Just After Sunset (12 page)

Emily leaped over a tangle of driftwood and her shorts slid down, threatening to hobble or even trip her up. She didn’t have time to stop and take them off so she yanked them up savagely, wishing there was a drawstring she could pull, maybe even clutch in her teeth.

There was a yell from behind her and she thought there was fear as well as fury in it. It sounded as though Pickering was finally realizing this might not go his way. She risked another look back, hoping, and her hope was not in vain. He had tripped over the driftwood she had skipped over and gone to his knees. His new weapon lay before him, making an X in the sand. Scissors, then. Kitchen scissors. The big kind cooks used to snip gristle and bone. He snatched them up and scrambled to his feet.

Emily ran on, increasing her speed a little bit at a time. She didn’t plan on doing this, but she didn’t think it was her body taking over, either. There was something between body and mind, some interface. That was the part of her that wanted to be in charge now, and Em let it take over. That part wanted her to turn it on just bit by bit, almost gently, so that the animal behind her wouldn’t realize what she was doing. That part wanted to tease Pickering into increasing his own speed to keep up with her, maybe even close the gap a little. That part wanted to use him up and blow him out. That part wanted to hear him gasping and wheezing. Maybe even coughing, if he was a smoker (although that seemed too much to hope for). Then she would put herself into the overdrive gear she now had but rarely used; that gear always seemed like tempting fate, somehow—like donning wax wings on a sunny day. But now she had no choice. And if she had tempted fate, it had been when she’d swerved to look into the Pillbox’s flagged courtyard in the first place.

And what choice did I have, once I saw her hair? Maybe it was fate that tempted me.

She ran on, her feet printing the sand with her passing. She looked back again and saw Pickering only forty yards behind, but forty yards was okay. Given how red and strained his face was, forty was very okay.

To the west and directly overhead, the clouds tore open with tropical suddenness, instantly brightening the fog from dreary gray to dazzling white. Patches of sun dotted the beach with spotlights; Em ran into one and then out in a single stride, feeling the temperature spike with returning humidity and then drop again as the fog once more took her in. It was like running past an open Laundromat door on a cold day. Ahead of her, hazy blue opened in a long cat’s eye. A double rainbow leaped out above it, each color blazing and distinct. The westward legs plunged into the unraveling fog and doused themselves in the water; those curving down toward the mainland disappeared into the palms and waxy fiddlewoods.

Her right foot clipped her left ankle and she stumbled. For a moment she was on the verge of falling, and then she regained her balance. But now he was just thirty yards behind, and thirty was too close. No more looking at rainbows. If she didn’t take care of business, the ones up ahead would be her last.

She faced forward again and there was a man there, standing ankle-deep in the surf and staring at them. He was wearing nothing but a pair of cutoff denim shorts and a sopping red neckerchief. His skin was brown; his hair and eyes were dark. He was short, but his body was as trim as a glove. He walked out of the water, and she could see the concern on his face. Oh, thank God, she could see the concern.

“Help!” she screamed.
“Help me!”

The look of concern deepened.
“Señora? Qué ha pasado? Qué es lo que va mal?”

She knew some Spanish—driblets and drablets—but at the sound of his, all of hers went out of her mind. It didn’t matter. This was almost certainly one of the groundskeepers from one of the big houses. He had taken advantage of the rain to cool off in the Gulf. He might not have a green card, but he didn’t need one to save her life. He was a man, he was clearly strong, and he was concerned. She threw herself into his arms and felt the water on him soak onto her skin and shirt.

“He’s crazy!” she shouted into his face. She could do this because they were almost exactly the same height. And at least one Spanish word came back to her. A valuable one, she thought, in this situation.
“Loco! Loco, loco!”

The guy turned, one arm firmly around her. Emily looked where he was looking and saw Pickering. Pickering was grinning. It was an easy grin, rather apologetic. Even the blood spattered on his shorts and swelling face didn’t render the grin entirely unconvincing. And there was no sign of the scissors, that was the worst. His hands—the right one slashed and now clotting between the first two fingers—were empty.

“
Es mi esposa,
” he said. His tone was as apologetic—and as convincing—as his grin. Even the fact that he was panting seemed all right.
“No te preocupes. Ella tiene…”
His Spanish either failed him or seemed to fail him. He spread his hands, still grinning. “Problems? She has problems?”

The Latino’s eyes lit with comprehension and relief.
“Problemas?”

“
Sí,
” Pickering agreed. Then one of his spread hands went to his mouth and made a bottle-tipping gesture.

“Ah!” the Latino said, nodding. “
Dreenk!
”

“No!” Em cried, sensing the guy was about to actually push her into Pickering’s arms, wanting to be free of this unexpected
problema
, this unexpected
señora.
She blew breath into the man’s face to show there was no liquor on it. Then inspiration struck and she tapped her swollen mouth. “
Loco!
He did this!”

“Nah, she did it to herself, mate,” Pickering said. “Okay?”

“Okay,” the Latino said, and nodded, but he didn’t push Emily toward Pickering after all. Now he seemed undecided. And another word came to Emily, something dredged up from some educational children’s show she had watched—probably with the faithful Becka—when she wasn’t watching
Scooby-Doo
.

“
Peligro,
” she said, forcing herself not to shout. Shouting was what crazy
esposas
did. She pinned the Latino swimmer’s eyes with her own. “
Peligro.
Him!
Señor Peligro!
”

Pickering laughed and reached for her. Panicked at how close he was (it was like having a hay baler suddenly grow hands), she pushed him. He wasn’t expecting it, and he was still out of breath. He didn’t fall down but did stagger back a step, eyes widening. And the scissors fell out from between the waistband of his shorts and the small of his back, where he had stashed them. For a moment all three of them stared at the metal X on the sand. The waves roared monotonously. Birds cried from inside the unraveling fog.

–11–

Then she was up and running again.

Pickering’s easy grin—the one he must have used on so many “nieces”—resurfaced. “I can explain that, but I don’t have enough of the lingo. Perfectly good explanation, okay?” He tapped his chest like Tarzan. “
No Señor Loco, no Señor Peligro,
okay?” And it might have flown. But then, still smiling, pointing at Em, he said:
“Ella es bobo perra.”

She had no idea what
bobo perra
was, but she saw the way Pickering’s face changed when he said it. Mostly it had to do with his upper lip, which wrinkled and then lifted, as the top half of a dog’s snout does when it snarls. The Latino pushed Em a step backward with a sweep of his arm. Not completely behind him, but almost, and the meaning was clear: protection. Then he bent down, reaching for the metal X on the sand.

If he had reached before pushing Em back, things might still have worked out. But Pickering saw things tilting away from him and went for the scissors himself. He got them first, fell on his knees, and stabbed the points through the Latino’s sand-caked left foot. The Latino shrieked, his eyes flying wide open.

He reached for Pickering, but Pickering first fell to one side, then got up (
Still so quick,
Em thought) and danced away. Then he moved back in. He curled an arm around the Latino’s trim shoulders in a just-pals embrace, and drove the scissors into the Latino’s chest. The Latino tried to back away, but Pickering held him fast, stabbing and stabbing. None of the strokes went deep—Pickering was working too fast for that—but blood flowed everywhere.

“
No!
” Emily screamed.
“No, stop it!”

Pickering turned toward her for just an instant, eyes bright and unspeakable, then stabbed the Latino in the mouth, the scissors going deep enough for the steel finger loops to clash on the man’s teeth. “Okay?” he asked. “Okay? That okay? That work for you, you fucking beaner?”

Emily looked around for anything, a single piece of driftwood to strike him with, and there was nothing. When she looked back, the scissors were sticking out of the Latino’s eye. He crumpled slowly, almost seeming to bow from the waist, and Pickering bent with him, trying to pull the scissors free.

Em ran at him, screaming. She lowered her shoulder and hit him in the gut, realizing in some distant part of her consciousness that it was a soft gut—a lot of good meals had been stored there.

Pickering went sprawling on his back, panting for breath, glaring at her. When she tried to pull away, he grasped her left leg and dug in with his fingernails. Beside her, the Latino man lay on his side, twitching and covered with blood. The only feature she could still make out on a face that had been handsome thirty seconds before was his nose.

“Come here, Lady Jane,” Pickering said, and pulled her toward him. “Let me entertain you, okay? Entertainment okay with you, you useless bitch?” He was strong, and although she clawed at the sand, he was winning. She felt hot breath on the ball of her foot, and then his teeth sank gum-deep into her heel.

There had never been such pain; it made every grain on the beach jump clear in her wide eyes. Em screamed and lashed out with her right foot. Mostly by luck—she was far beyond such things as aim—she struck him, and hard. He howled (a muffled howl), and the needling agony in her left heel stopped as suddenly as it had begun, leaving only a burning hurt. Something had snapped in Pickering’s face. She both felt it and heard it. She thought his cheekbone. Maybe his nose.

She rolled to her hands and knees, her swollen wrist bellowing with pain that almost rivaled the pain in her foot. For a moment she looked, even with her torn shorts once more sagging from her hips, like a runner in the blocks, waiting for the gun. Then she was up and running again, only now at a kind of skipping limp. She angled closer to the water. Her head was roaring with incoherencies (that she must look like the limping deputy in some old TV western or other, for instance—the thought just whipping through her head, there and then gone), but the survival-oriented part of her was still lucid enough to want packed sand to run on. She yanked frantically at her shorts, and saw that her hands were covered with sand and blood. With a sob, she wiped first one and then the other against her T-shirt. She threw one glance back over her right shoulder, hoping against hope, but he was coming again.

She tried as hard as she could,
ran
as hard as she could, and the sand—cold and wet where she was running—soothed her fiery heel a little, but she could still get into nothing resembling her old gait. She looked back and saw him gaining, putting everything he had into a final sprint. Ahead of her the rainbows were fading as the day grew relentlessly brighter and hotter.

She tried as hard as she could and knew it wasn’t going to be enough. She could outrun an old lady, she could outrun an old man, she could outrun her poor sad husband, but she couldn’t outrun the mad bastard behind her. He was going to catch her. She looked for a weapon to hit him with when he did, but there was still nothing. She saw the charred remains of someone’s beach-party campfire, but it was too far ahead and too far inland, just below the place where the dunes and sea oats took over from the beach. He would catch her even sooner if she diverted in that direction, where the sand was soft and treacherous. Things were bad enough down here by the water. She could hear him closing in, panting harshly and snorting back blood from his broken nose. She could even hear the rapid whack of his sneakers on the damp sand. She wished so hard for someone else on the beach that for a moment she hallucinated a tall, white-haired guy with a big bent nose and rough dark skin. Then she realized her yearning mind had conjured her own father—a last hope—and the illusion blew away.

He got close enough to reach out for her. His hand batted the back of her shirt, almost caught the fabric, fell away. Next time it wouldn’t. She swerved into the water, splashing in first to her ankles, then to her calves. It was the only thing she could think of, the last thing. She had an idea—unformed, inarticulate—of either swimming away from him or at least facing him in the water, where they might be on more even terms; if nothing else, water might slow the strokes of the awful scissors. If she could get deep enough.

Before she could throw herself forward and begin stroking—before she could even get as far in as her thighs—he grabbed her by the neck of her shirt and pulled her backward, dragging her toward the shore again.

Em saw the scissors appear over her left shoulder and grabbed them. She tried to twist, but it was hopeless. Pickering had braced himself in knee-deep water, his legs apart, his feet planted firmly against the sand-sucking rush of the retreating waves. She tripped over one of them and fell against him. They splashed down together.

Pickering’s reaction was fast and unmistakable, even in the wet confusion: pushing and bucking and convulsive thrashing. Truth lit up in her head like fireworks on a dark night. He couldn’t swim. Pickering couldn’t swim. He had a house by the Gulf of Mexico, but he couldn’t swim. And it made perfect sense. His visits to Vermillion Key had been dedicated to indoor sports.

She rolled away from him and he didn’t try to grab her. He was sitting chest-deep in the rolling boil of the waves, which were still agitated from the storm, and all his efforts were focused on scrambling up and getting his precious respiration away from a medium it had never learned how to cope with.