as Sam’s voice creased the night. “Down! Everybody down!”

I whispered, “Stay low,” and felt the deep purr of a whimper roll through Sunny’s body.

CR-ACK.

The second shot seemed even closer, so close it rocked the car.

Sunny said, “Oh my God, oh my God, I’m pregnant. Oh my baby, oh my God. My baby. Don’t hurt my baby.”

The Land Cruiser listed to starboard.

Between Sunny’s sobs, I thought I heard the crunch of gravel. I raised my head at the sound of a motor whirring in the barn and saw the tops of the big white doors start to swing outward.

The side door of the shed flew open and Sam ran out in a crouch, rolled once, and came up behind a propane tank with his automatic in his hand. Although the move had been graceful and athletic, the strategy was flawed. Sam, too, recognized immediately that using a tankful of compressed gas as cover in a gunfight might not be advisable, and ducked away. I couldn’t tell where he went.

Lucy covered Craig Larsen as he made a dash out the front doors of the barn and tried to camouflage himself behind a withered pine. Once they were in place, all the cops were quiet, not eager to draw attention to themselves. Their eyes scanned, trying to find a target, trying to find out if they were a target.

I knew they would all have been safer in the barn. They were risking themselves by spreading out. They were doing it for Sunny and me.

The roar of a high-revving engine fractured the silence, and in the confines of the river valley the whining of high RPMs and the melody of quick gear changes echoed as distinctively as heartbeats.

Of the three cops, Sam had the best cover. He was behind a boulder the size of a Volkswagen bug. He called out, “Anybody hurt?”

I said, “No, we’re fine. Scared.”

“See anything?”

“No.”

“Damn.”

Craig Larsen said something into his radio and waited a few long seconds for a garbled reply.

We all held our breath for the next gunshot. Sunny had lowered herself all the way into the footwell and had quieted her mantra to a hollow whisper: “Don’t hurt my baby, don’t hurt my baby, don’t hurt my baby.”

Except for the brightly lit spot where the cars were parked, the night was dark. I realized that Sunny and I were the only well-defined targets and felt, suddenly, as though I were wearing a bull’s-eye on my chest.

As though someone could read my thoughts, the floodlights died on the barn and I felt the darkness as though it were a blanket made of Kevlar. In a voice loud enough to be heard by her colleagues, Lucy said, “That was me. Just wanted to level the playing field.”

Sam said, “Good. Everybody stay down. Stay cool.”

In the distance, the whine of the motorcycle engine cleared the river valley, and the sound evaporated like mist in the sun.

I said, “He shot out my tire. There were two shots. Maybe he did Craig’s, too.”

Larsen broke his silence. “Too risky to check right now. This could be an ambush. Let’s wait for backup. Everybody be patient, keep your eyes open. Backup’s on the way. It won’t be long.”

Long, I decided, is relative.

Crouched over a frantic, pregnant stranger in the cross-fire of a potential shootout, the twelve minutes we waited for the Summit County sheriff to begin to arrive en masse seemed like an incredibly protracted time.

The reinforcements approached gingerly. They parked their vehicles a distance from the barn and scoured the surrounding woods and pastures carefully as they approached the two vehicles that were parked in the clearing in front of the barn.

It took a good twenty-five more minutes before someone yelled, “All clear.”

I sat upright and helped Sunny back onto her seat. She was holding both hands to her womb.

“You all right, Sunny? Is the baby okay?”

She was looking straight out the windshield, nodding rapidly, like a woodpecker attacking an ash.

I said, “Good. It’s over now. You’re both going to be okay.”

She faced me and narrowed her eyes, still nodding. Finally, she said, “Where’s Haldeman?”

I stared into the dark tunnel of the barn. Just then, Lucy flashed the lights back on and revealed a huge empty cavern where the motor coach was supposed to be.

Stupidly, I said, “I don’t know.”

Sam was with the local cops for a good half-hour before he found me struggling to get my damaged tire back in place under the car. He said, “You want some help with that? We spooked them coming here. Damn perps got away on the motorcycle.”

It wasn’t a question but I said, “That’s the way I worked it out, too. Came down the hill without power, rolled away without power. Started the bike down near the gate. What do you mean, you spooked them? Hand me that thing, there.”

“What thing? This thing?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s called a lug wrench,” Sam said. “They were here, in the barn, when we came down. Think they went out a back door as we came in the front.”

“How do you know?”

“Heat was on. A light was on in a tool room in back. Two cold drinks were open. One beer, one Diet Pepsi. They weren’t careful, we’ll get latents, lots of them. What are you guessing, they took off to the north?”

“That’s the way it sounded to me. The engine noise disappeared in that direction. Though I would think that there would be more options to the south, toward I-70. That’s the way I would have run.”

Sam shook his head. “Backup would have been coming from the south. That’s where the population is. He’d risk running right into them. Anyway, I don’t think he’s running. He’s just returning to ground.”

“What do you mean?”

“They have the RV. They have it parked somewhere to the north. That’s their safe house.” He paused. “Bet you that the vehicles up at the cabin have flat tires, too. They didn’t want to be followed.”

“If they already have the RV, why would they risk coming back here?”

“They’re having generator problems. They were poring through Dead Ed’s service manuals and magazines, trying to figure it out. The books are open on the workbench.”

“If they’re worried about the generator, it means the thing isn’t hooked up to power any place, right? That means they’re not at a campground.”

Sam smiled at me as though I were an imbecile. “To say something that stupid, you must be really tired. A campground? Why didn’t I think of that? Maybe I’ll call the local KOA to see if the kids checked in. How about that? And while I do, you go home. You obviously need some sleep. I’ll catch a ride with Lucy.”

Although I didn’t think the campground conclusion was that stupid, I didn’t have to think twice about the offer. “Great idea. Sam, Sunny’s pregnant. She’s real worried about the baby.”

He nodded. “Listen, you did good with her. You weren’t in a pretty situation there, with the lights on and all, and you didn’t panic.”

It was almost midnight as I was climbing the steep incline of I-70 toward the Eisenhower Tunnel. I figured I would be in bed before one-thirty. And I figured I would wake up to find a message from Sam that it was Madison and her boyfriend, Brad, who were on the run in Dead Ed’s luxury motor coach.

I decided that the time had come to put some more pressure on Merritt to tell me exactly why.