Dr. O (31 page)

She reached down, holding firm to him, but she wasn't strong enough to pull him up. He swung a leg over the edge and they toppled together, panting.

Robyn looked to see the helicopter lifting upward, Ovierto holding tightly to the rope ladder below, making his way up and up toward the bubble of the machine.

"He's getting away!" she shouted, rushing headlong toward the chopper.

"Be careful!" the man behind her cautioned.

She got into a position on the opposite side of a massive pillar, the chopper and Ovierto clearly in view, but the distance between them increasing with each second. She aimed for Ovierto, whose form was spinning in the wind. Her shot missed. The helicopter was moving off now at a rapid rate. She aimed for the chopper's blade, specifically the rotor at the base of the blades where she knew that there were any number of moving parts the destruction of which could cause it to go down. She fired successive shots at the rotor and watched one after another ping off the blade shaft. She emptied what was left of her bullets into the shaft.

But the helicopter kept moving off, and her last few rounds hadn't a chance of hitting the mark. She slumped into a heap, all her emotions flooding in on her as she watched the blood-thirsty maniac pull himself into the cab, the chopper way out over the St. Lawrence now, going due west. She buried her head in her hands.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

"Get me the hell out of here!" a bleeding Ovierto shouted to the pilot of the aircraft. He'd been hit in the arm by Thorpe and in the leg by Robyn Muro's bullet. His ingenious hologram was meant to catch the two of them in a crossfire, to end the careers of both Thorpe and Muro, whom he had recently begun to learn more about. He had no way of knowing for certain, but from appearances, Donna Thorpe was killed due to his last sleight-of-hand, but Muro had survived.

It had taken him some time, during the race from the locks to here, to figure out just how Muro had gotten there, that she had been in the crate all along, somehow surviving the cold. The two women had deceived him and he had deceived them.

One day he would live to see Muro killed, but not like Thorpe. With Muro he'd take his time. Abduct her... give it a few days, maybe a week or more to watch her die slowly. He'd think of something fitting to repay the pain she had inflicted on him.

His leg would be stiff for a month or more. He'd have a lingering limp, he decided when he cut the pants leg open with a knife and saw that the entrance of the wound had been in his kneecap, the bullet exiting just above the pit behind the knee. A limp would mark him, limit his disguises, and he hated the idea of being maimed by a woman.

He silently cursed Robyn Muro and vowed to one day get more than even with her.

She had continued to fire at him while he was dangling in the air like a fucking carnival target, and then she had opted for the chopper, scaring the hell out of the pilot who loped off at such a speed he almost sent Ovierto to the seaway below. But now he had his machine under control —or did he?

The whirlybird began a drunken dance in the air. "What's happening? What's wrong?"

"They must've put one in the rotor shaft, damaged the equilibrium between the blades, Dr. Samson."

"Can you compensate for it?"

"I... I don't think so, sir"

"We're going down?"

"Better buckle up, sir."

"We're going down?"

"Yes."

Ovierto had to think fast. The pilot knew his intended destination, the location of his jet. If he should survive the crash, the pilot could talk.

"You're absolutely sure there's no getting us to Long Sault Airport?"

"None... not any chance."

They were losing altitude and gyrating in lazy loops, still in the area of the dam, no doubt giving Robyn Muro great pleasure. He thought he saw her jumping up and down atop the dam, but no, just his imagination. It was too far to make her out, but she could see them spiraling down and down toward the trees, the pilot trying to soft-land the thing in the five-foot-high prairie grass banking the wide river.

"At least get us closer to the goddamned Canadian side!" shouted a hurt, frustrated Dr. O, his leg bloody red now, the pain pumping from the wound.

"I'll do what I can," said the pilot, trying desperately to control the uncontrollable. "We're going to hit... going to hit!"

Just as the helicopter was coming down into a bay, Ovierto whipped out his bowie knife and reached across the pilot's throat, drawing a deep gash from side to side, turning his shout into a gurgling, sputtering sound like the one his machine was making. The impact of the machine against the water shook the entire bubble, and a tree branch crashed through the glass within inches of Ovierto's eyes. Water was filling the cab. He fought against his seat belt and the weight of the dead pilot over him. He saw the water rising up along the dash, sucking the machine down and down.

"I won't die this way!" he cried out. "I won't die this way!"

The water took him down with the helicopter, the fallen tree following at the end. Beneath the water he struggled to get free, a powerful current pushing him back and down. He cut the restraining belt that held the pilot and kicked madly out at the body, and this effort also sent him out the side and into the current that tumbled him over and over, sucking him like a toy into the maw of the mighty St. Lawrence.

He wondered if he would die here like this, feeling a great weakness overtaking him.

He fought the desire to simply give in to the power of the water.

But then he remembered Pythagoras and Muro and he wanted to live....

Robyn Muro and the single workman on the dam watched the helicopter spiral into the trees in the distance, and it caused a cheer in them that resounded off the dam. She and the workman made their way carefully back to the safety of the building, which was now abuzz with police who had infiltrated from the lot outside. She shouted that she was a police officer and she flashed her badge. She was still in her wet suit, and they had some difficulty believing her at first.

"We've got to get to the Canadian side about two miles down. A very desperate criminal, a murderer... just went into the water in a downed helicopter."

Some of them had watched as the "crazy" pilot had "deliberately" swung into those trees.

"Get me over there, now!"

Even with sirens blaring and going at top speed, it was a good hour up to the bridge, over and down two miles on the other side of the St. Lawrence. Robyn had the local police call ahead to the Canadians, giving them a location fix on the "suspect."

Most of them were relaxed. No one could have survived such a crash, they said, but Robyn knew better; she knew that there was something almost superhuman about Ovierto. He would not readily go to his death, not even plunging toward it in a helicopter out of control. She tried to tell the others this, to convey the sense of evil about this man. She went into some detail about what he had done in Chicago, in Seattle, to Thorpe with her parents, and now this. She only stopped when she realized that the state policemen listening to her were beginning to wonder about her.

She fell silent until they reached the wreckage where some raggedly dressed Canadian in overalls that were torn and dirty had tried to claim the salvage rights to the helicopter since it was on "his" land. He had hooked a tow truck pulley to the damned thing and was cranking it in with great care. The Mounties had simply stood back and watched him do so before they told him he could take not a single thing from the aircraft since it was evidence in a criminal case.

This was what Robyn pushed past when she arrived, going directly for the cab, stepping out into the water up to her knees and peering inside the cab at the dead pilot whose throat was split like a melon, the blood washed away by the river, no sign of Ovierto.

"There was a second man in the chopper! Did you see anyone climb from the water?" she shouted at the salvage man.

"No, no... no one."

"If you're lying—" She approached as if she would tear his heart out.

"I saw no one! No one alive!"

She grabbed him by the lapels of the oily jumpsuit he wore and shoved him into the side of a huge green tractor that appeared rusted solid. "Did you see another body, then! Did you? Did you?"

The hefty man swung at her, hitting Robyn Muro in the ribs, to which she responded with a knee to his groin, sending him to his knees as the New York State police officers pulled her off. She felt completely alone, watching all of the local cops staring at her as if she were a monster.

Sam Boas came to her, finding her in a Canadian parka and drinking hot cocoa laced with a local whiskey.

Robyn Muro's distress call had also been heard by Dr. Samuel Boas and the other agents waiting this side of Ottawa. They rushed to the scene in a helicopter, which had promptly been put to work locating the airstrip used by Ovierto, to close off any chance he might have of getting to his airplane and escaping the area entirely. The plane had to be somewhere nearby, but according to the Canadian officer who joined the helicopter crew, there were twenty-one small airstrips in the region. It would take great patience and time to locate a single Beech craft that didn't "belong."

Meanwhile, Dr. Boas had been dropped at the scene of the helicopter wreckage. He had been monitoring radio transmissions as they had approached, and, on first seeing the crash sight, he cursed their luck. Everything would be much easier if the damned machine had plunged onto the American side, or at least in the center of the river. He had seen what complications could arise between the two countries when extradition orders were put through. And with a man like Ovierto, if the Canadians attempted to hold him for up to six months or a year while they decided, he'd break free to kill again.

Hopefully, he was dead already, a victim of the crash. But somehow Sam Boas didn't imagine that the evil doctor would go so easily. News had it that he had drowned, that the body had not been recovered from the wreckage, only that of the pilot.

Boas's first concern on landing would be to examine the pilot's body and the wreckage closely, to see if it told him anything. Now he was on scene, and Boas saw Robyn coming straight for him—obviously distraught, unattended bruises on her cheek, forehead, and hands —but still alive. She had survived the awful drug and frigid coffin that had killed Riley; she had survived a firefight with Maurice Ovierto, the firefight that had killed Donna Thorpe.

Instinctively, he took her in his arms, but she pulled free, shouting, "Doc, we've got to get these fucking Canadians moving. He's getting away! Ovierto is getting away, and these fuckin' idiots got their fingers up their asses and—"

"Take it easy... easy..."

"Easy my ass, Sam! He killed Donna! Or rather, he got me to kill her."

"Whoa up, slow down." She was on an adrenalin high.

"He's getting away! I know it! I can feel it. He got free of the wreckage. No one saw him. No one saw. He's disappeared."

"He's very likely at the bottom of the river."

"Then tell these assholes to start dredging!"

"We may have to do such operations ourselves, Robyn."

"I can't believe this."

He made her sit down, ordering more of the cocoa from the man who apparently lived in the ram-shackle old place on the property. An enterprising man, he had brewed coffee, made cocoa, had broken out some whiskey, and was selling it all at inflated prices. The men and women on scene appreciated his efforts far more than they denounced them.

With Robyn calmed a bit, Boas now went to work overseeing the inspection of both the aircraft and the pilot's body. He immediately noted the throat wound and the severed safety belt. Another victim of the maniac, the pilot had been murdered. The damage to the helicopter was slight. Broken bubble, crushed supports and detached wheel. It was a "soft" landing crash, he felt, soft enough so that both men could have survived. Ovierto had obviously feared that the pilot would be taken alive, questioned, and break under that questioning, so the man was killed.

He returned to Robyn and the clutch of agents who had been with Thorpe since her removal to Nebraska. The other men were offering hesitant congratulations to Robyn for a job well done. "At least you know you put a bullet in him, and you brought down his helicopter," an agent named Pyles was telling her. "That's more'n anyone else, other than Sykes and Thorpe, ever got with him."

Boas then reported to them all the bad news as he saw it, explaining his preliminary findings in the cab of the chopper. "This means that Ovierto was alive at the point of impact, when he knew they were going down. He would have cut the safety belt only if he could not get it unlatched, or if he could not reach it, given the angle of the cab, water flooding in."

"What are you saying, then? He's still alive? I knew it," said Robyn, getting excited again.

He waved her down. "He cut both belts and pushed himself outward in an attempt to save himself, but-"

"Knowing Ovierto, he meant to use the pilot's body as a float, like a goddamned log, to take him down river," she said. "That's it."

"Possibly."

"What do you mean, possible, Doc? Possible, hell! The man's an animal. Deserves to be found hiding in the hole he's lying in and shot dead the way you'd shoot a dangerous snake."