Deadly Pursuit (21 page)

If he could prevent any further absorption of the sedative, the dose he’d already assimilated would wear off quickly enough.

He looked around him. Jack was nowhere in sight. For the moment, then, he was safe.

With a final effort he lurched to his feet and staggered down the trail, toward the beach.

He knew what he was looking for. He only hoped he could find it in a world of darkness and fog.

* * *

Steve was gone by the time Jack reopened his eyes and blinked away the blue retinal afterimages spotting his vision.

Must have left via the French doors in the dining room. No time to hunt him down now. Without the gun, he was no longer a serious threat or an urgent priority.

Kirstie was Jack’s main concern at the moment.

She would almost certainly be making her way around the house, toward the dock. When she reached it, she could take the motorboat to Islamorada.

Fortunately, the dense brush would slow her progress. Jack still had time to intercept her.

Still, she would be wary about approaching the dock. Somehow he would have to get close enough to squeeze off a clean shot.

Or perhaps—he smiled with the beginning of a thought—perhaps he could make her come to him.

35

Kirstie’s arms were red with scratches, her legs peppered with insect bites. She had no idea how long she’d been thrashing through the brush or how near she might be to the dock.

Jack hadn’t come after her. She was quite sure of that. And twice she’d heard what had sounded like a gunshot from the direction of the house.

Had Steve shot Jack? Was it possible?

She was hardly planning to go back and ask.

The night was hot and wet, the moonless sky bright with stars. Around her stretched a tangled waste of wildflowers, creepers, and sporadic eruptions of slash pines, their glossy needles gleaming like bundled knives. Birds screeched and hooted in the dark.

Mud soaked her sandaled feet. Several times she had stumbled into small water holes concealed by a scrim of plant life. Mosquitoes were a constant presence; she no longer bothered to wave them away.

The house was somewhere off to her left, invisible now, masked by trees and scrub. To her right must be the island’s western shore, a beachless skirt of mangroves. And ahead, perhaps a hundred feet or a thousand miles, lay the dock.

If she reached it, she could steal one of the two boats moored there and escape. After that, the police could handle things.

They would arrive, make arrests. Steve would go to prison as Jack’s accomplice. He deserved it, of course; yet she couldn’t suppress a surge of sadness at the thought.

She had loved him. Still did. Or at least she’d loved the man she’d thought he was. The man who had driven her out to the Connecticut coast one summer night and, under a sky striped with Perseid meteors, slipped an engagement ring on her finger. The man who had stayed by her hospital bed every day throughout her two-week battle with blood poisoning, when more than once she’d been certain she would die. The man who had waded, fully clothed, into a pond in Rocky Hill to rescue Anastasia when the pup appeared to be in danger of drowning.

The same man who had watched unmoving as Anastasia was knifed to death a few hours ago.

You never really know anybody, she thought as she struggled through stiff patches of broomsedge choked by the strangling stems of morning glories. You think you do, but what you see is mostly what they’re willing to show. And then the real person comes out, and it’s ... horrible.

If she survived this, she would never trust another human being, never leave herself vulnerable, never take any kind of risk. For the rest of her life she would be wary and lonely and safe.

“God damn you, Steve,” she said again, the words her mantra now.

A thicket of waxmyrtle materialized before her. She blundered through it, and then miraculously the underbrush began to thin out, and the breeze freshened with a sharper accent of the sea.

She’d made it. Having circled around the house, she’d arrived at the southern tip of Pelican Key, where she would find the dock.

Of course, the men might be waiting. Her plan was her most obvious course of action; they were likely to anticipate it. And maybe those distant percussive cracks she’d heard earlier hadn’t been shots.

She could assume nothing. One mistake, and it was over.

A slow shiver caressed her. If someone had asked yesterday, she would have said she didn’t particularly fear death. It was natural, inevitable, and college had left her too deeply secularized to fear punishment in an afterlife.

But now dying scared her. She had watched Ana die, had seen the bewildered panic in her face, had heard her whimpering moans as death shook her in its cold, fierce grip.

She didn’t want to go like that. She felt the imperative of survival as an animal must feel it, not in her mind but in her blood, in the racing energy that contracted muscles and electrified nerves.

Elbowing her way through the last of the ground cover, she emerged on the lip of the coral beach.

A few casuarinas grew here, their trunks throwing long shadows across the sand in the starlight. She crouched behind the nearest tree and peered out.

From her vantage point, the dock was a thin, comblike projection in silhouette against the glittery shallows. The shadows of the pilings wavered on the water like a web of wind-stirred gossamer. A single boat drifted at the end of a slack mooring line, hull creaking secretively.

Jack’s runabout was gone. Odd.

She remembered hearing a brief motor noise shortly after the men had left the house, while she was still a prisoner. At the time she’d assumed it to be a passing boat, cruising near the island on the way to blue water.

She’d been wrong. What she had heard was the runabout. Steve and Jack had moved it.

If she’d been thinking more clearly, she could have guessed as much already. The men had left via the front door, yet she’d encountered them on the path at the rear of the house. The only logical explanation was that they’d transferred the boat to a new location, then walked back.

None of which mattered anyway, because the other boat, the motorboat provided by Pelican Key’s owners, was still here.

In less than two minutes she would be on her way out of—

Wait.

Movement on the dock. The shadowy figure of a man.

His dark outline blended with the masses of tropical foliage at his back, and only his restless pacing revealed his presence. His pacing—and a glint of starshine, faint but perceptible, winking fitfully as he moved.

Eyeglasses. Catching the chancy light with each turn of his head.

Squinting, she dimly made out the nylon jacket Steve had worn for most of the day.

A sigh eased out of her. The dock was off limits as long as Steve was guarding it. She couldn’t reach the boat.

Still, there was the runabout. Possibly she would find it at the cove, where Jack had beached it originally.

Even the thought of retracing her route through acres of almost impenetrable vegetation—sharp-edged saw-palmettos, creeping ground ivy, foul-smelling skunkbush—exhausted her. But she would have to do it. And hope that Jack wasn’t lurking in ambush somewhere along the way.

She was retreating toward denser brush when a hoarse whisper stopped her.

“Kirstie.”

Frozen, huddled behind a clump of groundsel-tree, she listened.

“Kirstie, are you out there?”

Steve didn’t seem to see her. He was just calling her name at random.

She waited, afraid to move and possibly draw his attention. It was a strain to hear him; his rasping stage whisper was barely audible.

“I shot Jack. But he’s not dead, only wounded. And ... he’s got the gun.”

Could it be true? Had Steve rebelled against Jack, redeemed himself? Skepticism competed with a desperate desire to believe.

“Jack’s looking for me. Thinks I went north. But I doubled back to find you. I know you’ve come for the boat.”

A breeze kicked up, and she heard his jacket ripple like a sail. The sparkle of his glasses was the sole identifiable feature in the ink-blot enigma of his face.

“Show yourself. Please. I won’t hurt you. I never wanted to hurt you. I’m not part of this anymore.”

But how could she accept that statement, how could she risk believing anything he said, when this could so easily be a trap?

Still, she had heard gunshots. She was sure she had.

“Please, Kirstie.” His whisper turned sibilant, a hiss. “You’ve got to trust me.”

Trust him? Did she dare?

A few minutes ago, she’d vowed never to trust another person. Now she was being asked to trust Jack Dance’s accomplice.

But he was something more than that. He was her husband.

And she did believe he hadn’t wanted to see her hurt. He’d intervened when Jack was slapping her around. Saved her life, probably.

Whatever his weaknesses and sins, he must still care for her. Now, repentant, he was offering a chance at escape.

“Kirstie? Can you hear me?”

She had to give him the trust he asked for, this one last time.

“Please.”

Had to.

Slowly she stood. She walked forward, out of the cover of the trees, onto the hard coral sand.

“Here I am,” she said in an answering whisper.

The glint of his glasses swung in her direction. “Thank God. Hurry up, get over here.”

She did not hurry. Her steps were slow and measured as she crossed the narrow strip of beach.

“Come on.
Come on.
”

The dock was less than fifty feet away. She wished there were a moon. She wanted to see Steve’s face, study his expression. If she could look into his eyes ...

Her sandals crunched on coral, a soft, gravelly sound. The sea breeze twined around her bare legs, groping like lascivious fingers. On the horizon burned the lights of Upper Matecumbe Key, distant as the stars, close as the boat that could take her to Islamorada and safety.

She had left cover behind. Here on the yards of bleached sand she was totally exposed, a slender target in a field of white.

Ahead, Steve waited on the dock, motionless, a swatch of night cut out of the larger darkness around him.

A bad feeling, a premonition of some kind, bobbed to the surface of her consciousness. Perhaps because Steve was standing so still, so deathly still, not running to greet her as she might have expected—or perhaps because she was so terribly vulnerable now, and more vulnerable with every forward step—whatever the reason, she felt suddenly as if she were walking down the center lane of a turnpike, traffic rushing at her, horns blaring, a quick, grinding death under a tractor-trailer’s giant tires only seconds away.

She slowed her steps.

“Kirstie! Dammit, what’s taking you so long?”

His strained whisper—something was wrong about that, too. She wasn’t sure quite what.

Time slipped into a lower gear. Seconds elongated, stretching like taffy. The world took on a fantastic clarity; every ripple of starshine on the water, every weave and pucker of the coral beach, every smallest detail of her environment was magnified, brightened, enhanced.

But still she could not see Steve’s face.

“Hurry up!”

She stopped.

There was no reason for it, no logic to it, or at least none she could name; but abruptly her legs would advance her no farther.

On the dock, a blur of motion.

Steve’s right hand peeling back the flap of his jacket. Something shiny in his fist, rising fast.

The gun.

Betrayal.

She pivoted, legs pumping.

Behind her:
crack
.

Puff of sand at her feet. Chips of coral stinging her ankles.

She ran for the brush, the trees. Just in time she remembered to zigzag.

Crack
.

The second shot landed along the straight-line path she’d been running a heartbeat earlier.

Trees close now. Ten feet ahead.

Crack
.

Rustle of leaves as the bullet whizzed past her head and struck one of the pines.

Near miss, that time. Inches.

She reached the trees, flung herself headlong into the brush.

Crack
.

God, he was still shooting.

“Stop it!”
she screamed.
“Stop it, you son of a bitch!”

She scrambled wildly through the ground cover, plunging into a dense, concealing thicket of horse nettle, heedless of the plants’ slashing thorns.

Huddled there, shuddering all over, she waited for the next shot.

None came.

Perhaps he was following her. Moving in close for a surer kill.

She dared a look.

Steve remained on the dock. As she watched, he leaned over the side, aimed the gun straight down, and fired a single shot at the motorboat, puncturing the hull.

He was scuttling the boat. Denying her that means of escape. So he and Jack could hunt her down at leisure, take her life at will.

Shivering, she retreated deeper into the brush. She didn’t stop crawling until the dock was lost to sight, the undergrowth around her a solid barricade.

On her knees, she leaned against a rotted log, the corpse of a fallen magnolia. Large black beetles crawled on it. Some detoured onto her hand, her arm. She didn’t care.

“God damn you, Steve,” she said for the hundredth time, but with even greater feeling now.

He was every bit as bad as Jack. No, he was worse.

Jack, at least, had not used her love and trust to lure her into a death trap. Only her husband had been capable of that.

He’s sick, she thought in time with a confused rush of emotions: rage, grief, pity.

Then she shook her head. It wasn’t sickness. Steve was suffering from no delusion; he knew who she was and what she ought to mean to him; and he had tried, repeatedly and cold-bloodedly, to put a bullet in her back.

Had it all been a lie, then? Every moment of their years together? Every smile, embrace, kiss? Every shared secret and whispered confession?

“God …” She began to say the familiar words of her private mantra, but strength failed her. The curse, unfinished, became a kind of desperate prayer.

Crying, she staggered on through weeds and scrub, lashed forward by one thought.

The runabout.

Hidden somewhere.

Perhaps at the cove.

* * *

Jack shrugged off Steve’s nylon jacket and slung it into the water with an angry swing of his arm. The eyeglasses followed, vanishing with a splash.

His ruse had nearly worked. If Kirstie had advanced just a few steps nearer ...

No point in thinking about that. He would have to try again, that was all.

He checked the Beretta’s clip. Eight rounds left, plus another in the chamber. Plenty of ammo.

Though he hadn’t handled a gun in years, he was confident enough of his ability to hit a stationary target at reasonably close range. As a teenager he had often borrowed his father’s Heckler & Koch .45—well, taken it without permission, actually—and driven out to the woods, where he would practice for hours, unobserved.

He’d been a good marksman then. But now, when it mattered—when he’d meant to pay back that little bitch for the bloody hole in his leg—his every shot had gone wide of the mark.