Final Panic

16

Somehow, Jim had reached the shore.

He lay there, gasping for air, breathing heavily, flat on his back.

He was freezing cold. His body was shivering almost uncontrollably. The water had been colder than he’d realized.

But there wasn’t any time to rest. He couldn’t let that fake cop get away.

Jim stood up, his wet pants clinging to him heavily.

Again, his hand reflexively went to the Ruger that wasn’t there.

He scanned his surroundings.

It was mostly just trees. A couple scrubby bushes here and there. A patch of sand. Some kind of beach. A couple of pieces of permanently installed exercise equipment. Pull-up bars and parallel bars.

A house stood about a hundred yards away. A regular, nondescript sort of house. Two stories.

No sign of Andy or the boat. Or the stolen gear.

It was hard to think quickly and clearly with his body exhausted, pushed to the very edge. But he concentrated on his breathing, which steadied his thoughts, and gave him some kind of stability.

Andy couldn’t be that far. Right now, he’d be trying to find a vehicle with which to abscond with the gear. He had to continue on land now, where the boat was of no use to him. He must be somewhere close by, near the shore.

The house. That was the answer.

There didn’t appear to be anyone home. Of course, it wasn’t as if he could go by whether lights were on or not.

But there were subtle signs that his eyes picked up. There wasn’t a car in the driveway. That was an obvious sign.

But there was something else, something about how the flag near the front door had gotten wrapped around the pole in the wind. No one had been there to untangle it.

Or maybe they’d been scared to.

Maybe there was someone holed up in the basement, clutching a shotgun or a butcher knife, shaking with fear.

It was a chance Jim had to take.

He made his way to the front door, his sopping wet clothes hanging heavily on his frame.

He tried the door handle before knocking. Unsurprisingly, it was unlocked.

That almost certainly meant there was no one home.

The door creaked open and Jim stepped across the threshold into the darkened downstairs. The curtains had been drawn and not much light entered.

Normally, he would have liked to take stock of the situation. He would have liked to understand his surroundings, to check to make sure there really wasn’t anyone there, and to check for anything useful that he could use.

But there wasn’t any time for that.

Jim’s body was exhausted, but the possibility of spotting Andy was giving him new energy. He bounded up the stairs, two at a time.

There was a small bedroom that faced the lake. Jim entered, stepping over the things that had been scattered across the floor, as if someone had been packing in haste and abandoned the project at the last minute.

At the window, Jim threw back the curtains.

Outside, the sky was gray. He could see the lake, which seemed to stretch endlessly out and into nothing. He couldn’t believe that he’d swum across it.

No sign of Andy.

Not yet, anyway.

Jim was patient.

He knew that it was normal for the human brain to miss seeing objects that were right there. He’d chatted with a former air force fighter pilot once. He’d just been some nondescript guy who’d wandered into Jim’s shop, and they’d happened to get to chatting. It turned out the guy had been a really good pilot, and he said the trick to it all was in the eyes.

Jim hadn’t known what he’d meant at first, and had asked him more about it.

The eyes, the guy had explained, move seemingly on their own. When there are blind spots, like the pillars in a car that border the windshield, your eyes skip right over them. And in doing so, they tend to miss things near the blind spots.

So, the answer, according to the former pilot, was to force yourself to focus your eyes on three distinct spots that span across the field of vision.

Jim had tried it out in his car, driving around Rochester. He’d found it fine at first, but as he’d kept practicing, he realized that he was noticing things that he would have otherwise missed. And then one day, it saved him getting plowed into by an enormous SUV that was coming towards him in his blind spot.

Jim did the trick now, focusing on three points outside the window.

And then he saw it.

It was the boat, tucked neatly away amid some shrubs.

It was about a half mile to the east.

If the boat was there, Andy would be nearby.

There was no time to waste.

It was unlikely that Andy’d managed to find a working vehicle in such a short amount of time. But there were plenty of other means by which he could escape. All he needed to find was a bicycle, and he could be off Jim’s radar in no time.

Jim raced back down the stairs, threw the door open, and took off at a run towards the east, where he’d seen the boat.

It wasn’t until he was halfway there, that the rush of adrenaline started to die off, leaving him with muscles so exhausted that they felt like nothing but dead weight.

He didn’t think he could keep going.

He slowed to a jog.

And then a walk.

And now he was barely making headway. Each step he took seemed impossibly difficult, impossibly painful. The lake had taken almost everything out of him already. He wasn’t sure how much he had left to give.

When he found Andy, how would he have the strength to fight?

There was no time to rest.

And that’s when he remembered, reaching for his Ruger, that he’d lost it.

His mind must have been scrambled from the fatigue. He should have searched the house for a weapon. For a knife. For a baseball bat. For anything at all.

Now he was empty-handed.

He’d reached the boat, his thoughts distracting himself from the painfully exhausting walk.

Nearby, the water lapped gently against the shore. The sky was gray, and the nervous chatter of small birds was nearby.

Jim looked towards the woods, and he saw Andy, dragging some kind of improvised sled, piled high with Jim’s own gear and supplies.

Jim reached again for the Ruger that wasn’t there, and his heart started pounding in his chest. It didn’t feel good, and it didn’t feel right. The beat felt fast and slow at the same time. It felt heavy, and it made him feel sick. It felt like his blood was cool.

He’d have to think of something. His eyes scanned the area for some kind of weapon. They settled on the boat’s paddle. It was big and heavy. Maybe too unwieldy to swing easily. But it would do serious damage if it smacked into a skull. Andy hadn’t swung it hard enough, but Jim knew that he could.

Off in the distance, Andy seemed to be struggling with getting the gear over something in the ground. Maybe some rocks. Maybe some jagged pieces of concrete that had been left there. Jim’s vision seemed worse than normal, and he couldn’t make it out.

Jim kept his eyes on Andy as he reached for the paddle.

Just as his hand wrapped around the wood of the paddle, Andy turned around and saw him. Andy’s eyebrows shot up and a look of fear took over his face.

A scared enemy was a dangerous enemy.

Andy’s hand went right for his gun. He was fumbling. And he clearly wasn’t a good shot. But it didn’t matter.

All that mattered was that he had a gun and Jim didn’t.