Hunter/Prey

Chapter 22

He didn’t know what hurt more, getting hit in the head with the lamp or rolling down ten concrete steps and landing on the back of his neck. Of course, he didn’t have time to really turn over the options before he saw her standing at the top of the stairs, halfway between following him down (for his gun, no doubt) or fleeing.

He helped her with that decision by groping for the sidearm, then switching the gun over to his left hand and taking a shot at her. Thank God Glocks didn’t come with safeties, otherwise he would have spent another second trying to find the switch. Of course, even without wasting that extra time, his first shot still went awry, smashing into the wall above the door.

Not even close!

He had been wondering all day if he could hit the broad side of a barn with his left hand. Now he knew.

Then she was gone, fleeing through the door.

He didn’t know why, but he fired a second shot after her anyway. Maybe it was frustration or anger or — oh, who was he kidding. It was anger. Simple, pissed-off anger. At that moment, he stopped caring about using her as his final swan song, and he just wanted her dead. Too bad she wasn’t cooperating.

Beckard pushed himself up from the hard ground with a lot of effort. A bag of chips that had landed on his stomach fell and he stepped on it with his boots. There was blood all over the steps, and for a moment he thought it was his.

He checked, but he wasn’t bleeding. At least, not outside his bandages. His neck hurt and his back felt like someone had landed a train on top of it, and every part of his legs and arms and joints shivered with every movement he made. But he wasn’t bleeding.

So where did all the blood come from? And how the hell had she gotten out of the handcuffs?

Then he remembered the sight of her hands. Bloodied.

He stumbled down the steps and turned the corner and saw the handcuffs dangling from the metal spike in the wall. Blood was still dripping from them.

Beckard turned around and started up the steps again. He crunched a package of Snowballs and kicked a bottle of Gatorade out of his path. He had wanted this to go down a different way, but well, nothing was really going as planned these days anyway, so why should this be any different? He had adjusted on the fly before, and he’d just have to do it again.

No muss, no fuss.

He knew she wasn’t going to be outside waiting to bash his head in a second time. Not the way she was running. No, she’d look for a weapon. A smart girl like her would go right for the car. But he had locked it (old habits die hard, even out here in the middle of nowhere) so she wouldn’t get anything there. He expected her to at least try to break the window, get at the shotgun inside, but the Crown Vic looked intact when he stepped out of the bunker.

He stopped for a moment and glanced around. A generous dose of warm orange was spreading above the tree crowns and filling up large sections of the wood with slivers of light.

He checked his watch to be sure: 5:45 A.M.

It wouldn’t be long now. Half an hour before the sun came up completely and the world woke up. It would be another hour, maybe two, until Harper got the manpower he needed to put in all the roadblocks up and down the highway, seal off the state, and pray he hadn’t already made it out hours earlier. By now, Harper would have torn Thomas Beckard’s life upside down. The banks, the credit cards — all those would be frozen by the end of the day.

Ten years. Not a bad run…

“Allie!” he shouted at the top of his lungs.

He listened to his own voice echoing off the trees, scattering birds nearby.

“You can run, but you can’t hide!”

She didn’t answer. Of course not. She’d be running by now. Where to? That was the question.

And the answer was easy.

The highway. A smart girl like her would recognize the barely-there road at the end of the clearing. There wasn’t much, but enough to get a firm direction of where civilization lay.

It didn’t take him long to spot the fresh bloody drops on the ground leading into the woods. That made him grin to himself. It was just last night when she had been tracking him using the same method.

He slipped in through two towering trees in pursuit.

Beckard was feeling giddy, which explained why he had just chuckled at the sight of Jones lying in the grass sans shirt. Someone had been rummaging through the poor trooper’s dead body, and it wasn’t the animals.

What were you looking for, Allie?

He remembered the sight of her hands dripping blood. Taking Jones’s shirt also explained why the blood trail he had been following for the last few minutes had suddenly dried up past Jones’s body.

Smart. Really smart girl.

She wasn’t completely invisible yet, though. He could still make out the trampled grass she had left in her wake.

He turned to follow that trail now when he stopped and almost fell. He stuck out his hand and by a stroke of luck found a tree nearby to keep himself upright. A wave of nausea rushed through him, followed by lightheadedness.

The pills. He had taken too many of them.

He tried to shake it off, but that only made things worse. Beckard sat down, leaned against the gnarled face of the tree, and snapped his eyes shut to rest.

He didn’t know how long he sat there, not moving. It could have been a few seconds, a few minutes, or maybe — an hour? No, it couldn’t have been an hour. When he opened his eyes again, it was still dawn and sunlight was still fighting to spread across the sky above him.

Still early morning, so it hadn’t been that long.

He pushed up from the ground and stumbled forward, gripping the Glock in his left hand. His right was held together by stitches underneath the almost cast-like bandages and was numbed all over. His face, thank God, had stopped hurting. Or, at least, he couldn’t feel the broken nose anymore. He wasn’t entirely sure if that was a good thing, but at the moment he was grateful for one less pulsating pain to worry about.

Beckard pushed on. It was almost over anyway. Once he found her, he’d finish it. He had wanted to prolong this, savor his last hurrah, but there was no chance of that now. She was becoming too dangerous and too time-consuming.

“Allie!” he shouted. “I think we got off on the wrong foot. Let’s talk this out! That highway’s not going to get any closer!”

There was no response. But then, he didn’t expect her to answer him. She’d be making her way toward the road at the moment. How much of a head start did she have on him? It depended on how long he had actually slept when he closed his eyes a few minutes ago.

“Fine!” he shouted. “Have it your way!”

He continued following the obvious signs across the trampled grass. He was actually a little surprised she hadn’t taken more care with her footsteps. Maybe he had overestimated her. She had probably lived in the cities all of her life, after all. So did all the other women he had taken over the years. They were delicate things, bred for busy sidewalks and intersections and cafés and offices. Most of them were tough, yes, but city tough was different from country tough. They had all found that out eventually.

Even Allie, for all her preparations. When you got right down to it, she was more equipped to survive in the cities than out here. In the woods, she might as well be a drunk babe walking around trampling everything in sight. As smart as she clearly was, he had no trouble picking up her trail.

In fact, it almost felt as if she wasn’t even making any efforts to disguise herself, almost as if she was doing it on purpose—

He froze.

No.

Could it be? Could she really be that smart?

Had he overestimated her intelligence, or underestimated it?

Could all of this just be…

Oh, shit.