CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

The dead earth of Starlit Meadow Farm stretched out before Ella like a graveyard in the moonlight. She pounded across the dirt in search of her man, because somewhere out here, Seth Baxter was hiding, waiting.

She scanned the gloom. The farmhouse slumped on one side, its boards ragged as broken teeth. The silo housing the watery death machine hulked on the other. Between the two, the barn listed like a punch-drunk prizefighter, barely on its feet.

But Ella"s sights had set on the shadows beyond the derelict structure.

The black maw of woods.

There, in that thick twisted undergrowth. That's where a rabid animal would run.

She was moving before the thought had finished crystalizing. She hoisted her Glock, shook off the drips of water still clinging to it and chased the darkness. Seth was close – so close she could practically smell that acrid reek of sweat and stale adrenaline.

Ella passed the farmhouse, aimed for the woods – but suddenly a shadow detached from the gloom. Fluid, fast. Man-sized and man-shaped. Ella caught a glint of moonlight on metal.

And then it was too late.

Ella pivoted and tried to throw herself clear, but she was a half-second too slow. Something caught her in the shoulder with a sickening crack and white-hot agony screamed from her arm to her wrist. Her vision strobed red and black as she hit the dusty ground in a graceless sprawl. She scrambled up with a mouthful of copper, but her shadowy attacker was on top of her.

Ella had only a split second to register the man behind the monster.

The gaunt cheeks, the fever-bright eyes rolling like marbles in a can.

Seth Baxter in the wild-eyed flesh.

‘Bitch! You ruined everything!'

Then Seth's weapon – a hammer – fell like the fist of an angry god. It cracked across her jaw, whited out the world in a nova blast of pain. Ella crashed back and her skull bounced off the ground, extremities gone to putty.

But some cop instinct, pure as the sin that spawned it, had her rolling. The hammer pulverized the soil where her head had been scant seconds before, sending clods of dirt skyward. Ella kicked out and connected with something that cracked like dry kindling. She scrambled to her feet, launched a punch with her good arm that caught Baxter square in the mouth.

Blood sprayed, a tooth dislodged, and Baxter stumbled backward but steadied himself on a barrel of God knows what.

Then Ella leveled her Glock.

Center mass, the largest target. Even half dazed, she couldn"t miss.

‘Drop the weapon, Baxter!' she breathed through the pain. Her trigger arm was weakened and she was sure there was a concussion swimming somewhere upstairs, but even so, she had her target locked.

Baxter cocked his head like a dog hearing a whistle. ‘You can't stop me. I'm going to finish this.'

‘You finish nothing. Drop it.'

Baxter froze, hammer twitching. For a long moment, they just stared at each other down the barrel of her Glock. Two dogs, one bone.

For a single, surreal moment, she thought he might comply. Those mad eyes flickered, some long atrophied shred of rationality struggling to the surface. The hammer wobbled and began to dip.

‘Move and I'll shoot,' Ella said. ‘I mean it.'

Baxter's expression twisted into a mask of pure transcendent rage.

Then he charged like a bull out of a chute. No thought, no strategy – just raw, screeching bloodlust.

Ella squeezed the trigger.

And pulled again.

And pulled and pulled.

Click. Click. Click.

The sound of her death sentence, written in impotent dry-fires. The barrel was wet.

The water. It jammed it up.

Time seemed to slow as Seth barreled down on her, close enough to count the capillaries in his bloodshot eyes. Close enough to read her own stunned incomprehension reflected there.

Reflex took over. Pure primal-brained fight or flight. Ella barely had time to bring her arms up, to brace for collision. They hit the dirt together, Seth"s weight crushing every molecule of air from her lungs. Something crunched wetly under the meat. Collarbone, maybe. Or the delicate architecture of her scapula crumpling like tinfoil.

The pain sizzled out every sane thought. Seth rained down a series of wild and uncoordinated blows – the kind of blows she could dodge had this son of a bitch not sent her world spinning on an ambush. Ribs cracked, air whooshed from her lungs in a frothy gout. Her already abused shoulder took the worst of it, bones splintering like brittle tinder.

Ella jackknifed and tried to buck him off, but Baxter had a hundred pounds on her. He rode her like a cowboy on a thrashing bull, bringing down fist and hammer blows into every inch of flesh that she couldn't cover. It clipped her cheek and sent blood sheeting into her eyes. The world suddenly swam out of focus, swallowed by a red tide.

But Ella wasn"t going down easy. Time to play dirty. She reached out and clawed at Baxter"s face. She dug her nails anywhere she could find purchase, raking eyes, stabbing temples, anything to get the advantage back. After catching something soggy and fleshy with her nail, Baxter bellowed like a branded calf and reared back. Ella torqued her body hard left and rolled them together in a tangle of limbs.

Ella ended up on top, straddling Baxter"s chest. She thumped a fist into his throat, and he gagged, hammer falling from his grip. She dove for it, scrabbling in the dirt. But Baxter recovered too quick, flipped them again with a twist of his hips.

And then it was Ella on her back once more, choking on blood and dust and the stench of Baxter"s insanity. He loomed over her, legs pinning her arms, a nightmare figure haloed by the pregnant moon.

The hammer, slick with her own blood, pressed against her chin. ‘Not… so… tough,' Baxter cried, punctuating each word with brutal shoves that forced Ella's head back at an impossible angle. She heard vertebrae pop and tendons strain to the snapping point.

Ella bucked, tried to twist away. Brought her knee up hard into Seth"s crotch. He grunted, flinched, but didn"t let up. The hammer bore down, grinding against her windpipe. Black spots swarmed her vision, lungs screaming for air that couldn"t come.

She scrabbled at his wrist, pried at his fingers. But it was like trying to bend rebar, like grappling with a statue that had come horribly to life. Seth was a man possessed, driven by something beyond pain, beyond reason. There was no stopping him, no reaching through the black fog of his rage.

Ella"s strength was fading. Her struggles were growing weaker.

The world had narrowed to a tunnel, to the soulless void of Seth"s eyes and the cold kiss of steel at her throat.

This was it, the end of the line. No clever play, no last-minute Hail Mary. Just a whimper and a gurgle, then the long fall into the dark.

Except – in that final, fading instant, something flickered across the screen of Ella"s mind. A life, her life, unspooling in fits and starts. The whole sordid reel, the good and the bad, the brutal and the beautiful.

Her dad, broad and beaming on a long-ago afternoon. Dappled sunlight, a soccer ball, the dizzying swoop as he scooped her in her arm. Working a desk at Virginia PD. The Academy, all spit-shined shoes and na?ve bravado. Then a slideshow of every psychopath and sicko she"d put in the ground or slammed behind bars. The ones that had slipped through her fingers, scurrying back to the shadows to kill and kill again.

It played out in the space between heartbeats, an entire existence reduced to snapshots and freeze frames. Thirty-odd years of blood and guts and grime, the whole tangled skein of love and loss and sacrifice. What a strange, vicious, wonderful thing it had been, this life of hers. What a wild, careening ride through the underbelly of the world.

A cop's life. The only one she'd ever known.

All those years, all those deaths. And for what? To end here, beaten to a pulp by some backwater whackjob with a murder boner for municipal water rights? Ella supposed there was a certain poetry to it, perhaps a grim sort of symmetry. Live by the gun, die by the blunt instrument. The law of the concrete jungle.

Ella blinked grit from her eyes and focused on Baxter. He stared down at her, lips skinned back from his teeth in a deranged grin. The hammer rose high, eclipsing the moon. A killing blow aimed straight for her temple.

She looked past the hammer, past Baxter. Up to the vault of stars twinkling cold and distant. Fixed her eyes on the brightest one and made a wish. Not for rescue or mercy or even a quick end. Just an acknowledgment, maybe. A final tip of the hat from the universe before the curtain fell.

The hammer fell like a comet, trailing silver. Ella tensed for impact, for the bright burst of pain and then nothing.

But it never landed.

BANG.

Instead, the night split with a thunderclap. The air sizzled and the stink of cordite singed her nose.

The world exploded. Sound and fury, fire and blood. Seth jerked like a marionette with its strings cut. Shock dawned on his face, stark incomprehension blossoming like a terrible flower.

He looked down. Ella looked down.

A hole, neat as a button, punched through his chest. Right over the heart, like a tag on a specimen jar.

Seth made a noise that in some life might have been human. The hammer collapsed from his hands as they shot out to cradle the steady flow of blood seeping from his torso.

His eyes rolled to whites. He toppled sideways and crashed to earth in a tangle of nerveless limbs and fallen hair, like a fallen scarecrow in a barren field.

Ella blinked. Blinked again. Her muzzy brain struggled to process, to make sense of the sudden shift from imminent death to – what? Resurrection? Miracle? Her gun was jammed. Luca was back in the silo, still tending to their half-drowned victim. There was no one else out here, no one around for at least a mile in every direction in this godforsaken slice of flyover country.

Maybe she"d willed it, channeled some untapped reserve of psychic fuckery and popped his melon like a ketchup packet. Was she was concussed, hallucinating some divine intervention in the form of miraculous ribcage rearrangement?

Or maybe this was it. The end of the line. She was dead, and this was some kind of purgatory pitstop on the way to her final destination. A little bureaucratic snafu before the big judgment call upstairs.

Ella rolled sideways, levered herself painfully up on one elbow. And there, standing tall among the rustling corn, grim as a hangman but twice as welcome. Tall, rangy. A halo of fire writhing around its head. Avenging angel? Valkyrie? Grim Reaper in brown boots?

No. That tread, firm and sure over the spongy ground. Only one person walked with that particular swagger, like they owned every inch of earth they graced.

‘Mia?'

The old dog lowered her smoking gun with one eyebrow arched in that ‘bitch, please' signature pose.

She strolled closer, as calm as a Sunday drive, and kicked Seth"s sprawled legs out of the way. Without a word, she rolled the man over, snapped on a pair of cuffs and put a foot on his back. Judging by Ella's limited vision, the man was still breathing. For how long, she didn't know.

Ella was alive too. Broken to bits and oozing from a dozen spots, but still breathing. Still on the right side of the dirt, despite Baxter"s best efforts. And all because Ripley had shown up in the nick of time to save her ass.

But that presented a whole new set of nagging questions. She fixed Ripley with a look that she hoped conveyed some of the emotions swirling in her gut. It was hard to pull off with blood in your eyes and a piece of tooth bouncing around your mouth, but she gave it her best college try.

‘Mia… how'd you…?

Ripley fished in her pocket and came out with a familiar black rectangle. She waved it like a winning lottery ticket.

‘GPS tracking,' Ripley grinned. ‘You should read your memos.'