Mortal Pursuit

55

A padlocked gate protected the picnic-area parking lot. Tyler approached it at sixty miles an hour.

High beams gleamed on the rusted gate poles. A wall of wire mesh flew at him.

Impact.

The gate blew open, and the Porsche burst through. Heavy links of chain, snapping free, fractured the windshield. The coupe’s front end sagged, mangled in the collision.

“Sorry, baby,” Tyler muttered.

Killing the cop named Wald had troubled him not at all. Taking out Robinson and the girl would be a kick.

But abusing a sixty-thousand-dollar set of wheels-now, that was just unconscionable, it really was.

The Porsche skidded to a halt amid yards of white-striped asphalt. Tyler killed the lights and motor, and then he was out of the car, running hard, bloodlust roaring.

He reached the head of a trail that twisted down a shelved hillside to the lake shore. Leaning against a tree, he scoped out the lake, its mirror-smooth expanse black and glossy like wet pitch, visible over the treetops and the roof of the snack shop.

There. The jet boat-moving slowly, slowly, a wounded thing.

Astern, keeping a wary distance, was a second boat, the one Blair must have hotwired.

Tyler licked his lips. Were the ladies hurt Dead

He checked his watch. 9:42.

By now Cain should have whacked Mrs. Kent. If the Sharkey boys could finish off their end of the job, the night’s festivities would be successfully concluded.

It had better work out that way. And soon.

He’d waited long enough to be a millionaire as it was.

Ally knotted the tourniquet.

More pain, a lightning strike through her leg, and Trish groaned.

“Too tight” Ally asked.

“No, it’s okay. How’s the bleeding”

“Not so bad now.”

“Elevate the wound. That should help.”

Ally eased the injured leg onto a flat rock, then wiped her hands on the tattered hem of her dress, leaving red stripes.

Trish kept her hand on the pressure point near her groin. “You’ll have to loosen the tourniquet in five or ten minutes. If it stays on too long …” She didn’t finish.

“What’ll happen” Ally asked fearfully.

“I could lose the leg. Below the knee.”

“It could be amputated”

“Don’t worry about that.” Trish tried to sound calm. “We’ll just have to keep an eye on it, that’s all.”

“Maybe … maybe I did the wrong thing, huh I mean, what do I know about this”

“You did fine. Ally. You probably saved my life. I was being stupid.”

“Brave.”

“There may not be much difference.” Trish felt her mouth slip into a smile. “Now will you dig the hole”

“Hey, digging’s my thing, remember”

Trish lay on her back, listening to Ally burrow in the sand, and thought of the damage to her leg-the lean and shapely leg she’d admired in the mirror, the leg that had known a man’s caress-shattered now, butchered meat.

Guns. She hated the evil things.

Amputation really was possible. From her first-aid training she was aware that a tourniquet should rarely be used at all, and almost never to stanch bleeding below the elbow or knee. The limb could be lost.

Still, she hadn’t lied to Ally. The blood loss had to be stopped. She couldn’t afford to go into shock. Amputation was a chance she had to take.

She knew that. With cool objectivity she could calculate the risks. But there was another part of her, not cool, not objective, only a shrill scream in the back of her mind, and it was insisting that she didn’t want to lose the leg, didn’t want to lose the leg, please, if anybody was listening up there, she didn’t want to lose the leg….

With effort she tuned out that voice and tried to assess the damage.

She didn’t think any bones were broken, and the blood hadn’t been spurting, so apparently there was no arterial hemorrhage. The Black Talon must have passed cleanly through the fleshy part of the calf, the gastrocnemius muscle, the short trajectory allowing no time for the trademark barbs to retract fully. Probably it had entered low, exited high …

A shudder snaked through her as she realized how close the bullet had come to shattering her knee. An inch or two higher, and there would have been a compound fracture and a ruptured artery. The combination of crippling pain and rapid blood loss surely would have been fatal.

As it was, if the leg could be saved-and it had to be saved, please, God, she didn’t want to lose the leg-then probably she could recover something close to full mobility. A limp Maybe. Lack of sensation, diminished strength Probably.

Her career as a police officer might have ended tonight. Well, the job was turning out to be sort of stressful anyway.

She heard herself laughing, a soft manic sound.

“Trish” Ally interrupted her excavation of the beach. “You … you okay”

“Hanging in there, partner.”

Eyes closed, she let the laughter segue to fresh tears.

Blair tracked the Sea Rayder as it continued slowing.

Ten miles an hour.

Five …

Finally it puttered to a stop. The boat lay on the placid water, as small and lightweight as a toy in a child’s bath.

Warily he steered around the mini-jet, checking it out from all angles.

Empty.

Impossible. They couldn’t have gotten away.

But they had.

Beside him Gage moaned. Blair looked at his brother, and pity lanced him.

The kid was rolling his head from side to side in a steady rhythm. Soft grunts escaped his lips, barely audible even with the FireStar throttled back to a low idle.

Blair knew what Gage was doing. It had been a childish habit of his brother’s at the age of four or five.

At night he would sing softly in the lower bunk, rolling his head relentlessly in time with nonsense songs chanted under his breath, until slumber quieted him.

Blair, two years older, had called him a baby for doing it. But Gage had been a baby then, hadn’t he

And he still was. Blair Sharkey’s baby brother-singing himself to his last sleep.