Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(47)

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BOOM! SHOTGUN!

Lucas didn’t know who she was shooting at, but glass sprayed over the yard and he and McCoy and Cousins scattered, down behind cars, and the door of the trailer kicked open and Calvin barreled out, a pump shotgun in her hand pointing at the sky.

Lucas had his Walther out, but he was down on his hands and knees behind a neighbor’s car when Calvin triggered another shot, this time straight up into the sky, and Lucas heard a pistol shot that smacked off the windshield of Calvin’s truck and she screamed, “Larry, you asshole,” and she pumped and fired another shot, leveled this time, and then she was in her truck, cranking it, and was off, straight down the street.

McCoy and Cousins were both up and unhurt, and shouting at each other. Lucas was closest to the patrolman’s car and Cousins popped the passenger side door and Lucas piled inside, and Cousins hit the siren and began shouting into his radio as they spun out of the parking area, McCoy a few yards in front of them.

The street looked like it was a dead end, but actually was a loop, and they followed the white Ford up to the main street and then left. They went through town at sixty, then eighty, then a hundred miles an hour, Lucas registering a bank, a school, a church, a residential subdivision, and then they were out in the countryside, flying low.

When Cousins, crouched over the steering wheel, had stopped shouting into his radio, Lucas asked, “Where’s she going?”

“Beats me,” he shouted, amped from the chase. “There’s nothing out here but trees.”



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A FEW MILES OUT OF TOWN, close behind Calvin’s Ford, they saw another light bar flashing well up ahead, but coming toward them. “That’s Roy,” Cousins said.

Instead of slowing, Calvin sped up and Lucas feared that she was going to take the approaching cop head-on, a crazy suicide run, but then a side road broke to their right, and she hammered on the brakes and slewed sideways into the new road, straightened out, and headed up the hill.

They all followed, with a third cop car now behind Cousins, McCoy still right behind the Ford, and they went up the hill and around a couple of curves and then the Ford braked suddenly, turned, rolled down through the roadside ditch and up onto what looked like a timber road and Cousins said, “Oh, shit,” as McCoy followed.

The cop car was no damn good on the rough track, banging around like a marble in a pinball machine and the Ford was getting away. Two hundred yards back into the woods, though, the track ended in a circle and the Ford skidded to a stop and Calvin was out and running into the woods, the shotgun still in her hand.

The three Goochland cops gathered behind the Ford, and McCoy said, “We gotta keep her in sight.”

They could still see her, fifty yards away, crashing through the undergrowth. To the cop who’d just joined them, he said, “Roy, you stay here and coordinate. Get the guys up here, see if Bill King is on the road, get him in here and any other troopers that might be around. Let’s go.”

“She’s fired three times,” Lucas said, as they jogged toward the tree line. “Unless she took some extra shells, she’s probably only got two left.”

“So one of us will get out alive,” McCoy said.



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LUCAS, MCCOY, AND COUSINS went after Calvin, spreading out behind her, twenty-five yards apart, like a net, so she’d have to keep moving forward and couldn’t reverse field and get around them. There was nothing subtle about either the runner or the chase: they were crashing through waist-high brush, clambering over rotting logs, occasionally falling. They saw Calvin fall into a deeper hole, where a tree’s root ball had pulled out in a storm, but she was back up with the shotgun.

Another fifty yards and they were closing on her, and she pointed the shotgun back over her shoulder without looking and pulled the trigger, and the shot went into the overhead, knocking leaves down around them. McCoy shouted, “That’s four,” and as he did, she fired another shot over her shoulder and Cousins shouted, “Five!”

Up ahead, Calvin threw the shotgun away and bulled through a patch of red berries. Lucas was in the center and stepped in an animal hole just inside the berry patch and fell down, the brambles scratching at his face and hands. He was up and running again, pain lancing down into his foot.

They were narrowing the net as they got close to her and a dead branch tore at Lucas’s sport coat, and then Calvin stumbled and fell. Lucas was right on top of her when she got back to her feet and she turned and had a two-inch-thick rotten dead branch in her hand and whipped it across his eyes and it broke but he went down again and then McCoy and Cousins were all over Calvin.

She was a big woman and fought them, cursing, with flailing fists, and Cousins gave her a solid punch in the cheekbone and when she went down, Lucas scrambled to his feet and dropped one knee on her head as the other two cops bent her arms behind her and put on the cuffs.

McCoy bent close and said, “We gotcha, Tabby. Now you can either walk out of here, or we’ll drag your ass back through that berry patch.”

“You motherfuckers,” she sputtered.

McCoy looked at Lucas: “What happened to you? Your face is bleeding.”

“She hit me with a branch.” Lucas put a hand to one eye; his cheekbone was throbbing from the impact.