by Linda Ladd
Oh, God. Who was that? Someone else was out there. A second figure was moving out of the shadows into the smoky light right behind Michael. Michael didn't see him, and Kate hit her palm frantically on the glass trying to warn him but could only watch with horror as Michael suddenly whipped around. The other man's arm was extended, and a shot cracked, the report strangely muffled underneath the low-hanging fog bank.
“Michael!” she screamed, panicking, but both men had disappeared now, hidden by the thick swirls of fog. She wasn't sure if he'd been hit or not. Her shock faded as she realized she had to call 911. She ran to Pop's old rotary-dial phone, grabbed the receiver and held it between her ear and shoulder, her fingers fumbling at the numbers.
“Put the phone down."
Shocked to hear a voice so close behind her, Kate whirled around, losing her grip on the phone. It fell hard, clunked against the wall, then swung erratically back and forth by the cord. Kate stared at the complete stranger standing in her kitchen, disbelieving in that first stunned instant that he was actually there.
“That's a good girl,” he said in a voice that was strangely subdued, almost casual in tone, but very thickly accented. “Now put kid on floor and back that way.” He gestured toward the sink with the automatic weapon he held in his black-gloved right hand, a deadly dark-blue steel pistol aimed at her head.
Sheer, unadulterated horror engulfed her, and she couldn't make herself obey, couldn't make herself believe this was really happening, that it wasn't some kind of terrible nightmare. Fear jerked a knot in the back of her throat, and she put both arms protectively around Joey in his sling and stared wordlessly at the intruder. The man was tall, at least six feet, deeply tanned with faintly lighter circles around his eyes such as a lifeguard or an alpine downhill skier would have. Long white-blond hair was bound back at his nape. He wore a tiny diamond stud in one earlobe, and looked young, in his twenties most likely, lean and strongly built. He wore some kind of black windsuit and black Nike hightops. His eyes were black frozen ice. He watched her unblinkingly out of them, completely calm.
“Do it. Put boy down so you and me can have little chat.” He pronounced the last as lattol shot, and she suddenly recognized the accent. It was Russian. Like some of the Olympians from Moscow she'd met when she'd been running in marathon competitions. Oh, God, what was a Russian doing here? What did he want?
Kate finally forced her lips to move, but her knees were trembling violently inside the legs of her black silk pajamas. So was her voice when she got her mouth to work.
“Who are you? What do you want?” It had to be a robbery, she realized then. Michael had been right, after all. “We don't have any money here, but take the cars, they're expensive models, there's a Lexus and a brand-new Ford Explorer, take them both, take whatever you want. Just don't hurt us."
The blond kid smiled, revealing straight, extremely even teeth as white as his hair. “I know of you, Kate Reed. You win bronze medal. You gutsy woman, I think, but not so stupid. Put boy down so he won't get hurt."
For a fleeting instant Kate held to the hope that this was a bad dream, a really, really bad dream, but when she looked down at Joey, he was still sucking happily at his bottle, his round eyes latched adoringly on her face. He stopped a moment to grin, his lips curving around the nipple in his mouth. Oh, God, she couldn't let anything happen to him. No matter what else happened, she couldn't let them harm him.
“Do it,” the man ordered sharply. “Don't be stupid."
Kate stared at him, her mind racing, trying to come up with a plan. He wasn't wearing a disguise. She'd seen his face, could identify him, and everybody, especially the granddaughter of a lifelong law officer, knew what that meant. He meant to kill her. There was no compassion in those weird obsidian eyes either, nothing but cold, merciless power. And now as she continued to balk, a sliver of anger appeared in him, disrupting his unruffled demeanor.
“Do it!” he said, louder this time, but he was getting impatient because his alien accent became even thicker.
“All right,” she hedged, her heart thumping so hard that she shook with each beat. “Please, don't hurt us. We'll do what you want."
The pan of water was still boiling on the stove. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see steam rising in wisps, though she didn't look at it. An idea began to form, and she slowly obeyed the man with the gun, lifting Joey out of the sling with both hands, then turning slightly as if she meant to lay him on the linoleum floor in front of the dangling telephone.
As she bent over with him, she suddenly darted to the left instead, slapping her palm hard atop the push-button light switch. The room plunged into darkness, and Kate grabbed the handle of the pan and flung the boiling water at the intruder. The scream of pain that followed told Kate she'd hit her mark.
Clutching Joey, she dropped to a crouch behind the counter and crawled toward the bedroom as he stumbled around in the darkness, yelling in his own language and knocking over kitchen chairs in his search for the light switch. She didn't have much time, and she scrabbled quickly on hands and knees into the hall. A shot went off behind her in a strobe flash of black and white. The acrid odor of burning cordite filled her nostrils. Oh, God, he was going to kill her! Joey wailed as Kate tightened her grip on him and took off for the sliding doors in the bedroom. Struggling desperately, she finally forced the lever up and slung back the heavy glass door, just as the light flared on in the kitchen.
Frantic, heart thudding wildly, she ran across the small side deck and jumped down into the grass, losing one house shoe in the iris bed. She had to get away from the house, into the woods where the fog and darkness would hide her! She could hear the blond kid yelling again in Russian words she couldn't understand as she gained the forsythia hedge at the edge of the yard and scrambled headlong into its thick, low-lying branches.
Throat clogged with a solid lump of terror, she rocked Joey back and forth, trying to muffle his scared cries against her breast. He wouldn't stop, getting more and more furious and frightened as she tried to get him to hush, and she fumbled desperately for the bottle in the elastic band. She found it and gave it to him the best she could with hands shaking uncontrollably, praying he'd stop crying, her whole body quivering. He took the nipple, and Kate held him tightly. Oh, God, they already had Michael. They shot at him. Oh, God, oh, God, what was she going to do?
Two
FOR THE FIRST chilling moments Kate sat carved in stone, on her knees, every muscle rigid. All she could hear was the pounding of her heart—hard, fast thuds that filled her ears and drowned out everything else. Frozen with the most utter, complete fear she had ever known, she clasped Joey tightly against her breast and struggled for the presence of mind to search the darkness for Michael. He had to be out there somewhere, probably hiding as she was. Oh, God, he had to be. He couldn't be dead, he couldn't! None of this could be happening.
But it was happening. Somewhere out in the black foggy night she heard another man call out. This one shouted in Russian, too, the deep voice drifting eerily through the cloying dampness. Disembodied, hostile, excited with blood lust. They'd come to kill them, her and Michael both; somehow her instincts told her that. The big blond man, his eyes had told her that, too, cold, lethal, eager to spill blood.
Oh, God help them. Why was this happening? She rubbed her face with one hand, found her skin sweaty and hot despite the clammy air. She couldn't stop trembling, no matter how hard she tried, and she clamped her teeth tightly together and heaved in a lungful of cool air through her nostrils. She had to pull herself together, she had to, if she and Joey had any hope of getting out of this alive.
Two men were down at the riverbank. She could hear them shouting back and forth at each other, and it sounded as though they were speaking Russian, too, but she couldn't quite tell for sure. She raised her head and strained her ears as they came closer, running up the concrete steps that led from the river to the rear sundeck.
This is absurd, impossible, she kept thi
nking but knew she didn't have time to dwell on that. It was happening, and armed men were out there, searching everywhere for her. She had a chance to evade them so long as it was dark, but when dawn broke they'd find her. She had to get away, now, before the sun rose.
Shutting her eyes, she swallowed hard and tried to reason. Come on, Kate, suck it up. You're the only one Joey has. She wasn't sure if they would hurt him, but if they were ready to shoot Michael and her in cold blood, Joey wouldn't have a chance against them. She wasn't about to let them get their dirty hands on her baby.
Okay, think, think, think. Reaching either of the cars was out. Her Explorer was locked up, out front, and she didn't have the keys anyway. Michael's Lexus was inside the garage, and that's the first place the blond guy with the gun would expect her to go. All the lights were on inside the house now, and the shadows flickering across the windows told her that somebody was in there searching for her. It dawned on her then that her only chance was to try to escape on the river. Pop's jon boat was still tied up at the concrete landing, gassed and ready to go. All she had to do was get to it.
Her mouth went dry at the thought, her lips stiff, and she moistened them with her tongue as she peered toward the river. Rolling fog obscured everything, shrouding the trees, wisping and swirling upward in columns in some spooky, macabre dance. She could hear the distant soft rush of the current behind the harsh grate of cicadas. She had to get past the men, and she had to do it while it was still dark. She could make it to the boathouse blindfolded. She knew the yard and riverbank better than anyone. More importantly, the men after her didn't.
You can do this, you can, she told herself firmly, ignoring the goosebumps sweeping up her spine and pebbling the flesh of her arms and legs inside the thin silk of her pajamas. Thank God they were black and would blend with the night, but Joey's sling was white. She'd have to bend over to keep the men from seeing it glowing in the darkness. She put her hand down and found the top of Joey's head. His curls were silky under her fingertips, and God bless him, she could hear him sucking contentedly on the bottle. Maybe he'd be good, keep quiet for awhile. He was used to being inside the sling while she went about her work at the bait shop. Maybe all this jostling wouldn't seem so strange to him. She settled him securely inside, adjusting the strap more tightly so that he'd ride snugly against her chest. Thank God for the elastic band that held his bottle in place. Listening intently, she slipped off the other house slipper, waited a moment, then took a deep breath and inched deeper into the overhanging bushes, angling away from the yard toward the woods behind the forsythia hedge.
She wished she had a gun. She was a good shot, a very good shot. Pop had made sure of that when she was growing up. She had scoffed at Michael, but he'd been right to be concerned. She had a bad feeling about him. He was dead, she felt sure of it; the gunman had been too close to miss him. In her mind she saw him dead—lying on the ground, blood all over him, a black bullet hole between his eyes. She shook off that awful image. She couldn't think about that now. She had to think about Joey and getting him to safety. Michael might have escaped, he could have; she had to hope he had.
Slowly, cautiously, every nerve ending taut and quivering like plinked piano strings, her legs like bags of jelly, she inched along on her hands and knees, Joey secure against her chest. Every instinct told her to hurry, hurry, move faster, faster, get away, get as far away as you can, but she could hear the small sounds she was making, the rustling of dead leaves, twigs snapping beneath her weight, no matter how hard she tried to keep quiet. If she could hear them, they could hear them.
She stopped again and listened. Thank God for the fog. She wouldn't have a chance without it. The moist gray clouds were protecting her, distorting sounds with their rising columns and rolling, stealthy creep across the grass. The coolness of it surrounded her, filled with the fishy odor of the river, the earthy smell of wet grass. She realized that she'd begun to shake again, couldn't seem to stop, and a terrible taste fouled her tongue, sour, bilious, sickening. The taste of fear.
Her breath caught at the sound of running footsteps crossing the grass, muffled into dull, quick thuds. She backed more deeply into the wet foliage, afraid they were getting ready to beat the bushes for her. Someone ran past her hiding place, and after a godawful eternity of building up her courage again, she took off, quickly this time, toward the woodshed off to the right of the circle thrown from the security light.
Michael had been accosted just below where she was now, and she tried to pick out a dark form lying on the grass but couldn't see anything. The woodshed was built of red brick, about ten feet square. She got to the rear of it undetected and pushed herself to her feet, her back pressed against the wall. Entirely enfolded in the mists, she rocked back and forth with Joey in a lame attempt to keep him calm, or maybe she was trying to keep herself calm. She strained her ears, trying to find out where the men were before she struck out for the boat.
Gasping, she pressed back as a figure emerged under the lamplight and headed swiftly up the hill toward the cabin, swirls of fog trailing out in his wake before he was swallowed up again. It wasn't the guy who'd accosted her in the kitchen, but a shorter man with a close beard, a goatee. His clothes were dark and he had a flashlight in his hand, one with an intense white illumination like those carried by cops. The bright beam of light slid back and forth, aimed up the yard toward the house, trapped under the fog like a lantern inside a pup tent.
Her heart began to pound again. How many of them were there? She was so scared that she had to force herself to move again when his footsteps finally faded. She crept, crouched over, to the big cottonwood tree, knowing that once she was there, she was within feet of the riverbank. Keeping down, she felt around until she reached the low concrete wall that edged the landing built about twenty yards upriver from the bait shop and boat ramp. She hunkered down and strained her ears. The gush of the river drowned out everything else now, gurgling and splashing in eddies around the concrete landing steps.
She was close now but she still had to be careful. She peered up at the cabin and saw the faint glow of flashlights under the mist. Feeling more confident now that all of them were up there looking for her, she stepped over the wall and hurried across the concrete pad and down the steps where the boat was moored to an iron ring.
Except for the rushing water, eerie silence held the night. Heart in her mouth, she made her way to the jon boat rocking in the current at the base of the stairs. The familiar odor of the river was welcome, and she embraced it like an old, dear friend. Current River looked black and deep in the strange gray light, foreboding as daylight began to dispel the darkness. Across the water on the far bank she could see the beginning of the faint pearly glow over the trees that heralded morning. She didn't have much time left before the men could see her.
Joey was beginning to get restless, no longer nursing but squirming around inside his quilted bed. Please, please, don't cry, she said over and over to herself, stepping down into the fifteen-foot aluminum boat and feeling it dip beneath her weight. The sky was festooned with a few pink streamers over the horizon, and the mist was already beginning to dissipate. Fumbling with fingers that seemed glued together, she managed to jerk loose the knot and pull the tether free from the mooring ring. She climbed over the middle seat and safely settled in the stern. She sat down and put her hand on the motor. Still no outcry. They hadn't seen her.
Picking up the paddle lying in the bottom, she put the end of it against the steps and shoved hard, propelling the boat out into the stream. When she floated free she sat still, allowing the current to take her away from the dock, her fingers curled over the handle of the start-up cord. Please, please, start, she thought, then jerked hard. A whine first, then a loud buzz as it caught, but then Kate's heart sank as it gave a couple of halfhearted sputters and died. The sudden loud noise frightened Joey, and his high-pitched scream echoed out over the water, telegraphing their location as surely as a giant pointed finger.
“The river! The river! Get her before she gets away!"
That floated to her loud and clear, one of the foreigners speaking in English. They weren't at the house as she'd thought, but closer, down in the backyard. She jerked the cord again, able now to see dark figures running down the steps. Oh, God, God, she had to get it started. The boat was floating slowly downstream toward the boat ramp where the men were headed.
Frantically she jerked the cord again. Again and again. Joey yelled louder, his voice muffled somewhat by the sling, and she sobbed with growing despair as the motor wouldn't catch. Then she realized she hadn't pulled out the choke. She jerked it out. The men were almost to the bottom of the hill, well within gunshot range. Grinding her teeth together she yanked one last time, giving it all she had. The motor fired, the buzz-saw roar music to Kate's ears. She grabbed the handle and thrust it down full throttle, veering the bow out to midriver, then upstream.
Her nearest neighbor was downriver as was the town of Van Buren, but her only choice was to head the boat straight up the channel where the river was deep and swift, away from the men with guns scattering out along the bank behind her. The speed of her flight broke up the fog and sent feathery patches up into the gradually lightening sky. She peered back over her shoulder and saw a man on the landing firing a gun at them. She ducked down but when she looked back a second later, she saw the others piling into a boat pulled up on the launching ramp. Oh lord, they'd come in by boat. She pressed the throttle harder but the ancient motor was already at full capacity.
Kate wasn't one to kid herself. Their boat was bigger and a lot more powerful. Pop had bought his old Evinrude at least twenty years ago, maybe more. It was on its last legs, good for lazy days of fishing but not for life-and-death chases with killers. She didn't have a chance to escape them once they opened their throttle; she'd be done for in minutes.