Jack’s runabout was gone. Odd.
She remembered hearing a brief motor noise shortly after the men had left the house, while she was still a prisoner. At the time she’d assumed it to be a passing boat, cruising near the island on the way to blue water.
She’d been wrong. What she had heard was the runabout. Steve and Jack had moved it.
If she’d been thinking more clearly, she could have guessed as much already. The men had left via the front door, yet she’d encountered them on the path at the rear of the house. The only logical explanation was that they’d transferred the boat to a new location, then walked back.
None of which mattered anyway, because the other boat, the motorboat provided by Pelican Key’s owners, was still here.
In less than two minutes she would be on her way out of—
Wait.
Movement on the dock. The shadowy figure of a man.
His dark outline blended with the masses of tropical foliage at his back, and only his restless pacing revealed his presence. His pacing—and a glint of starshine, faint but perceptible, winking fitfully as he moved.
Eyeglasses. Catching the chancy light with each turn of his head.
Squinting, she dimly made out the nylon jacket Steve had worn for most of the day.
A sigh eased out of her. The dock was off limits as long as Steve was guarding it. She couldn’t reach the boat.
Still, there was the runabout. Possibly she would find it at the cove, where Jack had beached it originally.
Even the thought of retracing her route through acres of almost impenetrable vegetation—sharp-edged saw-palmettos, creeping ground ivy, foul-smelling skunkbush—exhausted her. But she would have to do it. And hope that Jack wasn’t lurking in ambush somewhere along the way.
She was retreating toward denser brush when a hoarse whisper stopped her.
“Kirstie.”
Frozen, huddled behind a clump of groundsel-tree, she listened.
“Kirstie, are you out there?”
Steve didn’t seem to see her. He was just calling her name at random.
She waited, afraid to move and possibly draw his attention. It was a strain to hear him; his rasping stage whisper was barely audible.
“I shot Jack. But he’s not dead, only wounded. And ... he’s got the gun.”
Could it be true? Had Steve rebelled against Jack, redeemed himself? Skepticism competed with a desperate desire to believe.
“Jack’s looking for me. Thinks I went north. But I doubled back to find you. I know you’ve come for the boat.”
A breeze kicked up, and she heard his jacket ripple like a sail. The sparkle of his glasses was the sole identifiable feature in the ink-blot enigma of his face.
“Show yourself. Please. I won’t hurt you. I never wanted to hurt you. I’m not part of this anymore.”
But how could she accept that statement, how could she risk believing anything he said, when this could so easily be a trap?
Still, she had heard gunshots. She was sure she had.
“Please, Kirstie.” His whisper turned sibilant, a hiss. “You’ve got to trust me.”
Trust him? Did she dare?
A few minutes ago, she’d vowed never to trust another person. Now she was being asked to trust Jack Dance’s accomplice.
But he was something more than that. He was her husband.
And she did believe he hadn’t wanted to see her hurt. He’d intervened when Jack was slapping her around. Saved her life, probably.
Whatever his weaknesses and sins, he must still care for her. Now, repentant, he was offering a chance at escape.
“Kirstie? Can you hear me?”
She had to give him the trust he asked for, this one last time.
“Please.”
Had to.
Slowly she stood. She walked forward, out of the cover of the trees, onto the hard coral sand.
“Here I am,” she said in an answering whisper.
The glint of his glasses swung in her direction. “Thank God. Hurry up, get over here.”
She did not hurry. Her steps were slow and measured as she crossed the narrow strip of beach.
“Come on. Come on.”
The dock was less than fifty feet away. She wished there were a moon. She wanted to see Steve’s face, study his expression. If she could look into his eyes ...
Her sandals crunched on coral, a soft, gravelly sound. The sea breeze twined around her bare legs, groping like lascivious fingers. On the horizon burned the lights of Upper Matecumbe Key, distant as the stars, close as the boat that could take her to Islamorada and safety.
She had left cover behind. Here on the yards of bleached sand she was totally exposed, a slender target in a field of white.
Ahead, Steve waited on the dock, motionless, a swatch of night cut out of the larger darkness around him.
A bad feeling, a premonition of some kind, bobbed to the surface of her consciousness. Perhaps because Steve was standing so still, so deathly still, not running to greet her as she might have expected—or perhaps because she was so terribly vulnerable now, and more vulnerable with every forward step—whatever the reason, she felt suddenly as if she were walking down the center lane of a turnpike, traffic rushing at her, horns blaring, a quick, grinding death under a tractor-trailer’s giant tires only seconds away.
She slowed her steps.
“Kirstie! Dammit, what’s taking you so long?”
His strained whisper—something was wrong about that, too. She wasn’t sure quite what.
Time slipped into a lower gear. Seconds elongated, stretching like taffy. The world took on a fantastic clarity; every ripple of starshine on the water, every weave and pucker of the coral beach, every smallest detail of her environment was magnified, brightened, enhanced.
But still she could not see Steve’s face.
“Hurry up!”
She stopped.
There was no reason for it, no logic to it, or at least none she could name; but abruptly her legs would advance her no farther.
On the dock, a blur of motion.
Steve’s right hand peeling back the flap of his jacket. Something shiny in his fist, rising fast.
The gun.
Betrayal.
She pivoted, legs pumping.
Behind her: crack.
Puff of sand at her feet. Chips of coral stinging her ankles.
She ran for the brush, the trees. Just in time she remembered to zigzag.
Crack.
The second shot landed along the straight-line path she’d been running a heartbeat earlier.
Trees close now. Ten feet ahead.
Crack.
Rustle of leaves as the bullet whizzed past her head and struck one of the pines.
Near miss, that time. Inches.
She reached the trees, flung herself headlong into the brush.
Crack.
God, he was still shooting.
“Stop it!” she screamed. “Stop it, you son of a bitch!”
She scrambled wildly through the ground cover, plunging into a dense, concealing thicket of horse nettle, heedless of the plants’ slashing thorns.
Huddled there, shuddering all over, she waited for the next shot.
None came.
Perhaps he was following her. Moving in close for a surer kill.
She dared a look.
Steve remained on the dock. As she watched, he leaned over the side, aimed the gun straight down, and fired a single shot at the motorboat, puncturing the hull.
He was scuttling the boat. Denying her that means of escape. So he and Jack could hunt her down at leisure, take her life at will.
Shivering, she retreated deeper into the brush. She didn’t stop crawling until the dock was lost to sight, the undergrowth around her a solid barricade.
On her knees, she leaned against a rotted log, the corpse of a fallen magnolia. Large black beetles crawled on it. Some detoured onto her hand, her arm. She didn’t care.
&
nbsp; “God damn you, Steve,” she said for the hundredth time, but with even greater feeling now.
He was every bit as bad as Jack. No, he was worse.
Jack, at least, had not used her love and trust to lure her into a death trap. Only her husband had been capable of that.
He’s sick, she thought in time with a confused rush of emotions: rage, grief, pity.
Then she shook her head. It wasn’t sickness. Steve was suffering from no delusion; he knew who she was and what she ought to mean to him; and he had tried, repeatedly and cold-bloodedly, to put a bullet in her back.
Had it all been a lie, then? Every moment of their years together? Every smile, embrace, kiss? Every shared secret and whispered confession?
“God …” She began to say the familiar words of her private mantra, but strength failed her. The curse, unfinished, became a kind of desperate prayer.
Crying, she staggered on through weeds and scrub, lashed forward by one thought.
The runabout.
Hidden somewhere.
Perhaps at the cove.
* * *
Jack shrugged off Steve’s nylon jacket and slung it into the water with an angry swing of his arm. The eyeglasses followed, vanishing with a splash.
His ruse had nearly worked. If Kirstie had advanced just a few steps nearer ...
No point in thinking about that. He would have to try again, that was all.
He checked the Beretta’s clip. Eight rounds left, plus another in the chamber. Plenty of ammo.
Though he hadn’t handled a gun in years, he was confident enough of his ability to hit a stationary target at reasonably close range. As a teenager he had often borrowed his father’s Heckler & Koch .45—well, taken it without permission, actually—and driven out to the woods, where he would practice for hours, unobserved.
He’d been a good marksman then. But now, when it mattered—when he’d meant to pay back that little bitch for the bloody hole in his leg—his every shot had gone wide of the mark.
The stab wound, at least, had almost stopped its painful throbbing. Before leaving the house, he’d inspected the injury, then wrapped his thigh in a strip of bedsheet to stanch the blood. He could walk without limping now.
He turned his attention to the motorboat, fully submerged at last, dragged to the bottom by the weight of the Evinrude outboard. Through the crystalline water its outline shimmered faintly, blurred and strange, a ghost vessel in a dream.
Kirstie wouldn’t be getting away in that boat, anyhow.
Only the runabout was left. Steve, of course, knew where it was concealed, but Jack was unconcerned about him. His energy had been fading fast. By now the sedative in his system must have put him under.
And Kirstie had no idea where to find the runabout. Still, she was certain to try. Where would she look first?
The cove.
Obviously. The cove was where the boat had been beached in the first place. Probably she was on her way there right now.
Waiting for the boat to founder had cost him time. She had a head start. But he could catch up.
And when he did, his next bullet would not miss.
36
Where the forest trail met the coral beach, Steve found what he was looking for.
He had spotted it ten days ago, on an aimless walk with Anastasia. The borzoi, like all dogs, had liked to sniff everything within reach; but when she’d started nosing a waist-high shrub with scarlet flowers and yellow fruits, Steve had pulled her hastily away.
Jatropha multifada. The physic-nut tree.
Easy enough to recognize the species. Jack, in fact, had first identified it to him when they vacationed on the island together. Varieties of Jatropha grew throughout south Florida; one of them, native to Key West, was known by locals as “the bellyache bush.”
An appropriate name for any of the Jatropha species, which collectively were responsible for dozens of accidental poisonings every year. The tempting, candy-colored fruits were irresistible to children; the seeds within the fruits contained a purgative oil similar to the ricin found in castor beans.
As little as two seeds could produce symptoms of gastroenteritis within a few hours. The larger the quantity, the faster the onset and the more severe the effects. A large enough dose could prove fatal.
Crouching by the bush, Steve plucked a small yellow capsule of fruit from the nearest branch. With trembling fingers he tore it open, plucked three seeds from the cavities.
He raised them to his lips. Hesitated.
You sure you want to do this, Stevie?
The voice, strangely, was Jack’s. But the thought was his own.
A ripple of tingling cold skittered up his forearms as if in answer. A new wave of the sedative kicking in.
Goddammit, he had to get that shit out of his system. Adrenaline wouldn’t keep him going much longer.
Eyes closed, he thrust the seeds into his mouth.
They were tasteless, crunchy. He chewed, swallowed, then picked another fruit and consumed its seeds as well. A total of six so far.
How many would it take to get quick action? If he overdid it, he would face a painful, writhing death. But if he was too cautious, he wouldn’t feel the effects for hours. Hours he could hardly afford to waste, not with Jack undoubtedly hunting Kirstie at this moment, the Beretta hot in his hand.
He plucked a third fruit, ate the seeds.
Nine now. He’d heard of people dying from a dose of ten.
But other than a mild burning sensation at the back of the throat, he still felt fine.
Dammit to hell, this wasn’t going to work. Maybe he’d misidentified the plant. This might be some harmless shrub that only looked like a physic-nut. In that case he could gorge himself on seeds without effect, until the damn sedative finally put him under.
He jerked another fruit free of the branch, began to pulp it in his fingers to find the seeds, then froze, listening.
From the south end of the island, a distant crack of sound, then another, and more.
Gunshots. Four in all.
Then, rising high and breathless in the night air, Kirstie’s keening cry.
“Stop it! Stop it, you son of a bitch!”
Christ, Jack was killing her. Killing her right now.
“Hell with this.” Steve threw aside the fruit and pushed himself to his feet.
He had to save her. Had to find the strength somehow. If the seeds wouldn’t work, then he would fight off the sedative with sheer willpower. He could do it. He—
A sudden agonizing stomach cramp bent him double. Sparks of white glitter whirled before his eyes. They expanded, merged, bleaching his world to a spread of arctic snow.
The poison. Kicking in.
He collapsed on his side, trembling violently, as pain clamped down harder on his guts and currents of nausea raced through him like fever chills.
You ate too many of the damn things. The groaning voice in his thoughts was nearly drowned out by the hum and sizzle that seemed to fill his skull. You killed yourself, you asshole. And Kirstie, too.
Somewhere far away, a fifth gunshot sounded. He barely heard it. The noise had no reality to him. Nothing had any reality but the spasms of agony knotting his bowels.
He twisted on his belly and vomited. Again. Again.
His stomach emptied, and he was left rasping with dry heaves that shook his body.
“Oh, God,” he whispered. “Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.”
Fire laced his throat. His heart pounded impossibly hard in his chest, each separate beat threatening to shake him apart. Sweat dripped from his face in a silent, steady rain.
“God. Oh, my God ...”
Flies were already gathering at the foul-smelling puddle he had made. Weakly he crawled away from it, off the path into a patch of weeds, then buried his face in the dirt, tasting grit. For a long time he did not move again.
Gradually pain and sickness receded, leaving him with the limp, hollowed-out feeling of utter exhaustion.
/> I think you’re going to make it, old buddy. The interior voice was still Jack’s, the words accented with cold mockery. Looks like you bought yourself a second chance.
“Second chance ...” Steve licked his lips. His tongue was sandpaper. “Yes, Jack. That’s what I’ve got.”
He lifted his head from the dirt and blinked, trying to clear his vision.
The world seemed murky. Had the poison damaged his eyesight somehow?
No, of course not. It was his glasses; he’d lost them in the fight with Jack. That was why he couldn’t see.
All right, then. How was he doing otherwise?
Methodically he took inventory of his symptoms.
The numbness in his extremities was still present, but less obvious than before.
His limbs had lost their leaden heaviness.
He no longer had to fight a nagging impulse to shut his eyes and yield to sleep.
His thoughts seemed clear.
“It worked.” A crooked smile ticked at the corner of his mouth. “Goddamn worked.”
He had purged himself of the drug. He was clean.
Fighting light-headedness and a residue of nausea, he struggled to his knees. The effort was too much for him. He fell forward, panting.
For a bad moment he was sure he would be sick again. His stomach convulsed. But there was nothing left inside.
He lay unmoving, concentration focused on deepening each breath and slowing his hectic pulse.
When he felt ready, he tried again to stand.
This time he succeeded. His knees fluttered badly, and he had to grab a tree limb for support.
Holding tight to the branch, eyes shut, he waited for his strength to return while considering his next move.
He had to find Kirstie. That much was obvious. Track her down and take her to the boat. Either the motorboat at the dock or ...
Or Jack’s runabout.
His eyes flickered open with a thought.
He’d forgotten the runabout. It was camouflaged under fronds and sedges on the verge of the beach, only a short distance from this spot.
The most logical thing to do was to leave the island right now. Take the boat, speed to Islamorada.
Deadly Pursuit Page 24