Struggling against a rising swell of panic, Mira turned off the flashlight, clipped it to a belt loop in her shorts, removed her sandals, and slipped them into her pack. Then she climbed onto the fallen tree and scrambled several yards up the massive trunk. She rolled onto the balls of her feet and grabbed onto the lowest branch of the closest banyan, lifted her legs, and brought the soles of her feet to the trunk of the tree.
She started swinging, harder, faster, and moving her feet higher and higher on the trunk until they found a groove in the branches. Mira scrambled up, up, up into the thickest leaves, where smaller branches curved and twisted, providing ample handholds, footrests, places to lean against.
She found a secure foothold when she was in the bushiest part of the tree, and wrapped her arms around the trunk, hugging it so tightly that the odor of moisture and antiquity inundated her senses. The muscles in her arms ached from the sudden exertion; her eyes and throat flashed dry. It was as if his proximity were sucking away her body’s moisture.
Now she heard him moving through the woods with all the subtlety of an enraged giant, the whacks of the machete rhythmic, echoing.
If he looked up and saw her, if the branch on which her feet rested suddenly cracked and gave way, if her phone rang… No, she had put it on vibrate, she clearly remembered doing that. One thing in her favor.
Keep going, guy, keep moving, don’t look up, leave me alone.
Somewhere distant, a motorcycle revved its engine. Closer in, she heard the whacking sound again. Then it stopped. Everything went still, except for her heart, slamming around in her chest like a tennis ball. It made so much noise she was afraid he might hear it.
“Mira, come out and play,” he called.
Goose bumps exploded along her arms, fear coiled in her belly. Exactly what he intended, she thought, and pressed her cheek against the sweet-smelling trunk, praying that he would move on. Willing him.
Whack, whack. Then: “I know you’re here, Mira. I found your bike. You’re not that fast on your feet. You hiding under here?” Whack . “Oops, was that your leg? Nope. Too bad. But it’s not your leg I want, you know. I want what’s in your head. They say you’re good.” Whack, whack, whack. “They say you’re the real thing. Worked with cops, the feds, the whole nine yards. I looked you up on the Internet. They say you found your husband’s killer. Never mind that it was five years after the fact. You found him. That’s impressive. Yes indeed. I’m impressed.” Whack. “She hired you, didn’t she? Suki Nichols hired you to find her son.” Whack, whack. And he started laughing. “But I’ll find you before you find the kid. Trust me on that.”
Mira’s head pounded, she squeezed her eyes shut. His voice flowed through the clearing and up through the soles of her feet like a hot liquid, connecting them. Images flashed through her—of the house she’d drawn at Suki’s, of Adam in that shuttered room.
Then she had a vivid image of his face, but it wasn’t human. It looked like the alien popularized by Whitley Strieber’s book Communion, a gray face with huge, black wraparound eyes, two little black holes for nostrils, a dash for a mouth, skin as smooth as a baby’s. Metaphor. But what did it mean? That he felt alienated?
Whack, whack.
“Here’s the thing,” he went on, and moved into her field of vision, a madman in the moonlight wearing some sort of mask—an alien mask, that s it, that why I thought of Roswell—and shaking his machete like some wacko shaman who, any second now, would turn into something else, a wolf, a coyote, a giant bird. “I know who you are. I know where your store is. I know your grandmother lives with you, that you have a daughter about the same age as Adam, and that your husband, Tom, died when your daughter was three. I know more about you, Mira, than you will ever know about me.” Whack. “And if you keep up with this bullshit, I’ll plunder your life and make you wish you were dead.” Whack. “Are we clear?” he shouted.
Then: silence.
She breathed in the smell of the banyan and talked herself through a mounting panic. Annie and Nadine were in Miami. No way this man could find them. Her home number was unpublished--and at the moment, inoperable. He wouldn’t find her address through the reverse phone directory. But in the event he located her house some other way, she shared a trailer with two men who owned guns and wouldn’t hesitate to use them.
And while all of that was great and certainly in her favor, it didn’t do squat for her immediate situation. She was stuck forty feet up in a tree, in the middle of a wooded area flanked by Old Post Road, relatively untraveled in the post-hurricane world at night. If he realized where she was and came after her with the machete, she had nothing in her pack with which to defend herself.
But she had something better than a weapon. His location. And he was too arrogant to see how he had exposed himself by coming after her. Mira slipped her phone out of her pocket, sent Sheppard a text message.
Kidnapper followed me. Am hidden 40 ft up in banyan between e/w old post wooded area. He has machete.
A response returned within seconds:
Stay till I text u. Did u c his car?
Sports car
But as soon as she wrote this, Mira sensed something wrong about the car, but couldn’t pinpoint it any more than that.
On our way.
Whack. “I’m like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, Mira. Still here. You thought I’d left. But I’m a patient man. I can wait.”
His voice drifted on the currents of heat, the waves of stillness. In lieu of touching him or something he had touched, Mira sensed she could read him through his voice by tuning into a frequency of sound rather than of touch.
She carefully slipped her phone back into her pocket and began to alter her breathing. She suddenly felt like Schrodinger’s hypothetical cat in the quantum world, both alive and dead, here and not here, and understood that many possible versions of these events existed.
If she went back to where it had all begun, that day in May when Sulu had come into her store, then there was a version of events where Mira hadn’t read for her, where the door between her and this man never opened. And there was another scenario where she never stumbled upon the Nicholses’ house that morning, never had the vision that had prompted her to enter the house.
More recently, reality had split off at the moment she’d left her store. In one possible version of events, she had accepted Ace’s offer for a ride back to the trailer and gone home without incident. In a second version, the man had come up behind her while she was on the bike and had snatched her. In yet another scenario, the man had caught her on the ground and she hadn’t made it into the tree. In a fourth version, she fell out of the tree, and in a fifth, she got out of this mess. There might be dozens of other possibilities, but only one that mattered, escaping.
She allowed herself to sink into his voice, to tune into its frequency, then opened herself up a little at a time, hesitant to take in too much at once. She saw a little conch house, two people making love, and then a boat of some kind, blurred, hazy, as though she were seeing it in a dream. She sank deeper….
They speed through the desert, the man and the boy, the old rusted heap of a car spitting out air that is barely cool.
The boy is sweating, nauseated by the heat, the speed, the blurring landscape of sand and cactus. “I’m gonna be sick;” the boy says, and suddenly doubles over; vomiting on the floor of the car
The man swerves to the side of the road, the tires shrieking and whining against the hot pavement, and slams on the brakes. “Jesus God, what a fucking mess you made. Clean it up.” He smacks the boy’s head with a roll of paper towels. “Now.”
“I… I…”
The man leans across the boy, hurls open the door, and shoves him into the heat. “Finish puking out there.”
The boy stumbles forward, then falls to his knees and gets sick again. The man marches around to the passenger side of the door and punches the boy in the side of the head. He falls to the right and just lies there, groaning….
A
screeching siren severed the connection.
Two minutes after Sheppard and Goot arrived, more choppers swooped in out of nowhere, bright, burning lights spilling across the wooded area and the roads that surrounded it. A dozen cruisers converged on the area, sirens blaring, lights spinning, brakes screeching. Doors flew open and men in SWAT gear leaped out, Charlie Cordoba among them. A little Hitler, barking orders, directing his men this way and that.
“I told you it was a mistake to call that asshole for backup,” Goot muttered.
“I told him backup, surround the woods, and I told him quiet. I didn’t mention choppers, SWAT teams, a goddamn production. Check out the sports car before Charlie’s men get to it, Goot.”
“I’m on it.”
Sheppard hurried over to Cordoba, his blood pressure soaring. Before he could say a word, Cordoba spoke.
“Shep, the place is surrounded. The fucker is trapped.”
“The fucker is gone, Charlie.”
He looked indignant. “You don’t know that.”
Sheppard threw out his arms, a gesture that encompassed the whole glaring mess of lights and noise and bullshit. “You blew it. We could’ve had him and you blew it. Call your men off. Now.”
“I don’t take my orders from—”
Sheppard grabbed Cordoba by the front of his miserable shirt, and jerked him forward. “Yeah, you do. If you want to be in the loop, Charlie, you take your orders from me.”
Cordoba’s eyes turned homicidal, he wrenched back. His glare was filled with contempt, rage, and a myriad of other emotions that Sheppard had no intention of deciphering. He finally touched the mike on his lapel. “Hold your positions.” He covered the mike with his hand. “Where do you want them?”
“Fanning out toward the dock, south toward the nearest marina, and anywhere within a mile of here. Since he needs a boat to leave, the choppers should sweep out across the island, alert for any vessel heading away from Tango.”
Cordoba gave a curt nod, issued his instructions, covered the mike again. “You say he’s gone and you’re basing this on what?”
Sheppard held out his phone, showing him Mira’s last text message: He’s gone.
“Yeah, I figured it was something like that,” Cordoba spat, and turned away in disgust.
When the first siren had torn apart the stillness, Finch had known it was for him, that Mira must have called or e-mailed or sent a text message to the cops. Stupid of him not to think of that. But then, he hadn’t planned for Mira the way he had planned for Adam.
Finch hurled the machete into the trees and took off, sprinting through the woods to where Mira had left her bike. The sports car, now abandoned by the side of the road, had been stolen from the ferry parking lot, where some schmuck had tucked his keys in the visor, secure in his certainty that no one would dare take his pretty little car. So the cops would find the car—but no prints—and that would distract them for a while.
He pedaled madly away from the woods, the alien mask tucked in his back pocket. The bike sped up and down side roads that would lead him into downtown Tango and to the cove where he had tethered his skiff. Now, distant but closing in fast, he heard the whoop, whoop of choppers. Best to lay low, he decided, and detoured into the alley behind Mira’s store. He hopped off the bike and pushed it quickly into the stand of trees behind the overflowing Dumpsters.
Finch was winded and stood for a moment in the shadows, catching his breath, scanning the alley. Due to the damage to downtown Tango Key, nothing within four blocks of the ruined pier was open at night. Good thing. He would get into the store and stay there until an hour or so before curfew began. What better place to lay low than inside her store? No one would think to look for him here.
He set the bike on the ground, shrugged off his backpack, unzipped it, brought out his flashlight and a small packet of tools. Just in case. Flashlight on, he darted across the dark alley and stopped at the building’s rear door. No handle, just a lock. No problem. He had it picked within twenty seconds.
He entered a large room with mats stacked against one wall. Against another wall stood cartons of books, dozens of them, maybe hundreds. Posters of flexible women in an array of yoga postures decorated the other walls. Just looking at their postures made his back hurt.
He went through another door and into a huge room with empty bookshelves. The floor was new. The walls had been recently plastered. And the roof, he thought, dropping his head back, still sported blue FEMA tarps.
Nothing to steal in here. The only possible reason for locking the door was to keep people like him out.
His sneakers squeaked against the floors, the noise echoed. The flashlight’s beam swung from left to right, exploring, penetrating into the dark recesses. He passed the curved counter, an empty display case, everything new, waiting to be filled with books once the roof was done.
To the far left, he spotted another door. It was locked. He picked it in even less time, slipped inside, shut the door behind him. He shone his flashlight around. An office. A bit too warm, but snug, safe. He opened the rear exit door and saw a generator tucked away in a vestibule, then the loading dock beyond it.
He was tempted to turn on the generator, worried that it might be heard, but dismissed the thought. No one was around to hear it. He turned it on, plugged in a light, the fan, and Mira’s lonely Mac. Then Finch made himself at home in the comfortable leather chair, booted up the computer, and rubbed his hands together like a gleeful kid who knew he was getting away with murder.
“Right here,” Mira said, pointing at the spot where she had left her bike. “This is where I dropped it and started running.”
The powerful hurricane lanterns that Sheppard and Goot held cast a wide swath of light across the ground. “You’re sure?” Sheppard asked.
“Positive.”
“That explains how he got outta here,” Goot said. “I’ll alert Cordoba that we’re looking for a guy on a bike.”
Mira suddenly realized why something about the sports car had bothered her earlier. “The car he drove. It was stolen.”
“So he either left his car at the Key West dock and came over on the ferry, or he came on his own boat,” Sheppard said. “Goot, make sure Cordoba has people posted at the dock and at every marina on the island.”
“I thought we told him that.”
“We need to keep reminding him. We’re moving in on curfew, so if this guy is still on Tango, he may try to get off in the next fifty minutes. And pass out those sketches from forensics.”
“Right”
Goot hurried off, leaving Mira and Sheppard alone. He asked, “You feel up to showing me where you hid?”
What she really wanted was to shower, eat, sleep, and not necessarily in that order. But in the last several minutes, it had occurred to her that she was in the process of reinventing herself. She hadn’t climbed a tree since she was six and yet, she had scrambled up a sixty-foot banyan and managed to stay hidden for more than an hour. She had tuned in on the man who had terrorized her and done it without touching him or anything that he had touched. Although that had happened before, this time it had happened spontaneously and not because she had willed it. Even more curious, she had tuned in on him without taking on any of his physical ailments. Then there was the value a client had placed on her abilities. Two hundred thousand dollars. And even if it never happened again, it had forced her to see herself in a new light.
Sleep, food, and a shower could wait. “Sure. You have an extra flashlight?”
He dug one out of his pack, handed it to her. As she retraced her path through the woods, something nagged at her, something about the vision she’d had of the young boy in the car speeding through a desert. But she couldn’t isolate it.
“When did you realize you were being followed?” Sheppard asked.
Mira explained her unease upon leaving the store. “But I wasn’t really sure until the car doubled back.”
“Ever since your name was released to the press, I’ve
been afraid something like this would happen.”
Mira thought she detected something else in Sheppard’s voice, something he wasn’t saying. “Let me guess. You asked Ace to keep an eye on me. That’s why he called and offered me a ride home. That’s why he and Luke canceled their trip up to the preserve.”
“I didn’t realize they’d canceled anything.”
“I’ll take that to mean you’re guilty as charged.”
“Never try to fool a psychic,” he muttered.
“I appreciate the effort, Shep, but rather than paying someone to protect me, let’s just find this shit before he finds me or kills Adam.”
Moonlight now filled the clearing. A slight breeze had risen that strummed the branches of the trees, creating a kind of hum, an eerie music. Night sounds she hadn’t noticed earlier now suffused the darkness—the chirr of crickets, a chorus of frogs, and the haunting hoot of an owl.
Mira stopped under the banyan where she had hidden, glanced around, and walked over to the approximate spot where the man had stood when she actually had seen him. “Here. He stood right about here.”
“Let’s take a look around.”
As they searched the immediate area, Sheppard questioned her for specifics, details. She cut to the chase. “He taunted me while I was hiding, threatening to wreck my life if I didn’t leave this investigation alone. He guessed that Suki had hired me. He said he wants what’s in my head, my ability. He’s searching for something, Shep, and figures a psychic can help him find it.”
“Searching for what? Do you have any idea?”
She started to say no, but suddenly realized that the desert vision held the clue. “Maybe something he can’t remember or figure out about his childhood.”
Cold As Death (The Mira Morales Series Book 5) Page 14