The Dead Run Read online

  And then, abruptly, the message ended, and Ruth let the mobile slip from her hand. It fell to the floor beneath her feet, and for a moment, she was silent. Her face as blank as a department store mannequin’s.

  “What?” he asked. “Doc, talk to me.”

  All at once, Cantwell’s face came back into focus—sharper than Nichols had ever seen it, the expression hard, the cheeks aflame. Her foot mashed the gas, and the needles jumped.

  The Audi redlined, and the scenery blurred. Goddamn, this thing had pep.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, doc—what the hell are you doing?”

  They were coming up on the shit-brown sedan, quicker than seemed possible. Cantwell jerked the wheel. The sports car jagged into the other lane and streaked past.

  Would’ve been a better move if an eighteen-wheeler weren’t bearing down on them.

  Nichols’s protest was drowned out by the truck’s foghorn. Cantwell threaded the needle, cut back into her lane with milliseconds to spare. Now it was the shit-brown sedan’s turn to honk, the sound gone in an instant as Cantwell piloted them out of earshot, turned their quarry into a distant speck.

  “What the fuck is going on?” the sheriff demanded.

  Hysteria edged Ruth’s voice. “Melinda Richards is dead. Murdered. Sherry’s on the run, and I know where. We’ve gotta get to her first.”

  Nichols’s head spun, and the speed-blurred world spun with it.

  “I’ll call for backup,” he heard himself say, and leaned over to scoop up Cantwell’s cell. Punched in some numbers. Waited.

  It rang.

  Nichols cursed his shitty, underfunded department.

  It rang some more.

  His morbidly obese dispatcher, probably on a midafternoon Arby’s run.

  It kept ringing. He hung up in disgust.

  The needle on the speedometer quivered at one sixty, as if shaking its head in disbelief. Outside his window, all Nichols could see was tan and tan and flashing red and flashing blue.

  Uh-oh.

  The police cruiser had been hiding in a turnout, parked perpendicular to the road so the cop inside could clock drivers in both directions with his radar gun, a drill Nichols knew all too well. Not that this guy needed any technology to see that Cantwell was breaking the law.

  The cruiser pulled out, tires squealing, lights awhirl. Any second now, he’d flip on the siren.

  Nichols felt a sense of powerlessness he had not experienced in years.

  Cantwell gritted her teeth and kept on burning up the pavement.

  “Pull over, Ruth. If you don’t, he’ll just call for backup. And take you in for resisting arrest.”

  She acted like she didn’t hear him, so Nichols spoke louder.

  “Look, there’s no other choice. I’ve got my badge. We’ll make something up and be on our way.”

  She relented and flicked her turn signal. Slowed down gradually, responsibly. And there they were again, sitting on the shoulder of the highway.

  The cruiser shouldered in behind them, lights still spinning. The heat was coming off Cantwell in waves.

  There was nothing they could do but watch as the shit-brown sedan rumbled past.

  CHAPTER 18

  Sherry Richards was somewhere no light could reach, no one could touch, no feelings could penetrate. It was a kind of padded room inside herself, a secret mental chamber she had forged long ago, retreated to before.

  It was hidden. It was safe. When you left, all memories of it disappeared, so that you’d never betray its location, never lead anyone there. How she’d found her way back now, Sherry didn’t know.

  But she wasn’t ever going to leave.

  Eric’s hand encircled her arm. He was speaking. Perspiration danced on his forehead. Sherry looked down, saw her feet moving across a parking lot, heard her flip-flops slapping against her heels, deduced that she was no longer in the car. She couldn’t remember where Eric had said they were going, and she didn’t care.

  A trail. Rocky, winding, steep. She stumbled, lost her footing, stubbed her toe, felt pain. Righted herself, trudged on. Envisioned wandering a vast and timeless wilderness, like the ancient Hebrews in the Book of Genesis: just Sherry and the boundless heavens and the featureless land, one foot trailing the other, no clouds in the sky, no thoughts in her head. Just emptiness, pure and brutal, the days of her life ticking and tocking away until she faded, becoming first a shadow and then disappearing entirely.

  Eric’s palm pressed against the small of her back, urged speed. Sherry complied. It didn’t matter. Nothing did. She stared at the sun and let the brightness invade her, flood in through her eyes and burn her brain away, turn it to a glowing mound of ash. Kept walking.

  Then it was dark and cool, the damp air scented with rock and moss and water. Sherry inhaled deep and closed her eyes, watched the sunspots playing on the insides of her lids like a private fireworks display. She let the breath out slow, contemplated whether to take another. Opened her eyes, allowed herself to come into focus, just a little bit.

  Sherry looked around, confused. It was as if she’d stepped inside that hidden room—as if that part of herself had been actualized, projected onto the world, made manifest in stone and color. The image of her mother lying in the hallway—lying there like that—lurked on the periphery of her consciousness, and Sherry concentrated on keeping it at bay. On toeing the edge of reality, without stepping fully over the threshold.

  “I used to come here with my Scout troop,” Eric said, his voice right by her ear, soft and breathy, the cave limning it with reverb. “I’d find a place to hide, and nobody would bother me for hours. I always felt so . . . safe.” He took her by the hand, his warm, hers dead. “Come on, let me show—”

  And just like that, they were falling. Tumbling through blackness without end, no bottom visible, no light above. It was over in a second and a half, Eric hitting the ground ten feet below with an oof and Sherry coming down atop him, rolling off unharmed.

  But that moment of free fall, of plummeting through a seemingly infinite void, was like a lifetime. Or a taste of death. And though it was so quick it had barely happened at all, Sherry was a different person when she clambered to her feet and stared up at the sheer wall they’d stepped off, the weak light trickling through the cavern’s mouth above.

  She’d learned something about herself.

  She didn’t want to die.

  She didn’t want to wander, or fade, or disappear.

  She wanted to kill.

  All of them.

  Every last one of the bastards.

  She pulled her father’s gun out of her waistband, weighed it in her hand. Wondered what he would do.

  He’d make them pay.

  Eric’s labored breathing echoed through the cavern, and Sherry’s head snapped over, the new alertness spreading through her body like heat.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “I think I sprained my ankle. Guess I don’t remember this place as well as I thought—this isn’t the cave I thought it was. Guess that’s why the sign said it was off limits.” He stood gingerly and took a couple of steps. “It’s not so bad.” But Sherry could see that he was favoring his left leg, putting as little weight on it as he could.

  “So what’s the plan?” she asked, and heard her voice bounce crisply off the walls.

  “Fuck,” Eric muttered, hobbling in a small circle.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sorry. Talking to my ankle.” He looked up at her. “The plan is, we hide out here awhile, until things blow over.”

  Sherry cocked her head at him. “Blow over? Eric, this is never going to blow over. We’re talking about murder.” She gestured with the gun and saw his eyes go wide. “I don’t want it to blow over. I want justice for my mother.”

  Eric raised both hands, palms flat. Like a mime inside a box. “
Sherry. Put . . . the gun . . . away. Before you make a mistake.”

  She scowled at him and jammed it back into her jeans. “Sitting around here isn’t going to do us any goddamn good.”

  The curse word startled Sherry as it rolled off her tongue; she’d never said it in her life. But what did it matter? Who was left to chide her for taking the Lord’s name in vain?

  And what the fuck had He done for her, lately?

  From the look on Eric’s face, he was as taken aback by Sherry’s take-charge attitude as she was.

  “Is there another way out of here?” she demanded. “Because I don’t know how we’re going to climb back up that wall. Why’d you ignore the sign, anyway?”

  “I dunno, I thought—”

  He was interrupted by a low, scratchy voice from above.

  “No, Sherry. There’s no other way out of there.”

  Her heart leapt into her throat, and Sherry looked up to see the enormous, backlit bulk of a man.

  A man in a fedora.

  Oh no. Oh God. Not him.

  “It’s lucky for you,” he continued in the same phlegmy, inflectionless tone, “that you’re needed alive.”

  His hand flashed across his body, withdrew a handgun from the holster strapped around his waist. Waved it in the air so they could see.

  “Your little boyfriend there, he’s not needed at all. So whether he makes it out of here still breathing depends on whether you’re a good girl for me. Do we understand each other, Sherry?”

  She was shaking so hard she couldn’t speak—much less reach for her own pistol. It was as if all the world’s air had been sucked away. As if that monster up there had pulled every last bit into his vacuum-cleaner lungs.

  His arm arced through the air, and thwack.

  A coil of rope landed on the floor of the cavern, inches from Sherry’s feet.

  She stared down at it, then up at him. Even if she’d wanted to, she couldn’t have moved.

  “Why don’t you come down and get us?” Eric called.

  “Nobody’s talking to you,” the monster volleyed back. He spread his arms, the gun in one hand and some sort of sack clutched in the other. “Come now, Sherry. Climb on up here like a good girl, and I’ll let you talk to your mother.”

  As abruptly as it had begun, the shaking stopped. Rage suffused her body, and Sherry went stiff.

  “My mother’s dead, you son of a bitch.”

  A snort of laughter from the monster.

  “That doesn’t mean you can’t talk to her,” he said, and shoved his gun back in its holster.

  Then he showed Sherry what was in the bag, and her scream filled the cavern.

  CHAPTER 19

  They stayed frozen in their poses for a few ticks, Galvan and the woman with the gun. Like some sick art installation. Strangers on the Verge of Murder.

  He could feel his arm tremoring invisibly beneath the weight of the machete, a million ready-to-rock nerves vibrating furiously. For no decent reason Galvan could think of, his brain chose that moment to offer up a few more pearls of wisdom from Kodiak Brinks.

  Adrenaline the medicine / messin’ with the specimen / this brethren stand strong weatherin’ / storms with a regimen that make your head spin / ten thousand strong men who never sin / nourishin’ like niacin, minds with messiah bends / Leviathons stalk iron men / in the lion’s den . . .

  In his periphery, Galvan could see Payaso and Britannica edging closer. The woman saw them, too—flicked her eyes at one and then the other, probably running the numbers. Size, weight, speed. How many bullets, how much time. Galvan was punching the same buttons on his mental calculator.

  The math, as it so often tended to be, was a bitch.

  A second crawled by, and then another. Galvan’s boys had gotten as close as they dared, neither one enterprising enough to find a rock and creep up on her blind side, double the threat and change the whole equation.

  Somebody do something, he thought.

  And then, You don’t wanna shoot me, lady.

  Finally, the driver’s voice, rough and dry as sandpaper, intruded on the tableau.

  “What’s in that box?”

  His tongue darted from his mouth, and he licked his lips.

  Galvan peeled his eyes away from the gun and checked him out. Dude was staring at the object with a manic intensity, eyes bugging out of his head.

  “What’s in it? What’s in it?”

  He was rocking in his seat now, oblivious to the knife at his neck. And he’d captured his wife’s attention, too. She kept the gun trained on Galvan, but she leaned toward the black metal container and cocked her head, as if expecting it to make a sound.

  The girls in the backseat slid closer together. They looked like they were holding hands under the blanket.

  Payaso took another couple of steps toward the passenger door. The woman paid him no mind at all, blind to everything except the box.

  “What’s in it?” she asked, taking up her husband’s refrain just as he changed his tune.

  “I want it,” the guy said. “I want it.” Louder this time.

  She wagged the gun at Galvan. “Give it over. Now. Right now.”

  Payaso looked like he was getting ready to make a move, but he’d waited too long. She wasn’t looking to get out of this unscathed anymore; she was looking to prosper. That made her infinitely more dangerous.

  Galvan caught the kid’s eye and shook his head a fraction of an inch: We’re outgunned, don’t be an idiot. Payaso nodded and fell back.

  Galvan studied the couple, both of them staring intently at the box, the expression on their faces not unlike the one he’d seen slapped across Gutierrez’s mug as that awful, corrupting lust crept into the enforcer’s soul.

  An idea wriggled its way into Galvan’s head.

  Not a good idea, necessarily.

  Possibly a lethal one.

  But it wasn’t gonna kill him any quicker than that gun.

  He withdrew his machete, handed it behind him to Britannica. Pressed the box between his palms, held it before his chest like a birthday cake.

  “What’ll you give me for it?”

  The woman lowered her weapon a few degrees. “What do you want?”

  Galvan thrust his chin at the girls.

  “Them.”

  He felt Britannica and Payaso deflate a little bit, both of them presumably expecting to hear him demand the car. Well, tough shit. That might as well have been his little girl sitting back there, bound for Cucuy’s lair and a fate worse than death. And hell, they were supposed to travel as men did in ancient times and all that bullshit.

  The woman looked at her husband, or co-kidnapper, or whatever the hell he was.

  Apparently, dude wore the pants, even if she handled the artillery.

  He mulled it over.

  Galvan waited. Mr. Patience.

  “You can have one,” the guy declared at last, baring a row of butter-yellow teeth in a lascivious parody of a smile. “Choice is yours.”

  Galvan shook his head. “Uh-uh. I need ’em both, or no dice.”

  The driver kept on eye-raping the box as he replied, voice hollowed-out and distant. “Those’re my daughters you’re talkin’ about. A man’s family is all he’s got.”

  “It’s worth it,” Galvan replied, letting a little more magic creep into his voice. He tucked the box under his arm again, allowing them to imagine what losing out on it would feel like. Leaned in close, downshifted to a gruff whisper. “You know it’s worth it.”

  They hoovered that up.

  Galvan used the silence to reflect on the fact that neither one had asked what was inside the goddamn thing.

  And on the risks inherent in the idea he’d just mortgaged his life on.

  “Fine,” the driver said at last. “Fine. Now give it here.”
>
  Galvan took another step back. “Send them over to me first.”

  The dude opened his mouth to argue, but his wife was already out of the vehicle, keys jangling in her hand, unlocking one back door and then the other.

  “Out,” she ordered, and the girls obeyed, sliding from beneath the blanket. Their wrists were tied in front of them, the twine cutting into the flesh, the hands purpled.

  Galvan felt his fury expand outward, rising from his stomach up his throat.

  Easy, Jess. Easy.

  Britannica stepped close enough to whisper in his ear.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he hissed.

  Galvan twisted toward him. “A pure man must carry it,” he intoned. “Those two child-trafficking assholes look pure to you?”

  Fear danced in the priest or not-priest’s eyes. He blinked it back and stared at Galvan, uncowed.

  “You’re gonna get us all killed.”

  “We were dead already, Padre.”

  The woman stalked over and planted herself directly in front of Jess, the gun clenched at her side.

  “Give it over.”

  He looked past her, at the girls. “Come here,” he called. “It’s okay. You’re safe now.”

  Maybe.

  They plodded toward him, molasses-slow, and Galvan gave them the once-over, trying to determine what condition they were in. Was it fear that had them in this affectless state, this walking catatonia? Or were they drugged?

  Either way, they’d better be able to shake it off when push came to shove.

  Which oughta be in about eleven seconds.

  Give or take.

  “Now!” the woman screeched. “Right now!”

  “All right, already. I heard you. Here.”

  . . . goes nothing.

  He held it out.

  She ripped the box from his hands and turned back toward the car.

  A surge of panic tore through Galvan as he watched her go—with the heart, and the gun, and the car.

  As nothing happened.

  He did the math. He could be on her in three strides, quicker than she could spin and fire.