Deadly Pursuit

46

Their embrace might have lasted a minute, an hour. They clung to each other, swaying slowly like dancers.

“It’s all right, Steve,” Kirstie murmured in a soothing tone. “Everything is all right.”

His breath was damp on her neck. “Forgive me.”

“I do. I do.”

The words felt like a second marriage vow.

Abruptly his knees weakened; he sagged in her arms. She helped him to the bunk and sat him down like a weary child. He slumped against the wall, eyes half shut.

Under the ragged remnants of his shirt, a faint trickle of fresh blood was visible. Droplets pattered on the bunk, red rain.

She looked him over more carefully. Blood had soaked not only his shirt but his pants, even staining the Nikes tied incongruously to a belt loop. His feet, bare like her own, were raw with lacerations.

He was not a dead man, as she’d thought. But he was close. So close.

She touched his cheek. His eyelids fluttered. He blinked at her, then noticed the incisions in her arm and shoulder, ugly and swollen and ringed with purplish vesicles.

“What… what happened?” he croaked.

“Snake bit me.”

He nodded. His mouth curved into a brief, rueful smile. “Me, too.”

She knew which snake he meant. “Have you been… shot?”

“Stabbed.” The word was a hoarse rasp. “Jack left me for dead. In the swamp.”

The swamp.

In her mind she saw it again: Jack plunging forward, the gun firing harmlessly.

At the time she had attributed her survival to some sort of miracle. And now it appeared she’d been right-only it had been a different order of miracle from what she’d imagined.

It had been Steve. Risking his life to knock Jack off his feet and prevent the fatal shot from reaching its target.

But if Steve had saved her-if he had been willing even to die for her-then why…?

“Why did you try to shoot me?” she whispered.

“Shoot you?” He lifted his head, honest bewilderment in his eyes.

“On the dock.”

“I was never near the dock.”

“Dammit, I saw you.”

“It must have been Jack.”

She almost made some sharp reply, then hesitated. What had she seen, exactly? Steve’s nylon jacket, the glint of his eyeglasses, the gun.

He was wearing neither the jacket nor the glasses now. And the Beretta-Jack had that, didn’t he? He’d had it in the swamp.

“Oh, God,” she whispered. “It was him.” And she had hidden in the black waters as Steve pleaded for her to answer. So much blood and pain could have been saved, so much horror. “If I’d known…”

“Doesn’t matter now. Listen.” Every word, every breath, cost him an obvious effort. “We can still get away.”

“How?”

“Jack’s runabout. I helped him hide it. I was on my way to it when

… when I saw your footprints in the dirt.”

“Is it far?”

He coughed. A spray of vivid red bearded his chin. “Just beyond these shacks. Maybe… fifty yards north… edge of the beach…”

She took his hand. “Then let’s go.”

He struggled to rise, pushed himself halfway to his feet, and then his legs folded and he sank to the floor, head lowered, gasping.

“Can’t,” he whispered, “No more… strength.”

She gripped his shoulders and helped him up. He reclined on the bunk. Another sputtering cough brought fresh blood to his lips.

“Boat is… camouflaged.” His voice was fading, barely audible. “Palm fronds.”

“I’m not going without you.”

“You have to. Get to shore. Tell the police. Tell them”-his eyes squeezed shut-“everything.”

She hesitated, then nodded. It was the only way. “I’ll tell them. And they’ll come for you. You’ll be all right.”

His labored breathing was more regular, his features smooth. He did not answer.

Unconscious. Perhaps slipping into a coma. The blood on his mouth-it signaled a hemorrhage, didn’t it?

She had to hurry. She’d gotten her husband back. She would not lose him again.

A last caress of his matted hair, and then she was moving toward the doorway. Distantly she was aware of new energy surging through her, a fresh release of adrenaline combating the poison’s effects.

She left the shack, shutting the door softly behind her, and headed down the line of row houses.

Fifty yards north, he’d said. Not far.

She reached the end of the line, turned the corner-and stopped.

“Out for your morning stroll, Mrs. G?”

Kirstie felt no shock, no fear. She felt nothing. The only words in her mind were a simple acknowledgment of the obvious: Well, of course.

She stared at Jack Dance, standing six feet from her in a haze of morning light.

No longer was he the neatly dressed, suavely smiling figure she had seen on the beach twenty-four hours ago. The crisp lines of his jeans and denim shirt had been chewed to ragged tatters. His hair, formerly combed and styled, was a disheveled horror flecked with black crumbs of earth.

And his smile-it was still there, stubbornly ineradicable, as if pasted on his face, but it held no humor now, not even the cruel humor of mockery. It was the frozen smirk of a madman.

Civilization had dressed him up in clothes and manners, concealing his essential self under a gloss of style. A night in swamp and jungle had scraped off that disguise. Now he was naked in her sight, a thing subhuman and despicable. She wondered if all his victims had seen him that way in their last moments.

So close, a voice in her mind whispered. I was so close to making it.

A hurtful, piercing sliver of regret was the only emotion she had the strength to feel.

“Nice day for a walk,” Jack went on pleasantly, trying for a light, bantering tone, the glib insouciance of the man he had spent his life pretending to be. “But an even better day for you to die.”

The Beretta in his hand slowly lifted, the muzzle targeting her chest.

She waited, safely past the final extremity of fear, at a point of surreal calm.

Though she was unafraid, she heard her heart pounding. Louder. Louder. The hard, steady throb unnaturally audible.

No. Not her heartbeat.

The whop-whop-whop of rotor blades.

Jack frowned. “What the hell…?”

He glanced up, and his face froze.

“Shit.”

Kirstie followed his gaze, glimpsed a metallic glint in the western sky, brightening as it expanded.

Fingers clamped on her arm. Jack pulled her to the front of the building, kicked open the door of the nearest shack. A hard shove, and she stumbled through the doorway and fell sprawling on the floor.

He hugged the door frame, watching the sky as the chopper swung directly overhead.

“Miami P.D.,” he muttered. “Goddammit.”

She couldn’t quite understand. The police? Was he saying the police were here? It seemed like a dream. Everything was a dream.

Slowly the helicopter moved on, its rotor noise diminishing as it explored the north end of the island.

When he turned to her, his face was flushed and wild, his eyes unnaturally wide. “Looks like you get to live a little longer, Meredith. If I were you, I’d savor every moment.”

“My name’s not-”

The door slammed behind him. Darkness closed over her like a smothering embrace.

Outside, brief rattle of the doorknob. A thud, shaking the wall. Then, running footsteps.

Kirstie crawled across yards of bare floorboards till the wall bumped up against her groping hands. She pulled herself upright, crabbed along the wall to the door, and tugged at the knob.

The door wouldn’t yield. Jack had secured it somehow, though there was no lock.

The only other exit was the window, boarded up. She had no tools with which to work the nails free.

Trapped, then. She was trapped.

Her brief burst of energy was over. Her thoughts swam giddily; she could make sense of nothing. The police were here, but how? She hadn’t reached Islamorada, hadn’t even found the boat…

It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Despair and fatigue overwhelmed her.

She slumped against the door. The only desire left to her was a feeble, plaintive wish to see the sunrise.

Almost certainly the last sunrise of her life.