As he continued to wrestle the ATV, Joanna slammed on the brakes. "Hit the bricks, Frank. I'm right behind you."
To Joanna's dismay, Frank didn't respond with instant compliance. Instead, he thumbed down the speak button on the radio one more time. "We're out of the Blazer, Kries. I'm going right. Sheriff Brady's going left. Tell those sharp-shooters of yours to go after him, not us."
With that Frank threw the radio down and bailed out of the truck. Joanna paused long enough to look back at Sonja. "Remember, stay down!" she ordered. "If you see things are going bad-if you see that Frank and I are losing it-put the Blazer in reverse and get the hell out of here. Understand?"
Sonja nodded wordlessly.
Leaving the engine running and drawing her Colt, Joanna dropped out of the Blazer. She hit the ground rolling, shoulder first, and came to rest against a pillow-sized boulder. The force of hitting the rock knocked the wind out of her lungs and sent the Colt spinning away from her hand. Only when she had retrieved the gun did she realize how badly she had hurt her shoulder. Her whole arm was numb. It was all she could do to maintain her hold on the Colt's grip.
Seconds later, still rubbing her bruised shoulder, she heard the clatter of an arriving helicopter. Good as his word, Todd Kries had already dropped over the mountains and was bringing in his two sharpshooting deputies as promised. Way to go, Todd, Joanna thought, but before she could finish that train of thought, the engine of the ATV surged to lifer. Moments later, it came roaring down the road,
"Joanna," Frank shouted, "look out! He's coming your way!"
But then Joanna realized that Merritt wasn't coming toward her at all. He was actually aiming for the Blazer. In a flash of intuition, she realized that her four-wheel drive vehicle was what he was really after. A fateful flat tire had disabled Ryan Merritt's main means of escape. He had other transportation. For off-roading, the ATV was great, but long-term, it wouldn't move far enough or fast enough for him to get away. And it wouldn't carry any kind of payload, either.
As those thoughts flashed through Joanna's mind, she also realized that because the road was terribly rough right there, he was being forced to use both hands to drive. Both hands. For those few seconds, then, Ryan Merritt wasn't armed.
Measuring the distance between him and the Blazer and between herself and the Blazer, Joanna knew it would be a foot race-a life-and-death foot race. She also knew she had to get there first. Placing second wasn't an option. If Ryan beat her, the Blazer would be his. It was sitting there running with the key already in the ignition and with Sonja Hosfield trapped in the backseat.
He wouldn't hesitate at killing Sonja, any more than he would hesitate at killing someone else, Joanna thought.
Sometimes during the summer, before diving into the icy-cold, well-water depths of the Elks Club pool, Joanna would stand on the diving board and gulp a single preparatory breath. She did that now. Then she pushed up off the ground and propelled herself toward the Blazer.
She beat him there by mere inches, flying horizontally into the open driver's door from five feet away and sliding all the way across the seat. The knuckles of her fingers slammed against the door handle on the passenger side. Once again the Colt was knocked from her hand. This time it landed on the floorboard. By the time she had groped around and found it, Ryan Merritt was already behind her at the open door. And now he, too, was armed. He was raising the deer rifle to aim it when the deafening sound of a gunshot exploded in Joanna's ears.
She looked on in horror while a shocked expression froze on Ryan Merritt's face. The bullet smashed into his forehead, leaving a seemingly small hole. Then it exploded out the back of his head in a shower of gore. The half-raised deer rifle clattered to the ground. It fell backward, away from the open door. And so did he.
At first Joanna thought that Frank must have raced back to the far side of the Blazer and fired the fatal shot from there. But then she saw him. He was still yards away. The shot had come from much closer than that.
The sound of the shot reverberated in Joanna's ears. The smell of cordite stung her nostrils. Puzzled, she raised her-self up and turned around. In the backseat of the Blazer sat Sonja Hosfield. A small but deadly and still smoking pistol was gripped in her trembling hand.
"I wanted him dead," Sonja said simply. "Ryan deserved to be dead, and now he is."
"But where did the gun come from?" Joanna asked. "I thought…"
"It was in my purse," Sonja Hosfield explained. "It's always in my purse. I've carried it for years."
"You'd better hand it over," Joanna said. Without a word, Sonja Hosfield complied.
The next few minutes were a blur of activity. But when there was a pause in the action, Joanna tried to slip away on foot, putting a little distance between herself and the din of arriving emergency vehicles. Some thirty feet from the roadway, she sank down on a boulder. She had retrieved her cell phone from Frank. Unfortunately, her attempt at a discreet exit hadn't gone unnoticed. She had removed the phone from her pocket and was punching numbers into the keypad when Frank Montoya came surging through the undergrowth.
"What's the matter?" he asked anxiously. "Are you all right?"
"I'm okay," Joanna said shakily, holding up the phone so he could see it. "But if you don't mind, I need a little privacy-to call my daughter."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Afterward, Joanna barely remembered the rest of that Friday night. She finally went dragging home sometime around midnight. There was a message on the machine from Marianne saying that if it was all right with Joanna, the services for Esther would be Monday afternoon at three o'clock.
She stood in the shower until she ran out of hot water, but no amount of showering could wash away the horror of what Fran Daly had shown her when she met up with the medical examiner in the hot little room behind the garage on Alton Hosfield's Triple C. Monty Brainard's assessment had been right on the money.
The frost-covered freezer compartment of Ryan Merritt's refrigerator was his trophy room. There, wrapped in separate plastic sandwich bags, Fran Daly had discovered the frozen, bloodied remains of four newly harvested human scalps. A few feet away, in the bottom dresser drawer, she had found one more, much older than the others.
"What do you think?" Fran Daly had asked, opening the drawer and shining a flashlight so Joanna could see inside.
Joanna had sighed. "I think we just found the rest of Rebecca Flowers," she had said. "The poor little runaway from Yuma."
After the shower, Joanna went to bed and tried to sleep, but without much success. She found herself almost wishing that Butch had come back to the house so she could have cuddled up next to him. It wasn't that her body was chilled; her soul was.
Butch called the next morning as Joanna was getting ready to leave for work. "How about breakfast?" he asked.
"I can't," she told him. "I have to be in the office in ten minutes."
"Are you okay?"
Joanna closed her eyes, grateful that he had asked the question, while at the same time wondering what about her voice had given her away.