The Dreeson Incident(184)

Ron, hearing her stop, slowed and then turned back.



Chandra? Sitting at the post office?



"Get on," Missy said. "We'll explain later. Something blew up after you left Grantville. Once we take care of it, I'll take you back home with me, if you don't mind riding behind. Not the most comfortable way to go, but a lot faster than a horse and wagon."





Chandra nodded. Any way to get back home was better than staying here, sitting outside the Post Office, waiting.



Ron and Missy proceeded through Frankfurt pretty sedately. She figured they didn't want to attract a lot of attention. At "sedately," they would just be a couple more of those oddball up-timers, doing oddball up-time things that involved oddball up-time machines. The inhabitants of Frankfurt were used to that by now.



Chandra hadn't expected that their business would take them directly to Nathan's.



Nor that, as they pulled up, Bryant Holloway would burst out of the back door and make a run for it, heading toward the east side of town.





It took them a while to explain things to Nathan. Particularly since Ron and Missy didn't want to explain one bit more than they had to.



Particularly since Chandra had left for Frankfurt before Bryant had beaten Lenore up. Explaining that caused quite a bit of delay all by itself. First to Chandra, who was horrified. Horrified, but not surprised. Missy looked at her rather sharply when she noticed that.



"He beat her up in February," Chandra said. "We managed to hide it. He wasn't so bad to her when he came back in March. We sort of hoped that the worst had blown over. Maybe he was just biding his time."



Then to Nathan, who was righteously indignant that Bryant thought he would provide him with any kind of refuge after he had pulled a stunt like that.



Nathan didn't much want to ride behind Ron, but he did. They headed back, in the general direction in which Bryant had been running. There was only one real road going east from Frankfurt. They came to it from behind the post office.





"Look!" shouted Minnie, pointing to something on the side of the road. Looking over, Denise saw the unmistakable tracks of truck tires heading off into the woods.



Minnie might have trouble with depth perception, with just one eye, but there was nothing at all wrong with the eye itself.



They set off in pursuit. Buster would have chewed Denise out, if he'd seen her driving a motorcycle like that over such rough terrain, especially a bike with a sidecar.



But Buster was dead and Denise thought she finally had one of his killers tracked down and cornered. Some part of her mind understood, probably, that Bryant Holloway hadn't been directly involved with her father's killing. But that was a very small part of her mind and one she'd already brushed aside.



Buster had had a favored expression, when he wanted to describe someone in a really dark fury. "He's feeling Old Testament," he'd say.



Denise Beasley was feeling very Old Testament that day. Who cared whether Bryant Holloway had been directly responsible for her father's death? Had the God of the Old Testament cared about the fussy details when he slew all the firstborn of Egypt?



Not hardly. If it was good enough for God, it was good enough for Denise.





They found Holloway's truck, but there was no sign of Holloway himself. Denise took the carbine from Minnie and climbed into the truck bed. Then, stooped so she could get a better look at the papers he had in there.



"Look out!" Minnie shouted.



Two gunshots. They shouted like pistol shots. Nine millimeter, maybe.



Denise sprawled flat and then peeked over the side of the truck, in Minnie's direction. She could see Minnie's feet sticking out from behind a different tree, where she must have gone for shelter.



Movement to the left. She looked and saw Holloway, rising from behind a bush. He must have heard them coming and been waiting in ambush.



He saw her at the same time, aimed in her direction, and fired two more shots with his pistol.



Both of them went wild, as far as Denise could tell. But she wasn't paying much attention to that. She was getting up on one knee and the carbine was coming to her shoulder and she was a damn good shot and her soul was now well into Leviticus.



Bam! Bam! She didn't even feel the recoil.



Holloway was down, sprawled against another tree. There was blood all over his chest.



There were a lot of chapters in Leviticus, none of them kindly and forgiving. And there were fifteen rounds in the magazine of her M-1 carbine.



Which her Daddy had given her, for her twelfth birthday.



She went through the entire clip. Only the last two shots missed. By then, finally, Denise Beasley had started crying and her aim got a little wobbly.



She didn't cry for long, though. By the time Minnie came up, she was dry-eyed. In fact, she was starting to reload.