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Clutching the fire extinguisher, she debated. If I don't do something now, Sheri'll die. She'll burn to death.
Dance looked up cautiously, then ducked down again. No gunshots.
She thought of her children, how she couldn't stand the idea of their being orphans. Thought too that she'd specifically gone into kinesic analysis and investigations to avoid tactical situations that might put her life in danger.
And here, I'm not even on duty, she thought.
Another cry from the car, but muted. Sheri Towne was losing the battle.
Now. It has to be now.
She leapt to her feet and began to sprint to the Mercedes, just as the flames were reaching into the passenger compartment.
Waiting for the bullets.
None came her way but still she dove into the ditch, out of the line of fire of the shooter in the woods, and crawled fast to the car. Inside, Sheri was pounding on the windshield with bloody hands. She was retching and coughing as the smoke roiled into the interior. Dance's skin prickled in the heat from a grass fire surrounding the car.
The woman inside turned desperate eyes to her and mouthed something.
Dance gestured for her to move back and she slammed the extinguisher base into the passenger-side window. It shattered easily. Dance tossed the extinguisher away--it wasn't going to do any good on a fire like this--and reached inside to yank the woman out. Sheri was convulsing in spasms and coughing hard, spittle flying from her mouth. Tears streamed down her sooty face.
The agent dragged her thirty feet from the car, crouching, in case the attacker was still there with his gun. They sprawled on the ground in a depression by the roadside.
The woman dropped to her knees and vomited hard and tried to stand.
"No, stay down," Dance said, starting for her SUV and her phone to see if Madigan had gotten her message and, if not, to call 911.
Which was when she heard a loud bang behind her and felt something slam into her lower back. She pitched forward onto the hard, sunbaked earth.
Chapter 37
DENNIS HARUTYUN WAS standing over the gurney Kathryn Dance lay on, face down.
The medic was on the opposite side from the deputy, laboring away on her back.
"No leads yet," the detective said.
With her perpendicular
view of the scene, Dance could see the ever-efficient CSU team scouring the grounds where the attacker had nearly killed Sheri Towne ... and Dance herself. But there wasn't much left; the fire had spread and taken out some of the trees and brush where he'd been standing.
"That hurt?" the med tech asked.
"A bit."
"Hm." He continued working on her, without otherwise acknowledging her answer.
After a few minutes: "You almost through there?" Dance asked, irritated that the doctor was taking so long and that he hadn't responded to her comment about the pain. She should have said, "Yeah, hurts like hell, butcher."
"I think that'll do it."
She pulled her shirt down.
"Just a scratch. Wasn't deep at all."
Dance was sure she'd been shot in the back--her immediate thought was of her friend, the crime scene expert, Lincoln Rhyme, who was a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down. How can I be a good mother if I can't walk? she'd thought, tumbling over Sheri Towne from the impact. In fact, what had happened was that the fire extinguisher she'd tossed aside had landed in the burning grass and exploded, sending either a rock or a piece of its own casing flying into her back. She'd lain stunned for a moment then had turned to see on the ground a big disk of white foam or powder from the detonated extinguisher. And she'd understood, then crawled on to the SUV and retrieved her phone and--giving up on Madigan--called 911. A quarter hour later the police and fire and medical teams arrived.
The medic took his bad bedside manner and wandered off to tend to his other patient--Sheri Towne, who was sitting next to her husband. She was breathing oxygen and staring at her bandaged hand. Her long nails were, coincidentally, the color of fresh blood.
