Deadly Pursuit

25

Funny how it felt to have your world collapse.

Steve lay in bed, fully clothed, stretched supine on the taut bedspread; he hadn’t bothered to climb under the covers. With empty eyes he gazed at the ceiling, whitewashed with afternoon sun rays, speckled with the gently waving shadows of palm fronds.

Somewhere, either in the room or just beyond the open window, a solitary insect droned. It sounded like the hum of a distant lawn mower in his Connecticut neighborhood, a Saturday morning sound.

He wished he were in Connecticut. Wished he had never come to Pelican Key.

At dawn he had been a man with a wife, a job, a home, even a dog. And with a guilty secret, too; but he’d carried that guilt so long, he was wearily familiar with it. It was a pain he’d grown accustomed to, a dull ache from an old wound.

Now, only a few hours later, he had lost everything. Everything except the guilt, which was of a new and different order, not familiar anymore.

His life had taken on an unreal quality, a strange remoteness. Since returning from the reef, he’d found himself touching things-doorknobs, countertops-merely to feel the small shock of contact with something solid and firm.

In a dream there was no sensation of touch. So this was not a dream.

A sigh shivered through him. He thought about the gun. About using it. First on Jack. Then on himself.

It would be the best thing.

But he didn’t have the courage. And Jack knew it.

When you lied for him last time, he told himself as the palm shadows rustled in a breath of breeze, when you backed up his phony alibi, it wasn’t for friendship or loyalty or any other noble bullshit.

You did it out of fear. Fear of Jack.

He didn’t even know what he had thought Jack might do. Nothing specific, really. The mere prospect of disobeying and displeasing him had seemed as awful in its implications as angering some cruel, dark, tribal god.

Was that what Jack had been to him? And what, in some irrational way, he still was?

A god?

My private god, Steve thought. My personal deity.

His eyes squeezed shut. He moaned.

“Steve?”

Blinking alert, he saw Kirstie standing in the doorway.

“Steve, are you all right?”

“Sure.” Vaguely he was pleased to hear that his voice sounded normal. “Just resting.”

She approached the bed. He didn’t want to look at her, didn’t want to see how beautiful she was, couldn’t help himself. He took mental snapshots of her features, focusing first on one detail, then on another-the line of her jaw, the bridge of her nose, the sunlit shimmer of her hair-storing up memories for his long exile.

“You never take naps,” she said, her mouth pinched in a worried way.

“Guess the diving tired me out.”

“You weren’t asleep.”

“I was just nodding off when you came in.”

She sat on the bed, took his hand. Her touch was gentle, her fingers very soft. He remembered kissing her hand on the night he proposed.

“Are you cold?” she asked.

“Cold? No.”

“Then why are you wearing your jacket?”

Before lying down, he’d changed back into his long pants and shirt, then donned a blue nylon jacket to conceal the Beretta tucked into his waistband.

“Thought I was getting a little sunburned,” he said lamely.

“Indoors?”

He feigned a smile. “You can’t be too careful. Where’s Jack, anyway?”

“Around.” She leaned closer, and he could smell her fragrance-not perfume-salt and perspiration and the indefinable scent of her hair, hair that had been his pillow so many times. “I wanted to talk to you about him.”

He waited, gazing up at her, marshaling his strength for more lies. The wash of sunlight on the ceiling haloed her in a golden aureole. Silly thoughts of angels flitted like schoolboy fancies through his mind.

“He took his pocketknife with him to the reef,” she said.

“How did you know that?”

“I went through his clothes.”

His head lifted. “What?”

“It was wrong, I know, but… well, some money fell out of his pants pocket. Seven hundred dollars in cash. I thought that seemed suspicious. It made me curious.”

“What’s suspicious about carrying cash on a vacation?”

“Nothing, I guess.”

“You think he stole it or something?”

“Of course not.”

“Jack Dance, the notorious bank robber, on the run from the law.” He laughed, but it came out wrong, not laughter at all. Dry coughing sounds.

“All right,” Kirstie snapped, “maybe I was being ridiculous, but I searched his damn pockets and the knife was gone. He took it. Why did he do that?”

“He always carries a knife when he dives. Safety precaution.”

“Did you know he had it?”

“Sure. I saw him strip some gulfweed off the anchor line.”

Jack’s own lie had come out of his mouth. Steve felt slightly sickened, as if the two of them had shared a kiss.

“Oh.” Kirstie frowned. “Guess I was wrong, then.”

“Were you afraid he was going to… attack me?”

“I don’t know what I was afraid of.’

“Jack’s harmless. Stop worrying about him. He’s a great guy.”

Ribbons of images threaded his thoughts: Meredith Turner as she’d looked in her yearbook portrait, newspaper photos of the women Mister Twister had picked up in bars. Harmless. A great guy. His stomach knotted.

“I looked for the gun,” Kirstie said quietly. “It wasn’t under the bed.”

“I already packed it.”

“Where?”

“One of the suitcases.” He deflected further questions by asking one of his own. “What do you want it for? You planning to shoot Jack the next time he does something suspicious?" He put a nasty sarcastic lilt in the last word.

“I just want to feel safe,” she answered coldly. “And I don’t.”

“Because of your overactive imagination.”

“Because I don’t trust your friend-and because I can’t seem to communicate with you.”

“We’re communicating right now.”

“No. We’re not.” She got up and stood looking down on him. “What’s going on here? Why are you acting this way?”

“What way?”

“You’re not yourself.”

“I told you, I’m just tired, that’s all.”

“Your behavior is… off. Strange.”

“Christ, all I’m trying to do is lie down for a while.”

Kirstie studied him for a long moment. A glimmer of dampness trembled on one eyelash, her only confession of pain.

“I’ll leave you alone, then,” she said finally. “Sorry to disturb your rest”

She did not slam the door when she left. The cold snick of the latch bolt was worse. It conveyed the quiet finality of a death rattle.

Steve shut his eyes again.

God, he wanted to be out of here. Wanted this to be over.

He pictured himself on the flying bridge of the Black Caesar, speeding recklessly toward the Bahamas in a stinging cloud of spray.

Despite Jack’s best salesmanship, the escape plan still struck him as a crazy fantasy. He had no confidence it would succeed. But the alternative was prison, prison for life, and he couldn’t face that. Death would be better. He would kill himself before he let a cell door clang shut behind him forever.

So those were his options now, the total range of possibilities open before him, shaping the rest of his days. A fugitive’s hounded existence or a bullet in the head.

Rolling on his side, he curled into a fetal pose, shivering all over, his face buried in his arms.

He’s lying.

Kirstie strode into the living room, circled it twice, and flopped down on the sofa.

He’s lying. The words beat in her mind with the repetitive insistence of a song lyric. He’s lying. He’s lying.

A gossamer fall of sunlight burned white stripes on a fern’s glossy leaves. Outside, a breeze shivered through the hedges and set the garden gate creaking. Anastasia, sprawled before the cold fireplace, favored her mistress with a cool glance and an interrogative whine.

All right, so he was lying. That much was certain.

But what exactly was he lying about? And why?

A vague scenario took shape in her imagination like the outline of a movie plot. Jack had found the gun. Somehow he was using it to intimidate Steve, forcing him to go along with something Steve didn’t like.

Great theory.

Except Jack was absent at the moment. Nothing prevented Steve from hustling Kirstie and Anastasia onto the motorboat and fleeing to Upper Matecumbe Key.

No, whatever he was doing was of his own free will.

Besides, there was no longer any particular reason to suspect Jack of criminal behavior. Had he wanted to hurt Steve, he could have done so at the reef. Could have stabbed him with the knife. Could have killed him.

But he hadn’t. Which proved he was no threat, regardless of her intuitive forebodings.

Of course it did.

She got up, paced. Anastasia watched her, fascinated by her restless prowling.

The living room was normally her favorite spot in the house. Today it was a cage. The decorative ironwork on the windows had become the bars of a cell. The thick, moist air was suffocating; it clogged her lungs.

She found herself drawing rapid, shallow breaths and forced herself to stop. Hyperventilating wouldn’t help.

Too much nervous energy. That was her problem. Well, there ought to be some way to work it off.

The garden. She’d amused herself several times in the past two weeks, pulling weeds and trimming shrubbery. The work was by no means necessary-the Larson heirs paid a maintenance crew to attend to the upkeep of house and garden-but she’d found it relaxing.

Some relaxation was precisely what she needed right now;

In the kitchen she collected scissors, work gloves, and a small plastic bag for cuttings. She carried the stuff into the garden and set to work, humming to herself.

The tune, she realized with a small shock, was “Stranger in Paradise.”

It fit. But who was the real stranger? Jack… or Steve?

Jack switched off the radio when he heard Kirstie’s footsteps in the kitchen. He sat stiffly in the straight-back chair before the worktable, listening to the rattle of drawers, a hummed melody that diminished with distance, and finally the muffled closing of a French door in the dining room.

Then there was no sound but the throb of the generators through the thin wall and the answering beat of his heart.

He had spent the past fifteen minutes in this narrow hideaway that Steve, in his guided tour, had somewhat incongruously referred to as the maid’s room, though there was no maid in residence at the Larson house now. The radio room-that was what it should be called, since the two-way radio on the worktable was the sole object of interest in the place.

Part of his time had been occupied with a small but important operation requiring some minimal mechanical skill. Only when that chore was done had he switched on the radio, dialed the volume low, and found a news channel. Ear pressed to the speaker, he’d waited for an update on the manhunt.

According to leaks from anonymous sources “close to the investigation,” the FBI had tracked him at least as far as Miami International Airport. Meanwhile, Sheila had achieved the status of a minor celebrity, peddling her story to a tabloid television show for $25,000.

There had been more, but he hadn’t heard it. He’d been afraid to leave the radio on with Kirstie in the next room. His behavior-sitting alone by the radio with the door shut-would only deepen her suspicions and perhaps prompt her to listen to the news herself.

He wondered what she had been doing in the kitchen… and what she was up to now.

Rising, he crossed the room and eased open the door. The kitchen was empty.

He remembered the sound of the French door shutting. She’d gone out onto the patio. Perhaps she was sunbathing.

His blue jeans, which he’d donned again after the trip to the reef, swelled slightly with the beginning of an erection.

Voyeurism was not his usual mode of operation. But he wouldn’t mind a glimpse of Mrs. Kirsten Gardner stretched in a lounge chair, wearing a swimsuit, skin oiled with suntan lotion.

Cautiously he passed through the kitchen into the dining room and approached the French doors, their square panes dappled with sun. He peered through the glass and felt a brief plunge of disappointment.

She wasn’t sunbathing. She knelt in the garden, her back to him, pulling dandelions.

No swimsuit, either. Her outfit was the same one she’d worn all day: sandals, shorts, yellow tank top.

Still, even that attire was revealing enough. Save for the tank top’s straps, her shoulders were bare, the upper part of her back exposed. Her muscles flexed as she worked. Firm, well-toned muscles.

He watched as she leaned forward, still humming the same melody he’d heard in the kitchen, and uprooted another weed. He thought of kneading her shoulders, her back.

Her lean, sinuous arms reached for a clump of ragwort. The weed was unexpectedly stubborn. She pulled hard, muscles stiffening. Jack thought of Ronni Tyler in her last living moment, her body snapping taut, head thrown back, arms extended like rigid poles. And years earlier, Meredith thrashing in the pool-her muscles had been well-toned also-she’d reached up for the surface, grasping desperately for life…

A shudder moved through him, the shock wave of some internal explosion, and abruptly he knew what he had to do.

His need was suddenly too strong, the blind, raging need that had been building steadily throughout the day. He had no choice but to satisfy it. Will, self-control, his very sense of self melted away in the furnace heat of the fever within him.

Distantly he recalled Steve’s warning, but the memory seemed remote and unreal. Steve wouldn’t shoot him. Little Stevie? No way. He didn’t have the nerve.

The door opened soundlessly under his hand. No creak of hinges. No squeal of wood.

He stepped into the humid air, heavy with flower scents. For a moment he stood in the shadowed coolness of a portico, peering out at the garden like a predator lying in ambush in its den.

Then silently he advanced into the heat, the light.

She was only six feet away. Her suntanned shoulders were dusted with soft freckles. The down on her nape shivered in a lazy current of air. She went on sweetly humming, the tune hypnotic and gently sad, haunting as a lullaby.

Regrettably he didn’t have his knife. It must still be packed with the snorkeling gear, which Steve had concealed somewhere in the house.

Well, his bare hands would do.

Her neck was thin, delicate.

If he grasped hold of her head from behind, gave it a good sharp twist He could almost hear the wet crackle of snapping bone.

With luck he would merely paralyze her when he broke her neck. Then he could finish her more slowly while she watched with wide, helpless, staring eyes. Blue eyes. Meredith’s eyes.

He took another step.

A hand closed over his arm from behind.

His heart stuttered, missing a beat. He jerked his head sideways.

Steve was there, his gray eyes cold behind his glasses.

Slowly, wordlessly, he nodded toward the house.

Making no noise, the two men retreated, leaving Kirstie to continue her work, unaware.

Steve didn’t speak until the French door was shut, and he and Jack were in the living room. Then: “You son of a bitch.”

Jack was certain the Beretta was concealed under Steve’s jacket. And equally sure Steve was very close to using it.

Maybe he did have the nerve.

“Hey, Stevie,” he said with a faltering smile, “relax. I didn’t

… do anything.”

“Only because I stopped you. All of a sudden it occurred to me that it wasn’t such a good idea to leave you alone with her.”

“You can trust me.”

“Like shit I can. Now listen to me, asshole”-Steve jabbed him rudely in the chest, the first time in their long friendship he had ever done so-“you keep your goddamn distance from her. Got that? Keep your fucking distance.”

“Sure. Sure. No problem.”

“Oh, yes, it is a problem. A big problem-for you. Remember what I said on the boat. You so much as touch her, and I’ll kill you. I mean it, Jack. I really do.”

Jack met Steve’s wintry gaze and understood that he was serious, he did mean it, he really would kill to protect or avenge his wife. It was the one hard spot within him, the one place where he was not weak and pliable and yielding.

In that moment Jack knew there would be trouble before the night was over.

Because regardless of what he’d promised, he no longer had any intention of allowing Kirstie Gardner to live.