Deadly Pursuit

11

Jack Dance woke at dawn and rubbed his aching neck. Sleeping curled up in the runabout had left him sore and stiff.

He had beached the dinghy in the cove, on the seaweed-strewn mud flat, and camouflaged it with palm fronds. He didn’t want it to be spotted from the air in daylight.

Throughout the night, biting insects had harassed him without mercy. Only after arriving at the island had he realized that he’d forgotten to purchase bug spray. Sleep had been fitful, his fragmentary dreams disturbing.

Breakfast was a can of pears. He consumed the entire contents, including the heavy syrup. The thick, sugary liquid made his gut roll.

Jack sighed. Yesterday’s euphoria, born of plotting strategy and taking action, had faded. He pictured his apartment in Westwood-the well-stocked refrigerator, the comfortable chairs, the thick-pile carpet, the king-size bed. It made a disheartening contrast with his present circumstances.

Yes, he’d had quite a fall. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, he had gazed down on Los Angeles from a height, a monarch surveying his dominion. Now he was a sweaty, muddy, ravenous thing, a hunted creature seeking refuge in the wild, master of nothing, not even of ticks and sandflies.

He would rise again, though. He swore he would.

First light was breaking, a soft luster brightening the sky. Time to reacquaint himself with the island. Seventeen years had passed since his last visit here, with Steve Gardner, in the summer after their high-school graduation.

Leaving the cove, he immediately found the boardwalk that ran through the mangrove swamp. Sure, he remembered this. He and Steve had traversed the walkway many times. It was a haphazard, crooked thing, twisting and bending like a malformed spine. At its far end, as he recalled, was a forest trail.

He started off down the boardwalk, moving slowly, wary of weak spots in the old wood. But the structure seemed sturdy enough. Remarkably well preserved, in fact. In better condition than his memory would have led him to expect.

The swamp folded over him like a nightmare, surrounding him with rank smells and contorted shadows and sinuous shapes that glided through the murk. Clumps of mangroves, their skirts of aerial roots exposed at low tide, formed a labyrinth of twisted trunks and branches. In the narrow channels meandering among the trees, the water had the dark gloss of an oil slick, its surface puckered and dimpled with random bubbles.

This was a prehistoric world, fetid and lush, crowded with mysterious life. Jack almost expected to see Tyrannosaurus come sloshing into view with a bellows blast of breath and a jet-plane roar.

He kept walking. As he did, he ran his hand along the boardwalk’s wooden railing, studied the planks passing by under his feet. He began to feel the first stir of misgivings.

He’d counted on having Pelican Key all to himself. But the boardwalk’s condition was too good, too perfect. It had not been left to rot. It had been repaired-even partly rebuilt, he believed. There were sections where the wood looked new and the nail heads gleamed.

Jack frowned. Was the key occupied? Had old Donald Larson finally restored the old plantation house and taken up residence there, as he’d promised?

“Shit,” he muttered. If he wasn’t alone, he would have to leave in a hurry, before he was discovered.

No point in jumping to conclusions. Maybe the island was inhabited only in the winter months. In that case he could stay until at least the end of September. By then Teddy Lunt should have come through with the documents.

To find out, one way or the other, he would have to take a look at the house and determine if it was presently in use.

He could hardly walk up to the door and knock. But from a vantage point on the beach, he could scope out the place with little risk of being seen. He quickened his steps.

In less than ten minutes, the boardwalk delivered him to the hardwood forest at the center of the island. He hurried along the trail toward the red radiance of the sunrise, intermittently visible through breaks in the foliage.

His shoes crunched on the dry, crumbly soil, frightening small lizards out of his way. Walls of dense shrubbery and trees enclosed the path, forming a tunnel of green. Somewhere a parrot squawked.

The tropical hammock was a showcase of the superabundance of life, nature’s insane fecundity. Things grew everywhere here, even on other things. A palette of varicolored lichens smeared the bark of mastics, gumbo-limbos, and banyans, paint splotches dabbed on by some frenetic, freewheeling artist. Orchids, wild pine, and resurrection fern ornamented other trees, bright as Christmas bows. A tall mahogany tottered, its trunk wrapped in the twisted roots of a strangler fig, slowly smothering in that octopus embrace.

Jack walked on, blinking at the steadily growing brightness of the day. A rabbit flitted through the underbrush and vanished beneath the yellow blossoms of a Jerusalem thorn. Something splashed in an unseen pond. The recesses of the forest seemed impossibly remote, lost in shadows and mist, partitioned by screens of foliage and ropy webs of medicine vine.

The end of the trail was just ahead. He could smell the fresh salt breeze.

The brush thinned. Dark loam gave way to white coral sand. Past a scrim of ferns and waving sawgrass in red bloom, he saw the crimson thread of the horizon. The sky blushed. The sea flamed.

On the fringe of the forest, he halted abruptly. He shaded his eyes, blinked, then leaned against the rough bole of a date palm and stared out into the blinding light.

“Oh,” he said simply.

For just one moment Jack Dance forgot who he was and what he did for fun. He forgot the syringe and his victims’ convulsions and his sweaty exercise afterward with their undressed bodies.

In that moment he was not a killer. He was only a man gazing transfixed at the woman on the beach.

She wore sandals and shorts and a yellow tank top. Her hair was golden, her skin sun-bronzed. Her slender body was limned in fire against the red dazzle of the sun.

She ambled lazily along the irregular line of seaweed that marked high tide, her head thrown back, arms loose at her sides. Plovers scattered before her, comical in their helter-skelter distress.

An enchanting picture. So perfect it might have been posed. The woman belonged on a postcard or a calendar. Anyone looking at her would smile, just as Jack was smiling now, not in lust but in simple aesthetic appreciation.

She knelt to examine something on the beach. A shell. It gleamed in her hand. She put it back, reached for another, and then her gaze lifted and, across a span of thirty feet, she met his eyes.

Slowly she stood. She watched him.

Jack saw the sudden tightness in her mouth, the unnatural stiffness of her body. He saw fear. And seeing it, he remembered himself.

His interlude of rapt contemplation ended instantly, as if a switch had been thrown. No more time for that. There was a job to do.

He stepped out of the brush into the loose pebbly sand and started toward her, still smiling, but his smile held a different meaning now.

From this distance he could not distinguish the color of her eyes. He hoped they were blue.

Even if they were not, he would enjoy watching her face when he took out his pocketknife and buried the spear blade in her throat.