Her Last Scream (28 page)

Cruz and I raced to Nederland at a hundred miles an hour, a State Police vehicle leading the way. It occurred to me that this was how everything started: racing to the morgue as Rein cleared the path.

“Bromley didn’t know anything?” Cruz asked.

“Not about Trotman’s whereabouts. At least, that’s what he claims. I figure it’s right.”

“Have you got enough to hold him?”

“The current charge is conspiracy to commit murder. The judge took a look at the evidence and denied bail.”

“A hotshot like Bromley got remanded to custody?”

“It seems the first thing the forensics people saw when they popped his trunk was a smear of blood beneath the carpet. Human blood that’s now being tested for DNA.”

“He didn’t clean up? He had that much ego?”

“Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first exalt,” I said. “What’s the plan?”

Cruz shot a glance at her watch. “Strather’s got his team moving, gonna direct the operation from above, says we’re welcome to fly along.”

“Nice of him to offer,” I said.

“I think he’s doing it to keep you in sight,” she said. “Given how you started freelancing at Flood’s place.”

Rein opened her eyes to see a rectangular cavern, large, perhaps ten paces by eight. There was a table, a chair and ottoman, three lamps hung from beams, the light low and amber. Heat poured from a kerosene heater in a corner. Strips of plastic covered one end of the room, keeping the heat from escaping.

Living in a big cave
, Rein thought. Like the fucking Flintstones.

There was a bookcase. A cedar chest. Atop a table in a corner sat a bowl and pitcher like in antique stores. But it was the décor that pulled Rein’s awakening eyes: a huge poster from the movie
High Plains Drifter
centered the far wall, Clint Eastwood under a fiery sky, gun in one hand, whip in the other. Freakier were the half-dozen posters from the movie
300,
bands of rock-bodied Spartans with weapons drawn.

“I see you,” said a voice from the far side of the strips. He entered with a collapsible sawhorse in one hand, a pair of boards in the other, spaghetti-strand muscles laboring against the weight.

“Your stench is about to make me puke,” he said, setting up the sawhorses and laying boards between them. He left the room, returning a minute later with a cloth tool bag, setting it on the table at his back. “If you try to hurt me again I will shoot you in your guts and piss on you while you squirm. You will lay on this table and do exactly what I say.”

He pulled the knife and sliced the tape. Rein felt blood flow back into her hands and feet.

“Take off your clothes. Don’t look at me like that. DO IT!”

Rein stood naked before her captor. He stared with disgust. “Don’t stand with your feet apart. Keep them tight.”

Rein shuffled her feet together. “Lay on the board,” he commanded, opening the tool bag and producing a roll of duct tape, binding Rein’s ankles to the board. She expected her hands to be next and wondered if she could get her nails to his eyes. Instead, he produced a square of black oilcloth the size of a bandana. He set the cloth and tape on her belly.

“Tape the cloth to your stomach so the cloth goes over your thing.”

Rein looked down at herself. “I don’t understand.”

“TAPE THE CLOTH OVER YOUR FILTHY CUNT, YOU STUPID COW!”

Dr Kavanaugh was right
, Rein thought, stripping off a length of tape, her mind pushing free of the chloroform and thinking from a dozen directions at once.
He’s
terrified of my vagina.
She laid the swatch of plastic over her groin, taped it down. Trotman produced a length of rope, snapping it between his hands. He reached into the bag and found a spoon, its edges polished bright, sharpened.

The rope will tie my torso down
, Rein realized.
The spoon will remove my eyes
.

Rein’s mind remembered something Carson had said about psychopaths:
When all else fails, and there’s nothing between you and death, fuck with them.

“Did you ever get that espresso machine?” she asked, fighting to keep the fright from her voice.

“What?”

“You were Astra,” Rein said. “I see it now. You had me convinced you were a woman.”

“I did what was necessary,” Trotman grunted, pulling a bottle of alcohol from the bag.

“I’ll bet you like being a woman. Wearing a big wig, putting on the make-up. It’s fun, isn’t it?”

“Shut up.”

“You sure talked about sex a lot. Tantric sex with men? A transgendered partner? You ever get confused about just what –”

Trotman snarled and punched her face. “Wearing a wig,” Rein continued, shaking off the blow. “A dress. Make-up. You liked being a woman, you freak. But you’re a lousy woman and a worse man.”

He hit her again, his fist bouncing off Rein’s forehead. She saw stars.

“Eunuch,” she spat. “Ball-less little scumba—”

Trotman roared and kicked at her head. The impromptu table tipped over, spilling Rein to the floor, feet bound to the wood. “LOOK WHAT YOU DID!” he screamed. “YOUR SICKNESS IS ALL OVER!”

Rein looked down. Her menstrual release was in full flow, blood running down the board from beneath her, smeared by her buttocks. The plastic was askew, her pubic hair in view.

“COVER YOURSELF!” he yelled, waving the gun. “COVER IT!”

Was it a fear of female genitalia
? Rein wondered.
Or was it the menses?
She ran her hands across her labia, felt the wetness in her palms as he crouched and checked her bindings. Rein sprung forward, her gymnastics-trained body pushing the limits. She reached out, her hands wiping across his face and hair.

Trotman stumbled back grabbing at his face. He saw Rein’s blood on his fingers. “I’M GOING TO DIG YOUR HEART OUT THROUGH YOUR EYES,” he screamed, beginning to gag, running to the pitcher in the corner and pouring the bowl full, dunking his head in the water as if his face were on fire.

The helicopter skimmed the treetops, the snow-covered peaks of the high Rockies in the distance. We were heading toward Trotman’s Neverland, Cruz and I in back, Strather and the pilot up front. The SWAT team was racing in from below, a couple miles behind us, moving along dirt roads.

“It looks like the middle of nowhere,” Cruz yelled over the roar of the engine. “But it’s twenty minutes to downtown Boulder.”

Strather alternately studied the map in his hands and looked out the window through massive binoculars. “ETA is four minutes,” he said, frowning down at the verdant ridge top. “I’m not seeing a place to set down.”

Her captor gagging and splashing water over himself in the far corner of the room, Rein’s eyes frantically searched the dirt. She saw the upended bottle of alcohol, the roll of tape …

Where is it?

There! In the dust at her feet. Rein snatched the sharpened silver spoon from the dirt. It took two strokes to cleave the tape from her ankles. The man was hunched over the bowl splashing soap and water across his face.

“This FILTH is ALL OVER ME!”

Rein considered attacking with the spoon, but he had a gun. He lifted the bowl in both hands, pouring water over his head. She slipped between the plastic slats, bolted down the tunnel, lit by lamps hung every dozen or so feet. And then, to the side, another plastic-slatted opening. She poked her head through the plastic, looking for a way out.

His bedroom: a mattress on a log frame, a stump for a bedside table. Another fucking Eastwood poster. Two more
300
posters. An elk head above the bed. The kerosene heater. In the corner, a gun safe, sized for at least a dozen long guns. Rein dashed to the metal box.
Please
, she implored,
be open.

The safe was locked. She spun back toward the tunnel. Saw a bottle of Hoppe’s solvent beside the low bed, a box of barrel patches. Had he been cleaning …? A pistol! A .22 revolver on the floor, magazine snapped open. Rein grabbed it and ran. A howl of rage echoed through the mine. The bowl shattering, thrown.

“GET BACK HERE,” the man screamed.

Rein vaulted back into the tunnel. The floor elevated to her right, angling up. She ran like wolves were on her heels.

“The property is around here somewhere,” Strather said, the chopper hovering three hundred feet above fir and aspen and jagged outcroppings of gray rock. My heart was as loud as the roar of the engine.

“When will the team catch up?” I yelled, two feet from Strather.

“Ten minutes,” Strather said. “But I don’t see any dwellings.”

I looked down. The trees were evenly and thinly distributed. There weren’t many places a cabin could be built.

“Over there,” I said, catching a line through the green. “Is that a road?”

Strather lifted the binocs. “Good eyes,” he said, giving a thumbs-up. “Not much more than a trail.” He gestured for the pilot to track the road below and radioed directions to the on-racing team of warriors and medics.

Rein saw a pile of beams. A dead-end? She dashed to the pile of rotting wood, not a dead-end, but a subterranean crossroads. Darkness in both directions. Rein listened into the space at her back.

Nothing. What was he doing?

Rock chips exploded from the wall, stinging her face, the rifle shot cutting through the mine like a sonic knife. The man had visited his gun locker. Her captor loosed another shot and Rein heard the ugly
tup
as the slug sizzled past her ear. She dove to the ground as a half-dozen more rounds clattered through the tunnel.

Then quiet. Reloading?

Rein had two directions she could go. She started to the left, stopped as the echoes of the gunshots faded. Was that the sound of a helicopter? No way. Still, she zigged to the right, shots starting again. He was running after her. The tunnel veered, almost black now. In her path lay a wall of boulders the size of appliances. Rein patted until finding an opening, pushed through. Rounds screamed into the rocks. But there, up ahead, was that light?

And dammit, that
was
a helicopter.

We followed the road, the pilot ascending to avoid a pillar of rock jutting past the trees. Strather was leaning forward, the lenses tight to his face. I saw his hand point before his voice spoke. “A vehicle, two o’clock, about five hundred yards. Looks like an Explorer. Black.”

“What Trotman drives,” Cruz confirmed.

The pilot banked and we were there in seconds, Strather sucking in detail, barking into his helmet mic, relaying the info to his team leader: “… road veers past creek bed, small ravine, cut to north another quarter mile. Truck against outcropping, west side. No subjects visible.”

“It’s mining country,” Cruz said. “The ground is probably like a honeycomb.”

“I’ve been after people up here before,” Strather said. “If a mine opening’s small and remote enough, you can hide it with deadfalls.”

“We’ve got to get down there,” I said.

“No LZ,” the pilot said. “Not for miles.”

“ETA on the team?” Cruz asked.

“Still ten minutes, Detective.”

The pilot settled into a hover, waiting on further instructions. I saw him lift his sunglasses as if unsure of his eyes.

“Down there. What the hell’s that?”

“What?” Strather said.

“Just popped out from under that cliff, look left.”

Strather aimed the binocs. His mouth fell open. “Christ almighty,” he said. “It’s a naked woman tearing through the brush.”

“I’m on it,” the pilot said, nudging the controls as the chopper tumbled sideways. I could see her now, a blur of motion beneath the trees. I watched her stumble down an incline.

“It’s Rein,” I yelled.

“What’s she running from?” Strather said as the upper windscreen shattered.

“We’re taking fire!” the pilot yelled, instinctually rolling the chopper. Another round punched through the skin. “I see the shooter,” the pilot called. “Nine o’clock, moving low and fast toward the woman. Rifle in hand, another over his shoulder.”

“Trotman,” I yelled. “Go after him.”

“This ain’t an Apache, Detective,” he said. “It’s a search-and-rescue craft. He can shoot this thing down.”

As if knowing a point was to be made, another round whanged off the craft. “Extra glasses?” I yelled to Strather, fingers indicating circles around my eyes. He reached to the pack at his feet and jammed binoculars into my hand as the pilot retreated to safer air. I searched the ground frantically, saw Rein running toward the jutting peak we’d just skirted, a solid wall of rock.

“NO!” I yelled. “OTHER WAY!

“Shit,” Strather whispered, watching.

“What’s going on?” Cruz said, her voice dry with fear.

“Rein’s out of room,” I said. “She’s trapped.”

“Come on!” Strather yelled into the microphone.

“How soon?” I said.

“Three minutes.”

The helicopter was still in the air, Rein saw, but hanging in the distance, as if barred by an invisible shield from getting closer. The man had stopped running; he was moving towards her at a leisurely pace, an afternoon walk. Now and then he’d fire a shot, laugh. Rein’s feet were bloody from running over shards of broken rock, her breath ragged gasps.

She ducked behind a tree and studied the path ahead, seeing why her pursuer was amused: a plate of gray rock rising into the sky, nowhere to hide. The man had only to walk up and shoot her.

Bang. Just like that.

Rein looked at the gun in her hand, five rounds in the chamber, 22-caliber, about as effective here as the plastic guns she’d carried as a child, pulling her badge and announcing she was Harriet Nautilus, Girl Cop. A slug whumped into the Douglas fir shielding her, telling her he knew where she was. Another laugh. He was a hundred feet away, Rein figured.

She looked up the rock wall ahead of her, a looming gray gravestone. Rein glanced around the tree, saw him closing in with a lever-action rifle in hand. He was wearing a goddamn cowboy hat.

“This what it takes to make you feel like a man?” she called. “Hunting a defenseless woman?”

“What’s the best thing about a blow job?” he yelled back. “Ten minutes of silence.”

“Who fucked you up most, sonny?” Rein called. “Mommy or Daddy?”

He growled something incomprehensible and fired into the tree. Rein held her breath, scrambled to another tree eight feet back. She was almost to the cliff.

He kept moving forward.

Down to this
, Rein thought. She listened into her head, heard Carson’s words from the long night at the range:
What I do is lock my shoulders, elbows and wrists into a solid unit and roll with my …

“Step out here, Mama,” the man said, two dozen feet away. She heard him cock the rifle. “I got more important things to do.”

Rein dove out from behind the tree, hitting the ground and rolling. The man jacked his rifle to his shoulder …

“Did you see that?” Strather said, glasses to his eyes. “Jesus!”

“Is … am I seeing right?” I croaked, my heart so high in my throat I could barely speak.

“What is it?” Cruz said, shaking my arm. “What’s going on?”

“I … think …” I couldn’t speak. I could only shake.

“The shooter is down,” Strather barked into his mic. “I repeat, The shooter is down. Approach with extreme caution.”

“Carson?” Cruz said. But I could only open and close my mouth like a fish out of water. Cruz looked to Strather, his own glasses to his eyes.

“Your officer is on the move again,” he grinned. “Looking safe and uninjured. Our people will have her in one minute.”