Deadly Pursuit

44

Kirstie lay supine on the bunk in the musty darkness, fighting hard for breath.

The poison had done something to her respiratory system. She couldn’t seem to get enough air. Twice in the woods she’d sunk to her knees in a swoon; only by lowering her head had she saved herself from a blackout.

She lifted her hand to her throat and felt for the carotid artery. Her pulse had been frighteningly weak and fluttery the last time she’d checked. Now she detected no pulse at all.

Dead, then. I must be dead.

The thought was meant as a joke, but she didn’t smile.

Thirst choked her. She wished she had water.

There was water in the house, and the house was not terribly far away. The old Kirstie could have walked there in five minutes. But this was the new, pathetically debilitated Kirstie, the Kirstie locked in a losing battle with whatever witches’ brew of toxins had been unleashed on her system; and this Kirstie could not walk another five feet.

It had required all her energy merely to take refuge in this one-room shack, part of a line of ramshackle row houses on the eastern end of the island. The shacks, she recalled Steve telling her, had been erected in the early part of the century, when a lime tree plantation had flourished on Pelican Key.

Two bunks, upper and lower, were built into one wall. There was no furniture, no lighting, no kitchen or bath; the one window long ago had been boarded up. The plantation workers had been housed like prisoners, two to a cell, without even a toilet of their own.

Hard to imagine how anyone could have lived in this filthy hole. But dying here-that was a different story. She was beginning to develop a disturbingly vivid picture of what that would be like.

Something whined in the dark. Mosquito, shut in with her. A tickle on her shoulder; the bug had alighted to feed. She was too weak to brush it away.

Well, let the goddamn thing drink its fill. Maybe the snake venom would kill it.

Distantly, the slam of a door.

She stiffened.

Had it been the wind? Had one of the row-house doors blown open and shut?

Another slam. Closer.

A brief pause, time enough for her to realize that she could feel her heartbeat now, its rhythm strong and fast, and then a third door banged shut, nearer still.

Someone was methodically checking the shacks, one at a time.

Absurdly she was seized with the impulse to fight. Crazy; she had no weapons, no strength.

But to lie here immobile and let death take her-to put up no final resistance, simply cower like a beaten animal…

Her right arm hurt too much to move. Reaching down with her left hand, she groped on the floor. Her fingers brushed past the dried carapaces of dead insects, brittle as bits of eggshell.

What did she think she was looking for, anyway? A shotgun conveniently left under the bunk? Or maybe a hand grenade or a bundle of dynamite sticks? Hopeless.

Slam. Closer.

She punched through a gummy meshwork of cobwebs under the bunk. Feeling along the wall, she touched something small and hard and slender, sharply pointed at one end. She withdrew it carefully.

A nail.

Some workman must have dropped it while boarding up the window. A good, long nail-three or four inches.

Slam. Very close now.

A ripple of light-headedness passed through her as she struggled upright. She took a slow step, then another, treading lightly to prevent the loose floorboards from squealing.

Slam. The next door down.

She found the door frame, leaned against the wall, the nail clutched tight in her fist.

Hardly a lethal weapon. But if she put it in his neck, she might disable him long enough to grab his gun-assuming he had a gun-and shoot him, shoot to kill.

She could kill now. Kill either of them. Yes, even Steve. He was not her husband anymore.

Outside, a crunch of footsteps.

There was a very good chance she would be dead within a few seconds. Oddly the thought did not frighten her. She had done her best. She could not have done more.

The door swung open. Pallid light streamed into the gloom. The emaciated shadow of a man stretched along the floor.

Kirstie raised the nail, holding it parallel with her line of vision.

The shadow wavered. The man leaned forward, his face in profile sliding into view.

At first she didn’t even recognize him. Mud streaked the bird’s-nest tangle of his hair. His eyes, sunk deep in the sockets, were underscored by dull crescents the color of dead flesh. Beard stubble dusted his cheeks, fringing cracked and swollen lips, the parched lips of a wanderer in the desert.

And his shirt-God-it was crusted with blood.

He didn’t see her. Though she had hesitated, though she ought to have forfeited the advantage of surprise, his glazed eyes, blinking vapidly, appeared to focus on nothing at all.

Against such a badly weakened adversary, even a three-inch nail wielded by a woman on the verge of collapse might prove as effective as a bayonet in a soldier’s hand.

But somehow she couldn’t make her arm lash out in a deadly thrust. It would be like… like killing a dead man.

Instead, almost involuntarily, she breathed his name.

“Steve…”

The sound of her voice took a second to register with him. He turned in her direction, eyes narrowed, lips pursed.

She couldn’t interpret the look on his face. Warily she lifted the nail in her clenched fist.

“Stay where you are. Don’t try anything.”

He didn’t seem to hear. With dreamlike slowness he reached out to touch her left hand, then gently pried open her unresisting fingers. The nail clattered onto the floor.

“Kirstie…” he whispered in a voice like death.

The sudden violence of his embrace shocked her. The press of his mouth against hers seemed to capture and condense every kiss they had ever shared into a frenzy of desperate, hurried intimacy.

She didn’t understand-it made no sense, none of it-yet she found herself holding him tight, stroking his matted, brier-strewn hair, as his mouth brushed her neck and he spoke her name again and again, each separate moan a new, agonized confession of remorse.

If this was another trick, another trap, then she would let him deceive her, let him win.