apart, like a net, so she’d have to keep moving forward and couldn’t reverse field and get around them. There was nothing subtle about either the runner or the chase: they were crashing through waist-high brush, clambering over rotting logs, occasionally falling. They saw Calvin fall into a deeper hole, where a tree’s root ball had pulled out in a storm, but she was back up with the shotgun.
Another fifty yards and they were closing on her, and she pointed the shotgun back over her shoulder without looking and pulled the trigger, and the shot went into the overhead, knocking leaves down around them. McCoy shouted, “That’s four,” and as he did, she fired another shot over her shoulder and Cousins shouted, “Five!”
Up ahead, Calvin threw the shotgun away and bulled through a patch of red berries. Lucas was in the center and stepped in an animal hole just inside the berry patch and fell down, the brambles scratching at his face and hands. He was up and running again, pain lancing down into his foot.
They were narrowing the net as they got close to her and a dead branch tore at Lucas’s sport coat, and then Calvin stumbled and fell. Lucas was right on top of her when she got back to her feet and she turned and had a two-inch-thick rotten dead branch in her hand and whipped it across his eyes and it broke but he went down again and then McCoy and Cousins were all over Calvin.
She was a big woman and fought them, cursing, with flailing fists, and Cousins gave her a solid punch in the cheekbone and when she went down, Lucas scrambled to his feet and dropped one knee on her head as the other two cops bent her arms behind her and put on the cuffs.
McCoy bent close and said, “We gotcha, Tabby. Now you can either walk out of here, or we’ll drag your ass back through that berry patch.”
“You motherfuckers,” she sputtered.
McCoy looked at Lucas: “What happened to you? Your face is bleeding.”
“She hit me with a branch.” Lucas put a hand to one eye; his cheekbone was throbbing from the impact.
McCoy and Cousins hauled Calvin to her feet, and she spat at Cousins, who dodged, then leaned into her and said, “You do that again, I’ll bite your fuckin’ nose off.”
They marched her out of the trees to the cars and called off other incoming cops, and Cousins drove her back to the sheriff’s office. Lucas rode back to the Cadillac with McCoy, got cleaned up in a restroom at the sheriff’s department. He’d have a black eye where he’d been hit with the branch and had bloody scratches across his face and neck. He patted the scratches with paper towels until all but two stopped oozing, and the sheriff, Uwell, came in with a first aid kit that had Band-Aids.
“Your jacket’s ripped,” the sheriff said, as he handed the kit to Lucas. “Not gonna fix that.”
“This was supposed to be easy,” Lucas said. He smeared some disinfectant ointment on the bleeding scratches and stuck on the Band-Aids.
He looked at his jacket—a four-inch rip across the fabric behind one pocket. The sheriff was right: it wasn’t fixable. His shoes were okay, but his left ankle hurt; he sat on a toilet to check it and thought it might be swollen.
“We’ll get you some ice for that,” the sheriff said.
“Wonder what the hell that was all about? What was she doing?” Lucas asked.
“She panicked. We got a guy down at her trailer, turns out she had about a thousand yellow pill bottles sitting on her kitchen table and she was packaging up a few pounds of oxycodone tabs,” Uwell said. “Biggest dope bust we had here in a while.”
“Ah. Where is she?”
“Gotta a couple of our gals with her, getting her cleaned up. We’re waiting for her lawyer to show up.”
“Everybody else okay?”
“Everybody’s scratched up from that briar patch, and McCoy banged up his bad knee again, but that happens about once a month. In return, we got ourselves a nice combat shotgun and a truck, unless the federal court