“You know something?” he said, with a big fat grin. “I do too.”
“Will you come down to the station with me peacefully?”
“The fucking hell I will,” he snapped. “You’ll have to work for it.” And, without another word, he turned and bolted down the pathway to one of the dead-men runs, which went straight down the damn hill.
Swearing, she raced after him.
Simon called out, “Kate, I’ve got the gun.”
“Stay up there,” she ordered, but she knew he wouldn’t. That he’d found the gun was great though because then she didn’t have to worry about some innocent bystander finding it and accidentally shooting themselves. But this trip down the mountain was bullshit. It was hard. It was fast. It was slick. And she knew that she would have a hell of a time with it. Yet she would not let Charlie get away though.
She knew where to find him potentially, but he could also have another bolt hole, and anything that delayed getting him into custody was just another chance for him to kill somebody else. Four deaths in this scenario were enough. It made a sick sense, but it all came back to his bad divorce and losing his family. So many times it was based on some simple trigger like that, something that ended up pushing people over the edge. She wasn’t even sure exactly what the trigger had been in this case.Maybe Barry’s divorce. There could have been a lot of small ones that built up to it.
Up ahead, dust and branches whipped past, and an almost crazy laugh came from Charlie.
She yelled, “Stop it. You’ll hurt yourself.”
“Who fucking cares?” he asked. As he came to one particularly bad corner, he turned and looked back at her. “You can’t even keep up,” he said, with a sneer. And, at that moment, he stumbled and cried out.
She watched in horror as he fell, tumbling overhead, down the rest of the path. She stopped and waited, but he hit hard at the bottom, and he didn’t move. She made her way down as fast as she safely could, and, when she got to the bottom, she raced up to him, then reached down to check for a pulse.
As she heard other noises, she looked up to see Simon, a gun in his hand, coming down behind her. She looked up and shook her head. “He’s dead.” Actually she hadn’t even needed to check his pulse because his head was at such an odd angle. “He broke his neck,” she added, straightening up and gasping for breath. “God damn. What an ending to this mess.”
“Well, you got your man,” Simon stated, as he held out the weapon.
She looked at it and took it from him. “This is not how I wanted my day at the beach to go.”
He looked at her in horror.
She nodded. “Now that I’ve caught him, you know I can’t take off.”
Simon glared, and she nodded, but then he smiled. “So how about tomorrow?”
She looked at him with hope. “Can we take a rain check?”
“Absolutely we can take a rain check,” he replied, “but you’ll want to call this in. I’m not even sure the path is safe up there because, for all we know, this guy had a booby trap set for you.”
Kate nodded. “He was trying to direct me to a certain place.” She wiped the dust and dirt off her face. “So I wouldn’t be at all surprised.” She pulled her phone from her back pocket and called it in. She looked over at Simon when she was done. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For distracting him,” she said. “It allowed me to get into position.”
“And what about the instructions?”
She looked at him, startled for a moment, and then she frowned. “Instructions?” she asked cautiously.
“Yeah, what happened that caused you to go bolting down the hill?”
She grimaced. “It was just this drive, this need, this—I don’t know—this voice in my head, telling me toRun, run, run.”
He gave her a fat smile and nodded. “That was me.”
She stared at him in shock. “No, no, no, you don’t,” she said. “No way in hell you’ll convince me that you were talking in my head.”
“Remember the vision that I had about the runner who,uh, was convinced to stay in bed and to not go out that day?”
She nodded. “Yeah, what about it?”