Hunter/Prey

Chapter 15

The girl was shaking as Allie removed the duct tape from her mouth, then used the knife she had gotten from the kitchen to cut her free.

“Stay here,” she told Rachel. “The both of you.”

Rachel nodded and scooted over to Wade as Allie did the same to his binds.

He sucked in a large grateful breath, then asked, “Where are you going?”

“After him,” Allie said.

“You’re crazy. That guy’s a maniac.”

“That’s why I’m going after him.”

Rachel was glued to the dog across the room, still sitting next to its owner. If it was aware of their existence inside the cabin, it didn’t show it. She wondered if it knew its master was dead. Or did it think he was just sleeping? How smart was a dog, anyway?

“Should we…” Rachel started to say.

“Leave it alone,” Allie said.

“You saw the way it clamped down on his arm?” Wade said. “I can’t believe he’s still walking around out there after that.”

Allie turned to the window and peered out at the darkness again. Wade was right. Beckard was out there, somewhere. The way he had been bleeding all night, it was a miracle the man was even still alive. If she was lucky, he had fallen unconscious somewhere in the woods not far from here and all she’d have to do was track him down and put him out of his misery.

If I’m lucky. Because I’ve been really lucky tonight.

Yeah, right.

She looked back at the college students. “Rachel, do you still have your phone?”

The girl nodded and pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and handed it over. “Do you really think he called the police earlier?”

“I don’t know, but we can find out.”

Allie took the phone and punched up the calls list. The most recent was less than two hours ago. It wasn’t, as she had expected, 911, but a string of numbers that looked almost random. She pressed redial and put the call on speaker.

A computerized voice answered. “The number you have dialed is no longer in service. Please hang up and try again.”

She ended the call. “I guess not.”

“Was he even really a cop?” Wade asked.

Good question.

She had been trying to figure that one out since Beckard revealed himself in his state trooper’s uniform. If he really was law enforcement, it explained so many things, but she couldn’t pretend as if he wasn’t capable of another lie. Beckard had proven all night just what a good liar he was.

“I don’t know,” Allie said. “I spent so many years looking for him, studying everything he’s done that the cops and the papers knew about. Not once did it occur to me that he might have been a cop. A state trooper. But it makes sense, now that I think about it.”

“You’ve been searching for him,” Wade said. It wasn’t a question. “How long?”

“Ten years.” She pulled the handgun out of her waistband and walked to the window, letting the chilly air wash over her. “How far are we from the highway, Wade?”

“A mile, maybe,” Wade said. Then, “Aren’t you going to call the cops?”

Allie looked down at the phone.

“Ma’am?” Wade said.

She was surprised by that, but then realized he wasn’t wrong. She was thirty-three and at least ten years older than him. Wade looked barely twenty-one, maybe twenty-two at the most. He was just a kid.

Like Donnie, dead in the kitchen.

Or Sabrina, in the bathroom.

Like Carmen…

Beckard’s victims. That was the point of tonight — to keep him from taking more lives. But she had screwed that up, and Donnie and Sabrina had taken the brunt of that failure. And he was still out there, right now…

You can run but you can’t hide, you sonofabitch.

“Not yet,” Allie said. She walked back over and tossed the phone to Wade. “Give me until dawn.”

“Dawn?” Wade said, confused.

“Before you call the cops.”

Wade exchanged a worried glance with Rachel. Then he looked back at her. “Why? What are you going to do between now and dawn?”

“I’m going to hunt him down.”

“But why? He’s gone. All we have to do is call the cops and wait for them to show up. The real cops. They’ll take care of it. Take care of him.”

“It’s safer that way,” Rachel said, clutching Wade’s arm.

Allie handed the pistol to Wade, who took it hesitantly.

“He killed my sister,” Allie said. “And he just killed your friends.”

Wade’s eyes darted to Donnie’s half-visible body in the kitchen.

“Do you know what the cops will do when they find him?” Allie asked. “They’re going to put him in prison and he’s going to sit there and wait for a year — if we’re lucky — while he goes on trial. More likely, he’ll spend years inside with a nice comfortable bed, eating three meals a day and exercising in the yard, while the trial drags on and he becomes a celebrity. Girls will send him letters, and he’ll smile for the camera and mock everything that’s decent. Even if he’s convicted, there will be appeals. A lot of them. Five years, maybe more, until he gets what he deserves for killing your friends. For killing my sister. For killing all the other sisters and wives and nieces.”

She paused for a few seconds to let her words sink in.

“Do you want that?” she continued. “Can the two of you live with that? I can’t. It took me a long time to get here. Trust me when I tell you, you don’t want to live the next five or ten years waiting for him to get what he’s got coming. That’s no way to live.”

Wade’s face had slowly hardened as she talked, and she knew she had gotten through to him. He looked over at Rachel and, to Allie’s surprise, the younger woman nodded, her own face looking just as grim and determined.

She’s a lot tougher than I gave her credit for.

“Okay,” Wade said. “We won’t call the police until dawn. That should give you enough time to hunt the sonofabitch down.”

Allie nodded gratefully, then walked over and picked the shotgun up from the floor. Wade and Rachel watched her curiously as she reloaded the weapon with the extra shells from the side carrier.

“I won’t be coming back to the cabin, Wade,” Allie said. “If you hear someone coming and there aren’t police sirens, you should shoot first and ask questions later.”

Wade stood up from the floor, pulling Rachel with him. “We’ll be fine,” the young man said. “Don’t let the bastard get away.”

She smiled at them and walked to the open door.

Allie stopped next to the dog. It lifted its head slightly and looked up at her with large brown eyes. Was it asking her a question? Maybe about its master?

She crouched next to the animal and stroked its head, forgetting that less than ten minutes ago it had tried to bite its way through Beckard’s arm. It might have sighed (did dogs sigh?), before laying its head down on its chin to let her run her fingers through thick, blood-matted fur. Beckard’s blood.

I hope you’re bleeding to death out there right now, you piece of shit.

She put her palm in front of the dog’s head and the animal licked it. “Stay, boy. Stay with your master.”

It seemed to groan in response, then returned its stare to its unmoving owner.

She stood up and left the cabin.

Her side still hurt, and the ribs that Beckard had broken made her wince with every step. She hadn’t felt the pain when she was running around earlier, thanks to the abundant adrenaline. It was gone now, and she couldn’t avoid it any longer. And she didn’t want to. Pain helped her concentrate on the moment, on what awaited her out there.

I’m coming for you, Beckard.

Every step, every breath, reminded her of those ten years of research, the six years of training, and the three years getting ready for this one moment. She thought it had passed after the bad turn earlier, but things had reset. She had a second (third?) chance, and the night wasn’t over yet.

It didn’t take her very long to pick up his trail. All she had to do was follow the bloody drops, still fresh, on the grass. They led her around the minivan, where she spotted handprints along the side of the vehicle. How the man was even still alive, much less fleeing while bleeding like this, was mindboggling. Maybe, like her, he was just determined not to die until the job was done.

She found the spot where he had returned into the woods and followed.

The flashlight beam came out of nowhere and hit her in the face as soon as she stepped out of the trees and into the clearing, where she had tracked Beckard’s blood trail.

He was going back to the side of the highway, returning to the spot where their vehicles had crashed last night. She had no idea how he even knew what directions to take, but maybe the man was just better at moving around in the woods than she gave him credit for.

None of that mattered now as the brightness blinded her and she instinctively lifted the shotgun to fire.

Allie was on the verge of pulling the trigger when she heard a man’s voice (not Beckard) screaming through a bullhorn, “State police! Lower your weapon, or we will open fire!”

It’s not Beckard’s voice! her mind shouted.

Don’t shoot!

You’re going to kill cops!

In the back of her mind, another voice screamed, What if they’re like Beckard? Don’t take the chance!

Through the blind spots she saw not one, or two, but what seemed like half a dozen figures standing in a semicircle, their flashlights and the headlights of multiple vehicles pointed right at her as if they knew exactly where she would emerge out of the woods and had been lying in wait all this time.

But of course they knew. She was following the blood trail that Beckard had left behind.

Beckard!

She couldn’t tell if the figures had their weapons drawn, but it was a damn good chance they did.

“Lower your weapon now!” the voice boomed again. “You’re surrounded! Lower your weapon, or we will open fire on you!”

No, no, I was so close.

I was so close!

Allie lowered her arms slowly, expecting the first gunshot to ring out and the first bullet to strike her. She had seen stories like this on TV. All it took was one trigger-happy cop and it was over. The irony was that she wouldn’t have blamed them. She had just burst out of the woods with a shotgun, after all. Shooting her down now would have been completely justified.

She kept waiting for the bullet, for the loud crash of a gunshot, but they didn’t come.

Instead, the lights continued to blind her mercilessly even as Allie bent her knees slowly and placed the shotgun on the ground. As soon as she did that, three of the shadowy figures rushed forward. They swarmed her, one almost tackling her as he pushed her down with his much bigger body. She grunted through the pain, wondered if maybe she had just broken another rib.

A pair of large hands ripped the shotgun from her grip while their owners shouted, “I got it! I got the weapon!”

You got it because I let you have it, asshole! she wanted to shout back, but of course she couldn’t because there was suddenly a knee pressing down on the small of her back and her face was buried in grass and dirt.

Callous hands seized her arms, followed by the cold sting of metal handcuffs snapping into place and biting into her wrists. She grimaced through the assault, but it was nothing compared to the burning fire roaring up and down her sides.

Finally, the one on top backed off and she could breathe again.

“This her?” she heard a voice she didn’t recognize ask.

“Yeah, that’s her,” another voice answered. This one sounded familiar.

She turned her head sideways. Two of the state troopers were standing behind her, their legs blocking her view of another man in the background. She didn’t have to see his face to know who it was.

She recognized his voice easily enough.

“That looks like the shotgun she tried to kill me with,” Beckard said.

Then, when the two troopers bent to haul her from the ground like she was a piece of useless meat, Beckard took the moment to wink at her.