Hal fell to the floor. She stumbled once more, unable to wrench her eyes from the sight of him, writhing on the floor, one hand clasped around the screwdriver. She couldn’t tell whether he was attempting to pull it out or just trying to decide what the hell it was. His beautiful face had turned monstrous. She whirled around and ran for the ladder, the canoe, the lagoon, the mangroves, ran to reclaim the life he had stolen from her. She scrambled down the ladder, and leaped into the canoe. It tipped, it rocked, a scream raced up her throat and exploded into the air, raw shards of noise. She grabbed onto the paddles, but went nowhere.
The rope, oh Christ, the rope was still tied to the ladder. Her fingers fumbled at the knot. She got it loose, tore it off the rung, and it dropped into the water.
Then she paddled furiously, madly, without looking back.
Hal, Hal, Hal.
The mangroves moved closer.
It started to rain, slow, hard drops at first. Faster, faster, oh God…
The canoe began to fill with water. It lapped at her feet, rose over her heels. Rain rolled into her eyes and she kept blinking and paddling, blinking and paddling, her body approaching adrenal exhaustion.
Then the green closed around her, branches snapped back in her face and clawed at her clothes.
Faster.
Faster.
When she looked back, she could no longer see the chickee. She could no longer see anything.
Gone, the bitch is gone.
He knew it as soon as he came to, lying on his back on the open platform, rain pouring into his face, the screwdriver sticking up out of his right shoulder. He saw it in a corner of his vision, standing upright like a flagpole, a big chunk of the metal embedded in him. Blood stained the fabric around it, most of it from when he had tried to jerk the screwdriver out earlier and had passed out from the pain. The rain had turned his blood pink and it ran off of him, diluted, anemic.
Hal rolled onto his left side, then pushed up very slowly to a sitting position. Bad, but not so bad that he would pass out again. Rain lashed his face as he pushed to his feet. He stumbled into the kitchen, under cover, and swayed. He felt so dizzy he thought he would puke. He gripped the edge of the counter to steady himself and stared out through the curtain of rain that swept across the lagoon.
Darkness.
Rain whipped sideways across the water in a shimmering curtain that reduced his visibility to practically zilch. He tried to reach for Rae, to find her beyond that curtain of water, somewhere out there in the mangroves. But he was too weak. And he would remain weak until he took care of his injury.
His shoulder had become a hot, oozing throb. He lit a lantern, then unlocked the drawer where he kept his first aid supplies. Weaving like a drunk, he carried them over to the table. He eased himself into one of the chairs.
He picked out everything he needed, bottles of this, jars of that, a needle and thread, scissors, and a dozen penicillin tablets. The first thing he did was cut away his shirt, exposing his shoulder. His head spun when he saw just how deeply the screwdriver was buried in him. At least three inches. Blood seeped around it.
Had it hit an artery? If he pulled the screwdriver out would it be like pulling a plug? But he couldn’t travel with the goddamn screwdriver sticking out of him. Do it.
He swabbed the area with alcohol, then betadine, wrapped a sterile cloth around the base of it, then began to ease it out very, very slowly. Hot agonizing shoots of pain raced down into his arm. His vision blurred from the pain. Twice he nearly passed out.
He stopped frequently to check the bleeding. Worse, but he saw no sudden spurts, nothing to indicate the metal had punctured an artery. A little more, just another inch. Jaws clenched, he eased the metal out the rest of the way. Stars exploded in his eyes, he dropped the screwdriver and collapsed against the table, panting from the waves of pain that crashed over him.
After a time, with his hand still pressing the cloth tightly over the wound, he lifted his head from the table.
Fresh cloth, he thought.
Rae did this to me.
Peroxide, more betadine, sterilize the needle in alcohol.
But Fletcher is responsible.
He worked now like a man possessed, doing what needed to be done. He handled it okay until the instant when he poked the needle through the inflamed flesh around the puncture wound and then he lost it big time. He shot out of the chair, howling, the needle still stuck in his skin, swinging like a miniature pendulum. The sudden movement caused fresh bleeding and when he fell back into the chair, blood rolled down his arm.
In all, he took eighteen tiny stitches with heavy duty black thread. It stopped the bleeding but not the pain. The shoulder pulsed and throbbed like an abscessed tooth, a steady, maddening beat without relief. He bandaged it, swallowed two more penicillin tablets and three Tylenols with codeine.
The rain still came down, a tempest. Rae wouldn’t get very far in it and neither would he. But he didn’t have time to wait now. Fletcher would pay for this, for all of it. And then he would vanish like Houdini again.
As for Rae, let her rot. He didn’t want her anymore. She’d tried to kill him. And she wouldn’t get out of here alive, anyway.
Not only was she terrified of water, she would be terrified by everything else out there, too. Her panic would do her in and the Everglades, cruel and eternal, would do the rest.
By then, he would be gone like the wind.
Chapter 28
Hal left the chickee on a puny Zodiac raft that Big Guy could have punctured in seconds if he’d been in the lagoon. It had been strapped to the roof, where Rae couldn’t get to it. He hoped the blinding rain had driven the gator farther into the mangroves and that it made a meal of Rae.
The Zodiac putted through the canopied tunnels to where he’d left the airboat. He loaded his belongings on board, then headed out across Hell’s Bay.
The rain swept in great, shuddering sheets across the bay, biting his face, soaking him through his poncho. Bolts of lightning spilled electric blue light across the water, allowing him to see where he was going. The noise of the storm nearly swallowed the roar of the airboat’s engine.
By the time he neared shore, exhaustion suffused him. He wanted desperately to climb into someplace warm and dry and fall asleep. Instead, he forced himself to keep moving. As long as he moved, he could hold back his fatigue.
He tethered the airboat in the mangroves, unloaded his belongings, and hiked along the edge of the road to the hammock where he kept his truck. He unlocked it, tossed his things into the passenger seat, and scrambled inside.
He pulled dry clothes from his bag, changed, chewed three more Tylenols. Then he cranked up the truck and pulled onto the road that led out of the park. Traffic didn’t exist at this hour in the park and the storm only reinforced that. He got out of the park in forty minutes, but on the open road his visibility shrank to just about zero.
Hal pulled off into a cluster of trees and brush, killed the engine, and sat back. Rain drummed the roof of the truck and streamed over the windshield. He felt used up, depleted, directionless. Even though he’d considered the chickee only a temporary home, it had been home in the deepest sense of the word, a place that grounded him, a refuge to which he could return. Now that had been ripped away from him.
He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and an image of Fletcher took shape inside of them. Fletcher with her coy smile, her hard eyes, her relentless agenda. And suddenly his consciousness sprang away from him, reaching for her, yearning to squash her like a goddamn bug.
But he couldn’t find her. His fatigue was too great to reach across vast distances right now. She might have moved out of Pier 66 after the coral snake incident, but even if she had, he would be able to locate her once he got within the city limits. He would find her the way he always had, through that irritating static, that envelope of white noise that seemed to surround her.
The same noise, he realized, h
ad surrounded Sheppard out at the pub, but not in the same way. With him, the static had pulsed erratically, allowing Hal to squeeze inside it and turn on the pressure in his skull. He sensed the difference was significant, but had no idea why.
He pulled back into the road, puzzling over this apparent contradiction. In the past, the only times he’d been able to reach unimpeded into Fletcher had been when they had sex or, less frequently, when she slept. It used to bug him, but he eventually wrote it off to some quirk that she and Steele had shared. But now the whole question took on new meaning and urgency.
The rain abated somewhat as he neared Lauderdale. Streetlights swung eerily in the wet wind and water from standing pools splashed against the sides of the truck He crossed the bridge that led to Pier 66, swung into the lot, and nosed into a parking space. He turned off the engine, shifted his body into a more comfortable position, and reached for Fletcher.
Nothing. Not even the white noise.
He reached again, tossing out a wider net. He caught the flotsam of dreams, orgasmic rushes, drunken gropings, laughter, cruelty, love, a vast emotional spectrum. But he didn’t find Fletcher.
He didn’t think she’d left town, but knew of one sure way of finding out.
Hal reached into his bag and brought out a notepad where he’d scribbled phone numbers, addresses, impressions, ideas for photos. He flipped through the pages until he found the address he was looking for. Then, smiling to himself, he backed out of the parking space and turned north on U.S. 1.
Thanks to the weather, they didn’t get off the ground until nearly one A.M. As soon as they reached a thousand feet, turbulence gripped the seaplane and Sheppard’s stomach rolled over. He suddenly wished he’d driven.
Fighting a headwind and rain, it took them twice as long as it should have just to reach the outer fringes of the Glades. Once the park lay beneath them, Young brought the plane down to 800 feet, but the visibility here wasn’t any better than it had been higher up. Surrounded by a wet darkness, Sheppard suddenly knew how Jonah felt in the belly of the whale.
Young had to resort to instruments to find Hell’s Bay. When they were supposedly right over it, Sheppard peered down and saw only blackness. “Maybe your instruments are wrong,” he shouted over the noise of the engine.
“It’s down there,” Young shouted back.
He dropped down to 150 feet and flew over the frothing bay. Manacas had said the trail markers nearest Hal’s hideout were in the higher digits; according to the park map, the higher digits lay on the west side of the lake. Sheppard pointed westward. “Land over there. I don’t want to cross this shit in a rubber raft.”
Young nodded, and the seaplane lifted suddenly, leaving Sheppard’s stomach behind. He gripped the edges of his seat as Young swung around again and came in for his final approach. Rain hammered the windshield. The wind kept catching the right wing and tossing it upward, as if to flip the plane over on its back.
Then the pontoons struck the surface of the water. Struck hard. Sheppard’s body snapped forward, his stomach revolted, and he doubled over and threw up on the floor at his feet.
“Shep, take this. Drink it.” Young shoved a bottle of Gatorade at him.
Sheppard lifted his head, wiped his arm across his mouth, took the bottle and sipped at it. The plane bobbed on the surface of the water. Young had turned on a pair of spotlights that illuminated a shimmering curtain of rain. Beyond it, mangroves embraced a small cove.
He throttled back on the power, nosed carefully into the cove, and killed the engine. In the noisy silence, water splashed against the pontoons. Neither of them moved. They just stared out the windshield as the vast, impenetrable blackness of the mangroves. Then Young threw open his door.
“I’ve got to secure the plane.”
Sheppard released his seatbelt and opened the passenger door. He stepped out onto the pontoon, his eyes fixed on the twin beams of the spotlights. Brilliant lights. But they barely dented the blackness.
No way, he thought. He slipped back inside the plane and crawled into the rear. They’d removed the backseat, but even so the inflatable dinghy and their supplies took up most of the space. Sheppard pushed everything around, found his rolled-up sleeping bag, and propped it against the side of the dinghy, and laid down.
He heard the door open, heard the rush of wind, then Young said: “Hey, Shep.”
“What.”
“C’mon, let’s launch the dinghy.”
“I’m not launching a fucking rubber dinghy in this weather, to go into a black swamp where we’d be as good as blind, Gerry. And I don’t think Bennet is going anywhere, either. It’ll be light in a few hours. We can go then.”
Young scrambled into the back, grabbed the front of Sheppard’s jacket, jerked him forward, and hissed, “Rae Steele has been missing for nine days, Sheppard. We’re going in.”
In the glow of the spotlights that spilled through the front window, his face looked wild, almost manic. Sheppard threw off Young’s hands and shoved him away. “What the fuck’s wrong with you? Flashlights won’t do shit in those mangroves. And if we’re lost in there, what the hell good are we going to do her?”
Young’s face suddenly sagged in the jowls, as if weighted by excessive gravity. The glow of the spotlights deepened the lines at his eyes, his hair looked grayer. He seemed to be aging as they stared at each other. Then he held up his hands, patting the air and nodding. “You’re right. You’re absolutely right. We’ll wait for the storm to let up. We’ll grab some sleep. Yeah.” He kept nodding to himself as he crawled into the front and turned off the spotlights. “Good idea. Sleep an hour, then do it.” His hands burrowed through the supplies and yanked out the roll of his sleeping bag. He put it at the far end of the plane and sank down against it.
In seconds, his snoring punctuated the splash of water against the pontoons. Sheppard puzzled over what he’d glimpsed in Young’s face, something that didn’t fit. But he couldn’t seize it and finally surrendered to the slow rocking of the plane.
She woke suddenly, inexplicably, her eyes snapping open to the darkness of her bedroom. Before she even blinked, a dry, calloused hand clamped down over her mouth and a muscular arm locked around her neck, immobilizing her, nearly choking her. Mira’s senses blew wide open; a thick, crippling miasma rushed into her.
It’s him. Bennet. Hal Bennet.
An alarm shrieked inside of her and she immediately threw up a wall around her fear, sealing it away where he couldn’t find it.
“You scream, you’re dead.” He whispered it, his voice as slippery as moss.
She nodded slowly and he removed his hand from her mouth, but the pressure around her throat remained. “I can hardly breathe,” she rasped.
He eased up on the pressure, then his head loomed above her, a dark, featureless shape. Smells assaulted her, his smells, of wind and water, sweat and smoke and sex, a thick, suffocating stink. She felt like vomiting.
Behind the scents, she felt him, the feeling tone unique to Bennet, the sum total of who he was. And it, this presence, this psychic gestalt, seemed to dissolve as soon as she perceived it, seeping through the pores of her-skin like some noxious gas. She felt the moment that it came together again inside of her and molded itself to her, to the shape of her soul.
“Now, first question.” His breath warmed the side of her face. “Is Lenora Fletcher still in town?”
“Yes.” She felt him inside of her now, weighing her answer, reading it, scooping her out with his psychic hands. “She was with a man I read for at the fair tonight.”
“You mean last night. It’s nearly five A.M.”
“Yes, last night.”
“What fair?”
“The Lauderdale street fair. We … I … my store … has a booth.”
“Where you do readings and shit.”
“Yes.”
“And she was dressed like …” He paused and Mira felt him swimming through her, looking for Fletch
er. “A witch?” He exploded with laughter. “Who was she with?”
She blurted, “If you can see her as a witch, then you can see who the hell she was with.”
His essence exploded inside her, infecting every cell of her being, every crack in her soul. A terrible throb mounted in her skull, right between her eyes. She winced with pain, then gasped, every muscle in her body twitching hard, as if she’d been splayed like a frog and pinned to a strip of velvet.
It ended just as abruptly as it had begun; it was like having a rug literally pulled out from under her. She fell through a sudden void, a weird and terrible emptiness, fell the way she sometimes did in dreams, slowly, with the world spinning crazily around her. Then she slammed into the walls that hid her fear and lay there, wounded and breathless.
Bennet grinned and said, “You’re kidding. Evans?” As if nothing unusual had happened. “An old guy with gray wisps of hair and small eyes? Him?”
The pressure around her neck had vanished. He no longer restrained her in any way. “His first name was Rich.” She coughed and rubbed her neck. “That’s what she called him. He wore a Zorro costume.” She coughed again and he turned on the floor lamp.
“You can sit up,” he said. “But do it slowly.”
Mira pushed to a sitting position, but didn’t turn to look at him. She couldn’t look at him just yet, couldn’t stare into the eyes of the man who had murdered her husband.
“What were the old guy’s cards?” Bennet sat at the corner of her bed now.
“The only card I remember is The Hanged Man.”
“That’s my card.”
She didn’t comment.
“Do you remember what you told him?”
“That The Hanged Man represented danger for him.”
The Hanged Man Page 30