The lights scorched the desert, a dozen angry globes bearing down on the gravel parking lot below.
Jack grabbed the railing with one hand as he came to the end of the landing. Still, his momentum nearly tumbled him over the side.
Jack steadied himself, then racked the slide and chambered a round in the handgun
He was really going to do this.
He had to do this.
He took aim.
But the sheriff was already aiming at him.
She’d heard him chamber that round.
Wyetta’s pistol bucked in her hand.
A bullet trenched the meat of Jack’s left forearm just below the elbow.
The Heckler tumbled through the night.
***
The gun landed in front of the black guy, sending up a splash of gravel. He didn’t even grab for it. He was too busy hacking up a dark stream of blood. Down on his knees, one hand under his coat, where a bullet from Wyetta’s.44 American had excavated one hell of a burrow.
A bloody rattle raked his throat, and his eyelids fluttered heavily as his muddy brown eyes tracked that tight bank of lights which skimmed the desert floor.
The lights were coming, and coming fast. Had to be a truck with high beams and fog lights and even a rack up on top.
Just like the rust-bucket Dodge Dakota that Kate Benteen drove.
That bitch. She was too damn smart for her own good. Sending Baddalach through the back door while she raced hellbent for leather through the front.
“It’s a goddamned diversion.” Wyetta squinted, moving back. “They’re trying to sucker us.” She pointed at the second story landing. “Baddalach’s up there. Gotta be he’s trying to grab the money while Benteen plays off-road games. I’m going after him.”
Rorie said, “What do you want me to do?”
“Kill the little bitch,” Wyetta said, and then she snatched up Baddalach’s pistol and tossed it to the deputy.
Jack couldn’t quite figure out how he had ended up on his knees. He didn’t remember making the trip at all.
Light spilled across the landing from the open doorway. He got up, looked at his arm. A chunk of it seemed to be missing. There was a whole lot of blood.
A bullet cracked the cinder-block wall just above his head.
“Don’t move, cowboy.”
Wyetta Earp started up the staircase.
Jack dove through the open doorway and slammed the door closed with his feet.
He was up in a second. He locked the door and rammed the deadbolt home. Then he scanned the room, searching for a knife, a club, anything-
The only thing he found was Sandy Kapalua-Dayton.
She lay on the bed. Her wrists were handcuffed, and her legs were bound with an electrical cord tom from a lamp.
A hand towel was jammed in her mouth, held in place by a bandana.
Sandy’s eyes bulged. Her face was a startling shade of purple.
And then a wild spasm wracked her body, and she tumbled off the bed and thrashed about on the carpet, her head banging the floor like a runaway jackhammer.
Rorie stepped past the dying black guy and aimed the boxer’s pistol at the headlights.
The truck kept coming. Three hundred feet away. . two fifty. . The driver had to see her by now. Two hundred. . one fifty. . But the driver didn’t slow down, didn’t so much as swerve-
Rorie pulled the trigger. The first bullet smacked the left headlight and she corrected her aim. . one twenty-five. . the pistol rocking in her grip, two shots through the radiator and. . one hundred. . steam spit through the grille and the next two shots spiderwebbed the windshield dead center and. . eighty-five. . seventy. . Rorie adjusted one more time, fired. . fifty feet. . and the bullet-pitted glass and the battered Dodge Dakota swerved wildly, kicking up sand and rocks and brush like a wild bronco.
The truck crashed through the chain-link fence that penned the junkyard, slammed into a rusted-out Chevy and did not move another inch
Rorie waited. In the junkyard, a dog ran at the truck, barking like it was the end of the world.
But the truck didn’t move. It just sat there, all those headlights glowing like a portable football stadium.
Rorie checked the boxer’s pistol. It was an excellent weapon. A Heckler amp; Koch USP.45.
The only problem was that Rorie had emptied it.
She couldn’t finish Kate Benteen with an empty pistol.
Damn. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another.
She turned around, searching the parking lot for her own pistol. The black guy had dropped it when Wyetta plugged him. Had to be that it was around here somewhere-
The black guy said, “Surprise.”
Woodrow rose with some effort, staring at the lights.
He was still in the parking lot, but it was no longer morning.
He tried to remember. He had checked into the motel, and he had parked the Saturn in the lot by the junkyard, and he had taken his prayer rug from the trunk, turning toward Mecca to pray. .
And he had suffered another blackout.
A long one, because now it was night.
Woodrow could not imagine what had transpired in the interim. He only knew what had happened since he emerged from the blackout-he’d seen the lights in the desert, and he’d been shot by a female law-enforcement official who had departed the immediate scene, and he’d managed to shoot the woman’s partner. .
He stumbled forward, toward the lights. They had never been this close before. And being this close, he could tell for certain that they were not an illusion, no figment of a wounded brain.
The lights were real. If Allah would grant him the strength, Woodrow would know what was behind them before he died.
He stepped through a hole in the chain-link fence. A dog barked at him, but the animal was somewhere in the shadows and he could not see it. Still, he fired the deputy’s pistol into the night, hoping to hear the animal squeal because he recalled all too well the damage inflicted by Jack Baddalach’s dog.
Quite suddenly, the dog ceased its barking. Perhaps Woodrow had been lucky. Perhaps Allah had guided his aim.
He turned and faced the lights.
They beckoned him forward, and this time no needles of pain assaulted his skull, and no taffy-pulling machine tore at his brain.
Still, Woodrow was afraid. He hesitated, squinting into the light.
A silhouette shimmered within the pool of bright white fire.
The silhouette came toward him.
It was a woman.
Woodrow watched her come.
Her face was scarlet. Masked with blood.
Her clothes were black … but her hands were very white.
And in them she held a shotgun.
Woodrow raised his pistol.
The woman fired her shotgun.
Jack pulled the towel out of Sandy’s mouth. She gasped deeply, shivering.
“Easy,” he said. “Take it easy. .”
Sandy took another breath, and then another, and then her face wasn’t purple anymore.
Jack heard footfalls outside. Someone was running along the landing, just the way he had.
It had to be Wyetta.
Sandy’s fingers dug into his arm. The look in her eyes told him that she heard the same thing he did.
“Keep quiet,” Jack whispered, “and she’ll never know you’re here.”
Fortunately, Sandy Kapalua-Dayton was a skinny woman.
She actually fit under the bed.
Kate lay on the ground for a long time.
The shotgun recoil had put her flat on her ass. And even though she was a Montana girl and Montana girl’s got things done, she couldn’t quite get up the gumption to move. Partly because one of the deputy’s bullets had notched her right ear and nicked her skull, and she was still leaking pretty good.
That part of it was okay, though, because fresh blood made good camouflage. She’d smeared it over her face, just the way they taught her in the army. In a dangerous situation without the proper equipment, a soldier must improvise. And, hey, it had worked, because the hit man hadn’t known what to make of her until it was way too late.