Fifteen
John Cantrell idled in the motel court with his
parking lights flashing. At times, to be conspicuous was to be
invisible. Dimitri had glanced his way with a worried expression, but
idling traffic in a motel court was far too par for the course to spark
concern.
John had done as had been expected of him. He had
followed Dimitri to his prey, although not in time to stop him from
harming another innocent victim. She’d be dead by now, by
John’s estimation, murdered by a wounded, desperate and sick man, one with
very little time of his own left to live. John had been able to read the
state of the man’s soul by his posture, his walk, and the twisted
expression on what had once been a handsome face. Dimitri Carvelli had
been pushed over the edge, not by the world around him, but by his own
pathological appetites.
John opened the manila folder on the seat at his side
and glanced again at the only girl who absolutely had to die. She was
getting to him already, a beautiful child, jail-bait, some father and
mother’s long-lost baby girl, a child in a woman’s body, legs like a
Barbie doll, and an oval face with pouting, heart-shaped lips. Her dark
eyes touched the depths of his soul. He had no other information on her,
just the picture and the need for her death.
“Bullshit.”
He smacked the steering wheel with his fist,
increasingly agitated and frightened by his plight. He was further from
home turf than he had been in twenty years. He felt like an illegal alien
in an otherwise harmless place called Iowa. A week ago, he would have
defined Iowa as a place filled with pigs and dull-witted farmers wearing
bib-coveralls, but the people around him were, if anything, a consistently
more impressive bunch than he would have found about the hood.
He sighed heavily and stared at
the motel door through the rain streaming down the side window of his
rented car. He’d wait another few seconds. By then, Dimitri
would finish what he had started and would be on his way back out into the
storm. They’d meet in the middle of the drive, and the storm would
cover what John had planned for the man.
Jennifer Wessner was going to survive
her ordeal. Garko would have to
live with it, or send someone else in to commit a sin of that magnitude.
He had no control over Jennifer’s fate beyond his own hand in it, but to
that extent, she would not be harmed.
The full-sized white Ford all but brushed the side of
his car and stopped blocking his view of the door. A girl got out,
oblivious to the downpour. He caught only a moment’s glance.
“Son of a bitch!”
It was her, Jennifer Renee Wessner, pounding at the
motel room door with her car blocking his view and his line of fire. John
started the engine and backed away as Jennifer yelled impatiently.
Whatever she heard, or didn’t hear, from the other
side of the door put her on alert. She backed from the door and brought
her right hand up to the purse slung over her left shoulder, almost as if
she was reaching for a gun.
Dimitri Carvelli burst through the door, awash with
the blood of his victim and bellowing laughter at the horrified expression
of the girl standing in his way. Dimitri thought he was dealing with
still another helpless victim, and John thought himself fated to watch her
die.
But this would-be victim ignored the lunging knife. The speed
and decisiveness with which she sensed trouble and reacted startled both
men. Trained mercenaries seldom moved with such crisp precision. She
made a half turn like a karate expert to evade the swing of the knife,
whipped a small pistol from her purse, and opened fire at point blank
range. Dimitri was hit at least once. He threw himself to one side,
fell, and tried to roll clear.
John’s hand was twisting the door handle when
stroboscopic red, blue, and white lights exploded directly behind him. He
glanced at his rear view mirror and cried out in exasperation. He hadn’t
seen the highway patrol car pull into the drive.
A halogen spotlight pinned Jennifer and her drawn gun
in a beam of white light. “Freeze!” an officer bellowed from alongside
John’s door. “Drop the weapon and lie face down on the ground! Do it
now!”
John saw the shocked expression on her face, and then
Dimitri rose into sudden view. Jennifer dived to one side to avoid him,
but when he came up shooting, he had a new priority target. A bullet
ticked its way through John’s windshield on the passenger’s side of the
car, ricocheted off the sheet metal roof overhead, and went out the back
way. The front windshield remained intact. The back window turned
opaque. Dimitri’s gunfire took out a tire of the patrol car. Its
windshield exploded and rained across the inside dash.
Maybe Dimitri would have had the foresight to save
his last bullet for the girl, but she ducked through the cover of the
downpour and circled around to her car like a wraith. With a whine of
tires sliding on the slick pavement, the white Ford vanished into the
rain.
Dimitri went after her in a darker foreign sedan,
leaving the officers pinned down by the shock of the unexpected exchange
of gunfire. John put his car in gear and followed in pursuit of the
two, leaving his
headlights off in the dimming light. The two cars ahead of him were but
two sets of red tail lights in the gray downpour. The Ford was the faster
of the two, easily pacing Dimitri until Dimitri passed slower traffic and Jennifer
got pinned by traffic in the opposing lane.
Maybe Dimitri took a pot shot at her. That or some
other consideration caused her to slew off the road and bounce across a
roadside ditch. She spewed mud and gravel accelerating down an unpaved
lane leading into an empty pasture. Dimitri did a quick u-turn and followed without hesitation.
John turned in behind them, still in stealth mode,
confident that neither Dimitri nor Jennifer had noticed his presence. The
dirt lane quickly deteriorated into a quagmire. Rather than risk getting
bogged down behind the two, John pulled out of sight into a grove of
trees. He shut off the lights and engine, dropped the keys onto the
floor, and abandoned the car.
John raced through the downpour until he saw the two
cars stopped ahead and Dimitri limping his way after the girl across an
open expanse of terrain. She could easily outdistance the both of them
with her long legs and soon managed to do so. John was beginning to hope
she’d make a clean escape when he spotted the gray hulk of the barn dead
ahead. She be a fool to trap herself, unless…
Dimitri made a bee-line toward it. John picked up
his pace, alarmed by the prospect of the spunky girl turning the tables on
the wanton killer. Dimitri’s untimely death would be an unfortunate turn
of events. Garko would order him to kill the girl himself, and he would
refuse, regardless of consequence. Killing the girl was beyond his
capability now. Dimitri’s premature death could too easily spell his own
as well.
Dimitri was bellowing his rage into the storm.
“Satan will feed upon your souls!” he was yelling above the roar of the
rain. “Rosie, you bitch! You think you know everything!”
Delirium, or vital information to commit to memory?
There was something strange about Dimitri’s maniacal pursuit of Jennifer
Wessner, more to the man’s madness than met the eye.
John arrived at the barn in the nick of time to
witness the trap a child had set for a madman. There was just enough daylight left to see Dimitri
staggered down the central isle of the barn between empty stalls.
Jennifer Wessner stood overhead on the precipice of the loft with a
pitchfork balanced in her right hand, about to send it plunging into
Dimitri’s back.
“What the hell are you doing on my property!” John
called out, and then ducked out of sight when Dimitri whipped about and
fired a wild shot.
“I’m calling the police!” John cried at the top of
his lungs.
The threat of a witness turned Dimitri away from his
prey-turned-predator. He fled back toward his car, slipping and sliding along the
way and roared off back toward the highway. John stayed out of sight until Jennifer’s Ford crept cautiously
toward the highway a few minutes
later.
Lightning laced the sky overhead in delicate tendrils
of white hot light. John kept her in view and caught up with her five
miles down the road. He followed at a safe distance until her turn
signals came on. She turned off the road and pulled into the drive of the
first house on the side street.
John went on by, laughing. She had spotted
someone behind her and was waiting to see if he would slow as he passed,
or even turn in after her.
“Smart girl.”
She waited until he went by. John watched in his
rear view mirror as her headlights came back on. Judging him as harmless,
some idiot with poor judgment to be driving without lights, she drove
another three miles several car-lengths behind him before turning up a
steep hill.
John made a u-turn at his first opportunity. As he
passed the drive on his way back to town, he glanced up at the apartment
building on the crest of the hill overlooking the river. He was home free
now. The rest would be, at worst, a matter of waiting for the madman to
close on his uncooperative victim a second time. Dimitri had made himself
scarce for the moment, but John was willing to bet that Jennifer’s turn
into the driveway had been witnessed by more than just himself. No
matter how clever the girl, she was far, far out of her league crossing
swords with the likes of Dimitri Carvelli.
