"Sharon." Grace reached across Annie to touch Sharon's left hand, which had fallen into her lap like a dead thing. It was ice-cold. Her right hand still held the 9mm, still pointed at the place where Deputy Diebel's head had been before his body slumped to the right, over the console. "Sharon."
Annie watched Sharon's eyes move just a little, hardly far enough to notice-maybe she did know the trick. Hello, Sharon. Anybody in there?
The noises stopped, and Sharon's throat moved. Her mouth opened and a whistle came out, then a whisper: "Sorry about the noise." And then her right hand started to shake, hard, and she lowered it slowly to lie in her lap with the left one. She felt Annie and Grace looking at her, and she turned her head to meet their eyes.
"I'm sorry," she said, her tone calm, perfectly controlled, pretending to be normal but sounding hideously abnormal coming from her face. It was a ghastly gray color, and all the skin looked loose.
Grace didn't know what to say to that. Sharon had just killed the man who was driving them to safety, a deputy just like her, and now she was apologizing as if she'd burped at the dinner table.
"I have to do it again," Sharon said suddenly, lifting the gun so fast that Grace couldn't believe it, firing two quick shots and blowing out her side window.
Annie slammed her hands over her ears, but it was too late. Instant deafness. She couldn't hear the safety glass falling to the ground as Sharon pounded at it with the butt of her gun, desperate to reach for the outside door handle, to crawl through the window opening itself if she had to, anything to get out of the car.
In the end, she couldn't manage it. Not just yet. She was simply too tired. Funny how pulling a little trigger could wear you out. But that wasn't really true, either. On the range, she could get a hundred shots off without feeling the strain in her finger or the muscles in her forearm quiver. Killing an actual person was surprisingly exhausting. Sharon had never done it before, had never dreamed she would ever have to do it, in spite of all the training and preparation. She sat there on the edge of the seat, ready to do something she couldn't quite remember, her thoughts tripping away to touch on things, losing focus almost immediately. The psychology major inside her head put a finger to her mouth and nodded sagely. Oh, yes. She was going to need therapy.
"Sharon?" Grace's voice, tentative, filled with tension.
"Right here."
"Look at me."
Sharon turned and gave Grace her eyes, and then Annie. Why were they looking at her so oddly? Why did they still look afraid? She'd taken care of everything, hadn't she?
"Why?" Grace said.
Oh, that.She felt a bad, naughty smile trying to form. . . .Don't dothat, don't smile, can't excuse smiling after you filled a person, not evenwith displacement behavior or any of that gobbledy gook. . , oh, shit. I forgot to tell them why.
A wave of clarity rolled over her mind, washing away all the silly, disgusting, normal human reactions to trauma you were allowed to have when you were just a person and not a cop. She took a deep breath and came back to the here and now.
"He didn't check my badge," she said simply, because that was when it had started. That had been the first thing to bother her. "He should have looked that thing up and down and sideways, made sure I was FBI, but he didn't. All he cared about was getting my gun."
Grace and Annie were still staring at her, saying nothing. It wasn't enough.
"He had another gun under the front seat. A long one. Part of it's probably in plain view in the front, and I was too goddamned stupid to check out the car before we got in. Too goddamned relieved to see a cop to even think about checking the car. My fault."
"Cops all carry shotguns," Annie said carefully, and Sharon nodded impatiently.
"In the trunk. Always. Unless it's racked. Besides, the barrel was all wrong." She pulled an untidy memory from her brain, and her voice got hard. "I know guns. My father was a collector. Don't know where he got half of them; now they'd be illegal as hell. But one of them was an Ml6. Just like the one under the seat. Our Deputy Diebel was oneof them."
Grace was very quiet, her gaze turned inward, trying to decide if Sharon had jumped too fast and way too far, or if all her vigilance had failed her once again.
"And there's this." Sharon lifted the hat from where it still sat on her lap, undisturbed by shooting and window-breaking and madness. She flipped it over and showed Annie and Grace the inside.
Annie looked down at it stupidly. "It's a hat."
"Look at the name tag."
Grace grabbed the hat and squinted down at the small, faded printing that read "Douglas Lee." "Oh my God."
"What?" Annie snatched the hat and held it close to her face. "Oh, Lord. This ishis car, isn't it? This was Deputy Lee's car. . . ." Her eyes jerked to the front seat, then quickly darted away. "Jesus God in heaven. We went right with him. We just hopped in the car and let him drive away with us."
Sharon's neck was starting to hurt from looking to the right for so long, but she couldn't look anywhere else, she just had to keep looking at Grace and Annie because her thoughts were slipping again, like marbles on ice. "I killed him," she said matter-of-factly. "Just like he was going to kill us. They killed Deputy Lee and took his car and his hat, and that bastard up there is probably carrying Deputy Lee's gun, so I killed him right in Deputy Lee's own car." She leaned forward and hissed toward the bloody ruin that had been the man's head. "How's that for poetic justice, Deputy Fucking Diebel?" And then she scrambled right out the open window and tumbled to the ground and started to suck in huge breaths.
It was the first time Sharon had really scared Grace, even more than when she'd fired the gun in the first place.She's losing it. She's forgetting everything. Damnit, she didn't even look before she went out there.
Annie had her arm out the window, reaching for the outside door handle, but Grace was looking everywhere frantically, around every car, the sides of the building, through the tall grass, and into the trees beyond.
She was positive of only one thing-if this was where that imposter in the front seat wanted to take them, she didn't want to be here.
EXCEPT FOR ROADRUNNER, who was still back in the office, all of the men were in the front of the RV, looking worriedly at the towers of flame in the woods on their right, moving steadily toward the road.
Less than a mile from the Four Corners turnoff, Harley eased the rig to a stop at a makeshift roadblock that some firefighters had set up. There were two fire trucks ahead of them, pulled as close to the nonexistent shoulder as they could get, and it still left only about an inch of clearance for the RV to get by. One of the engines looked like it should have been pulled by horses.
Two men in heavy yellow firefighting gear were gesturing wildly for Harley to back up the rig, which was just plain ridiculous. Magozzi and Halloran went outside with their badges and guns and attitudes, and it still took another minute before they could talk the firefighters into letting them pass through. Charlie slipped out the open door before anyone noticed.
"Your dog's loose." Halloran pointed on the way back to the RV, and Magozzi saw Charlie rooting around in the ditch, running back to the woods toward the fire-stupid dog-then back up to the road again to plunge his nose into a piece of debris he'd found.