CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
He could hear frantic car horns from the road outside. Then Monty’s voice crackled from the front cab. “We’ve got company. Coming up fast.”
Gus leaned forward, peered through the narrow window. Blue strobes flared behind them, bouncing off the bare birch trunks. A police cruiser. Old Crown Vic. Too close. It surged alongside, horn blaring, lights raking the ambulance with manic pulses.
“Are we supposed to have a police escort?” Gus asked, mainly to himself. He glanced down at the patient, all sweaty and grey, lost in his own sickness.
In the cab, Monty flicked a glance across. The driver of the cruiser—a square jaw, eyes hidden by dark glasses—was leaning half out of his window. The man’s voice carried over the howl of engines.
“Fella! My partner’s having an allergic reaction. No epi-pen. We need help now!”
Monty’s stomach tightened. Orders were orders, and their orders were to take the prisoner to St. Spiridion Hospital without stopping.
The patient was dangerous, apparently, but Monty didn’t see it, not from the grey, frightened-looking face they’d strapped onto that gurney back at the jail. Sickness was a great leveller.
He glanced across at the cop car. The passenger was slumped, red-faced, clutching his throat. A third man in the back leaned forward, lips moving urgently. What was he, some perp they’d arrested? Now that would be a story for the clientele of Wolfgang’s Bar this evening.
Monty clicked on the intercom. “You hearing this?”
“Fellah, please. He’s my partner, man. He’s got two kids!”
Monty kept both hands on the wheel, eyes flicking from the road to the men beside him. He heard his own heartbeat in his ears. Protocol was clear, unequivocal. There’d be an enquiry, one he didn’t need, not after that business with the missing Percocets. But a life was a life. A man could die.
And a man could so easily live, too, go on to know his grandchildren, with just a single, simple, two-minute procedure.
“We’re supposed to—” Gus began.
“I know what we’re supposed to,” Monty snapped. He tasted copper. “But fuck it, Gus. We’re not a DoC taxi service, we save lives. And we don’t let a man choke out in front of us.”
Another blast of the cruiser’s horn. The driver gestured, frantic.
Monty exhaled. “Hold tight, man. I’m pulling over.”
+ + + + +
Kate gripped the wheel tighter as Marcus’s voice buzzed in her ear.
“So they’ve both gone dark,” he said. “Cox and Santos.”
“Cox and the person claiming to be Santos.”
“On the plus-side, the ambulance and the cop car have trackers. Currently looks like they’re close together on the northbound lane of Route 202. A lay-by.”
“I’m twenty minutes away.”
“Make it ten. I’m closer. We’ll meet when we’re in range.”
The call clicked off. Kate swallowed the bitter taste rising in her throat and pressed harder on the accelerator.
+ + + + +
Monty nudged the ambulance into the gravel lay-by. The cruiser swung in behind, its lights still flashing. Gus hopped out, carry-bag in one hand. Speed was of the essence.
“This is the right thing to do,” he said, as Monty stepped down from the cab. “Keep an eye on Papillon, will you?”
The cruiser door opened. The man who’d been slumped—they called him Danny—stumbled forward, hand to throat.
“This way,” Gus called, already pulling a syringe from his kit.
Bill straightened, the motion too smooth. The gun came up, black and dull. Two shots. Gus dropped. Monty barely had time to turn before the second shot slammed into his chest.
Cox stepped down from the ambulance, shaky and slow, but calm. The three men from the cruiser turned to him—the driver Franko, the gunman Danny, who’d masqueraded as Santos, and the quiet, stocky one they called Jakes.
Franko’s grin was almost servile. “Mr. Cox. Sir. We—”
The shot cut him off mid-word. Franko folded, eyes wide. Danny barely flinched before Cox swung the barrel and fired again. Blood sprayed the gravel.
“They were useful,” Cox said, voice low and almost kind. “But to everything there is a season.”
He turned to Jakes. “Unlike you. You will have a bright future. Your kills were… they contained a spark of the divine. Wait and see what we will build together, Jakes.”
Jakes’s throat worked, but no sound came.
Cox lifted his face to the sky. “Let’s give thanks.”
The two men knelt on the sharp gravel and bowed their heads.
Cox, in thin prison-issue pyjamas, winced a little as the stones pierced his kneecaps, but the words rolled soft and certain, nonetheless: thanks for success so far, a plea for protection in the final stages.
Jakes’s lips moved, but his mind roared with a single thought: he could trust in God. But could he trust Elijah Cox?
Then the ambulance engine suddenly coughed and roared to life. Monty, bloodied but breathing, was behind the wheel. The rig jolted forward, tires spinning, slewing across the lay-by before bursting onto the highway.
Jakes flinched. Cox didn’t even glance back.
“Leave him,” Cox said. “He won’t live.” He coughed and spat blood.
+ + + + +
Marcus’s voice in Kate’s ear was tight with urgency. “I’m five minutes out. You?”
“Seven. What have you got?”
“The trackers show both vehicles at a lay-by off 202.”
“I’ll meet you there.”
Static, then: “Kate—hold up. The ambulance is moving. Fast. Heading my way.”
Kate gripped the phone. “Marcus?”
“It’s crossing lanes—damn—coming straight at—motherf—”
She heard something from Marcus then, something in between a loud intake of breath and a strangled cry. The line went dead under the sound of an almighty crash. She heard it in stereo: the road beyond her erupted in squeals of brakes, slammed horns and secondary collisions. It was a pile-up.
“Marcus? Marcus!” Kate’s own voice sounded alien. She jabbed at the radio. “All units, officer down, Route 202—possible collision, need EMS—now!”
She fumbled for another number, Poppy back at HQ, explaining in haste. “Status on the cop car?”
There was an agonising wait while Poppy logged onto the secure tracking site.
“It hasn’t moved,” Poppy said, voice small. “Still at the lay-by.”
Kate’s foot jammed the accelerator. Trees blurred. Her heart thudded against her ribs.
The lay-by was a crime scene waiting to be taped. The cop car sat silent, its lights dead. Kate killed her engine, climbed out. No sound but the tick-hiss of cooling metal.
A groan. A man in green coveralls lay beside a bush in a pool of blood, pale but alive, one hand clamped to his bleeding shoulder. His nametape said AUGUSTUS.
Kate dropped beside him. “Help’s coming,” she whispered into her radio.
A glint caught her eye—a sudden, bright flash in the trees beyond the gravel. Sunlight on metal? Or a watch-face? She rose, pistol drawn, and stepped into the undergrowth.
Branches closed around her. The world shrank to shadows and the damp reek of pine. A twig snapped behind her. She spun—nothing.
Then movement ahead: a dark figure, hobbling, but fast. “FBI!” she shouted. “Stop!”
The figure didn’t.
Kate fired a single shot into the air. The forest swallowed the sound.
A second shot cracked behind her. She whirled, stumbled, went down hard. Pain flared in her knee. She pushed herself up— just a graze…
A click. Cold and sharp.
“Don’t turn around,” a voice said.
Cox.
Her breath hitched.
“It’s been a while,” he said, through gritted teeth. “Kate.”
“You sure about this, Cox? You look ready to collapse.”
“I can achieve a lot before that happens,” Cox snapped. He was completely gray, Kate thought. Like porridge.
“This is a massacre, Cox,” she said, her voice trembling. “Why plan all these careful murders when you just wanted a bloodbath?”
“Walk,” he ordered.
She should be frightened of him, but she was just angry. “You’re an animal.”
“Quiet.”
They moved through the trees, his gun an unseen weight at her back, his breath creaking in his chest. The path was uneven, not really a route at all, merely a series of gaps in the dense, untended undergrowth.
Everything scratched or jabbed or pricked; it was Nature saying: humans stay out. And Kate would have loved to.
Looking ahead through a film of tears, she saw a snapped-off branch ahead, short and weighty, a bit longer than a baseball bat. Cox jabbed her in the back and she stumbled on. Estimating, counting: one pace, two paces, three…
At four, Kate seized the moment. She lunged sideways, grabbed the fallen limb, and in one continuous movement swung it back. It connected with a crunch. The gunshot exploded. A cry—not hers.
They grappled. She smelt his sick breath. She lost her footing, struck her head, but not before she’d slammed his nose into her knee. Pain rose up from the ground to greet her, then darkness surged, then nothing.
When Kate came to, the forest was silent save for the birds and, suddenly, in their tuneful midst, a low, ragged moan. She pushed herself up, dizzy and sticky with her blood and Cox’s blood, and followed the sound.
A man lay crumpled in the needles, stocky build, buzz-cut, blood gushing through his shirt. Something about him was familiar. His eyes flickered once.
The penny dropped. This was the killer. The thick-set figure at the crime scenes. Cox’s disciple.
No sign of Cox, though she felt sure she was witnessing his works.
Kate crouched, radio trembling in her hand.
“Agent Valentine,” she said, voice raw. “Officer down. Suspect at large. Repeat—Cox is gone.”
The wind moved through the pines, carrying the scent of sap and smoke. Somewhere, far off, a siren began to wail.