Cold As Death (The Mira Morales Series Book 5)

by T. J. MacGregor

  “Who’s this?” he demanded.

  “Glen Kartauk. I was the guy on Cape Cod. That scar over your eye is from an accident you had when you were four. You tripped out by the pool and hit your head against a ring of stones around a little garden. Your mother and I took you to the ER and you had to have five stitches. You used to call me Uncle Glen.”

  “Sorry, none of that rings any bells. Ding-dong, the witch is dead and we’ve run out of time.”

  “Wait,” Suki burst out, sobbing now. “Please. Let me have Adam back. I… won’t contact the police, I swear. I… just want my son.” She tried to stifle her sobs, but failed.

  “Hurts, doesn’t it,” he said, his voice now slippery and insidious again. “All that wanting.”

  “Let’s make an exchange,” Kartauk interrupted. “Me for Adam and Mira.”

  “Two for one? And for what purpose? I don’t know you.”

  “You’ll recognize me as soon as you see me,” Kartauk said. “Blood always knows blood. It’s in the cells.”

  Spenser howled with laughter. “Yeah, right.” He disconnected.

  Finch stood at the kitchen counter, breathing hard, the cell clutched in his one hand, the fingers of his other hand tracing the faint scar above his left eyebrow. Was it true? Was any of that true?

  Does it matter?

  Yes, it did. He didn’t know why it should, but it did.

  His cell jingled. He hadn’t realized it was still turned on. He glanced at the window, saw that he had a text message, but the number it had come from didn’t show. He clicked on it anyway: takes more than that to kill me, spense. Ha. Eden.

  “No way,” he whispered, and switched off the phone. He had seen her body hurled into the air, had felt the impact in his own bones. But he hadn’t stuck around to see her hit the ground or to check to make sure she was dead, so maybe it was possible.

  Equally possible, though, was that the police had found her and Sheppard had used her cell phone to send him a text message.

  Maybe this, maybe that. Maybe Uncle Glen was his true father, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe Eden was dead, maybe not. Maybe he should make a trade—and maybe not. Maybe he should cut his losses, get his ass moving, and leave. Nothing ambivalent about that.

  Finch stepped quietly into the room, a small pillow tucked under his armpit. Shoot them, then torch the house. He didn’t turn on any lights, didn’t have to. The bathroom door was shut, the shower running, and the glow of light from under the door was enough for him to make out the shape in the bed. To his left was the cooler.

  He pressed the manual override on the clicker, so the door wouldn’t lock automatically, and slipped the clicker into his back pocket. He gripped his weapon more tightly, held the pillow in his left hand, and approached the end of the bed. He held the pillow out in front of him, pressed the gun against it, and fired, muffling the noise so that whoever was in the bathroom wouldn’t hear it. Then he started toward the bathroom, hoping it was Mira in the shower. He had never killed anyone who was naked.

  He wasn’t sure what tipped him off—a soft whisper of noise, a stray scent, an inexplicable stirring of air. He spun around, but it was too late. She came at him like a six-wheeler without brakes on the downward slope of a steep hill. She crashed into him so hard that it jarred him to the core and he stumbled back, firing wildly into the air as his arms pinwheeled for balance. He slammed to the floor, the air rushed from his lungs, and his ears rang with the echoes of the gunfire.

  He heard her screaming for the kid to run, run, and he struggled upward and aimed at the door and fired over and over again. He didn’t know if he hit either of them, he couldn’t see enough of the door from here. But then she wasn’t screaming anymore and he scrambled up and lurched forward.

  As the cruiser raced up U.S. 1, Sheppard played the laptop’s keyboard and brought up a map of the two keys that comprised Sugarloaf. With Goot repeating the coordinates that Agent Ellis gave him from the triangulation of cell towers, Sheppard was able to narrow Finch’s location to an area of about one square mile, somewhere on Lower Sugarloaf Key.

  “It’s too large an area for just the three of us, in one car, to cover,” he said. “And we don’t have a boat.”

  “Check how many waterfront properties there are within the triangulation areas,” Blake suggested. “Mira said the place had water on two sides, right? A canal and some sort of bay or lagoon.”

  “Okay, there’s Lower Sugarloaf Sound and a bay between two peninsulas. We’re looking at two main roads off of here—South Point Drive is the first one, then Sugarloaf Boulevard. There are eight or nine streets off of South Point and other dozen or so streets off of Sugarloaf Boulevard, all on the water. Even if we just select the homes at the end of streets that are on canals and the sound, we’re looking at dozens of places. Dozens. We don’t have that kind of tune.”

  “We need the fucker to turn on his phone again.”

  “Okay, we’re approaching Lower Sugarloaf Sound,” Blake said. “Tell me what to do.”

  Sheppard looked up from the laptop screen. The bright headlights exposed the horizontal rain, gusting across the road as they passed a cluster of mangroves. He began to despair, to believe they had reached a dead end, that unless Finch turned on his cell or they got another piece of information, they were at the end of the line.

  Then he saw something just ahead, at the right side of the road, but couldn’t tell what it was from here. Visibility wasn’t good enough. “What’s that?” He pointed. “You see it? Off to the right there?”

  “I don’t see shit,” Goot said.

  “Me either,” Blake said.

  Sheppard leaned forward, wiping frantically at the glass. “Slow down, Ross.”

  “I still don’t see anything, amigo.” But as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he snapped forward. “Wait. I see her. A hitchhiker.”

  As Blake slowed and they neared the woman, goose bumps exploded across Sheppard’s arms and the back of his neck. It wasn’t just a woman. It was Eden Thompkins, her thumb stuck out, a hitchhiker, hoping for a ride.

  “Holy shit,” Blake breathed, and slammed on the brakes a yard away from her.

  They all leaped out, but it was Sheppard who ran toward her, Sheppard who understood what it meant, that she had heard him.

  The rain didn’t seem to touch her, but it lashed his eyes, making it difficult to see her clearly. He kept wiping his arm across his face, and saw that she was stabbing a thumb toward the street that ran to her right. He glanced up at the sign. Sugarloaf Boulevard. When he looked back at her, she was starting to fade like some old photo worn yellow by time.

  Sheppard whipped around and ran back to Blake and Goot, who just stood there, gaping in disbelief. “C’mon, fast, he’s down Sugarloaf,” Sheppard shouted, and they piled into the car.

  Chapter 25

  Meltdown

  The room, the porch door. It was just as Eden had described, and now Mira and Adam tore across the porch, the rain driving against them from the west, the boards slick beneath their bare feet. They skidded around the corner, clutching each other’s hands, and raced toward the stairs. Not much farther. They were going to make it, Mira thought.

  The first thing she saw was the boat tied up at the dock, its deck lit up like a carnival. It cast light into the yard, where she could see two cars, trees, bushes, and a wooden gate. But where was the raft Eden had mentioned? Panic gripped her, bile surged in her throat. Maybe it sat too low in the water to see from here.

  They reached the stairs and broke apart, Adam in the lead, Mira slightly behind him, the rain pouring over them. She tripped over her own feet and grabbed onto the railing to keep from falling…

  …and she and Adam speed across the canal in the Zodiac raft, a distance of perhaps ten yards. Trees bend over the ground on the other side, there a house back there, people who can help. But Spenser fires at them and the first bullet tears through her right knee and brings her down. She screams for Adam to run, run, but he hes
itates, and hurries back to help her; to pull her farther up the shore, into the trees. The second shot hits him and he lurches back, hands flying to his chest, and is dead before he hits the ground. She…

  …let go of the railing, a gasp exploding from her mouth, her feet moving faster, faster. Adam reached the bottom of the stairs first and glanced back at her. “Where? Gate or dock?”

  Mira pointed frantically at the dock. Eden had been right about everything else, so why not about this too? Adam took off, his thin body leaning into the rain and wind, moving as quickly as time. Mira loped after him, her bare feet slapping wet, cold sand, coming down hard against gravel, sliding across the slippery, splintered wood. And she saw the raft, bobbing in the water like an engorged cork. You were right, Eden, thank you, thank you.

  It was tied up behind the larger vessel, its engine tipped forward, and it was filling rapidly with water. “There’s too much water in it,” Adam said, his voice thick with anxiety. He kept wiping at his face, trying to clear the rain from his eyes. “We need to pull it out and tip it over.”

  “No time. Just get in. I’ll get the rope.”

  Adam swung around and eased himself over the side of the dock and into the raft. Mira fumbled with the tight, wet knot that held the rope to the dock’s railing….

  …the car slams across stones, branches, stumps, aimed straight at her In the moment when her head snaps around, her copper hair wild, flying through the air; her face looks as plump as a pumpkin, bloated with fear…

  Mira jerked her hands away from the rope, horrified that to untie the knot, she would have to endure the visions of Eden’s last moments on the planet. She rubbed her hands fast against her wet, slippery thighs, trying to rid herself of Spenser’s energy, of the emotional residue the rope had retained.

  “Mira, shit, hurry, I think I see him,” Adam called. “Up there on the porch.”

  A breath later, bright security lights blazed from the eaves just under the roof, exposing them like tumors on an X-ray. And then Finch opened fire, and Mira threw herself to the dock, craving the cover of darkness. The first two shots flew wide, the third struck the dock just behind her, and the fourth was so close she heard it whistle through the air inches above her head.

  She shot upward, clawing again at the knot, struggling to allow the violent images—of the car, Eden—to pass through her. The knot loosened. She glanced back; Spenser raced down the porch steps, a madman. Then the knot gave way, she tossed the rope into the raft, and practically threw herself into it.

  “Go, go,” she screamed, and Adam opened the engine wide and the raft swerved away from the dock, around the boat. The water inside sloshed around, so much of it that when Mira was sitting on the floor, it covered her legs. “Can it move any faster?”

  “It’s open all the way,” Adam shouted back. “Pretty soon there’s going to be so much water in here it’ll just sink. Which direction? Where should I go?”

  Anywhere except the other side of the canal. “Just get us away from here fast.”

  As the raft shot toward the open lagoon, the lights from Spenser’s home lit the way. She grabbed onto the handholds, and in her mind’s eye saw Spenser firing on them from the corner of his property, and one shot puncturing the raft.

  “Turn left,” she hollered. “Do it now.”

  He turned the raft abruptly and sharply to the left. Low-hanging branches raked across the top of Mira’s head, the raft slammed through the water, rising up, up like a balloon, then slamming down hard. Over and over again. “Move away from the shore,” she called. “Find a canal. Maybe we can get onto a seawall and run like hell.”

  It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was the only one she had.

  As they sped away from the house, farther out into the lagoon, the darkness clamped down around them, a sweaty fist so tight and suffocating that Mira could hardly draw a breath. She knew that Adam couldn’t see anything at all. Worse, she didn’t have any idea whether the tide was high or low. They were traveling blind and going much too fast.

  She shouted at Adam to cut back on the power, but the wind swallowed her voice. She started crawling back toward him, through the rapidly rising pool inside the raft, and the displaced weight pushed the rear of the raft down. The engine suddenly died, water poured over the sides, and Adam yelled, “Go back to the front, Mira, you’re sinking us!!”

  She scrambled backward on her hands and knees, her hands sinking so deeply into the center of the raft, into its soft, watery belly, that it felt as if they were being swallowed whole. Water rose to her armpits, over the backs of her thighs. The raft was going down and she didn’t have any idea how deep the water was, how far they were from shore, or worse, where Spenser was.

  And then, rising over constant noise of the rain and the sucking sounds the water made as the raft started sinking in earnest, she heard the noise of an engine, his boat, coming for them. Adam splashed toward her and she reached out and grabbed his hand. “Let’s not get separated.”

  He was treading water and thrust something at her. “A life jacket. There was just one inside, but we can hold onto it so we don’t get worn out. Maybe pretty soon our eyes will adjust to the dark and we’ll be able to figure out how far we are from shore.”

  Mira grasped one side of the life jacket, Adam held onto the other. No images rushed into her. She doubted that Spenser had ever worn the life jacket. She let her legs rest for a few minutes, then treaded water again. Rest, tread, back and forth until she fell into the rhythm.

  “Mira?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do sharks come in here?”

  Only the human variety, she thought, listening to the approaching clatter of a boat engine. “No.”

  “I just heard something splashing off to my right.”

  Shit. “Start kicking, Adam. We’re going left. I think that’s where the shore is.”

  Sheppard was hanging out the window, hoping for another sign of Eden, when he heard what sounded like gunfire, echoing eerily through the dark, rainy silence. “It came from just ahead,” he shouted.

  The tires screeched as Blake took a corner down one of the side streets. Too quiet, too dark, Sheppard thought, and told Blake to back up and take the next street. And the next. And the next. On Wahoo Lane, he heard a boat’s engine, something larger than that of a raft or a canoe, but couldn’t tell exactly where it was coming from.

  “Pull up here, Ross.”

  Sheppard and Goot ran between two houses, both of them still shuttered for the hurricane season, and stopped at the edge of the canal. The blazing lights of a place on the other side seemed to light up the rain from the inside out, as though it were some huge, weird Halloween lantern. And then something popped out of this weird lantern—a boat, a large boat—and raced off to the left.

  Sheppard and Goot whipped around at the same time and ran back toward the car. Blake raced up the road and hung a right onto Flying Fish Lane. At the end of the street, the lights they’d seen from across the canal now burned like a miniature sun. Blake screeched to a stop at a tall gate. Sheppard thought it looked like something out of ancient Troy, the rain pouring over it, the wood glistening in the brilliance of the headlights.

  “Get the gate open, Goot, I’m going to bang on doors. We need a boat.”

  “Got it, amigo.”

  Sheppard ran to the house next door, but it was obvious no one was home and hadn’t been home for weeks. Maybe months. It was the same thing at the next house. Then, two houses farther up, on the other side of the road, a shirtless guy with a beer in his giant paw and a tan belly hanging over his belt opened the door.

  “FBI.” Sheppard flashed his badge, quickly explained what was going on, and the guy grinned.

  “Yeah, man, I got a boat at the dock. Small, but fast. Out back. Which way did he go?”

  “Left.”

  “Well, the only way he’ll get out of there is by circling around. There’s no exit to the Atlantic in that direction. You’d think he’d know th
at, living here and all. He’ll have to head out under the bridge to the gulf.”

  They were outside now, by the dock. “What mile marker is that bridge at?”

  “Between sixteen and seventeen.”

  His first call was to Goot. Sheppard told him to be waiting at the corner of the seawall, they would be picking him up, and could he get Sheppard’s backpack from the car? And Blake, he said, should follow them on the roads as far as he could.

  His second call was to Charlie Cordoba. “Cordoba here.”

  “Okay, Charlie. I need a marine block and a roadblock between mile markers sixteen and seventeen and I need them now. We’ve nearly got him.”

  “What? How? Why—”

  “Just fucking do it,” Sheppard snapped, and disconnected.

  Within minutes, he and his new best buddy had picked up Goot and sped out into the lagoon, the boat’s searchlight burning through the rain. But the large vessel was no longer in sight. Either Finch was navigating without any lights and they couldn’t hear his engine over the roar of their own, or he had ducked into one of the canals, hiding until they passed.

  Finch spotted them by accident—a faint bit of color in an otherwise colorless landscape. Shades of Pleasantville, he thought, when the world had gone from black and white to color because the characters had attained some sort of consciousness.

  In terms of this drama, maybe it meant that Mira and Adam had realized their time was up, it was their turn to die regardless of what they did. Maybe it meant nothing at all. He didn’t give a shit one way or another. Except for Hollywood, he always finished what he started and he intended to finish this.

  He aimed his searchlights at the bit of color and hit the switch. Despite the rain, he saw them clearly, both of them clinging to the bright orange life jacket that had been in the raft. They were treading water fifty yards away, rats whose ship had sunk.