Obstruction of Justice (36 page)

"I thought, the cabin. I had to think. But when I got there, he was dead."

"The shovel with the blood, though, that puzzles me."

"It was right next to the rock. Like Nina said. He fell on it. I moved it away from him...." Jason was reliving the moment.

Molly took one of the suitcases and said desperately, "Come on, I’m ready."

"I’m going now," Jason said, looking down. "Tell my mother—"

"Just one more thing. Don’t worry, I won’t stop you from opening that door," Paul said. "The thing that would bring all this together for me. Just this: Why did you dig up your father’s body?"

Jason said, "Tell my mother I’m sorry. Tell Nina thank you. She tried to help. Kenny—"

"Good-bye," Kenny said softly, "bro." He edged over and gave Jason a shy hug, little Mutt hugging tall Jeff.

"Good-bye, Moll." But Molly wouldn’t let him hold her.

"No! No!"

"Please, Molly," Kenny said. "Stay. I need you."

"What’s that noise?" Jason said, pointing at the door.

"I didn’t hear anything," Paul said. "Don’t go, son. We’ll try to help you."

"There’s someone outside!" Kenny said.

Collier burst in, pushing Nina ahead of him. His gun was drawn and he was breathing in short gasps. "Get out of the way," he said to the air, and then he raised the gun and aimed it at Jason, who was standing not two feet from Nina.

"No!" Nina yelled, and threw herself in front of Jason. Paul had his own gun drawn now. "Put it down, buddy," he told Collier. "You’re not going to shoot Nina, are you?"

Jason’s arm shot out, knocking over the lava lamp, which whacked the vinyl floor, bounced once on its base, and cracked into smithereens, leaving them in complete, windowless darkness. Someone whimpered. Paul grabbed Nina, holding her still, and froze, praying that Collier wouldn’t fire off a shot in the dark.

The apartment door swung open. Jason and Molly ran out into the hall. Paul’s hand found Collier, but Collier whirled away from him and ran out too.

The outside deck held the only real light, all of forty watts beaming muddily down from above the doorway. Paul checked the gun in his hand. An eerie green glow surrounded it from the Tritium night-sights. Two figures fled like deer through the dimness, disappearing almost instantly, Collier already falling behind.

The rest of them waited a long, silent instant, until they were sure he and his trigger finger had gotten safely away.

Then Nina and Paul raced out into the parking lot, past the startled neighbors, Kenny hopping along behind them. They arrived in time to see the Jeep, followed by Collier’s car, skidding around the corner of the street at top speed, brakes screeching, the people driving behind the steamy windshields wearing looks of equal determination.

They leapt into the van, Kenny jumping in back just in time, and chased the cars. At Highway 50, all three cars, one after the other, careened into a sharp left. Paul drove the van, and had no trouble in the light traffic keeping track of Collier in his little car trailing the Jeep in front. Nina was punching 911 for the third time that month. Paul pried the phone out of her clutching fingers and calmly described the Jeep, its license number, and the pursuing car, all the while driving at top speed up the street.

But there didn’t seem to be any danger of the two cars ahead losing each other. Collier stuck to the car ahead of him. When he got close, he surged forward, slamming into the back of the Jeep. Jason skidded left, veering up onto the sidewalk, where he drove for what seemed like an eternity, narrowly avoiding posts, flattening some bushes, and causing two pedestrians to jump for their lives.

"Why’s he trying to kill them?" Kenny said, hanging on to the back of Paul’s seat.

"The probation officer Jason killed—she was his wife!" Nina called back, not turning her head away from the cars in front.

"Anna Meade? He never did that!"

"He just confessed, didn’t he!"

"No! You’re all mixed up!"

Down again onto the road in front of Collier, Jason jumped the curb with a thundering jolt, raising up a sheet of water from the half-flooded street. Nina could see Molly’s hair flying behind her as the Jeep skewed once more, almost completely out of control.

Collier roared up behind Molly and Jason again. Again, he slammed them.

"Oh, my God! He’s going to kill them both!" Nina cried, but they recovered somehow, returning to take the lead, their maniacal speed eating up the road before them. Her cell phone rang in vain somewhere near her feet.

"They’re heading across the state line!" Kenny yelled, his hair brushing against Paul as he leaned over the seat. "It wasn’t him! Stop that guy!"

"Damn it, Paul. Faster!" Nina shouted, and Paul gritted his teeth, pushing harder.

Somehow they had crossed the miles between Kenny’s apartment and the casino district. Nina watched Paul, who must have had his foot glued near the floor already, edge forward, and listened for the sound that must come next, the sound of a crash. She closed her eyes, and almost instantly opened them, to the sight of Jason’s car whipping into a left turn that had to be the closest thing to a right angle possible in a car, directly into the Prize’s parking lot.

Collier shot past, skidded into a U-turn in the middle of the highway, nearly hitting a car coming from the Nevada direction, and hurtled up the drive into the parking area just ahead Paul. He cruised the lot rapidly, and they could see him craning his neck to examine the cars. Then they saw the Jeep, empty, windshield wipers slapping time, doors open, in the middle of the drive. Collier screeched to a dead stop and tore out of his car, running straight through the puddles into the brightly lit casino entrance.

"Oh, shit," Paul said. He grabbed his phone from the seat and barked out where he’d gone.

The van skidded to a stop. They all jumped out.

Brilliant and garish, full of busy people, the casino’s raucous atmosphere quickly absorbed anything out of the ordinary. Blinking in the bright lights, Nina stood in one place until she caught a glimpse of Collier in the elevator near the door, gun waving as the doors closed on him. A couple of security guards from the casino punched buttons on the next elevator. Two others ran for the stairs, their own guns drawn. Kenny had dropped behind them, lost in the crowd.

Collier’s elevator, an express car, stopped only at the rooftop restaurant.

"Police!" Paul yelled. The guards obligingly held the elevator door long enough for the two of them to run in, dripping and gasping. "All the way up!" Paul ordered. "Police are on the way. He’s trying to kill a young man with a girl who must be just ahead of him. His gun’s loaded."

The doors opened. They found themselves in a red-carpeted hall, the anteroom to the penthouse restaurant. A maitre d’ had shrunk his body tight against the wall. When he saw the guards, he stepped out and pointed, saying, "That way! He has a gun!"

"The roof!" one of the guards yelled. They ran after him to a small closed door, which led to a narrow flight of metal stairs.

On the roof, the rain-swept sky pressed down, heavy with unseen presences. Below, with its arc of gaudy light between lake and forest, the town looked as remote and frivolous as it had from the top of the mountain. Encrusted with brilliant neon signs, the walls of the neighboring casinos burned and hissed. Cylindrical shapes of ventilator casings and square concrete walls of unknown purpose broke the wet expanse of concrete, creating pools of complete darkness.

They spread out, searching for Collier, Nina staying close to Paul. Half-crouched as she moved beside him, her clothes already sodden and heavy against her skin, she was as exposed as she had been in that other storm, but this time she felt no fear. This time she felt that rocklike resistance rising in her against the tide that propelled them irresistibly from event to event, quenching every attempt to outwit it.

If only they hadn’t told Collier... and what was Kenny blabbering about in the car?

Out of obstinate loyalty to Jason, Molly, too, was now in the line of fire. I won’t let that idiotic girl die! Nina thought. But what could she do? Collier had cracked, and she felt tragedy rocketing toward them like a crashing jet.

Catching a movement out of the corner of her eye, she ran off to the left toward the edge of the building. "There they are, Paul," she shouted. He sprinted toward her, gun raised in his hand.

Fleet and light as birds, the twins made an unforgettable sight. Multicolored in the glittering neon, they moved swiftly toward the low wall of the building. Jason got there first. He twisted his head back toward Molly. "Stay back," he said. Then he made his move, leaping into a dive over the side. Nina’s breath froze in her chest. In her mind, she watched the inevitable ending, Jason falling out of the sky, a man-bird whose wings have failed him.

"There’s a ladder, Nina. There must be!" Paul said.

Out of a pool of blackness, Collier appeared, his gun silhouetted in front of a darker Tallac. In the dimness he crept along the edge toward Molly. Casting a terrified glance back toward the man who came after her like a hunting animal, she looked once below, then leapt over the side, following her brother into the abyss.

Collier ran after her, teetering along the building’s edge, seemingly oblivious of the danger and the rain streaming down his back.

Nina waited for a blast, a shriek.

No sound. No sound at all.

Paul had followed Collier, and now, too late, Nina saw a new danger descending upon them, imminent and terrible. Paul would have to kill Collier to save Jason.

"No!" she screamed at Paul, but her voice was drowned by the harsh static of electronics and the cacophony of voices behind her as the security people caught sight of them and came running toward them from the other side of the roof.

Paul stood directly behind Collier, his gun pointed at Collier’s back. Nina’s eyes, sharpened by anxiety, saw his finger on the trigger.

"Freeze!" Paul shouted. But Collier ignored him. She heard a hoarse cry from beyond the wall.

And she lunged forward, seizing Paul’s taut forearm, the one holding the gun. They were so close to the edge, and her balance was bad—God, it was a long way down. They wrestled furiously, until Paul finally flung her away. She felt herself losing her balance, going over, but Paul pulled her back toward the solid ground of the roof.

Gasping for breath, they looked toward the edge. Collier was gone.

Racing to the place he had disappeared, leaning over and straining to see over the side through the rain, they glimpsed the escape route, a metal ladder. Stretching down a hundred feet along the building, it ended on a flat extension of the roof spanning barely six feet. Molly was hurrying down the ladder to her brother, within twenty feet of the ledge where Jason stood, looking up into the rain. Collier was only a few feet above her, moving clumsily, an easy target for Paul.

A sound came, a tearing sound like a branch splitting off a tree. The ladder below Molly fell away, hurtling toward Jason, who raised his arms as a shield. "Omigod—" Paul had time to say, "Leo said—he planned to fix the fire ladders—"

The long length of ladder smashed onto Jason’s ledge, still standing straight up. It stood momentarily on end, then tumbled off the ledge and fell again, pitching heavily into the power lines far below. Crackling and sparking, the metal section hung between the wires, glittering in the air like a stairway to hell.

Then it crashed to the street, splitting into several pieces, narrowly missing several Douglas County police officers sheltering under their cars.

Jason! Had the ladder hit him? Nina spotted him still crouched on the ledge, looking up, his mouth open.

It was Molly who was in trouble.

Molly had managed to hold on to the last rung of the ladder with her hands. The whole thing had pulled away from its supports except at the very top, and the ladder swung gently several feet from the wall. Her feet, unsupported, danced in air.

A few steps above her, where the ladder was still in one piece, Collier clutched the sides of the ladder. He pulled his gun from his belt and aimed at Jason, who was totally unprotected as he stood on the ledge below.

"Jason," the girl shouted to her brother. "You can get away. Go!" Was it rain or tears that trickled down her face? Nina couldn’t tell.

On the ledge below, the boy stood up, swaying.

He seemed to jump toward the wall. With incredible strength and agility, finding invisible toeholds and fingerholes in the rough wall, he began to climb up the face of the building. "Molly, hold tight. I’m coming," he called.

"Jason, no! He’ll kill you!"

"Hold on tight!"

He was up, just a few feet below her waving feet. He almost had her.

One of her hands slipped. Flailing wildly, she scrabbled for a hold, just as she had that night in her bedroom as she hung, fighting to live....

"Molly!" Jason screamed.

The mass of people now surrounding Nina and Paul screamed in horror too, the din of their voices merging into one long moaning, crying sound that Nina would never forget. Rain broke the flashing neon lights into a hundred pieces.

Molly’s other hand slipped off the rung.

In an impossible, superhuman gesture, Jason reached out one arm, the other hand clamped to one of the ladder supports still attached uselessly to the wall, bending his body out from the building, stretching....

He had her. She was clamped tightly to his side, held with one hand.

They could not hang on. They couldn’t climb. They could only wait for the inevitable ending. The boy’s eyes bulged a little and the cords in his neck stood out, but he held his sister motionlessly. He had done all he could.

All Nina could see of Collier was the top of his head, slanting raindrops splashing against him and the bulk of his body. Paul must have realized he could not shoot now without endangering the two young people below him. He had stuffed his gun into his pocket.

The only sounds came from the rain splattering on the roof and the noise of sirens. Many heads now looked down over the side of the building, watching in an anguished hush. Nina felt the presence of death hovering in the air above the ladder.