Deadly Pursuit (23 page)

38

The swamp was hot and fetid, choked with clouds of mosquitoes, the pests swarming thicker here than in any other part of the island. Kirstie had lost the strength even to wave them off. They battened greedily on her, leaving a rash of bumps on every inch of exposed skin. When she brushed sweat from her face, her fingers came away dabbed with blood.

The bites didn’t matter. The heat and humidity, the sweat trickling from her hair, the aching exhaustion in every muscle—none of that mattered, either. Nothing mattered except planting one foot in front of the other, pushing herself remorselessly forward, crossing the endless yards of the boardwalk plank by plank, and arriving, finally, at the northern tip of Pelican Key. Then she would be at the cove, where maybe—just maybe—she would find the runabout.

Unless Jack or Steve found her first.

This boardwalk scared her. It was narrow and crooked and dark, and it could so very easily be a death trap. While making her way along it, she was as badly unprotected as she’d been on the beach. And an ambush would be easy in the swamp—the swamp, with its countless hiding places, its croak and buzz of ambient noise to mask more furtive sounds, its canopy of waxen leaves that eclipsed the stars and hung the trees in shadows.

She had never been here at night. The labyrinth of contorted mangroves and crisscrossing channels was creepy enough by day. Darkness made it a nightmare, some fevered blend of known and imagined terrors.

Cottonmouths glided through the opaque, tannin-stained water under her feet. Corn snakes and rat snakes writhed among the fantastically gnarled roots and branches of the mangrove thickets. The foul odor of hydrogen sulfide, signature of decay, hovered over the place like an unwholesome cloud. Somewhere a heron cried; to her left, a clump of marsh grass stirred with unseen activity; behind her, wood creaked in a low, regular rhythm, the footsteps of a restless ghost treading the boards …

She froze.

Footsteps.

Someone else was on the boardwalk. Whether it was Jack or Steve was unimportant. Both were killers now.

Was one of them shadowing her? Doubtful; the tread was heavy and quick, with no suggestion of stealth. It was the walk of a man in a hurry.

Most likely he didn’t even know how near she was. If she could hide till he passed by ...

The footsteps quickened, closing in.

She ducked under the low railing and silently lowered herself into the murk, then eased beneath the boardwalk. The water, only slightly less saline than the ocean, was warm and pungent. Her tank top and shorts, instantly soaked through, clung to her skin in wrinkled patches.

It was difficult to judge the swamp’s depth. The tide was not yet in, the red mangroves’ arching prop roots only partially submerged. Her feet kicked, searching for the muddy bottom, then sank into spongy ooze nearly up to the ankles.

Her collarbone was at the waterline. The underside of the boardwalk loomed ten inches above her head. Not much clearance, but more than there would be at high tide.

She waited.

The footsteps were closer now. Touching the boardwalk, she could feel vibrations through the planks.

How near was he? Thirty feet? Twenty?

The creaks became solid thumps. Loosened dirt fell from between the planks, showering her in a gritty rain.

He was directly overhead.

She willed him to keep going, pass her by.

He stopped.

The moan welling in her throat would be fatal if released. She bit down hard and held it in.

What the hell had he stopped for? There was no way he could know she was hiding here. No possible way.

A pale flicker of luminescence above her. The wavering beam of a flashlight. It swept over the water near the boardwalk, then stopped, a small floating object pinned its glare.

One of her sandals.

She drew a quick, silent gasp.

The sandal must have slipped free when she entered the water. Bobbing on the surface, it pointed out her hiding place like a traitorous hand.

He’s on to me. Oh, God, he knows I’m here.

Abruptly the flashlight swung downward, shining on the boardwalk itself, the beam’s splintered rays fanning through the gaps between the planks.

Could he see her through the cracks? She didn’t think so.

Her teeth wanted badly to chatter. She ground her jaws.

The light inched toward her, arriving in successive waves of vertical bands, crawling over her face, her hair, then slowly moved on.

He hadn’t seen her. She might be okay, then. If he decided to keep walking—

A yard from her head, the planks exploded in a hail of splintered wood.

Shock and terror nearly tore a scream from her lips.

He had the gun—must be Steve, then—and he’d fired directly at the boardwalk, hoping to either kill her with a lucky hit or drive her into the open.

Over the shrilling clamor in her ears, she faintly heard the creak-thump of another footstep.

Above her. Directly above.

Heedless of noise—
his
ears must be ringing, too—she flung herself backward, dog-paddling wildly.

A second blast. Another yard of the boardwalk, shredded. Debris showered her. The blue muzzle flash lighted the swamp like a burst of fireworks.

She refused to be panicked into committing a suicidal error. What she needed was cover. Cover that would allow her to swim to a new hiding place without being seen.

Scanning the black water, she saw a thicket of red mangroves growing adjacent to the boardwalk twenty feet away.

Overhead, creak-thump.

Again he was above her, tracking her by luck or instinct.

She executed a clumsy breast stroke, using her arms only, afraid to kick because the churning water might draw his aim. She swam for the trees.

Behind her, a third gunshot. Spray of splinters and nails. Was he planning to obliterate the entire boardwalk three feet at a time?

She kept swimming. The mangroves glided alongside her. Their exposed roots glistened in the patchy starlight, a cage of polished wicker. She kept the roots between her and the flashlight’s glow as she circled around the mangrove cluster and took cover behind the trees.

From this position she couldn’t see the boardwalk, couldn’t know if Steve had glimpsed her escape. She could only wait for the next shot, and the next.

Nothing.

The gun was silent.

The flashlight beam swept slowly over the swamp, first on the far side, then nearer to her. She saw its silvery trail in the water, gleaming like a long finger of moonlight.

The dense mesh of roots hid her from the beam even when it prowled over the mangroves. Still, the funnel of light hesitated, as if studying the trees.

“Kirstie ...!”

Jack’s voice—not Steve’s—raised in a shout.

What was
he
doing with the gun? Had Steve given it to him? Or were there two guns somehow?

“I know you’re hiding there. No other place for you to be.”

The beam glided across the water near the trees, silent and supple as a snake.

“You can’t stay hidden for long, darling. I can see in the dark. Got my flashlight back; picked it up on the trail while I was heading for the cove. Not hard to guess that you’d be on your way over there. I’m afraid your game plan has been entirely too predictable.” His voice lilted, became laughter. “Come on out now.
Ollee ollee oxen free
...” The childhood call of hide-’n’-seek.

The flashlight bobbed, trembled. A soft splash.

The angle of the beam was suddenly flatter, its point of origin near her eye level.

Rippling-water sounds.

Oh, hell.

Jack had left the boardwalk. He was coming after her. Sloshing through the water toward the trees.

At her back was a narrow channel unspooling like a ribbon between walls of mangrove roots. She took it, paddling furiously, retreating deeper into the swamp.

Her beating legs and arms stirred up new eruptions of mosquitoes. Their frenzied whines pursued her like the screams of angry ghosts.

* * *

Steve was on his way to the dock at the south end of the island when three gunshots sounded from the north.

He turned back, heading up the trail at a run. From somewhere ahead rose Jack’s voice, faint but audible.

“Kirstie ... I know you’re hiding there ...”

Other words, softer, unintelligible.

Quick tears misted his eyes.

She was alive.

Alive and hiding, apparently. Jack seemed confident enough of catching her.

But he hadn’t succeeded yet.

At the boardwalk Steve paused to slip off his Nikes. He knotted the laces to his belt, letting the shoes swing at his hip, then crept onto the planks, hunched low to make a smaller target. Barefoot, he made almost no sound as he proceeded deep into the belly of the swamp.

The planks disappeared abruptly. Giant holes in the walkway gaped at him like mouths, rimmed with glistening fangs of splintered wood.

What the hell had happened here?

No time to think about it. In the trees, a yellowish flicker.

Robbed of his glasses, he saw it only as a tremulous blur, a blob of color shivering like a raindrop on a windowpane. He identified it anyway. Jack’s flashlight.

The bastard was hunting her in the black swamp water, looking for a clean shot.

With the Beretta, the flash, and the knife. Jack enjoyed a triple advantage over either of his adversaries. Steve could think of only one possible point in his own favor.

He doesn’t know I’m here.

A small consolation, but it was all he had.

Soundlessly he swung down off the boardwalk, into the inky water, and joined in the chase.

39

Dead end.

Kirstie had retreated at least thirty yards into the swamp before realizing that the creek had narrowed to the width of a sidewalk. Ahead, it vanished entirely in a drift of close-packed turtle grass bordered by a wall of trees.

She turned, hoping to double back. No chance. Jack’s flashlight beam crept out of the gloom fifty feet away.

He hadn’t seen her yet. The channel was crooked, overhung with gnarled branches; a bend in the creek blocked her from his view.

Instinct moved her faster than conscious thought. Turning toward the nearest mangrove thicket, she grabbed hold of the dense skein of prop roots and hoisted herself out of the water.

The roots gave way to a confusion of intertwined branches, closely stitched. Thick leaves with the texture of leather and the gloss of wax hung in dense array, layers of green tapestry barring her path. Frantically her hands probed the branches in search of an opening wide enough to wriggle through. There was none. No space between the trees, either; not only their roots and branches but even their trunks were interlaced in a lunatic jumble.

No way through. The words beat like fists in her brain. No way through.

She glanced behind her. Jack was rounding the bend, the flashlight’s beam slowly swinging in her direction.

No way through.

All right, then. She wouldn’t go through. She would go over. Over the top.

The closest tree wasn’t tall, no more than fifteen feet high. She climbed it, feet and hands moving from branch to branch with desperate speed, dislodging dozens of long tubular seedlings. They dropped into the water, their soft splashes sure to draw Jack’s attention at any moment.

Faster. Faster.

She reached the crown and started down on the opposite side. Handhold, foothold, handhold, foothold. Like climbing on the monkey bars, she thought irrelevantly. In some strange way she had become a child again, playing in the summer night.

Jack must feel the tug of similar memories. She remembered his jeering call:
Ollee ollee oxen free
.

Kids at play—was that all this was?

She half clambered, half slid down the mangrove’s mossy roots, into the black water, and found herself in a new creek running parallel to the one she had left.

Jack’s flashlight still searched the other channel. He didn’t know where she had gone.

With gentle strokes she swam along the waterway. The flashlight’s glow receded. She advanced into a deepening darkness.

Black mangrove trees began to appear along the channel, encroaching on territory colonized by red mangroves years before. Steve had explained it all to her: how the red mangroves built soil out of shells, sand, and mud captured by their roots, blending it with the compost of their own rotted leaves. When the new land was firmly established, the black mangrove moved in and slowly wrested possession of it from the red.

All very interesting, and yesterday she would have expressed the appropriate wonderment at the adaptability of nature in the appropriate respectful tone, the kind of sentiment her colleagues at the PBS affiliate would understand.

Now she hated the swamp. She saw nothing in it worth preserving. The swamp was evil-smelling black water and hunched, spidery trees and pools of sucking mud. The swamp was mosquitoes and sand flies and unseen slippery things that brushed past her in the murk, briefly nuzzling her bare legs. The swamp was everything hostile to human life, and human life—her own life—was all she cared about right now; and as for what her coworkers might say about that particular observation while they sipped their mineral water and sliced their Brie and tuned in
MacNeil-Lehrer
—well, she simply didn’t give a shit.

Drain it, she thought with a kind of savage hysteria. Just drain the goddamn thing and pour concrete and put up condos. Condos and a shopping center, and to hell with the ecosystem—

She realized she was losing control. Not terribly surprising; she was neck-deep in slime, hemmed in by contorted caricatures of trees, pursued by a killer, and lost. Yes, lost. The maze of zigzag channels had left her hopelessly disoriented. She no longer had any clue where the boardwalk was or how to find dry land.

Well, maybe Jack was lost, too. Maybe she could find her way out of here and leave him wandering in the swamp till the mosquitoes sucked him dry.

Gazing over her shoulder, she saw no hint of the flashlight. No sign of movement—

There.

Spreading ripples in the water. A low, dark form perhaps a hundred feet away, moving toward her.

An alligator? Steve had said there were none on the island. But suppose he’d been wrong.

Didn’t look like a gator, though. It looked ...

Human.

A man’s head and upper body. Ripples radiating from his arms as they cut the water in quick scissor-like strokes.

Was it Jack, his flashlight off? Or Steve?

She didn’t know or care. What mattered was only to get away, lose her pursuer down some side channel.

She swam faster, each jerk of her arms tearing a new ache out of muscles still sore from her ordeal in the radio room.

Ahead, the channel forked into two narrower passageways. Both routes receded into blackness. She went to her right.

A backward glance eased her tension slightly. Her pursuer was no longer visible. For the moment she had outpaced him, and he would have no way to know which route she’d taken at the point where the channel divided.

The creek led her past stands of dead mangroves, the ravaged victims of some recent fire perhaps sparked by a lightning strike. Their jungles of roots remained intact, forming the banks of the waterway, but their trunks were rotting, the branches leafless and splintered.

She swam on. The creek widened, deepening. Her toes tried to touch bottom, couldn’t.

Around her, more dead trees. Fire had gutted this entire pocket of the swamp. Even here, though, there was life. Orb weavers had webbed the sagging branches in gossamer; hermit crabs scuttled busily among the roots. In the water, tiny mangrove seedlings already had sprouted, promising renewal.

Though she had no love of spiders, crabs, or mangroves, life’s refusal to accept defeat heartened her. If the smallest living things went on fighting for survival against every obstacle, she could do no less.

A noble thought, rich with inspiration, but she had no time to savor it.

The creek had dead-ended.

A breath of angry sibilance:
“Shit.”

She’d blundered down another blind alley. The wide, deep pool was hemmed in on almost every side by withered and toppled mangroves, the only opening the narrow passageway she’d taken a minute earlier.

Double back? Or wait here and hope her pursuer had gone the wrong way?

Neither.

He was coming.

She saw the glitter of ripples that announced his approach.

No way to get past him. And no time to climb through the trees and escape as she had before.

Motionless in the water, she was less easy to spot than he was. But he would see her soon enough.

She sank lower, the waterline rising to her chin.

From the far end of the pool, a whisper: “Kirstie?”

She breathed through gritted teeth.

“It’s me, Steve. I want to help you.”

Christ, the same line he used before. Did he think she was enough of an idiot to fall for it twice?

“If you’re here, answer me. Please.”

Fat chance, you son of a bitch.

She prayed for him to turn and leave, continue his search in the other channel.

“Kirstie ...?”

He swam closer. Hell, he would be right on top of her in a minute. Couldn’t help but see her then.

Unless ...

She drew a deep, slow breath, filling her lungs, then closed her eyes and gradually lowered her head beneath the surface.

Submerged, she was invisible. The turgid water, the color of dark tea, would conceal her as completely as a bath of ink.

The only question was how long she could stay under.

She waited, eyes squeezed shut, fighting the incipient panic prompted by the cutoff of breathing. Bubbles of air escaped her pursed lips and rose past her face to pucker the surface of the swamp. She could only hope Steve wouldn’t notice.

Seconds ticked past. She counted heartbeats, gave up after fifty.

There was no way to know if he was still nearby. She simply had to stay down as long as possible, then pray he would be gone when she finally surfaced.

Faintly she was conscious of a burning sensation in her chest. Her lungs were beginning to cry out for oxygen.

She ignored the warning, concentrated on staying calm. It was easier than she had expected. The warm salt water was the amniotic fluid of a second womb; suspended in it, she was an unborn child again.

An unborn child ... with no umbilical cord.

The distress signals broadcast by her body became more urgent. Her extremities tingled. Her head pounded. She pictured her face turning blue, eyes bulging behind closed lids.

Better surface. But what if he was still here?

She could hold out a little longer. She was sure of it.

Arms folded, she hugged herself. No more air bubbles dribbled from her mouth. Her lungs were empty.

Irrelevant images began popping on and off in her mind like flashcubes. A birthday party, the children’s laughing mouths smeared with cake frosting. A clumsy kiss in a grade-school stairwell. Bleeding knees, scraped in a rough fall on a gravel path. The green campus of Amherst College. A golden retriever named Lancelot plunging into a field of summer dandelions. Steve, stiff in his tuxedo, guiding his bride’s hand as she cut the wedding cake.

Random memories, fragments of her life. She wondered why she so often visualized herself as viewed from a distance in those scenes, as if she had not lived her life at all, but had merely observed a story unfolding.

Lungs bursting now. Fire in her throat. Hands and feet numb. Freight-train roaring in her ears.

Oddly she no longer felt the desperate need to relieve these symptoms. Though her body was starving for oxygen, her mind seemed curiously detached, her thoughts drifting, drifting ...

No. Snap out of it. And get oxygen—now.

She surfaced. Instantly her unreal calm was shredded as breath flooded her lungs. Shaking all over, fighting waves of light-headedness, she swallowed great gulps of air. The fire in her chest died down to embers, then to ashes. Her fingers and toes returned to life.

Only when she’d filled her lungs for the third time did she remember Steve. Dizzily she scanned the area.

He was gone.

She’d outlasted him. And nearly outlasted herself.

* * *

Jack paused, listening.

From a parallel channel, soft noises had risen a moment earlier: a muffled splash, an almost inaudible whisper. Sounds so faint he was hardly sure he’d heard them at all.

It made no sense anyway. Why would Kirstie whisper? She was alone.

Unless Steve was with her, had found her somehow.

Impossible. Steve was unconscious. He had to be.

Well, perhaps there had been no whisper. Perhaps he’d misinterpreted the sigh of the wind or the buzz of an insect.

One way or the other, he would find out.

He turned back, hunting for a passageway to the parallel creek. Yards of muddy water glided past, lined with misshapen trees. Somewhere a barred owl released a feline screech, its harsh cry scraping the night, fingernails on a blackboard.

Jack supposed most people would hate the swamp, would recoil from this place as if from a stinking carcass. Rot and mire, shadows and mist—nothing beautiful here.

But he felt a peculiar kinship with the swamp. Its comforting darkness concealed secretive, predatory things, hungry things that fed on weakness, things not unlike himself.

The swamp’s natural predators had eyes that saw in the dark. He had a flashlight. They had fangs. He had a knife, a gun.

How many rounds left now? Six, he calculated.

It would take only one shot to stop Kirstie’s heart.

Only one.

* * *

Kirstie pedaled water, catching her breath and clearing her thoughts.

Having failed to find her here, Steve must be retracing the route he’d taken, intending to explore the other branch of the channel. But at any moment he might return. She had to move on.

Still, returning the way she had come was too risky. Suppose she ran into him in the dark.

There was another option. The dead mangroves were largely stripped of branches; she could muscle her way between the trunks easily enough.

Briskly she swam for the nearest thicket of trees. Their roots, grayish-white and slimed with algae, broke the waterline in a jumble of knots and creases, like the folded gray matter of the brain. Topping the mound, a copse of fire-blasted trees sketched a tracery of coal-black lines against the sky.

At the skirt of roots she paused, catching her breath. She heard no sound to signal Steve’s reappearance. No sound at all except the ambient croak and hiss that formed the swamp’s perpetual background noise.

It occurred to her, for no particular reason, that this was one hell of a way to spend her summer vacation.

The thought made her smile. The upward curl of her lips felt shockingly strange, an unnatural action.

There were so many things she’d taken for granted. Smiles. Laughter. Clean clothes. Shelter and food. Physical safety—even with all the craziness in the news, she had rarely felt endangered.

Now all of that was gone, and she was no more than an animal, hunted in the wild, struggling for survival.

She shook free of those thoughts. Later she would muse on what she’d lost and what she’d learned. Later.

Grunting with strain, she grabbed hold of a thick root, hauled herself partway up, then found a foothold and reached higher. Her right hand closed over another, larger root ...

It came alive in her grasp.

Her next split second of awareness was a blur of fragmentary images: the shuddering, convulsive movement of something long and black and grotesquely twisted; a smear of pinkish-white describing a looping trajectory toward her right arm.