First Blood

12

Six bullets, Teasle counted. The kid's gun was empty. He charged outside squinting in the sun just in time to see the kid disappearing round the corner. Shingleton had his gun aimed; Teasle yanked it down.

'Christ, don't you see all those people?'

'I could've had him!'

'You could've had more than him!' He ran back in the station, swinging open the front door, three bullet holes in the aluminum screen. 'Get in here! Check Galt and Preston! Phone a doctor!' He was ru

The screen door whacked shut as Shingleton rushed in and down the hall; Teasle jabbed at a switch on the radio, talking fast into the microphone. His hands were shaking; his bowels felt full of loose hot waste. 'Ward! Where the hell are you, Ward?' he called into the radio, but Ward wasn't answering, and then at last Teasle had him, telling him what happened, figuring his tactics. 'He knows Center Road will take him out of town! He's headed west in that direction! Cut him off!'

Shingleton came rushing around the hall corner into the front room, over to Teasle. 'Galt. He's dead. God, his guts are hanging out,' he blurted as he came. He swallowed, trying to catch his breath. 'Preston's alive. I don't know for how long. He's got blood coming out his eyes.'

'Snap up! Phone an ambulance! A doctor!' Teasle jabbed another switch on the radio. His hands wouldn't stop shaking. His bowels felt warmer, looser. 'State police,' he called quickly into the microphone. 'Madison to state police. Emergency.' They didn't answer. He called louder.

'I'm not deaf, Madison,' a man's voice crackled. 'What's your trouble?'

'Jailbreak. One officer dead,' he told him hurriedly, hating to waste time repeating what had happened. Requesting roadblocks. The voice was instantly alert.

Shingleton put down the phone. Teasle hadn't even heard him dial. 'The ambulance is on its way.'

'Phone me Orval Kellerman.' Teasle jabbed another switch, calling another cruiser, ordering it after the kid.

Shingleton had already dialed again. Thank God he was all right now. 'Kellerman's outside. I've got his wife. She won't let me talk to him.'

Teasle took the phone. 'Mrs. Kellerman, it's Wilfred. I need Orval in a hurry.'

'Wilfred?' Her voice was thin and brittle. 'What a surprise, Wilfred. We haven't heard from you in so long.' Why didn't she speak faster? 'We were meaning to come around and tell you how sorry we were about A

He had to cut her off. 'Mrs. Kellerman, I've got to speak to Orval. It's important.'

'Dear, I'm awfully sorry. He's outside working with the dogs and you know I can't disturb him when he's working with the dogs.'

'You've got to ask him to the phone. Please. Believe me it's important.'

He heard her breathing. 'All right I'll ask him, but I can't promise he'll come in. You know how he is when he's working the dogs.'

He heard her set the phone down, and quickly he lit a cigarette. Fifteen years he had been a policeman and he had never lost a prisoner and he had never had a partner killed. He wanted to smash the kid's face against cement.

'What did he have to do it for?' he said to Shingleton. 'It's fucking crazy. He comes around looking for trouble, and in one afternoon he goes from vagrancy to murder. Hey, are you all right? Sit down and put your head between your knees.'

'I've never seen a man slashed before. Galt. I had lunch with him for crissake.'

'Doesn't matter how many times you see it. I must have watched fifty guys bayonetted in Korea, and I never kept from feeling sick. One man I knew in Louisville, twenty years on the force. He went to check out a knifing in a bar one night, and there was so much blood mixed in with the beer on the floor he had a heart attack and died trying to make it back to the cruiser.'

He heard somebody picking up the phone on the other end. Please let it be Orval.

'So what is it, Will? This better be as important as you say.'

It was him. Orval had been his father's best friend, and the three of them used to go out hunting together every Saturday of the season. Then, after Teasle's father had been killed, Orval had become a second father to him. He was retired now, but he was in better shape than men half as young, and he had the best trained pack of hounds in the county.

'Orval, we just had a jailbreak here. I don't have time to explain, but it's a kid we're after, and he's killed one of my men, and I don't think he'll stay on the roads with the state police after him. I'm positive he'll head for the mountains, and I'm hoping like hell that you're in the mood to give those dogs of yours the run of their lives.'

13

Rambo roared the bike down Center Road. Wind was stinging his face and chest, his eyes were watering in the wind, and he was afraid he would have to slow to see what was ahead. Cars were stopping abruptly, drivers staring out their windows at him naked on the cycle. People all along the street were turning at him, pointing. A siren started far behind him. He revved the cycle up to sixty, racing through a red light, barely able to swerve in time to miss a big oil truck lumbering across the intersection. Another siren started far to his left. There was no way a cycle could outrun police cars. But a cycle could go where police cars couldn't: the mountains.

The street dipped sharply and then rose long uphill, and Rambo sped up it, hearing the sirens. The one on his left had swung over to join the one behind him. He hit the top of the hill so fast that the cycle left the pavement, jolting back down, forcing him to slow and catch his balance. Then he was racing again.

He passed the YOU ARE NOW LEAVING MADISON sign, passed the ditch where he had eaten his hamburgers that afternoon. The fields of brown corn swept off on both sides, and the sirens were closer, and the mountains were off to the right. He swerved that way onto a dirt road, almost spilling when he turned sharply to miss a dairy truck. The driver leaned out his window, shouting at him.

Now he was throwing up dust behind him, holding his speed at fifty to keep from skidding on the loose gravel. The sirens were behind him to the right, then directly behind him. They were coming too fast. If he stayed on this dirt road, he would never lose them in time to get to the mountains; he had to leave this road for someplace they could not go. He dodged to the left through an open gate down a narrow wagon road, its ruts deep and yellow in the ground. The corn remained on both sides, the mountains were still off to the right, and he was searching for a way to get over to them. The sirens louder, he reached the end of the cornfields, turning right onto a field of wilted grass, the cycle heaving on the uneven ground, dipping and rising, whipping through the grass. But the police cars would still be able to chase him this way, and then he heard their sirens louder, yet, directly behind him again.

A stout wooden fence ahead. He sped closer, frantic from the sirens, seeing cattle. What must have been a hundred. They were in this field, but they were moving out ahead of him, ambling through an open gate in the fence and up a slope toward trees. The roar of his cycle started them galloping before he got to them, Jersey brown, bellowing, heaving three abreast through the open gate and up the slope, their milk sacks swinging full. They loomed larger the closer he came behind them, scattering, hooves thundering as he pushed through the gate with the last of them and raced up the slope. It was steep, and he had to lean forward to keep the front wheel from tipping up. Past one tree, then another, the mountains close, and then he was off the slope, speeding onto level ground. He leapt the bike over a narrow stream, almost upsetting on the other bank. But the mountains were wonderfully close now, and he steadied the bike and revved the throttle to its limit. Ahead a line of trees, then thick forest, rocks, underbrush. At last he saw what he was looking for — a draw between two slopes up into the rocky hills — and he steered that way as the sirens began dying close behind him.