Finders/Keepers

Thirteen

In a perfect world, there would have been police sirens before she shot Reese. Then again, in a perfect world she would be happily married, living in a house in the suburbs while plotting her next brunch with Carmen.

But it wasn’t a perfect world, and there were no police sirens (at least, none that she could hear), and when she shot him, Reese stumbled but he didn’t go down. For some reason, that didn’t surprise her whatsoever. She always knew the man would be hard to kill, that one bullet wouldn’t do it. Maybe two might, but before she could put that theory into practice, he grabbed the woman wearing too much red lipstick by the arm and dragged her in front of him to use her as a human shield. Lipstick was screaming her head off while fumbling wildly with her purse, as if there were some kind of life-saving device in there that would magically transport her to safety. Allie wished that were the case; then she could have finished Reese off.

She saw his eyes instead, zeroing in on her from behind Lipstick, even as his right hand disappeared behind his back in the direction of his holstered sidearm. Allie thought about taking a second shot anyway — going for the head this time, even if she could just barely see it over Lipstick’s left shoulder — but quickly dismissed that idea when she saw the sheer determination in his eyes while blood dripped to the floor between his and his hostage’s feet.

Christ, the man isn’t human.

Screams — this time from multiple people and directions — and stampeding footsteps from the dining room behind her made the decision for her.

She took one, two, then three steps backward before spinning and darting out of the hallway. She instantly collided with a wall of people — men, women, and children — trying to flee the large room. Half of them were pouring out of the diner doors, the other half flooding into the connecting store on the other side.

Allie slipped her gun inside her jacket flap and let herself be carried toward the closest door with the flow of human traffic. A woman holding a young boy by the wrist ran next to her, eyes wide and hair flailing like streamers. The boy glanced at Allie and smiled, oblivious to what was happening. She smiled back, her heart beating faster and faster as she waited for Reese to come out of the hallway behind her and open up.

But he didn’t, and soon the cold night air swarmed her as she stepped outside. The woman with the boy went right while others went left and forward. She hesitated for a moment, got pushed in the back, staggered, and had to right herself and get her bearings.

Now what?

There, across the parking lot — the black and red semitrailer parked in front of the white Ford. Both vehicles looked so far away, and maybe that was because they were. But she knew exactly where to look for them, especially the big rig, which hadn’t moved an inch. She couldn’t make out Dwight in the shadows, but he would be nearby. That is, if he wasn’t already headed toward her in reaction to the chaos.

She stopped thinking about Dwight and focused singularly on the semitrailer. It was the only thing worth a damn right now — stopping it here, now, before it could leave with Sara and the others. She hated to abandon her original mission, but twenty-three lives was twenty-two more than just Faith’s. Maybe, eventually, she could pick up Faith’s trail again, but in the here and now there was only one choice, especially in light of what Reese had said back inside the diner.

“Our employers. They want us to cut our losses.”

She knew exactly what that meant, because to the men behind all of this, Sara and the others were just assets to be used and thrown away. They were just numbers — money, specifically — and not human beings, easy to divorce from.

“Our employers…”

She would find them, one of these days. Sooner or later, she would uncover their identities and she would show up at their front doors. She was good at that — finding people who didn’t want to be found. And the operation was large enough that there would be cracks, soft spots to exploit. And she had time. A lot of time and money.

But that was for later, because right now the only thing that mattered was making sure the black and red semitrailer stayed exactly where it was.

She started moving, then sprinting, then full-on racing across the parking lot, all the while willing the big rig to remain still, to stay there, stay there and don’t you goddamn move—

It came out of nowhere — a powerful hand latching onto her right arm, almost at the elbow, and snapping her out of her stride so suddenly she thought her entire arm might rip off. Allie lost her balance and almost fell down, but by some miracle her shoes managed to find the hard pavement and she spun around, her gun hand coming out from inside her jacket where she had hidden it since exiting the diner.

“What the fuck happened?”

Dwight, standing behind her (How the hell did he get back there?) with his hand on her arm, the two of them surrounded by fleeing truckers and diner employees and civilians alike, the sound of car engines firing up around them forcing Dwight to shout.

She didn’t get a chance to answer him because Dwight saw the gun in her hand and—

She couldn’t finish bringing her gun hand up because of his grip around her elbow, so Allie was forced to swing with her left fist, but she was right-hand dominant and although she’d spent a lot of time strengthening both hands, she didn’t quite have the power in the punch that she would have wanted, something she was woefully aware of as soon as she made contact with his right cheek. His head turned slightly from the blow, but there was zero chance he was going to go down, so instead of (pointlessly) swinging again, she threw her right shoulder at his chest. Dwight was still holding onto her right arm, so he had no defenses when she launched into him.

He stumbled back, letting go of her at the same time he collided with a trucker in a red ball cap that was running past them. The man fell to the hardtop with Dwight on top of him even as more people swerved around them. The trucker might have screamed, but against the chaos of thundering footsteps, shouts, and car engines revving up all across the parking lot, Allie wasn’t even sure she could hear a gunshot—

Dwight, still sitting on top of the shocked trucker, was swinging his hand out from behind his back, somehow having managed to draw his weapon between the time she punched him and when he fell back down.

But Allie already had her gun out, and she lifted it, saw his eyes go wide — at this range, she couldn’t have missed even if she wanted to, and he knew it — when something crashed into her from the side and sent her flying to the parking lot floor. The concrete bit into her flesh despite her clothes, but thank God she had the presence of mind to keep her head up, or else she might have bounced it against the pavement like a bowling ball.

Large, meaty fingers grabbed her right wrist and someone (a man) shouted, “I got ’er! I got the crazy bitch!”

Crazy bitch? she thought, even as she struggled to turn over onto her back, the hand refusing to let go of hers. Worse, there were now two hands on her wrist and one of them was trying to pry her fingers off the gun’s grip.

A man at least a hundred pounds heavier than her was sitting on top of her chest trying to wrestle the gun away, his face contorted in intense concentration, his lips greasy with whatever he had been eating before he fled the diner. He was huge, and his weight on top of her was like a house-size boulder pinning her to the ground, and Allie had no delusions she was going to win this wrestling match.

“I got ’er!” he shouted again. “Someone give me a hand! Hey, someone give me a friggin’ hand!”

You idiot! she thought, and wanted to shout at him but simply didn’t have the strength. Getting blindsided by a man his size had knocked more than just the breath from her; it had dazed her, and being sat on by him afterward hadn’t helped. Her head was still swirling from the shock, and he had already managed to pry two fingers off the Sig Sauer’s grip and was working on the third.

The one bright spot was that absolutely no one had stopped to lend the man the assistance he was shouting for. Everyone kept running, going for their parked cars. She could smell plenty of burning rubber as vehicles continued taking off around them. It made sense, of course, why everyone was fleeing. Who was going to stick around when someone was shooting up the place? It might have just been one gunshot (hers), but she doubted if anyone realized that once the stampede began.

She didn’t care about any of them at the moment. The fact that they were fleeing was good because it meant less possible collateral damage. Right now she had to focus on the fat man on top of her trying to pry her fingers off her gun even while his weight threatened to shut off her ability to do something as simple as breathe.

“Let go!” the man shouted, spittle flying from his mouth and hitting her in the face. “Let go of the gun, you crazy bitch!”

She couldn’t lift herself off the ground far enough to hit him in his bloated face, so Allie went for the next best thing — his groin. It was squatting on her chest, within easy reach, and completely unprotected.

You’re such a cliché, she thought, and swung again with her left fist.

He gulped, cheeks ballooning as if he was going to vomit, before he leaned forward and raised himself slightly off her. Better yet, his grip on her right wrist lessened, which allowed her to jerk her arm, and the gun, away.

Of course she couldn’t just shoot him — he was, after all, just being a (vulgar and sexist pig) Good Samaritan — but that didn’t mean she couldn’t grab him by the shoulders and throw him off her. He offered little resistance and landed face-first on the concrete beside her even as she struggled to her knees.

She expected to find Dwight standing over her, having waited with a smug grin on his face all this time as she struggled with the Good Samaritan. But Dwight was gone and so was the man he had crashed into. There was just a hat where the two of them had been, and as she stared at it, red and green lights splashed across it and the parking lot floor around her.

When she looked up, Allie was surprised to see two squad cars pulling into the truck stop. She recognized their colors. State troopers. Their sirens were blaring so loudly that she couldn’t fathom how she hadn’t heard them until now. She guessed she was concentrating so hard on trying not to lose the gun to the Good Samaritan that the cops could have parked right next to them and she wouldn’t have been aware of it until their tussle was over.

The fact that they were coming in with sirens wailing surprised her, but that quickly gave way to reality — she had fired off a shot in the diner and someone had probably called 911 as a result. That, combined with what she had told Lucy to tell the troopers and someone, somewhere, had put two and two together and decided, as Lucy would say, “shit had gone down.” That meant taking the truck stop quietly and cautiously was no longer possible.

Or she hoped that was the case anyway, and that she wasn’t just dealing with a bunch of idiots who responded to her message like a bunch of Rambos. Either way, the squad cars were tearing through the parking lot only to slam on their brakes as fleeing vehicles blocked their path. Sedans, trucks, and semis were all moving at once, so many that they reminded her of fishes in a pond, each and every one of them heading for the multiple exits.

Block the exits, you idiots! she wanted to shout at the squad cars, but knew how stupid that was. There were only two so far, and it was going to take a hell of a lot more cruisers to do that. But right now, there was only one vehicle that she cared about.

She looked across the parking lot at where the black and red semitrailer and the Ford would be and immediately caught a glimpse of a running figure as it dodged a station wagon that nearly ran it over.

Dwight.

She scrambled to her feet and jumped over the Good Samaritan still rolling around on the floor, cupping his crotch. She focused on Dwight — he was moving fast, even as the red and green lights of more state troopers began filling the truck stop, flickering across the parking lot around her and turning the place into some kind of wild discotheque.

“Dwight!” she shouted.

She was hoping he would slow down at the sound of her voice and look back, and maybe lose a precious second or two (or five) and allow her to make up some ground. But he didn’t, and kept running. He might not have even heard her over the sirens and car engines and horns honking as people came dangerously close to colliding. It was a madhouse if she had ever seen one, except this one just happened to involve hundreds of tons of moving metal.

Then she saw it and instantly forgot all about Dwight: The black and red semitrailer’s headlights had turned on, the stream of bright lights cutting through the shadowed edge of the lot drawing her eyes.

No. No, no, no, no.

She was forty yards away and closing fast, but it wasn’t going to be quick enough. She knew it without having to think about it. She would never reach it in time, and when the driver finally put the rig in gear it was going to leave with Sara and the other girls in the back and she would have failed both Faith and Sara—

No!

No, no, no, no!

The ceiling light inside the semi’s cab flickered on as someone opened a door. It had to be the passenger side, since the driver was already behind the steering wheel and she could make out his form struggling with his seatbelt. The new light gave her something to focus on — more importantly, it gave her a target.

She fired, again and again, using the cab’s light as a marker, even as she willed it to stay on, stay on, goddammit, stay on just a little longer. She ran and fired and could feel the gun getting lighter in her hand, but she didn’t stop.

She couldn’t. She couldn’t.

Allie mouthed a curse when the cab light finally blinked out of existence, but there was also relief because the semi had still not moved. She concentrated on the headlights, the most visible part of the vehicle, and every second that it stayed frozen — even as she got closer — was a victory for her, for Sara, for all the other girls inside that long trailer, probably terrified to death of what was happening.

She eventually stopped shooting, but she never stopped running. Her breath hammered out of her, her heartbeat racing out of control from exhaustion and adrenaline and fear the rig would start moving. She didn’t know how many bullets she had left in the P250, but the gun felt remarkably light even as she swung her arms back and forth as she sprinted faster, faster, faster.

Allie was almost there, close enough that she could see the cab’s broken driver-side window, the bullet holes in its door, when it came out of nowhere — a new pair of headlights, blinding her from the right — and caught her as she was still in mid-stride. She might have jumped at the very last second, but she couldn’t be certain, because she was overwhelmed with a feeling of weightlessness, as if she were…flying?

She didn’t really feel the impact of slamming back down to the parking lot floor, or know which part of her hit first, never mind where the gun went. Allie was only vaguely aware of voices far and near shouting, police sirens that seemed to drown out everything, and tires screaming and screaming and screaming louder. There was also the thick smell of rubber and spilled motor oil everywhere.

Then someone was grabbing her by the arms and dragging her across the pavement before she found herself flying again, except this time it was a much shorter flight. She also landed on much, much softer material this time, almost like lying down on a cloud or something equally absurd.

After that it wasn’t very hard to close her eyes and let go, to allow herself to give in to the numbness that was flooding her senses. The alternative was to embrace the pain, and although she wasn’t a stranger to that either, she made it a general rule to opt out when presented with the option.

The blare of police sirens continued to dominate everything — at least for a while, because even that started to fade into the background until, finally, she couldn’t hear them anymore. It was instead replaced by the sting of sweat and heavy breathing, though she couldn’t be certain it was coming from her or somewhere else inside—

Where the hell was she?

She had no idea, except she could hear voices, and they sounded remarkably close.

“She dead?” someone asked.

“Yeah, I think so,” a second one said.

“You sure?”

“She’s breathing.”

“For now,” the first one said. “She’s going to wish she wasn’t when I’m through with her.”

Promises, promises, Allie thought, just before she couldn’t hear or see or feel anything anymore.