Deadly Pursuit

32

The pain in Kirstie’s shoulders had become a spread of tingling heat, draping her like a skin-tight shawl. Tendrils of agony shot down her arms, electrifying her elbows and wrists, as she went on raising and lowering her hands behind her with mechanical monotony.

Occasionally a string of whispered words punctuated her labor. The same words, always.

“God damn you, Steve.”

Oddly, she felt no desire to curse Jack. Jack was hopeless, irredeemable. Curses would be wasted on him.

But for her husband to stand by and allow that smirking psychopath to tie her to this chair with electrical wires-for him to simply watch, his gun as useless as a toy, while his wife was reduced to helplessness-for him to have permitted that violation of her person was a betrayal so deep it could never be forgiven.

For a long time after she’d been left alone, she had given in to alternating paroxysms of grief and terror. Finally the tears had dried to salty tracks. And a new emotion, equally intense and far more healthy, had risen to her surface.

Rage.

How dare they do this to her? Steve, especially. How dare he?

She was a modern woman, college-educated, career-oriented. She worked for PBS, for Christ’s sake. She wasn’t some peasant prostitute in a snuff movie. She could not be treated this way.

Fury had revived her, made her strong. She’d begun to consider means of escape.

Craning her neck, she’d scrutinized the radio console behind her. The transmitter and receiver components were housed in metal cases with clever edges and sharp corners. If she could maneuver her chair a little closer to the table, then rub her wrists against the radio till the insulated wire had been sawed through…

That was her plan. For some immeasurable stretch of time-hours now-she’d been struggling to carry it out. By gently rocking her chair, she had inched within reach of the table; by repeatedly shrugging and dropping her shoulders, she had dragged the binding on her wrists vertically along the nearest edge of the receiver.

There was no way to gauge how quickly the wire was being worn. She thought she sensed a little more give in it, but that impression might be only her imagination.

One thing was certain: the muscles in her arms and shoulders were rapidly reaching a point beyond soreness, a point of total exhaustion that would make any subsequent movement impossible.

She had no idea what Steve and Jack were up to. For a long time there had been silence. Then a frantic clatter of activity-Steve yelling, rapid footsteps. She had thought the men were having a fight.

Good, she’d told herself. Maybe Steve will shoot the son of a bitch.

But she’d heard no gunshots. Only silence again.

And now… footsteps.

The two men walking through the living room, into the foyer. The front door opening. Then closing a moment later.

No further sounds.

They’d left together, via the front door. Why?

To sit on the porch, maybe. The house was hot. Outside, it might be cooler.

Whatever they were doing, at least they were gone for the moment. And the wires definitely did seem looser now.

Ignoring pain and fatigue, she rubbed harder.

Steve kept the Beretta trained on Jack as the runabout motored slowly away from the dock. Jack steered, easing the throttle arm to port, guiding the boat to the island’s eastern shore. The motor, in low gear, burred softly.

Slowly the lights of the house receded, screened by trees. Lifting his head, Steve saw no moon, only a blaze of stars, diamond bright. Their reflected brilliance shimmered on the water like whirling sparks of fire.

He supposed this would be the shape of his life from now on. Tropical nights, starlit waters, the rustle of palm fronds-and guilt and shame and fear.

Prison had always terrified him. His fear of incarceration with violent, conscienceless men, spurred by his own guilt and by Pete Creston’s vivid stories, had become almost phobic in its intensity.

Yet now he wondered if his fears hadn’t been misplaced. Prison was a waking nightmare, but to forfeit one’s soul, become a man like Jack Dance-wasn’t that a still grimmer version of hell?

You’re not turning into Jack, he said to himself, disturbed by the thought. That’s ridiculous. He’s a murderer, for God’s sake.

A comforting rebuttal, but hardly persuasive. He was aiding Jack. Helping him escape arrest, in order to kill again. He had already allowed his wife to be struck twice, each slap a hard crack of sound like a pistol’s report. And afterward…

He remembered how she’d stared into his eyes, begging speechlessly for help. Help he had refused to give.

No, he wasn’t as bad as Jack. But he was getting there. And the longer they stayed together, the more like Jack he would become.

Unless, of course, Jack killed him first.

Steve pondered that possibility as the runabout approached the white coral beach.

He didn’t think Jack would continue to pose a threat to him once they were safely underway in the Black Caesar. It was Jack’s obsession with Kirstie that was making him crazy now.

At least, Steve wanted to believe as much. But he could be wrong. Jack had never planned on having a partner. Probably he still didn’t want one.

And I’ll have to sleep eventually. Hell, I’m… I’m starting to feel pretty damn drowsy now.

The stress of the day’s events must be catching up with him. There was a peculiar pins-and-needles tingling in his fingertips, a new heaviness in his eyelids.

Better fix some coffee when I get back. A whole pot-and I’ll drink it black.

On Pice’s boat he would have to risk sleep. But he did not dare close his eyes while he and Jack were on Pelican Key. Not with Kirstie a prisoner in the radio room.

The boat brushed the lip of the coral ledge. Jack looked up. “Okay if I get out and haul her in?”

Steve nodded. “We’ll both do it.”

They waded through the shallows, dragging the inflatable onto shore, then carried it farther up the beach into a tangle of brush.

The water revived Steve somewhat. “Cover it up,” he ordered, pleased to be feeling slightly more alert.

“Wait a second.” Jack reached into one of the grocery bags in the bow. “There’s something I want to get.”

Steve lifted the gun. If Jack had stowed a weapon on board…

Click, and a sudden yellow glare. A flashlight.

“Bought it in Florida City.” Jack smiled. “We can use it to find our way back.”

“Terrific. Now cover the goddamn boat.”

Jack camouflaged the runabout with leaves and grasses while Steve watched over him, his finger resting lightly on the trigger. He wished he had the courage to shoot this man, put a bullet in his evil, calculating brain.

But he couldn’t. He needed Jack. That was the hell of it. He’d made his bargain with the devil, and now their fates were inseparably joined.

Inseparably joined. A picture swam into his mind, a television image of conjoined twins, some random memory of a newscast he’d once seen. The infants’ faces blurred, changed, became his own face and Jack’s. Inseparably joined…

The image dissolved into a hallucinatory stream. He felt his eyes closing. It occurred to him that he was drifting toward sleep.

No, impossible. He was standing up. Nobody could sleep standing up. A person had to be in bed to sleep. Sleep and bed, two concepts inseparably joined.

He was… floating…

Jack tossed a last pile of brush on the runabout and clapped his hands. “Done.”

The harsh smack of sound shocked Steve awake. He shook his head to clear his thoughts.

What the hell had happened there? Christ, he’d nearly nodded off. It looked like wading to shore hadn’t done much to revive him, after all. He needed coffee, whole pots of it.

Jack was the one who ought to be fighting drowsiness. He’d taken the sleeping pills.

That last thought-Jack took the sleeping pills-almost suggested an idea to him, some ugly trickery on Jack’s part; but the idea was complicated, hard to grasp, and his mental processes seemed to be growing dangerously torpid.

Jack beamed the flash down the beach. “The trail starts there. We can come around the back way, reenter the house through the patio.”

It was the same trail the three of them had taken early this morning. Steve thought of Ana romping with Jack, fetching sticks for him. His gut tightened, and a spurt of anger squeezed some of the fatigue out of his system.

“All right,” he said brusquely. “Let’s move.”

They trudged along the beach. Jack, in the lead, swept the flashlight’s pale circle across stretches of coral sand, pebbly and pitted and stark, a moonscape in miniature.

“You ever going to put down that gun, Stevie?”

“Not till I feel safe.”

“When will that be?”

Steve frowned, once more blinking sleep out of his eyes.

“I don’t know,” he mumbled. The statement came out slightly slurred. “I don’t know if… if I’ll ever feel safe again.”