Deadly Pursuit

43

Deep in the tropical hammock, amid blooms of orchids and bursts of bromeliads like frozen fireworks displays, under a canopy of leaves allowing glimpses of pale pink sky, Jack Dance hunted.

Throughout the night he had been bitten by mosquitoes, stung by centipedes, jabbed by thorns and briers, scraped by poisonwood and manchineel. His shirt was speckled with burs, his pants shredded; dried mud crusted the insides of his shoes.

Acre by acre he quartered Pelican Key. He had explored the cove and the salt ponds, where roseate spoonbills sifted the fine silt for a breakfast of shellfish, and now he prowled the forest south of the swamp, moving slowly toward the island’s eastern shore.

His prey was here somewhere. He would find her. He would not be denied.

He was no longer quite sure why it was necessary to kill Kirstie Gardner. The boat would arrive in a few hours. All he had to do was ambush the captain, then race for the Bahamas. Kirstie could do him little harm after that.

Still, he wanted her. She was precisely his type. Another Meredith.

His eyes narrowed at the memory of Meredith Turner. Bitch. Evil, emasculating bitch.

The songs of cardinals and yellow-throated warblers whistled giddily through the clear, fragrant air. Morning glories opened tremulous blue petals to receive the day’s first light. Fastened to the bark of a gumbo-limbo, a tree snail gleamed like a gemstone, its porcelain-smooth shell a rainbow in miniature.

Beauty. Beauty everywhere.

Jack saw none of it.

“Bitch,” he breathed, the word low and susurrant, scratchy in his throat.

He was eleven years old. Sleepless in the dark, listening to faint noises from the living room.

His parents were out. He was alone in the house with his baby-sitter.

Or perhaps not alone.

Silently he crept to the top of the staircase, peered out from under the banister.

In the flickering glow of a lava lamp, two pale figures twisting on the sofa. Meredith’s white breasts flopping as she groaned. The man with long hair grinding his hips in the slow, measured rhythm of a dance.

Jack watched though the bars of the balustrade till both bodies shuddered in mutual release.

The man left shortly afterward. Jack, in bed once more, touching his penis and thinking, heard the back door swing shut.

Soft footsteps on the stairs. Meredith checking on him, leaning through the doorway, her face limned by the dim light from the hall.

Lying still, eyes half closed, Jack whispered, “I saw what you did.”

“What, Jack? You say something?”

“I saw it. You let that guy fuck you. Did it feel good?”

“I… You had a dream, that’s all. I didn’t-”

“Felt good, didn’t it?”

“Go to sleep, Jack.”

“I could do it. I’m old enough.”

“Jack, please…”

“I’ve got a dick, too. See?”

He snapped on the bedside light, kicked off the covers. He’d removed his pajama bottoms. His penis was stiff and red from rubbing.

“Oh, God, put on your p.j.’s-”

“P. j.’s are for little kids. I’m not little. I’m eleven. You’re really pretty, Meredith.”

“Cut it out-”

“I’ll tell. I’ll tell what you did. I’ll tell my folks, and they’ll tell yours.”

“Christ, what are you trying to do, get me killed?”

Jack liked her sudden panic. Enjoyed the sense of power it gave him. Meredith’s parents were devoutly religious, fanatically strict; she had to be terrified of what would happen if they found out about the longhaired boy.

“Let me put it in you,” he said softly, “and I won’t tell.”

“Are you crazy?"

“I can do it as good as that guy. I’m old enough.”

“You are not old enough-Christ-you’re in the sixth grade!”

“Let me do it to you, or I tell.”

“No.”

“Let me, or else.”

“Stop it.”

“Let me.”

“Oh, God, this is sick, you can’t mean this-”

“Let me.”

“Jesus. Jesus…”

“Let me.”

Sobbing, she turned away from him and tugged at her skirt. Jack watched, pleased with the control he now exercised over this girl who was in high school, nearly an adult, taller and stronger than he was, yet a captive to his will.

Guilt makes people do things. It was a lesson he meant to remember.

Meredith’s skirt was a wrinkled rag on the floor, her panties dangling from one ankle. She sat on the bed and spread her legs.

“What are you waiting for?” Her voice had thickened like paste. Tears glistened on her cheeks; Jack thought of slug tracks. “Do it. Get it over with.”

“Aren’t you supposed to kiss me and stuff?”

“Just goddamn do it.”

He eased himself inside her, slowly, slowly.

And his erection died.

“What’s the matter?” Fury and shame made her cruel. “Can’t you even get it up?”

“I’m trying.”

“You little asshole. You twisted fuck.”

“Hey, shut up.”

“You can’t do it ’cause you’re queer.”

“I’m not!"

“Maybe you could do it with a boy. You want me to find you a boy?”

“I hate you.”

“Faggot.”

“Bitch.”

“Fag, fag, fag!"

She escaped from his bed. For long minutes he heard water running in the bathroom pipes.

Meredith never baby-sat for him again. He told his parents he was too old for a sitter, and they agreed.

He no longer touched his penis. He had no more erections. It was as if a switch had been thrown, shutting off his sexuality.

Until his freshman year of high school, when a dark-haired, green-eyed girl who looked nothing like Meredith seduced him, almost against his will.

No humiliation this time. He was not a queer, not a faggot. Meredith had lied.

The sudden revelation of his sexual potency was the explosive rupture of a dam. Years of suppressed urges burst like floodwaters through the levees and restraining walls he’d built. He needed sex; he could not get enough.

Speedily he acquired expertise in the game of seduction. He possessed all the requisite assets: good looks, skill at manipulation, and a chilly brazenness that passed for charm.

He kept score of his conquests. In one memorable year he bedded thirteen of his classmates, two girls from other schools, and his young math teacher, Miss Chamberlain.

He had redheads, brunettes, girls with raven hair. No blonds, however. No Merediths.

Blonds, he told his envious friends with a shrug, were not his type.

In a deeper sense, though, they were his type, his only type. It was Meredith who obsessed him as he lay in bed in the unforgiving dark. It was Meredith he could not forget. Meredith, who had deceived and insulted him. Meredith, who had tried to make him less than a man.

He waited until August of 1978 before taking revenge.

“Bitch,” he whispered as he held her underwater and let chlorinated water flood her lungs. “Fucking bitch.”

Though he had killed her, she’d never truly died. She survived in every woman who reminded him of her. In Laura Westlake of San Antonio and Dorothy Beerbaum of Dallas and Veronica Tyler of Phoenix and all the others.

And now, Kirsten Gardner.

The others had paid for Meredith’s crime. Kirstie would pay also. And after the hell she had put him through tonight, how he would savor her death. Oh yes. She would be his best Meredith yet.

The trees thinned out. The dense hammock gave way to a clearing speckled with darting swallowtails. An oval of open sky spread a pale lucent wash over thickets of bottlebrush and rustling stargrass.

Half hidden in the grass, almost lost amid the star-shaped blossoms, lay Kirstie’s other sandal.

“Well,” Jack said aloud. “Well, well, well.”

He knelt and picked it up. The sole was caked with mud. She had been here after leaving the swamp.

Carefully he examined the grass. Tufts of green leaves, trampled by hasty footsteps, had not yet sprung upright.

Couldn’t have been very long ago when she passed through.

She was close.

His gaze traveled slowly over the clearing. A thin streak of glitter-something fine, threadlike-was strung along the garish spikes of a bottlebrush plant.

Spider web? No.

A strand of fabric, snared by the shrub.

He plucked the thread free, held it taut between two fists. Though it was ragged and flecked with dirt, its original color was still recognizable.

Yellow. The color of Kirstie’s tank top.

He followed the line of flattened patches in the grass. At the edge of the clearing he found a second yellow thread, fluttering in the beaklike flowers of a bird-of-paradise. Just beyond it, a third.

The tank top, unraveling, had left a loose strand every couple of yards. Even outside the clearing, in the comparative gloom of the canopied forest, he could pick out new threads now that he knew what to look for.

The hunt was nearly over.

He would have her soon.