One cop peeled off and ran back to the car, the other came and shone a light on them. Close up, Crow recognized Rhoda Thomas, one of the younger officers.
“Oh my God,” Rhoda gasped. “What happened?”
Val’s eyes were swimmy with growing shock and all she could do was shake her head. Crow said, “I don’t know what all went on. When I got here, Val was running from some maniac. He caught her and all but strangled her. I think he must have done something to her arm, be careful with it. ”
“Where is he?”
Crow jerked his head toward Missy.
Rhoda looked at the slumped figure and frowned. “What happened to him?”
“We had words. ”
“Who is he?”
“How the fuck should I know? I think he might be one of the assholes you people are looking for. Who knows? Look, we got to check something out. Val said that this clown shot her father. At least I think that’s what she said. Out in the cornfield somewhere. We have to find out what’s happened. ”
“Rhoda!” a voice called, and she and Crow turned toward the house. A cop Crow didn’t know stood by the side of the house, pointing toward it. “There are two people in here. Man and woman. Man’s tied up, and I think the woman’s been assaulted. I called for an ambulance. ”
“Jesus,” Rhoda breathed.
“Oh my God! Connie!” Crow looked from Val to the house to the cornfield and back to Val, trying to decide what to do. He bent his face close to Val, kissed her, and whispered in her ear, “Val, baby. I need to find your dad. You’ve got to tell me where he is. C’mon, baby, try to think. ”
Val’s eyelids fluttered and her eyes went in and out of focus, and slowly, slowly came back to focus. The pain came with the clarity, and she hissed through gritted teeth.
“Shh, shh, just breathe, just breathe,” Crow soothed. “Now, baby, where’s your dad?”
With her strained vocal cords, and wincing with the waves upon waves of pain, Val told him which path to take, but her voice dwindled and finally failed. Her eyelids fluttered shut and she went down into darkness. Crow held her, kissing her eyes, and then carefully laid her down on the muddy ground. Blood dripped from his torn face onto her lips, but he brushed it away. He raised fierce red eyes to Rhoda. “I’m going to see if I can find Mr. Guthrie. You stay here. Watch over her. And, Rhoda…”
“Yes?”
“Don’t let anything happen to her, you got me?”
“Yes. I promise. ”
Crow stood up slowly, hissing and wincing as he rose. Every inch of him hurt abominably. “You’d better cuff that son of a bitch before he wakes up. Be careful, though—he’s one tough bastard. ”
Rhoda looked past him to where Ruger lay. Crow was looking past her at the house, but in his peripheral vision he could see her eyes snap wide.
“Watch out!” she cried and shoved at him with one hand as she fumbled with her gun with the other. The sound of the Beretta was like summer thunder, and as Crow dove to the ground, he could see blood blossom on Rhoda’s chest, seeding the air with bright red petals. She pirouetted away from him, her own gun firing uselessly into the mud, but as she spun the gun came up and around in a fast arc and the heavy pistol crunched into the side of Crow’s head.
Crow fell hard and the world seemed to be made of white lightning and thunder and all of it was inside his head. He fought to clear his vision, and saw with horrified eyes the muddy gun—his own gun—clutched in Ruger’s bloody fists. The madman stood there, covered in blood, pieces of broken teeth sliding from between his pulped lips, holding the familiar gun. Something burned along Crow’s left side and half the air was knocked out of him. He couldn’t tell if he had been shot or grazed. His mind froze. He felt like he was facing something that just couldn’t be whipped. How could the bastard get up after that beating? How could he have found the gun in all that rain and mud? How could he be stopped? The gun exploded again. Firing, firing.
Crow rolled away, trying to dodge the bullets, and as he turned one hand slapped mud and the other slapped down on Rhoda’s wrist. He fumbled, felt the fist, felt the slack fingers releasing from the butt of her gun, felt the gun itself. It all happened in a bizarre slow motion as thunder boomed above him and a smaller, deadlier thunder boomed across the rain-?swept yard. Crow clawed the gun into his own hand, swept it up as he rose to a crouch, slipped his finger into the trigger guard. Something hit him on the belt line on his right side, punching hard against the hipbone and spinning him all the way around and flinging his arms straight up in the air as if he were surrendering. The pistol almost flew from his grip. Now both sides of his body were on fire. There wasn’t enough air in the world and black fireworks burst in the corners of his eyes. Howling with rage and pain, Crow wheeled around and brought the gun down into a two-?handed shooter’s grip and even as his knees started to buckle he squeezed hard on the trigger and fired, fired, fired. Ruger danced backward in a crooked jerking series of steps as Crow’s bullets hammered into him.
But he did not go down.
Then he heard shouts and saw an oblong of light at the front of the house and a silhouette burst out onto the porch, a gun held in both hands. He, too, fired, but Ruger was moving now, fading back out of the spill of light, staggering in a drunken zigzag toward the vast rolling sea of cornstalks. The officer on the porch kept firing and one of the shots blew Missy’s windshield into glittering fragments, but if any of the bullets hit Ruger it was impossible to tell.
Crow’s head was spinning and he lurched two steps toward the cornfield before his legs gave out and he dropped heavily onto both knees, the gun still in his right hand, the barrel now pointed straight upward. His eyes rolled up white in their sockets and he sagged onto his back, Rhoda’s gun firing up into the night sky, firing at the storm, firing itself dry, and then falling from his hands as darkness swarmed over him and smothered all light.
Chapter 18
1
Its work completed, the storm ended.
Snickering and sated, the bruise-?dark clouds slouched away into the west, leaving behind wreckage and an awful stillness. Cold and dispassionate, the moon was merely an observer in the sky, vaguely amused at the debris of hurt and suffering below; indifferent to the things that still crept and capered in the deeper shadows of the cornfields.