That was when they heard the echoing roar of vehicles speeding down the ramp into the underground car park. At least two of them. Moving fast, rapidly approaching.
‘That them already?’ Erin asked, wide-eyed.
‘No,’ Morrell said, looking as alarmed and surprised as she was. ‘That can’t be them.’
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Ben followed the white van away from City Hall. He was good at tailing people, and had been doing it for a long time. The trick was to hang back by a decent number of car-lengths, using the vehicles between you and the target to block you out. Three was ideal. It worked best in heavy traffic, where you could maintain constant visual contact with little chance of being spotted.
But there were risks, too. Allowing a distance between you and the target made it possible to get separated. Traffic lights were a constant menace. Burn through a red to keep up, and bad things could happen – you might get into an accident, you might alert the target to your presence, and if you were really unlucky you might draw unwanted police attention into the bargain. That was why the best way to track a moving target was with a coordinated team in multiple vehicles, staying in contact by radio or mobile phone. A combination of cars, trucks and motorcycles was useful. Air support was even better. If one team member thought they were getting too conspicuous or had lost visual contact, they could call in another who immediately picked up the trail. When it was smoothly done, the target didn’t have a clue they were being tailed.
Ben didn’t have the luxury of a whole team of guys. He was on his own, and for that reason he had to play it extra safe as he chased the white van through the streets of downtown Tulsa. Instead of three vehicles, he hung back four, his gaze fixed on the dirty panels of the GMC’s back doors so as not to let it get swallowed up out of sight in the traffic. Even that didn’t keep him completely hidden, because the van was moving fast, constantly stepping out of lane and slaloming left and right as it overtook just about everything in front of it, and Ben was forced to do the same. The two men were definitely in a hurry to get somewhere. He swore as the van sped past a station wagon, and wished they’d slow down. This reckless nonsense was going to get them all noticed.
The van turned this way and that, screeching through intersections, cutting a jagged path northwards through the city. After a few minutes, Ben realised that it had caught up with another fast-moving vehicle up ahead, a blue Ford. The two of them were keeping pace with each other. From this distance it was hard to tell how many occupants were inside the car – maybe three or four.
The blue Ford and the van were forced to slow a little as they came into a long right-hand sweeper choked up with traffic in both directions. From his three-quarter angle further back round the bend, Ben could see that the front passenger windows of both vehicles were wound down. The front seat passenger of the Ford was a heavy-looking ape with dark glasses. He was talking on a phone. So was the guy in the van. Ben would have bet money they were talking to each other. They were travelling in convoy. And taking it very seriously. Wherever they were heading in such a hurry, they meant business and it was a job for a crew of several men. Based on the Madeira experience, that almost certainly meant that these guys were heavily tooled up. Whilst Ben was totally unarmed.
Maybe this was going to get interesting after all.
Then, suddenly, it all started going wrong. A gap appeared in the slow-moving traffic and the driver of the blue Ford went for it, speeding along the solid line of cars on the right. The van followed. Ben muttered a curse and did the same. The Jeep accelerated to forty, then fifty. As he picked up speed, he could see the blue Ford coming to an intersection, chasing down the green light with the van right behind. Ben could see what was about to happen. They’d make it through the lights and he wouldn’t. He’d have to choose between losing them or going right on through.
He was wrong. The green light turned to red before the Ford got there. But the Ford didn’t slow down. As Ben watched, it went storming brazenly across the intersection with the van close behind, cutting across the path of an oncoming Nissan and causing it to swerve violently to avoid a collision. The Nissan’s driver hit the brakes too hard, lost control and spun a full three-sixty and slammed hard into a Lexus that had been coming up behind it. The Lexus spun into a Subaru, which went careering straight into the path of a bus. Horns sounded in panic. Tyres screeched. Metal crunched and plastic splintered. The blue Ford sailed through the middle of the chaos without taking a scratch, but the dented Lexus rolled backwards into the way of the van. The GMC was bigger and heavier and smashed it out of the way in an explosion of flying wreckage as it followed the Ford away from the intersection and up the street.
Ben hit the brakes and sawed the Jeep’s wheel this way and that, swerving wildly through the pile-up until he saw that the way ahead was almost completely blocked by crumpled vehicles. He pulled to a halt and scrambled out of the Jeep. Saw the blue Ford and the van disappearing away into the distance. He’d lost them. He clenched his fist and pounded it against the Jeep’s bonnet.
People were getting out of their cars, staggering about looking dazed. Someone’s horn was jammed on. The back door dropped off the badly buckled rear of the Lexus where the wing of the van had ploughed into it. The Subaru’s front end had been mangled by the bus and a plume of steam was hissing from its radiator. The bus driver, a heavyset black guy in a uniform and cap, was scratching his head and staring around him at the damage. Some of his passengers were getting out, shaken and pale. A child was crying.
‘Did you see?’ an old woman said, pointing. ‘That guy was a maniac!’
‘Is anybody hurt?’ Ben asked. All he got in reply were numb looks and a few head shakes. He couldn’t see any blood on anyone. The only real injuries were to metal and plastic and insurance premiums. The only fatality of the situation was his chase. The Ford and the GMC were long gone.
At that moment, something caught his eye and he walked over to take a closer look, his shoes crunching on scattered bits of headlamp glass. Where the van had collided with the rolling Lexus, there was a big dark stain on the road. It had been quite a thump. There was a lot of smashed plastic everywhere. Most of the van’s right headlamp unit had been torn out, like an eye ripped out of its socket. It looked as if the radiator had taken a bad knock, too.
Ben crouched down and touched a fingertip to the dark stain on the road. It was wet and warm. Water, not oil. It hadn’t come from the Lexus. He could tell that from two things. First, there was little damage to the front end of the car. Second, there was a whole trail of black splotches leading away from the accident scene and in the direction the van had gone.
He got back into the Jeep.
‘You can’t leave, man,’ the bus driver hollered. ‘Cops will be here in a minute.’ Ben ignored the guy, put the Jeep in gear and gently nudged a way between the two damaged cars blocking his way. If he returned the Jeep to the rental company with nothing worse than one or two scratches, nobody would die over it. Once he was clear of the wreckage zone, he hit the gas hard. His chase was back on, but how far would the trail lead him?
Chapter Forty
Both Erin and Detective Morrell stood frozen in the shadows of the car park, gawking in the direction of the fast-approaching roar of engines. Then, as they watched, a blue Ford Taurus burst into sight. Through the dazzle of its headlights Erin instantly recognised it as the one parked near her house earlier that day. Its front wheels hit the bottom of the slope, compressing hard against the suspension and making a squeal that echoed around the concrete walls and pillars of the underground space. The Taurus was closely followed by a white GMC van. Erin vaguely registered that the van was missing a headlamp and half its radiator grille.
But that was the least of her concerns as the two vehicles swerved across the car park and accelerated right towards where she and Morrell were standing.
‘Look out!’ the detective yelled, reaching out to grab her hand and haul her to safety. But Erin was
already moving. She retreated quickly through the gap between her Honda and the Toyota pickup next to it, ducked down behind them and crouched low. Morrell quickly joined her.
The blue Ford screeched to a halt next to Morrell’s Lincoln, rocking on its tired springs. The van pulled up at an angle to it. Doors flew open. Three men piled decisively out of the Ford, all wearing grim expressions. Erin only caught a glimpse of them, but she recognised one as the man who’d been sitting waiting for his buddy to dope her with tranquillisers so they could stuff her in the trunk and take her away. The other two she’d never seen before.
But the pair jumping down from the cab of the battered white GMC van: she got a clear look at them and she knew their faces very well. They were faces that had haunted her nightmares ever since that night at the cabin on Oologah Lake, and seeing them again hit her with a chill that made her gasp. McCrory’s henchmen, his killers for hire. Moon and Ritter, Morrell had called them.
She recognised the van, too. It had been there that night. They’d used it to dispose of the dead Kirk Blaylock.
She looked at Morrell. His face was etched with tension. He reached under his loose shirt, and she saw the concealment holster tucked into the hem of his jeans. He drew out a pistol. It was a Colt 1911 government model, big old-fashioned heavy iron. ‘Stay down,’ Morrell hissed at her.
The attackers were striding towards them, their steps echoing. Five against two. Erin heard a muttered command. She wanted to close her eyes and shrink into a tiny ball. Beside her, Morrell jacked a round into his Colt’s chamber. ‘Police!’ he yelled. ‘Back off or I’ll shoot!’
The response was a deafening thunder of gunfire that filled the car park. Erin flinched, covered her ears, didn’t know what to do. Bullets ripped into her little yellow car and howled off the concrete, tore chunks out of the wall behind. Morrell let off a wild shot and crawled around the back of the Honda. Now he and Erin were separated by about eight feet of open space. More shots sounded. The Honda’s windows shattered as if a grenade had gone off inside it, throwing out hailstones of glass that bounced all around the concrete floor.
Cringing behind the Toyota pickup, Erin suddenly realised that they were only firing at Morrell. The detective threw himself into a sideways prone position so he could aim his gun out from behind cover, firing back between the cars. Erin saw the white muzzle flash erupt three times, four times, from his Colt. The big .45 was extremely loud at close quarters. A spent shell case tinkled across the gap between the Honda and the Toyota and lodged under her arm, burning her skin. She hardly felt it.
Two of the men from the car dived for cover from Morrell’s gunfire. The Taurus’s back side window shattered. Morrell let off two more booming rounds, but he was in a bad position to shoot from and his shots went off target, punching fat round holes in the car’s blue bodywork.
Erin shrank deeper underneath the back of the Toyota. It had jacked suspension and oversized tyres that lifted its chassis high enough off the ground for her to get tucked right under. Peering out from her hiding place she could see a pair of feet. Lightweight combat boots, belonging to one of the attackers sheltering behind the white van. Her mind was beginning to focus now after the initial panic. She could feel the Springfield inside her pocket. There was just space under the car for her to get it out, but not enough to aim it properly. She had to hold it flatways and had no idea whether her sights would still line up. She fired anyway, letting off three shots as quickly as she could control the snappy recoil of the nine-millimetre, screwing up her face at the lancing pain in her eardrums. Her hearing was now just one big singing whine of tinnitus. She saw the combat boots dance quickly away and realised that her shots had all gone wide, punching into Morrell’s Lincoln.
The detective let off another round from his .45 and then its seven-shot magazine was empty. Exactly the reason why most people favoured high-capacity nines these days. Erin twisted around under the Toyota and saw him drop the empty mag from the butt of his gun, saw him reach to his left hip for the spare in his belt pouch. In the brief pause, the driver of the Ford broke cover from behind his car. He kept low as he sneaked up between the Honda and the pillar next to it, clearly intending to work his way around Morrell’s flank. The detective hadn’t noticed because he was focused on reloading his gun. Erin spotted the movement through what was left of the Honda’s shattered windows. This was the jerkoff who’d come to kidnap her earlier.
‘Morrell!’ she shouted, and opened fire from underneath the Toyota. She couldn’t shoot to kill. She lined the sights up on his shoulder. The Springfield snapped in her hand, twice, the bullets passing right through her car’s interior. The man fell back out of sight with his face contorting in pain and his hand slapping to his shoulder where he’d been hit. There was blood on the concrete pillar behind him.
Morrell flashed her a thumbs-up sign and an earnest look of gratitude. Despite her terror, Erin’s heart soared. We can win this, she thought.
But in the next few moments, she saw that she was wrong. A chattering blast of automatic gunfire riddled the side of the Honda and hammered the concrete between it and the Toyota, driving her back as far as she could scramble underneath for cover. She caught a fleeting glimpse of the two men from the van, steadily advancing towards Morrell’s position. They were holding black assault weapons of a kind she’d never seen before, weird and futuristic. Whatever the hell they were, they weren’t the sort of thing that was available to ordinary citizens, not even to ordinary criminals. They were full-blown military hardware and the two men seemed terrifyingly adept at using them. They were rapidly turning the Honda into Swiss cheese.
Morrell scampered for cover around the back of the car like a jackrabbit flushed out by hounds. The firestorm coming at him was so intense that he couldn’t return a single shot from his pistol. The Honda was literally coming apart. One corner settled as its tyre was shredded, then another. Its thin yellow body panels were more silver-edged bullet holes than intact metal. The two shooters kept coming. The ponytailed one did a lightning-fast reload while the other covered him, then they switched over. Empty cases streamed from their weapons. Their muzzles were lit up with strobing white light. It was a continual outpouring of bullets, the noise so bad that Erin wanted to scream. She couldn’t move, couldn’t shoot for fear that they’d direct the fire at her.
Morrell didn’t have a chance. He was so tucked in under the back end of the devastated Honda that all that was visible now was one leg sticking out, bent at the knee, bracing him tightly in behind his rapidly diminishing cover. Erin couldn’t see the rest of him. But she saw the blood that spattered up the wall behind the parked cars as the bullets ripped into him. Still they didn’t stop firing. The leg Erin could see started jerking and spasming, as if Morrell was having a fit. It was the impact of the bullets hitting him and the convulsions of his body as he died.
Now it was just her. She rolled over twice and wriggled out from under the dirty bottom sill of the Toyota. Leapt to her feet, squeezed off three shots behind her without looking back, and took off as fast as she could sprint between the wall and the line of parked cars. The way through towards the shopping mall was less than twenty yards away, but it might as well have been a thousand. She knew there was little chance of making it, and even if she did, they’d come after her. But she was going to try anyway. She’d rather die than let herself be taken captive.
She was nearly halfway to the exit when they shot her.
Chapter Forty-One
Erin sprawled face down to the hard concrete, dropping her gun, all her senses disintegrating into a wild tumult of pain and confusion. Something had pierced her shoulder, but it wasn’t a bullet. A bullet would have blown right through her, spraying a mist of blood outwards and across her cheek. She’d have felt the wound channel open up inside her, sinew and bone and soft tissue turning to jelly with the shock of the impact. This was something else.
A terrible current of agony was rippling through her whole body. She couldn?
??t control her movements. Her arms and legs were thrashing, her spine arching backwards so tightly that it felt like it would snap, if her muscles didn’t first. She was only dimly aware of the curly wires connecting the dart in her shoulder to the device that the ponytailed man had clenched in his fist as he strolled casually up to her with his automatic weapon slung behind his shoulder.
‘Hey there, darlin’,’ he said. ‘How’s about you take a little ride with your uncle Billy Bob?’ He smiled as he peered down at her. There was a wad of white gum rolling around between his teeth; she caught a sharp minty smell off his breath that took her confused senses straight back to the nightmare memory of the cabin.
He did something with the object he was holding and the awful electric convulsions stopped as suddenly as they’d begun, but Erin was too stunned to resist or even stand up. She was aware of figures of men circling her. Strong hands reached down and yanked her roughly to her feet. There was a jolt of pain as the thing stuck in her shoulder was plucked out. ‘Get your fucking hands off of me,’ she said. Her cheek was throbbing badly from the fall, and her voice sounded faraway and slurry. It was beginning to dawn on her that she’d been tasered. She kicked and struggled and lashed out with her fists. One of her punches made contact, but only weakly.
‘She shot me!’ It was the one she’d fired at through the Honda’s windows. Blood was soaking through his shirt and he was unsteady on his feet, pointing at her with a look of amazement. ‘She fucking shot me!’
‘Try and run, bitch,’ the one called Billy Bob said, taking out a pistol and shoving its muzzle under her chin. The steel was cool and hard. ‘Go on. Be a sport,’ he said. ‘That’s all I want, so I can blow your brains out.’