Crane, R [ Southern Watch 03] Corrupted (23 page)

A crack in his shell.

Arch took them around the corner slower, the fear of all manner of badness put into him now. His concern was assuaged slightly by the fact that Alison was just behind him, he could see her as he glanced in the rearview. Still, he had a sick, swimming feeling in his stomach, like it was in the kind of free-fall Erin’s cruiser had just experienced.

He glanced at Hendricks. He’d intended to look for just a moment before turning back to the road. Instead he ended up staring.

The cowboy was in rough shape, with a hand held up to his neck and blood rushing between the fingers. His lip was bloodied, and he was holding his body at a peculiar angle. There was a jagged cut along his eyebrow, too, though Arch wasn’t exactly sure where that had come from. All told, the poor guy was clutching himself like he was hurt in a dozen different places. For all Arch knew, he was.

“This is gonna be a problem,” Arch said, trying to think ahead. “I gotta call it in.”

“Do it,” Hendricks said, his voice muffled as he seemed to try and keep his mouth clenched as tight as possible. “Erin …” His words drifted off.

Arch paused, and stared at the mike on his car. He clenched his jaw and picked it up, wondering exactly how deep the trouble was going to run on this one.

Lauren came out from her little pocket at the front of the cop car like she was a groundhog coming out of her hole on February 2
^nd
. Tentative didn’t even come close to covering it. She poked her head out first, making sure there weren’t any other bikers streaming down the hill toward her.

There weren’t.

The sound of the engine and the burning scent that filled the air around her worked with her already fast-beating heart to give her a sense of numbness and a nausea-inducing taste in her mouth. She thought she was going to puke, to chuck hard right there staring at the broken and beaten frame of the cop car. There were torn branches lodged in the fuel lines and transmission, all speckled throughout the undercarriage like the damn thing had been feathered in them.

Lauren took a deep breath in disbelief, then another. She could hear sirens up the hill but she didn’t look up there. Not yet. First she saw a guy in a ripped suit lying on the ground to her left, just lying there, hand moving like he was poking at his hip.

Her training kicked in and overcame the desire to just sit there and stare, openmouthed, at the shit that had unfolded before her. She hurried over to him, still dimly aware that there was pain in her legs. She hit her knees at his side and snapped her fingers in his face. “Sir, can you hear me?”

“I can hear you just fine,” he said in a Yankee accent. Sounded like he was from Bahs-ton. “I can also see you.”

“How many fingers am I holding up?” she asked, throwing up a peace sign in his face.

“Two,” he grunted. “I’m fine, my back just hurts a little. Check on the girl in the driver’s seat.”

She whipped her head around to look in the window of the car. Sure enough, there was someone hanging there, limp, in front of the wheel. Thin arms dangled down lifelessly, along with longish hair that she could tell was blond in the last fading light of day. “Is that Deputy Harris?” she asked.

“Fuck, all you people really do know each other here,” Bahs-ton said. “Yeah, that’s her. You might want to go check on her. I just barely got her seatbelt fastened around her in time.”

Lauren started to get to her feet, ready to head around the car to do just that, but a police cruiser SUV came screeching to a halt just in front of her a second later, and out stepped Archibald Fucking Stan.

Alison got out of the car as soon as Duncan brought it to a stop and threw it into park. They’d seen a figure in a suit lying splayed out on the ground before Arch’s Explorer had blocked their view. Even without being able to see much in the way of a reaction on Duncan’s fairly impassive face, she could sense the temperature change in the town car. And it wasn’t a favorable one.

Duncan, for his part, bolted without even bothering to stop the ignition or pull out his keys. He was in a state, that’s how her mother would have described it. Seemed like it fit pretty well.

Alison watched Arch as he got out of the car, watched Duncan fly past him like he was running in an all-out demon sprint, cooking down the hill like he was on a skateboard or was one of the bicyclists. She just needed to make sure Arch was all right, and then she had a job of her own to take care of.

She knew he was all right by the way he stood there at the door, staring over it at whatever was happening past his car. Still, she watched him for a second. Looked at the wrinkles of his uniform, thought about how it needed a washing and an ironing later. Someone had to do it.

Then she hefted her rifle and went around the front of the car to use the hood as a rest. She figured she wouldn’t have to wait but a minute or two.

“How is she?” Hendricks asked, shuffling his way out of his seat only with great difficulty. There was a dark-haired woman with running shorts and bloody knees between him and the overturned cruiser, and he wasn’t entirely sure he could make it to her without tipping over.

“I—” The woman had a look on her face that was none too pleased. Hendricks didn’t know her well enough to speculate whether that was because of the bloody knees, the fact that there was an upturned car sitting in the middle of the road next to her, or because that was just her personality. Something about the lines around her eyes told him it was the last one, though.

“Lauren,” Arch said, calling her by name. Hendricks made a note of that through the fog of pain. Made of a note of it that was promptly balled up and thrown away as his ribs flared at him, pissed that he had the audacity to get out of the damned car. He fell straight to the pavement, and he couldn’t even rip a hand away from his chest to cushion his fall, which hurt like someone had dropped a semi-trailer on his side.

Arch watched Hendricks fall and was torn about what to do next. He knew Erin was in the upside-down Crown Vic, but that car was so trashed he was having a hard time imagining her surviving. The fall was at least a hundred feet down a mountainside, and that wasn’t the sort of crash resistance that the NTSB tended to rate on, he suspected.

“What the fuck is going on here?” Lauren said, and she made a move for him. She ran for Hendricks, and he watched her struggle as she went. She was tottering on weak legs, and blood was running down from both knees like she’d taken a hit from something.

“Hard to explain,” Arch said as something whizzed past his door, buffeting him with the breeze. It took a second for him to realize it was Duncan, and he was beside Lerner before Arch could say anything at all about it.

Lauren dropped down to triage the guy in the black coat and was again dimly aware of pain somewhere in her knees. That was the thing about triage, though—you needed to assess what was the worst so you could work on it. This guy looked like he’d been fucked up good. Whatever had happened to her legs was minor by comparison. She still needed a little better read on the guy in the middle of the road, but Deputy Harris was in desperate need of some assessment.

Even though Lauren suspected she was dead.

“Where are you feeling pain?” she asked the guy in the coat. His hair was all mussed and flattened back, like he’d been wearing a hat. She wondered what kind of hat would even go with this getup. Then he moved, and she saw the pistol holstered at his waist. She flinched back a notch.

“What?” he asked, shifting and then grunting in pain. He followed her eyes to the gun on his belt. “I’m riding with a sheriff’s deputy. Do the math on that.”

“You’re law enforcement,” she said and then leaned in closer to check on him again. She still felt her body grow stiff from the unease of being near to him. Lauren had a few cardinal rules, and avoiding guns was one of them. She glanced at Arch Stan. Figured that asshole would end up carrying one for a living. It just made him easier to dislike.

“Where does it hurt?” she asked the black-coated guy again.

“Ribs are broken,” he said, rattling it off between cringes. “Got a superficial lac on my neck, but it’s bleeding like a fucker. Some other minor shit. What about Erin?”

Lauren looked over at the upturned cop car. “Keep pressure on your neck wound, and try not to move. If you’ve got broken ribs, you’ve probably got other internal injuries.”

“I’m fine,” Black Coat said. “Go.” He waved her off with a bloody hand that he removed from his neck for just a second. She got a look at the wound he was covering; the blood was already starting to crust on it.

“Paramedics are on the way,” Arch finally said. She would have deemed him less than useless, but he was saying it from a prone position as he was wriggling his way into the passenger side of the overturned car. She could hear him, but he was muffled.

Lauren was ready to tear a strip out of him, but he’d gone the long way around to get to Harris, really. She came around the car at a jog, dropped down at the driver’s side window and saw the blond deputy still hanging there. She gently poked for the carotid pulse and felt the thrum of it. Harris’s chest was heaving up and down in gentle time, but she was straining, probably because she was upside down. Some open wound from somewhere on her body were causing long streaks of blood to run down her face and into her hair. There was a steady drip to the crumpled roof of the car as Lauren rested her hand on the underside of the—

A sound like thunder but louder and more violent caused Lauren to jerk, smacking the back of her neck on the door. Little pieces of shattered glass fell out of the door and down into her shirt. One of them caught on the back of her sports bra before it shook out. “Goddammit,” she said, and caught Arch Stan’s eye under the hanging deputy. “The fuck was that?”

“Gunshot,” he replied.

“What the fuck is going on here?” Lauren asked.

“Don’t you need to get her down?” he asked.

“I can’t,” Lauren said, not bothering to be polite. “She could have a neck injury. Moving her could be fatal, or it might mean she never walks again.”

“She’s bleeding awful heavy,” he said.

“I noticed that, too,” she mumbled, one step from ignoring his helpful words. “Do I need to worry about that gunfire? Because you don’t seem too alarmed by it.” Lauren was one step away from freaking out on him, but since he wasn’t exactly running to deal with it, she assumed he knew what he was doing. Though it did make her question her sanity.

“That’s our covering fire,” Arch said. “Still got some … bad guys … coming down the mountain.”

She looked up at him, only mildly incredulous. “Are the bad guys you’re talking about those assholes on the bicycles?”

“One and the same,” Arch said. “They’re the ones who killed Tim Connor and that other … person.” She wondered if that corpse had been identified yet and realized he’d just given her the answer as he knew it.

“So you’re up here on the mountain trying to stop them?” she asked. “And they what? Resisted arrest?”

She didn’t need to be a psychologist to tell he was pissed. “You could say that.”

Arch was lying. It wasn’t coming natural, either, so he tried to let Lauren Darlington fill in as many of the blanks herself and just work around that. So far he wasn’t having to get too out on a limb. The problem wasn’t with her, though, it was with what was following her.

And what was following her was Sheriff Reeve, at some point.

“She’s got … her abdomen,” Lauren said stiffly. Arch couldn’t tell if she was being so short with him because of the situation or just because she was short with him all the time. He didn’t have much cause to run across her, but when they had she had made it abundantly clear she didn’t want anything to do with him. Arch was fine with that; would have preferred to avoid her himself—because of how she acted, not because he had any personal grudge against the woman—but lately it hadn’t been real easy. “Put pressure here.”

Arch was not in an easy position to maintain. His frame was long and not exactly small, but he’d managed to crawl up in the front seat of the Sheriff’s Crown Victoria by shimmying in on his back like a mechanic changing oil. His chest was pinned under the center console and he didn’t have much mobility in his arms. “Need me to do what?”

“Put your fucking hands right here!” she shouted at him, and it echoed in the car. He didn’t flinch away, though, because it was like trash talk on a football field to him. No big deal. Heck, the louder she got, the cooler he tended to get in response. It was just his way.

He put his hands up there where she pointed, and he could see a dark blood spot on Erin’s khakis. Lauren had been able to get up a little higher and pull it down, but he couldn’t see over the ridge her clothing made hanging down. “You’re gonna have to guide my hands, I can’t see.”

“Superman’s got no x-ray vision, huh?” she snapped, and he wondered again how much of that was the situation. She grabbed his hands roughly and pushed them onto Erin’s belly. He could feel the wetness, and something sticking out of her skin, something metal maybe? He wondered what it was. “Now hold there,” she said.

“Yes ma’am,” he replied, as another of Alison’s big gunshots echoed down the mountain. He didn’t even flinch.

Alison took a breath and let it out slow. How many of these demons had they left behind? She waited until three of them had come around the curve and started to open up on them. She didn’t know whether they had ill intentions or not, but she knew she wasn’t going to give them a chance either way. It was possible they would have just pedaled on by the crash scene, but she didn’t live her life staking on possibilities and she didn’t much plan on letting her husband’s life hang in the balance, either.

She dropped the last one with a double shot. Missed the first time, hit the second. She wasn’t exactly a dead shot with the rifle, but she was getting better. Shooting was a perishable skill, and while she was good, handling a .50 was a whole different league of shooting.