Page 40 of Backtrack

“You’re bleeding.” He nodded at a half-dozen gashes up and down her arm, one of which was at least six inches long. “Most of these are superficial, but this one looks bad. Keep pressure on it while I find out what’s going on.”

Ray Gene drew the revolver from his duty belt and peeked around the truck. Still on the porch, the shepherd pawed relentlessly at the front door. Frenzied barks tuned into fearsome snarls.

Ray Gene expected gunfire to rip through the door at any moment.

Sue moved up from the back of the truck, crouching beside him. “Bear! Get back here!”

“Stay down.”

She held up her wounded arm. “I’m fine. If they were trying to cut me, they did a poor job of it. Couple of stitches and I’ll be good as new.”

Ray Gene frowned. “If you’ve decided not to bleed to death, go to the neighbors and wait there until I call you.”

He kept his handgun aimed in while he slipped the Motorola radio off his belt.

“Four Thirty-One.”

He got no answer. A dead spot. He tried again.

“Four thirty-one in the blind,” he said without waiting for Dispatch to respond. “I’m out at my residence with two armed intruders. I say again, two armed intruders inside my house—”

The passenger door of his pickup creaked open and Sue reached in to grab the Ruger Mini-14 rifle from the gun rack in the back window. She worked the action, putting a round in the chamber, then took aim at the front of their home from behind the wheel well. Blood dripped steadily from her elbow.

“Go to the neighbors my ass!” she scoffed. “And leave you and Bear here? Not a chance.”

Pink threw the bra on the floor and stepped away from the door, trying to work out what to do next. “What do you think?” he said. “Should we split up? I can come around one side while you go to the other and we’ll catch them in the middle.”

“We’d still have to deal with the dog,” Duvall said. “The damned thing wants to eat us. I don’t fancy getting chewed to pieces.” He snatched up the discarded bra and tried to staunch the blood oozing from the burst skin over his cheekbone.

“I’ll just shoot it,” Pink said.

“We could rush ’em if that bitch had a pistol, but …” Duvall peeked out the gap between the mini blinds and the wall, careful to stay well back and out of sight. “That’s a Mini-14 in her hands. Have you ever seen what a .223 rifle round does to a man’s pumpkin?”

“Can’t be worse than a shotgun,” Pink scoffed.

“Fair point.”

Pink chanced another look out the window. “I connected with my box cutter,” he said. They were close enough he could see the line of blood running down the woman’s arm.

Duvall stepped to the center of the room, glancing from the front door to the kitchen and the rear of the house. “That cop’s forsure calling in backup,” he said. “You ever hear the expression,You can outrun the cop, but you can’t outrun the radio? Well, I gotta tell you, I don’t like the idea of barricading. Every lawman who shows up is gonna feel like it was his own house we’ve violated and make his personal mission to blow our heads clean off. No way! Let’s get out of here before that dog chews a hole in the walls.”

The men eased quietly out the back door and ran straight for the fence, keeping the house between them and the crazy woman with her Mini-14 rifle. Pink caught sight of the first sheriff’s patrol unit as Duvall pulled his black pickup out of the trees and headed west on the dirt road, Sue Bryant’s underwear still pressed to his bloody face.

The receptionist at TexSafe Armored said Gerald Moffit was out for the day, so Cutter decided to head back to the Sheriff’s Office. He and Johnson had just passed the car dealerships at the junction of the Fort Worth Highway and Interstate 20 when Ray Gene Bryant put the call out over the radio about intruders at his place.

“My academy instructors said burglars like to hit rural houses in the middle of the day,” Johnson mused.

“At least they got that right.” Cutter checked his mirrors and made a quick U-turn.

Johnson braced himself against the dash. “Where are we going now?”

“Ray Gene Bryant’s,” he said. “It’s faster if I jump back on the Interstate.”

“We’re going to respond to a burglary call in the middle of a homicide investigation?”

Cutter turned to the younger deputy. “Who was the first person to arrive at the armored truck robbery?”

“Bryant,” Johnson said. “You think it’s the same guys—”