Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) (51 page)

“He got clear of the search area.”

“So why isn’t he here yet?  There are no cops this far, he should’ve had a straight shot to his vehicle.”

“Because,” the Wolf said, turning away from the window and tapping Veniamin on the shoulder—Veniamin, who had been hovering near the newspaper dispenser.  “He spotted one of us, or maybe all of us, and he knew something was wrong.”

“How could he know that?”

“Because he knows we’re after him,” he said, and hung up.  To himself, he muttered, “And because he’s got guile.”

He’s around here someplace
.
He must’ve just gone by, kept to the crowds
.  Shcherbakov had been watching the people moving up and down the streets, as well as those using the crosswalks.  But there was no way he could keep tabs on every single person. 
He slipped through the cracks, but he can’t have gone far
. 
He just left the mall and likely headed this way, so he’s got to be—

“Stop,
” he said to Veniamin, putting a hand to his chest and bringing him up short.  “You hear that?”  It was difficult to hear amid all the cars swishing by, the harsh wind in their ears, and people chattering on phones as they walked by, but it was there.  Somewhere in that sea of noise, it was there, stark and at once recognizable.  “Car alarm,” he said, and took off running around the corner.  Veniamin tried to follow, but slipped on ice almost immediately and went to his knees, struggling to stand.

The Grey Wolf had his hand in his jacket but had not yet pulled his weapon free. 
Up the hill of Bolshaya Ulitsa, he scanned quickly for any sign of…
There, lights flashing
.  Yellow lights and headlights.  About sixty meters away from him, a PT Cruiser’s alarm was blaring.  Just as he spotted it, though, two things happened in quick succession: the alarm was cut off, and shots were fired.  He heard screams, and…dogs yelping?

His eyes caught the black-and-gray blurs darting across the street, on their way to the Cruiser.  Before the driver could close the door, the animals were upon him, and the shots put one down, but the other two kept coming.  Pedestrians screamed and ducked behind cars for cover.

The Cruiser’s driver side door was shut on the head of one of the dogs, which yelped and snarled angrily for a second, then, its head exploded.  Then, the Cruiser started moving.  Shcherbakov drew his gun at low-ready and bolted for it.

Speed-d
ialing up Roman, he shouted into his phone.  “He’s here!  Just around the corner at Bolshaya!  Bring the car around!  He’s here!  He’s here!”

Horns blared at him as he darted through traffic.

Sirens were approaching.

The dogs moved unnaturally fast, closing the distance to him before he could reach for the door handle.  The lead dog leapt at him, and instinctively Spencer knew that if he went for the door handle, he would be just a second too late.  He leaned back across the seat and his hand went inside his jacket, barely getting the Uzi out in time.  The bullets hit the lead dog in the center of its chest, and lit a trail along its body as it fell to the street, its corpse sliding slowly down the hill.  The noise from the gunshots caused the other two to leap to one side, reconsidering for half a second, sliding on the ice, fighting to recover.  This gave Spencer his chance.  He reached for the door handle and slammed it, just as the head of one of the dogs came through and snapped at his arm.  He aimed the Uzi at it, and fired point-blank, sending up a spray of blood and smoking fur against the windows, and across Spencer’s face.  The thunder of the Uzi inside the car was nearly deafening.

People were screaming, darting for safety.

Spencer spotted six more dogs moving across the street in front of him, slinking around the cars, using them for cover as they tried to encircle him.

More sirens.  Just around the corner now.

The alarm switched off, all that was left was to light this firecracker.  Touching the wires together, on the engine turned over on his fifth attempt, and then opened the door to let the wolf’s corpse flop out before shutting it.  He put on the gas.

Just in time, because five seconds later a pair of police cars came slashing down the road, throwing up icy slush at his windows.  The Cruiser was tightly parallel parked.  He threw it in reverse, then moved forward, then reverse again, then forward and out.  He clipped a Chrysler
Concorde on his way out, and received an ornery honk from a motorist he cut off when hitting the road.

The two squad cars raced right by him—they had been too late to see him unload an Uzi on two dogs, and too late to see him boost the car.  No doubt they were on their way to the mall, to Spencer’s last known whereabouts.

Watching the police cars squeal away ahead of him, Spencer couldn’t help but smile.  “That’s right, folks!  He—could—go—all—the—
wayyyyyy
!”  He laughed in supreme triumph.

A
nd then a gunshot through his windshield cut the celebration short.  The bullet tore into his right arm, which caused him to jerk the wheel to one side.  He lost control, swiveled, had time to see his shooter just out his left window, just as another shot was fired and smacked against the side of the car, and then he clipped the side of another parked car on his way past.

The Cruiser fishtailed all the way to the bottom of the hill, forcing him to run a stoplight.  The tail end of his new
ride was smacked by a large van, which spun out after slamming its own brakes.  The Cruiser spun out, too, and nearly came to a stop in the middle of the road.

Spencer clutched his arm with his left hand, squeezed to put pressure on it, and growled menace at the world as he floored it.  The Cruiser didn’t pick up any traction at first, and even once it did, it was a slow start.  He had just enough time to glance at his pursuer in
the rearview mirror.  A stocky, blonde-haired fucker in a black coat was moving through the snowfall, bathed in the Cruiser’s red taillights.

Spencer ducked, knowing more shots were coming, and steered without looking.  Indeed, six more shots did pierce the rear windshield, and the Cruiser eventually picked up speed and was off.  Spencer peeked over the dash,
put himself on the right side of the road, and ran the next stoplight, turning a hard left away from Bolshaya Ulitsa.

Roman’s Mazda never quite stopped.  Instead, he leaned over and opened the door, slowed down just enough for Shcherbakov to run alongside and dive in.  They took off after the Cruiser, leaving Veniamin behind somewhere.  Roman didn’t even ask if they should wait for him, he knew their priorities.

“He went around Yeltsin Uli
—”

“I know, I saw.”

“Go, go, go!”

Spencer knew it was him.  The man from the docks.  In his bones, he knew it.  The same way he knew Kaley wasn’t dead, the same way he knew the significance of
pitbull
, the same way he’d known the nature of the Nigerian connection.  The man that had appeared briefly in his rearview mirror was the man from the docks, and he was a predator.

Spencer ran the next two stoplights, watching the headlights of one car gaining on him, running the stoplights just seconds behind him.  He had no doubt it was the silver Mazda.  They were on to him.

A pain in his arm suddenly seized him.  The muscles tensed and the arm jerked the wheel to one side, nearly causing him to hit a van head on before he corrected it.

Spencer made another hard turn, and when he did, he slowed down to barely five kilometers and hour.  Something smacked against the passenger side window.  He looked, thinking he had hit a person, but it was a salivating wild dog, its teeth bared and biting at the glass
, the beast’s eyes insanely fixed on his own. 
Not today, Fido
.  He floored it, and left the animal behind.

Another shot panged against the back of the Cruiser.  He ducked, then peeked up over the wheel.  In an instant, Spencer’s mind took a snapshot of his environment, absorbed the totality of his circumstances, and…

There!

He was moving south, coming to another four-way intersection.  The light had just turned red.  A line of cars were moving east and west in front of him.  Spencer caught sight of a Cadillac which, in the field of his windshield, was just on the outskirts of his “screen.”  He sped up to match its speed, knowing that as long as a car moving perpendicular to him stayed in the same place in his
windshield’s view, he would collide with it (another fun fact courtesy of Hoyt Graeber, may God rest his crooked soul).

Anticipating the airbag’s explosion,
Spencer put his hands on the wheel at nine o’clock and three o’clock—any other position might break his hands.  He approached the intersection, moved around the line of cars waiting behind the stoplight, applied the brakes just a tad as a final adjustment, and…

He smashed into the back of the Cadillac at its rear, having aimed the raised V on his Cruiser’s hood at the spot on the Cadillac between the back door and the gas cap.  Since the main weight of the Cadillac was in the front (the engine), it spun around, doing almost a complete 360-degree-turn on the ice, and causing cars coming from the other
direction to slam on their breaks, lose control, and slide into one another, creating a little pile-up.

Having nailed the right spot at the
Cadillac’s rear, Spencer’s Cruiser suffered only cosmetic damage, and continued forward losing almost no speed at all.  The airbag, however, did go off.  He’d relaxed his body a moment before impact to prevent injury, and shut his eyes to save them from the emitted white powder, but even so he was rocked and the world filled with white smoke and dust.  His head smacked off the bag—like getting punched with a hard fist wrapped in a pillow—and then it whipped back against his seat.

Tires were screaming all around, horns were blasting, glass spilled across the road and fiberglass crunch
ed and came away from a pair of trucks behind him.  Spencer hit the gas.  He had time to check his rearview mirror, saw the disorder he’d created and that the Mazda had had to slam on its brakes to keep from getting caught in it.  The Mazda careened, and smashed into a fire hydrant, which was knocked over and burst no water like one might expect.  The water was probably frozen solid.

Spencer chuckled, then winced, then chuckled
again, then started coughing due to the smoke in the car.  He could barely open his eyes to see.  They watered and he fought to reach around the airbag to wrestle with what bits of the steering wheel he could manage.  The airbag was rapidly deflating, allowing him some view of the outside world.  However, the car was not responded to his foot on the gas.

The g-
sensor
. 
Shit
.  The g-sensor had tripped the fuel pump cut-out switch, in case of a bad accident and fire.  The Cruiser was now virtually dead.  Spencer pulled hard to the right side of the road, slammed on the brakes, and rode up onto the sidewalk a ways, knocking over a mailbox and sending pedestrians leaping in all directions.  He finally slid to a stop and lightly bumped into the side of a closed bakery.  He pushed the door open, staggered out hacking and coughing, wiping the dust from his eyes.

Sirens.

God damn it!

Spencer checked his arm.  Bleeding pretty bad, potentially life-threatening.  Something would need to be done about it soon or he would pass
out.

Between the bakery and a neighboring automotive repair shop, Spencer found a narrow alley and dipped into it. 
With his good hand, he fished inside his pocket.  Blinking back tears, still chuckling to himself, he checked the phone to see if it still had reception.  One bar still.  He looked up the zip code for Bolshaya Ulitsa, checked for clinics in the area.  No clinics, but there was a hospital.

Shit
.  At all cost, he wanted to avoid hospitals.

While on the move
, he used Map Quest to define a route.  The nearest hospital was a few blocks from here, probably not accessible by foot, not out in this cold weather, not losing blood like he was.

He glanced over his shoulder, searching for his pursuer.  He turned down another alley and was about to emerge on another street.

Spencer did a search for “treating gunshot wounds to the arm” and came up with a step-by-step process at WikiHow.  He skipped the first couple of steps, which had to do with calling emergency hotlines and giving appropriate information, and went right to the treatment section.  He winced as he pulled off his coat.  Still on the move, he clumsily tied a sleeve tightly around his arm, between elbow and armpit.  The website warned that shock would occur in most victims because of loss of body temperature.

Last he’d checked, the temperature out here was well below zero.

Spencer knew he couldn’t hail a cab or walk into a hospital wearing his jacket on his sleeve, and with his arm bleeding profusely, not without getting noticed.  So, sirens closing in, he stepped out the other side of the alley onto a small street.