The Lonely Mile(65)
Canfield’s voice trailed off, and she appeared wistful. It was the first hint of emotion Bill had seen in her otherwise blank eyes since she had snuck up behind him when he was about to blast Martin Krall. In a way, seeing that tiny shadow of her former humanity was even worse than the almost robotic lack of emotion she had displayed up to this point.
It looked like she had finally satisfied her inner need for explanation. That was bad. If she was talking, she wasn’t shooting. Time had run out, and Bill still had no idea what to do.
Some time in the last few minutes the storm outside had finally dissipated, and he could hear the almost imperceptible sound of Carli sobbing atop the filthy bed off to his left. It was as if she didn’t dare make any more noise than she absolutely had to, but she simply couldn’t hold in the terror. His right hand throbbed from where he had scraped his knuckles on the splintered pine support strut hanging half off the ratty two-by-six beams that seemed to sum up this entire crumbling home perfectly.
FBI Special Agent Angela Canfield nodded to herself. “Yeah. This’ll work,” and she adjusted her two-handed grip around Martin Krall’s dead hand, using the first two fingers of her own right hand to force Krall’s lifeless pointer finger through the trigger guard on his Glock. She aimed took dead aim on Bill Ferguson’s chest, center mass, just as she had been taught back at the academy.
“Look at the bright side,” she told Bill. “At least you get to go first. You don’t have to watch your little girl take one between the eyes.”
She squeezed the trigger.
CHAPTER 57
May 28, 4:30 p.m.
BILL GRABBED THE ONE-INCH by one-inch pine support hanging uselessly off the two-by-six joist directly over his head, yanked it hard in one smooth motion, down and to his left, across his body, and slashed at Canfield, half-stepping to the right as he brought his arm down, driving it toward the murderous agent.
Two nails, which stuck out the front of the support at an oblique angle, pierced the skin of Canfield’s delicate neck just as Martin Krall’s gun discharged. For the second time in a matter of minutes, the ear-splitting boom of a handgun rocked the enclosed space, and the sharp smell of the discharged weapon filled the air.
Carli screamed. Instantly, Bill felt a burning sensation in his left arm above the elbow, and he knew he had been shot. He continued driving the makeshift stake through Angela Canfield’s neck, somehow keeping his balance as the bullet ripped through his left arm, following through like a baseball pitcher throwing toward home plate. A great spray of blood, crimson and terrifying, erupted from her neck as the stake ripped through her carotid artery, opening a gaping wound.
Canfield tumbled backward, crashing into Carli’s cot and falling onto her side, grabbing reflexively at the wound in her neck. Krall’s gun flew from her live hand and his dead one, skittering across the floor through his pool of rapidly cooling blood, coming to rest almost directly between the wounded FBI agent and the wounded father.
Bill stumbled to his knees as the momentum from his adrenaline-fueled thrust caused his makeshift sword to smash onto the cement floor and clatter away. He scrabbled on his hands and knees toward Canfield’s gun, desperately trying to reverse direction before she could recover and lunge for the weapon.
Bill watched in something resembling slow motion as Canfield rolled off her side and moved toward her gun. She slipped and slid in the spilled blood of the I-90 Killer as her own blood spurted between the fingers of her left hand, which was clamped firmly but ineffectively over the massive wound in her neck. She was injured grievously, maybe mortally, but like Bill, was still operating under the anesthetic effects of adrenaline.
She was going to get there first. He had been marginally closer, the gun laying on the floor maybe a couple of inches nearer his body than hers, but his momentum was carrying him away from the weapon while hers, after bouncing off Carli’s cot, had propelled her toward it.
She dived through the blood on the floor, like Rickey Henderson stealing second base. The gash in her neck began hemorrhaging the moment she removed her hand to lift her weapon into a two-handed shooter’s grip, again, exactly as she had been taught.
Rolling onto her back, Canfield lifted the pistol and once again took aim at Bill Ferguson’s body, the body she had so recently caressed and pulled into her own. For the second time, she aimed center-mass and squeezed the trigger.
CHAPTER 58
May 28, 4:31 p.m.
CARLI WATCHED THE WHOLE catastrophe develop with the dispassionate detachment of a shell-shocked war vet. She had lived through unspeakable horror in the last twenty-seven hours, and most especially in the last twenty minutes. Her head throbbed from the gash Krall had opened in it with the dirty steak knife. Her underwear was still damp after being pissed in several times, and her pants smelled like a baby’s diaper. The pee stains on her jeans were covered up by a new addition: blood stains, first from Krall’s obliterated skull, and now from the wound her dad had opened up on this crazy chick’s neck.
And now, she had to lie here on this disgusting mattress on top of this lumpy, uncomfortable bed that had to be fifty years old, and witness her dad’s murder, an act which would be followed, undoubtedly, by her own execution. Her dad had somehow found her, just as she had known he would, and had nearly rescued her, too, against all odds, turning the tables on the FBI woman, who he had thought was one of the good guys.