The Last Time I Saw Her (10 page)

Of course, if he'd seen Hughes's face—and from the look of him he had—he would be. There was no way he could have missed the resemblance.

“Hey,” she whispered. It was the merest breath of sound, but Michael heard, because he looked at her then. His face was a study in stupefaction.

“Who—” he began, while at the same time Sayers said, “He remind you of—”

Both were interrupted by Torres shouting, “
Mierda!
Here they come!”

Charlie's heart pounded in terrible anticipation. “They” could mean only the cops. Would the escapees try stopping the bus again, and would they—?

“Punch it, Doyle,” Abell yelled, giving her the answer. Already bouncing over the pavement, the bus picked up speed. The jolting of the floor beneath Charlie telegraphed the location of every pothole. Her shins hurt from the unforgiving metal slamming into them. An outbreak of curses from the escapees, coupled with the increasing loudness of the sirens, told Charlie that the cops who were behind them must be closing in fast.

Michael said, “Stay put,” stood up, and walked out of her line of vision. Catching her breath—having him out of her sight rattled her, she instantly discovered—she was relieved to find that she could follow the progress of his boots down the aisle. He stopped in front of the place where Hughes now sprawled. From the position of his feet, she knew that Michael must be studying him.

She didn't think it would take Michael long to grasp the significance of what he was seeing.

“There's two of 'em this time,” Ware warned, clearly referring to the cop cars.

Charlie couldn't see them, of course, but the revolving bar lights were reflected in the mirrors and the sirens were impossible to miss. The blur of trees flying past outside the windows gave silent testimony to how fast they were traveling. Charlie had a momentary mental image of the cliff edge beside the road, which made her shiver. Flying off a sheer drop in a hijacked school bus was relatively low on the list of horrible ways she could die in the next few hours, though, so she thrust it out of her mind. Shifting positions so that she could sneak a look around the seat, Charlie was just in time to watch Abell grab one of the handcuffed guards, jerk him off the seat where he'd been slumped, and force him—he didn't struggle—toward the rear door, barking, “Wedge it open,” to Ware as he came.

Ware forced the door all the way open and locked it in place. Charlie caught a glimpse of roiling mist colored blue by the flashing lights before Abell, with the prisoner in tow, filled the opening.

“Back off!” Abell screamed at the cops in pursuit. Bracing his feet against the rocking of the bus, he held the unresisting guard in front of the open door, one hand twisted in his collar. He placed his gun against the back of the guard's head.

Bang.

A cloud of dark particulates mushroomed from the guard's forehead and out into the deepening fog. Inside the bus, there was a collection of gasps. Somebody let loose with a truncated scream.

Charlie's mouth fell open as she watched the guard topple limply out of the bus. She heard the thud as he landed in the road. There was not the slightest doubt in her mind that he was dead, and that she'd just watched murder being committed.

Oh, my God…

From behind the bus came the sudden screech of tires. She could only assume that the cops, witnessing the shooting, seeing the body hit the pavement, had slammed on their brakes.

“Jesus Christ.” Michael was back, hunkering down in front of her. Charlie didn't know what she looked like, but from his expression she guessed it wasn't good. “Get back down on the floor, put your head on your knees, and cover it with your arms. And
stay
there.
”

Michael was right, she knew: she was way too exposed and she needed to get down. At that moment she was kneeling, her forearms resting on the seat as she craned her neck to look toward the rear door. There was nothing left to see, nothing she could do. The guard was dead.

Numbly, she dropped to the floor, pillowed her head on her knees, clasping her hands behind her neck, and concentrated on taking deep breaths.

“I'll be right back,” Michael said. Although she had her eyes closed to combat the dizziness that was assailing her and thus couldn't be sure, she got the impression that he was moving away toward the front of the bus. Her heart was pounding, and she focused on trying to slow it down. Since no bullets were flying—the cops apparently had been stopped in their tracks by the murder—there didn't seem to be a lot of point in shielding her head. Unclasping her hands, she wrapped her arms around her knees instead. She was shivering—from shock, she knew.

“We offing hostages now?” somebody—Charlie thought it was Fleenor—asked gleefully.

“Just slowing the bastards down,” Abell answered. “Scraping corpses off the pavement takes time.”

“Maybe we ought to get
los marranos
some bumper stickers: we brake for dead people,” Torres said, and snickered.

“Good one,” Ware answered, while Abell said, “Hey, get over here and help me.”

Michael hunkered down in front of her again. Charlie's eyes were still closed, but she knew he was there, and that knowledge was as stabilizing as an anchor in a storm. She expected him to tell her to cover her head, but he didn't. The sounds of quiet weeping reached her ears—Bree, or possibly Paris or even one of the boys. Of course they were terrified.
She
was terrified, and she had Michael, who she knew would do everything in his power to protect her.

“What? Wait!” It was a man's voice, one that Charlie didn't recognize, and it sounded panicky. It was accompanied by the sounds of a scuffle.

Her eyes popped open. Looking beneath the seats, she could see enough of what was happening to realize that Abell was dragging the other guard into the aisle. She sucked in a horrified breath. This guy was short and stocky, with buzzed blond hair. He struggled plenty, screaming and fighting, although given his and Abell's relative sizes—Abell dwarfed him—and the fact that his hands were cuffed behind him there wasn't a lot he could do to save himself. With Torres's help Abell had little difficulty wrestling him toward the door.

They're going to kill him, too.
Charlie knew it with an icy certainty.

“I got a wife! Kids!” the guard screamed.

“There's eight of them. They're all armed,” Michael said, talking to her over the commotion. Despite the lingering harshness that was a result of his sojourn in Spookville, his voice was almost back to its normal honeyed drawl. “We're in a confined space. That makes things tricky. But I'm working on it.” He was trying to distract her from what was happening, Charlie realized. He was actually succeeding, a little. She was listening to him rather than—

Her eyes widened and her insides seized up as Abell pushed the guard to his knees in the open doorway. She could see the guard now, or most of him, kneeling, cowering, clearly petrified. Behind him, she could see Abell almost to the waist, see his hand holding the gun.

“Close your eyes,” Michael ordered sharply.

Of course she didn't. She couldn't.

There's nothing I can do.
Oh, God, I can't just—

“Don't kill me! Please, don't kill me,” the guard begged. Abell's gun hand rose, disappearing from Charlie's view.

“Stop,” she cried, leaping to her feet. She knew it was foolish, knew it was probably useless, but she had to try. She could not simply hide and do nothing as another man was murdered in cold blood in front of her eyes.

“What the hell are you
doing
?” Michael roared. “Get down!”

He was instantly on his feet, his big body blocking her view. Even though she knew she could walk right through it if she wanted to, having him standing there like that was enough to keep her from confronting Abell. Stopping short, refusing to look at Michael because she didn't want to see in his expression the fury and fear for her she could feel coming off him in waves, she summoned the one weapon she had to wield: her knowledge of the serial killers she was studying.

She was pretty sure it was the only weapon that she and her fellow hostages had.

Abell was looking at her now. At what she saw in his eyes, Charlie felt the blood drain from her face. His usual mask of ordinary humanity was gone, and the killer he was at his core glared at her, silently promising retribution. As the guard pleaded for his life at Abell's feet, Charlie shook that threatening look off. Squaring her shoulders, she ignored Michael's furious “Don't you dare say another fucking word.”

“Mr. Abell, you still have Heidi”—Abell's twelve-year-old only child, part of his seemingly normal life as a married building contractor before his secret existence as the Midnight Rambler was revealed—“to live for. You don't want to provoke the police into—”
Killing you today
was what she was going to say, but Abell didn't let her finish.

Mouth curling, he pulled his eyes from hers to look back at the cringing guard. His hand jerked up.

Bang.

That shut her up. Abell had pulled the trigger, and the guard had been killed, all in a split second. The atmosphere in the bus was suddenly electrified as, shaken, Charlie watched Abell kick the body off the bus. Her throat closed. Her knees went weak. She had to hang on to the seat back to keep from crumpling.

Michael was livid. “Get down! Get down
now
! Jesus, are you
trying
to get yourself killed?”

Charlie felt the tingle as he grabbed her, which was a waste of time because his hands passed right through. In that single telescopic moment in the aftermath of the shooting, the bus suddenly seemed full of sounds: the rattling of the vehicle, the chaperone's rustling paper bag, the moans and sobs and heavy breathing from the other hostages, an argument between Fleenor and Ware about how to split up the dead guards' cash.

His expression ugly, Abell turned to look at her again even as the knowledge that it was too late, that the second guard had just been murdered, shot through the head right in front of them all like the first, truly hit her. The shock of it took her breath.

Abell said, “Anything else you want to say, Dr. Stone?”

Her eyes met his, held.

“No,” Michael growled. “Hell, no, you don't have anything else to say.”

Knowing that calling attention to herself as she had done had been incredibly stupid as well as
useless,
knowing that Michael was right and had been right all along, Charlie stayed silent.

“Thing about the death penalty is, it's like getting a kill-all-the-people-you-want-free card,” Fleenor said, cackling. “I mean, what're they going to do?”

Abell broke eye contact with Charlie to give Fleenor a thumbs-up.

“So how's about we throw out another roadblock?” Abell said.

“Get down,”
Michael told her in the kind of voice that could have stopped a charging bull in its tracks.

Shuddering, Charlie dropped to her knees. As the seat blocked her from the view of Abell and the rest of the escapees, Michael loomed protectively over her, cursing a blue streak, his fear for her obvious in every profane word he uttered. Sinking back on her haunches, Charlie looked up at him with mute horror as the bus, slowing, started chugging up a steep incline.

She couldn't get the image of that exploding head out of her mind.

“When this is over, assuming you're still alive, you need to see a shrink,” Michael said grimly.

I am a shrink,
Charlie didn't reply, because her throat was still so tight that she wasn't sure she could talk, and anyway, flippancy was inappropriate at the moment, and also guaranteed to piss him off. But he must have read something in her face he didn't like, because his jaw hardened and his still-scarily-black eyes flared at her.

“I'm serious,” he said.

“Speed it up, Doyle,” one of the men yelled, while Charlie smiled at Michael, just a little smile because it felt so good to have him there and to have him worrying about her, and, because, really, to have a man who had been hit with diagnoses ranging from charismatic psychopath to borderline personality disorder to homicidal maniac tell her that she needed to see a shrink was kind of rich, not to mention funny.

Michael's eyes were still on her face, but his expression had changed. He was looking at her like she was worrying him.

“Everything's going to be okay, babe,” Michael said, and from the gentler tone of his words, Charlie knew she'd been right. He was worried about her, and not just about her physical safety.

Probably the shock of watching those men get killed was still there in her eyes. Maybe her reactions to things were a little bit off because of it. Maybe that's what had him looking at her with such concern.

“Can't,” Doyle called back. “This is as good as it gets until we reach the top of this grade.”

“Floor it.” Abell barked the order.

“I am,” Doyle replied, adding, “I got to turn the lights on soon. You know it's getting on toward six, and with the fog and all, it's getting dark as shit.”

Sayers burst out with an angry “Why not just fire off flares telling them where we are while you're at it?” and strode right through Michael again, heading toward the front this time, grabbing on to random seat backs as he went because of the steepness of the grade.

“No!” It was a girl's voice: Charlie wasn't sure if it was Bree or Paris. The fear-filled cry sent prickles of alarm racing over her skin. Even as her head whipped around in the direction from which it had come, Sayers went charging back through Michael—dragging Paris behind him. Practically sitting on the floor in an effort to resist as Sayers hauled her by one arm, the girl screamed, “Help! Help me!”

Looking wild-eyed at Charlie as she was dragged past, Paris thrust her free hand at her.

“Help! Please!”

“Paris!” With her heart in her throat, Charlie grabbed for that flailing hand, missed, and lunged for it again, diving right through Michael, who roared “No!” as he tried to stop her.

Ignoring him, Charlie scrambled down the aisle after Paris, who was looking back at her with her hand outstretched, screaming and crying and doing her best to jerk her arm free of Sayers's hold. Visions of her teenage best friend Holly Palmer, of Bayley Evans, of all the young girls in all the cases she had worked who had been horribly murdered, flashed through Charlie's mind, turning her mouth sour with fear. Whatever the risk to herself, she had to do what she could to prevent Paris, prevent any of these kids, from joining their ranks.