Middle Of Nowhere

   The clock continued running in her head. Osbourne had said triangulation took time. Did they have a location on her? Was there a radio car waiting around the next corner, and three more coming up their tailpipe?

   "My guess is Davie would encourage you to work it out, not get yourself killed."

   "I told you to shut up!" He shoved the beer can onto the dash so that it wedged tightly between glass and vinyl. He tugged the gun from his waist and extended his trembling arm toward the floor of the car.

"No!" she hollered.

   But Flek pulled the trigger, shooting her left foot. The bullet traveled through her and out the floor of the car. "That's one!" he shouted madly, saliva spraying from his wet lips. "I got eight more in here, and I'll use every damn one before I bother to finish you. NOW YOU SHUT UP!"

   For a moment she felt no pain whatsoever, her brain frozen with shock. But then the burning began. It raced up her leg, through her gut, and she vomited.

   "You disgusting bitch!" he screamed at close range, beating her with the butt of the gun, directly on the wound he'd caused with the bottle.

   Her head swooned, but she struggled for consciousness and managed to sit herself upright and turn her head slowly to face him. The burning in her left foot was now an inferno. She could barely hear her own voice as she spoke. "What now, Abby?"

   "Shut the fuck up!"

   "You're going to have to bandage that, or pull a tourniquet, or I'm going to bleed out on you. And then what? Then I'm a dead cop, and Boldt isn't going to deal with you. You're damned if I die, Abby." She needed to speak but could barely find the strength. "You . . . know . . . that, don't you?" Her words were long strings of stretched taffy, her mouth disconnected from her brain. The purple goo loomed at the edges of her eyes, pulsing with each tick of her heart. She pushed it back, but it consumed her, determined to shield her from this pain. For a moment she maintained consciousness. She thought she saw a phone booth up ahead. A streetlight in the rain. But then the black hood of unconsciousness slipped over her head, and all hope was lost.

C H A P T E R

59

The fix on the transmission point for Flek's first call came only moments after Boldt turned right off 305 and onto Suquamish Way NE, a minute or two after Daphne had been shot.

   Reading from the back of his hand where he'd scribbled notes, LaMoia said, "The exact fix is North 47 degrees 45.45 minutes, West 122, 36.2 minutes. Give or take forty feet."

   "In English," Boldt requested.

   "A couple hundred yards east of something called Stottlemeyer Road NE. It's in the north end of the Indian Reservation." LaMoia fished the official SPD road atlas from the glove box where it was required to reside, and leafed through the nearly three inches of pages at a blistering speed. "You know what, Sarge?"

   "It isn't in there."

   "Correctomundo," LaMoia answered.

   "Dispatch!" they said, nearly in unison.

   "What do you want to bet they can track us from there?" Each and every SDP vehicle now carried a GPS location transmitter, enabling Dispatch computers to monitor location. On radio cars that carried MDT terminals, this same technology allowed patrol officers to monitor their GPS position on a moving map, and follow computer-generated directions for the fastest possible route, taking into account reported traffic delays. Boldt's unmarked car lacked the MDT, but still possessed a GPS transmitter in the trunk.

   "The system goes out wireless," Boldt instructed his sergeant. LaMoia never paid any attention to in-house memos. "As long as our phones are working, so's the GPS."

   "It's ringing," LaMoia said. Less than a minute later Boldt turned left on Totten Road, following LaMoia's instruction. Precise directions followed, as a woman twenty-three miles away, on the other side of Puget Sound, stared at a computer screen tracking Boldt's car to within a margin of error of forty feet.

   Right on Widme Road, and straight through the dark woods, Boldt driving twenty miles an hour over the posted limit and nearly rolling the car on a sharp right that appeared out of nowhere. The road bent immediately left and continued to its conclusion at Lincoln, where LaMoia pointed left and the driver followed.

   The darkness combined with the rain to lower visibility to a matter of yards, not miles. Two cars passed them on Lincoln, both Boldt and LaMoia straining and turning to get the best possible look.

   "I don't think so," LaMoia said after the first. "That ain't no Eldorado," he declared of the second.

   "You're the gear head," Boldt said, his driving strained by the divided attention. "Tell Dispatch we want a 'Lights Out' a quarter mile from our last turn. We'll leave the car there and go on foot."

   "Affirm," LaMoia answered.

   Stottlemeyer was the fourth right.

   "Three tenths of a mile, Sarge," LaMoia announced.