As soon as the light hit them, they kicked frantically, fighting to distance themselves from him. It was pathetic, comical, and he started laughing, and slammed the engines into high gear and raced toward them. For long moments in the glare of the light, they simply stared, shocked into paralysis, their faces frozen in time, like snapshots taken at a moment of intense trauma. And then they did the unexpected; they released their hold on the life jacket and swam in opposite directions, forcing him to choose.
But it wasn’t really a choice at all. Relative to his speed, they moved like molasses, and even when he went after one, the other wouldn’t get far enough away to make a difference. Mira was doing the valiant thing, trying to lure him toward her to save Adam. So Finch aimed toward the kid.
Adam saw him coming and dived.
Not enough, kid. He would have to come up for air in about twenty seconds, thirty if he had good lungs, maybe ninety seconds if his lungs were in terrific shape. That was fine. Finch could spare ninety seconds. He cut back on his power, waiting for the kid, biding his time.
And then an extraordinary thing happened. Mist seemed to appear out of nowhere, rolling in through the rain, across the water, enveloping the spot where the life jacket now floated, supporting no one. In seconds, the jacket was no longer visible. Finch leaned forward, searching for Mira, the kid, but the mist only thickened.
He took the engines up to their maximum power, plowing straight through the mist. The jacket got sucked under his boat, he saw it, the damn thing vanishing like yesterday. His boat struck something. He didn’t have any idea what the hell it was, but it caused the engines to sputter, strain, shriek. He cut back on the power and in the glare of the searchlights, could make out a massive flotsam of debris wrapped around the front of the boat—tangles of leaves and branches, plastic containers, pieces of fencing, wire mesh, junk left over from the hurricane. It probably had been floating out here for weeks.
Then, farther out, slightly to his right where the mist was thickest, something huge emerged, causing the flotsam to part like the Red Sea. Dolphins, dozens of them, fifty, a hundred, who the hell knew? They spread out across his path, dark shapes in the thickening mist, arching, diving, surfacing, again and again, forming a tighter and tighter and tighter chain across the water, through what now looked like fog.
Finch slammed the engines into maximum speed, whipped the wheel to the left. The Flybridge pitched sharply, its right side lifting out of the water, hurling everything that wasn’t nailed down to the opposite side of the boat. He would plow through the fuckers.
“I don’t think this is going to work, Spense.”
Finch didn’t have to look very far to see the source of the voice. Eden stood just to his right, as calm and poised as the Dalai Lama, hands clasped in front of her. She wore the clothes she’d been wearing when he’d last seen her, those denim Capri pants that hugged her hips, that feminine cotton shirt that accentuated her beautiful breasts. Her clothes were stained with blood, but she looked solid, real. He wasn’t hallucinating.
“Jesus God,” he muttered, and leaped to the left, away from her, his hands now free of the boat’s wheel, and the Flybridge flew free and wild. “You’re dead.”
“And you’re in deep shit.” She threw her head back and laughed and flung out her arms, a gesture that took in everything—fog, flotsam, dolphins. “You don’t have a chance against magic.”
His entire being slammed into meltdown. He felt it happen, every horrible, agonizing pain—the pressure that seized his skull, the abrupt loss of vision in his left eye, the sour taste of vomit in his throat, the utter emptiness of Spenser Finch.
He lunged for her, but she just laughed and faded away and the shoreline rushed toward him, a jetty of tall, thick rocks. Panicked, certain he couldn’t bring the boat around in time, Finch leaped over the side of the Flybridge seconds before it crashed into the rocks.
Mira shot to the surface for air and saw the boat fold up like an accordion against the rocks, wood and metal flying away from it. Moments later, its propane tanks exploded, throwing black smoke and fireballs that lit up the sky and hurled the stink of gas across the water.
“Adam,” she shouted, and suddenly felt the water beneath her heaving, rising, and then she was out of the water, her body lifted up by a pod of dolphins.
Tossed around like a beach ball, she grappled for something to hold on to. Her fingers clamped shut over fins and she gripped them as the dolphins raced forward. Images flowed into her, fluid, bright, in bold, crayon colors, and she didn’t understand any of them. They were as foreign to her as words in Latin or Greek. But she allowed herself to surrender to the strangeness, the unknown, the exhilaration of this alien world.
And then she was dumped, unceremoniously, into water so shallow that when she slipped off the pod, her hands and feet sank into seaweed. She gasped, she felt like a baby bird tossed out of the nest because it was deformed, genetically unfit, and she started to cry. For just a moment, she felt something against her leg, something soft, almost human, and a hand grasped hers. A webbed hand.
Images crashed over her, music flowed into her, she was transported, transformed, she got it. I am here. Here is home. Go home. Home is love. And when this too was gone, when she felt the webbed hand slipping away from her, Mira crawled to shore and collapsed against the sand, her cheeks pressed into a mound of crushed shells, seaweed, and the rain falling gently against her spine.
She opened her eyes and found herself staring into Adam’s face, pressed against the same sand and crushed shells, his breathing hard. He moved his arm until his fingers touched hers. His mouth moved.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered, her voice hoarse.
“The dolphins. And the mermaid. Did you see her?”
Mira moved closer to him, flung her arm over his body, and pulled him next to her. Strands of seaweed were woven through his hair. He smelled of salt, rain, sand, high summer, and childhood’s end. “We found the magic,” she said softly.
Sheppard crouched next to Mira, Adam. He pressed his hand to her forehead, her cheeks, ran his knuckles the length of her arm, then touched his fingers to her neck, checking for a pulse. Strong, steady. Beside her, Adam breathed.
Sheppard ran his fingers through Mira’s hair, pushing it off her face, and her eyes opened slowly, reluctantly. “Shep,” she said.
“It’s okay,” he said. “We’ll have you out of here in no time. Are you hurt? Is anything broken?” Stupid, his words sounded stupid and inadequate. He rocked toward her.
“Bruised. Exhausted.” She extended her hand and he pulled her to a sitting position.
“We fished him out of the water.” Finch, handcuffed, was lying on the sand no more than thirty feet away, and even though Sheppard gestured in that direction, Mira didn’t turn her head. She kept looking at Sheppard. He handed her a bottle of water and she drank, then passed the bottle to Adam, who was also sitting up now.
“Shep.”
“What?”
“I saw her. I saw your mermaid. She grabbed my hand.”
Sheppard rocked back on his heels, his knees digging into the crushed shells, and held her hand tightly, nodding. Dolphins, mermaids, ghosts, the weird and the strange, all the things that went bump into the night and onto into daylight, 24/7. Mira’s world. He was okay with it. And maybe, in time, he would learn to embrace it.
Chapter 26
August 3
Mira and Sheppard stood in front of the one-way glass, watching Spenser Finch fidget at the table where he sat alone. His leg chains rattled, his handcuffs glinted. He drummed his fingers against the tabletop. In the wash of fluorescent light, his face looked chalky, Mira thought, and the circles under his eyes were like bad bruises.
“It’s kind of unusual to do this, isn’t it?” she asked.
“I think Glen deserves the opportunity after nearly thirty years.”
Two cops stood behind Finch, and another opened the door to admit Kartauk. He limped in, leaning heavily on his cane. Finch
’s fingers went still.
“Who the hell’re you?” Finch barked.
“Not your attorney,” Kartauk replied, and limped over to the table.
The door to the viewing room whispered open. Suki and Adam slipped inside and joined Mira and Sheppard at the one-way window.
“So you’re another cop?” Finch asked.
Kartauk pulled out the chair and sat down. “I’m your father.”
Finch sat back, studying Kartauk. “I don’t see the resemblance.”
“I do,” Adam whispered.
“And here’s what you don’t know about the first five or six years of your life,” Kartauk went on, and started telling him how he’d met Joy Longwood on Cape Cod all those years ago.
As he spoke, three vague forms began to take shape in the room, at opposing ends of the table. They swirled like mist, then fog, then shadows, then smoke, and at each level they looked more real, more solid, more recognizable. Joy Longwood, Eden Thompkins, and a kid who looked exactly like young Spenser. His twin, Lyle.
“My God,” Adam whispered. “You see them, Mira?”
“See who?” Suki and Sheppard asked simultaneously. Mira and Adam shared a commiserating glance and she gave his hand a quick squeeze, an acknowledgment of their passage through Spenser Finch’s nightmare world.
For long moments, the dead remained, watching and listening just as Mira and Adam were doing. Then the three of them joined hands and started to fade.
“I need to pick up Annie at the ferry,” Mira finally said.
“Let’s all go,” Suki suggested.
“Great idea,” Sheppard agreed.
Mira—and then Adam—took one last look into the room where Finch and Kartauk sat. But the ghosts already had disappeared.
The Mira Morales Series
The Hanged Man
Black Water
Total Silence
Category Five
Cold as Death
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Table of Contents
PART ONE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
PART TWO
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
PART THREE
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Cold As Death (The Mira Morales Series Book 5) Page 31