Code 61 - Donald Harstad [162]
She nodded.
“If you don't think you have time, shoot the fucker. Shoot until your gun is empty. You understand?”
“Yeah, but … ”
“Just do it. You gotta protect her, too,” I said, mo tioning toward Melissa.
My trip down the hall was a little tense. I entered each room in turn, and found nobody home. No evidence of a struggle. Nothing. That left the third floor.
I hustled back down the hall to Sally.
“Sally? It's me!” I said that very deliberately before I stuck my head in the door.
“Okay,” she said. As I looked in, I saw that she had both hands on her pistol. Good.
“I'm going upstairs. Nothing on this floor but us folks.”
She nodded. “Melissa says that Huck tried to help her. She doesn't know where she is.”
I hate going up a stair when I believe there's somebody at the top who wants to kill me. I really, really hate that. But if Huck was alive, odds were that she was up there, too.
I figured I might as well go up in a hurry. I had my gun in my right hand, and tried the door with my left. It opened easily. A bad sign. It should have been locked, I thought, unless Dan Peale had gone up with a key.
I took two deep breaths, and then just ran up the damned stair.
The upper floor turned out to be just as empty as it was the day we searched it. I double checked, even under the bed and in the little slot between the refrigerator and the wall. Empty. So was the back stair leading down to the kitchen. And that door turned out to be locked.
I went back to check Sally and Melissa, and found a real crowd.
An ambulance crew of two women and one man were there, just getting started. We moved the bed away from Melissa while the smaller of the women EMTs wedged herself into the widening space, and began taking vitals. The only sound in the room was the puffing of the blood pressure collar.
“Nobody on three,” I said to Sally. “Back door's locked.”
“Where …?”
“I don't know,” I said.
“Okay,” said an EMT, “cervical collar.”
She was handed one, and she pushed the bed away from the wall another foot. In a few seconds, she looked up, and said, “Backboard.”
We shoved the bed back about five feet; they slipped a backboard against Melissa, tightened the straps, and gently rolled her over onto her back.
She looked like hell, with her left eye swollen out almost as far as her nose, and her left ear had a vertical tear in it that split the upper portion in half. That could have been from her head hitting the wall. That hard, she had to have at least a concussion. There was a lot of blood clotted on her face, her nose looked broken, and her lower lip was split. She opened her right eye, and said something. Sally leaned in, to try to hear over the rasp of opening Velcro and the tearing of bandage packs.
“What?”
Melissa said something again. Sally answered her with, “We will, don't worry, we will.” Melissa spoke again, and I heard the words “Huck,” and “stop.”
Sally stood, and turned to me. “She says that we gotta help Huck. She thinks he took her with him.”
“Did she say Dan or Dan Peale?”
“Just a sec,” said Sally, and leaned over Melissa once more. They were just putting an O2 mask on her, and just the glimpses of her split lip moving as she tried to talk made me wince. They had a small problem with moving the blood matted hair from her cheeks and mouth on the left, finally using alcohol wipes to get it loose before securing the transparent mask over her face.
Sally straightened up. “Yep. Dan. It's him, for sure.”
“I'll bet he thinks he killed her,” I said. “And I'll bet he gave Huck the same treatment, outside in the hall.”
“I agree,” said Sally.
We were both moving into the hallway as we talked.
In the hall, we met up with Borman, Byng, and the state trooper, who were just getting to the top of the stairs.
“He's hurt one of the girls pretty damned bad,” I said, “and he went after another one. We think”—and I pointed to the dent in the wall—“that's from her head. He kicked in this door. I already checked up on third. Empty.”
“You guys need help?” croaked a voice coming up the stairs.
Lamar. He sounded like he had strep