Time to see what was in that shower. In the bathroom a faint glow still came from behind the white curtain. I drew the curtain back to reveal a giant orchid, almost two feet across. It was covered in black flowers.
Having my wildest fears confirmed didn’t make me feel better. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Okay, so Liz had the orchid. Did that mean she’d killed Ben? Silvio would be the one who’d actually done the killing. Still, there were things that needed to be explained. If Liz already had the orchid, who had been in my house looking for it?
I closed the curtain. There was still one more thing I wanted to check. I searched the Internet for the picture of Angie that had appeared with the story of her murder. The article sprang up quickly. “Jumping Jesus.” In shock, I pushed back from the desk. Then I pulled myself forward again to stare at the picture. The little worm that had been burrowing into my brain since the night of the ball had found its way home.
“So, now we know,” I whispered to the screen. Here was the proof. I brought up Liz’s e-mail program, typed in Styles’s address and attached the link for the article. Then I started writing out the whole story, from the beginning of my trip back from Miami to finding the black orchid in the shower stall. Styles could sort through it, verify everything and put an end to my nightmare in the swamp. I had just hit Send when Buddy screamed in the night.
My head jerked up. I listened with an intensity that froze me in place. Then I heard a curse and more squawking and clattering in the wire cage before the earsplitting racket was sharply cut off. Somewhere, a door banged as if in a breeze. But it was a still night. They were coming. No, they had arrived.
“Silvio,” Liz’s voice called into the night. “Silvio, where are you?” She was somewhere on the veranda at the front of the house. “Silvio, what’s wrong?” There was fear in her voice now. It jolted me to my feet.
My first inclination was to race down the hall to the living room, but I didn’t know what was happening there. Besides, it wasn’t safe inside where it was all lit up. Outside then. I slipped around the back corner of the house and ran down the gallery for our bedroom.
Liz called again, in a voice less certain and demanding, “Silvio?” She was begging now.
And then I heard a gasp of astonishment I thought came from Liz. I started to call out to her but bit back her name.
I moved slowly towards the window of our room. Clay had left the door to the bathroom open and the light on. In the dim glow, the room appeared empty. I slipped inside. I dug in my duffle and brought out the Beretta.
Rubber soles squeaked on the bare hardwood floor of the hall. I slipped out through the open French doors. On the veranda, I pressed my body up against the wall and held my breath, waiting.
From inside came the sound of heavy footfalls on the floorboards. Not Clay. Clay moved like a ghost, never heard and seldom seen. Silvio? Not likely. This was a bigger and heavier man than Silvio, so someone new, a man who shouldn’t be here.
I could follow his movements by the squeak of his shoes on the wood flooring. I heard the click of a lamp being switched on, and then light fanned out onto the veranda. I pulled my toe from the shaft of lamplight and listened to him move about the bedroom. He wasn’t trying for stealth but moved with a confident indifference, sure that he was in charge. The closet door rattled in its track as it was pulled aside. Was he looking for me? Time to move, before he checked the veranda. I ran along the covered terrace towards the front of the house, wanting to reach Clay.
Behind me a stranger’s voice yelled, “Hey!”
Scissor-kicking like I once had for the high jump, I went over the rail and down, dropping the six feet onto the trampoline, landing on my ass and bouncing half over the edge before scuttling off. Under the house now, I ran north, towards the living room.
Feet pounded on the gallery above me. A voice yelled a warning. I kept running until I came to Silvio’s twisted body. Stumbling to a halt, I stared down at him. Someone charged down the flight of steps in front of me. The shadowy figure came around the end of the stairs, and then I heard a gun. Chips flew off of the pillar beside me. I zigged sideways behind the pillar. I raised my Beretta in both hands. He wasn’t trying to take cover, coming on without any expectation that I would return his fire. I squeezed the trigger. The sound was deafening, the scream of the guy even worse.
I darted left to the west side of the house and ran full-out down the underside of the gallery.
Without reasoning it out, I headed south towards the helipad, away from the direction of the dock and Buddy’s cage, where he stood guard and warned us before his alarm call had been brutally cut off. There was likely a man there to guard the exit. At least, that was my guess.
Past the pool and out to the lawn, zigging and zagging across the grass like a crazed rabbit, sprinting frantically and leaving Clay behind. The noise from the gun aimed at me was more a popping sound than the terrifically loud blast the Beretta made. Clods of dirt flew up around me.
I had no plan, no idea what I was doing. Escape was my only thought. At the edge of the lawn some innate survival system kicked in, telling me to think before I went too far. I burrowed into the shadows of the underbrush and looked back at the house. In the light from Liz’s bedroom windows I saw a man, built like a linebacker, run along the upper deck and start down the steps towards me, coming after me.
I had to hide, but where? By the water tanks? I hadn’t gone there with Liz and Clay so I didn’t know if they offered concealment. Besides, the linebacker would see me if I broke cover and headed across the grass in that direction. The mechanical sheds were out. But I had to find a hole to hide in.
I decided I needed to be in the thick underbrush beyond the tennis court. I moved towards the brick path. A gun exploded.
I ran. Adrenalin sent me crashing along the path and past the tennis court without thought to what was ahead of me. I was nearly to the helipad, driven by panic, before I jumped left, into the arms of the sea grapes. Digging deep into the underbrush, panting and winded, I settled down on my haunches with the gun raised. I steadied it with my left hand, just the way I’d been taught.
“I am not going to die,” I promised myself over and over while I waited for the man to appear.
He didn’t come. Cautious and aware that I had the advantage now, he was taking his time. But still, he was moving and I wasn’t. Silence and stillness were on my side. I wiggled farther into the undergrowth. Twigs snapped against me. A branch stuck into my back. Scrunched up to make a smaller target, I watched the path for movement.
Suddenly a pulsing sound filled the night. A terrifying sound, it grew louder and more insistent. A strange wind blew. The leaves around me whipped about and sand flew up into my eyes. It grew lighter in the undergrowth. It was like a spotlight shining on me from the sky.
I looked up to see a mechanical bug hovering over me. Could it see me?
It moved off a bit and then swung around to settle down on the huge white cross of the helipad. The helicopter was bringing reinforcements.
I let the branch settle back in front of me.
When the helicopter was still, the door slid open and Ethan Bricklin jumped out. He wasn’t more than a dozen feet from me and I could see him clearly in the helicopter lights. In his hand was a gun.
I aimed for Ethan’s chest. My finger tightened on the trigger. “Not yet,” I whispered. The sound of my own voice startled me and I hardly managed to keep from squeezing the trigger. It would give away my position, and killing Ethan might not be enough. How many men had Ethan brought with him in the helicopter?
A twig snapped under the weight of a man off to my right. They were on both sides of me now. My Beretta stayed locked on Ethan’s chest, but if the other man appeared first, he was a dead man.
CHAPTER 38
Ethan was clear in the light from the helicopter for only a few seconds before he
bent over at the waist and ran for the protection of the scrub. I thought I’d lost him and was about to turn my gun on the person coming from my right when I saw a sliver of Ethan’s body at the entrance to the tunnel. He paused, checking to see if the way was clear before he inched forward.
I’d only get one shot. I wanted him closer.
Ethan wasn’t about to do anything rash. Cautious and silent, he sidestepped his way into the tunnel, hugging the edge of the sea grapes. Big, but a country boy, Ethan knew how to move without a sound when he was stalking prey. The linebacker didn’t. The man coming from the direction of the house wasn’t used to operating outdoors, hadn’t been trained to hunt with Tully and stay quiet the way I had.
Ethan heard the linebacker and stopped moving. The crunch of leaves under a footstep and then a flash of light exploded from Ethan’s gun. The smell of gunpowder filled the air.
A scream rose in the night. The bullet, ripping through cartilage and bone and tearing into muscle, hadn’t yet destroyed life. The linebacker stumbled into view and fired as he fell. A splinter of wood dug into my cheek and I jerked sideways.
Any noise I might have made was covered by the sound of the man dying in front of me. With legs pedaling but going nowhere, he struggled for life five feet from me.
Ethan inched forward, his gun held in front of him. He turned on a flashlight and pointed it down at the man on the brick path. “Shit,” Ethan said.
On the ground but trying to get up, the man whispered hoarsely, “Help me. For god’s sake, help me.”
Ethan moved quickly. Surging forward, he stepped over the man and disappeared into the night. I had the Beretta on Ethan the whole time, but I didn’t pull the trigger. Now I had missed my chance. I bit back a curse.
He was gone. Or was he? Had he gone for help, or was he playing possum? I went over the possibilities. If Ethan had been in contact with the man chasing me, maybe Ethan knew I was nearby and was being clever, waiting in the dark for me to make a move. Was it possible for the strange men on the island to be in cell contact if there was no tower? I didn’t know.
I didn’t lower the gun. I kept it fixed on the spot where Ethan had disappeared.
My hands began shaking from tension and the weight of the weapon. Would I be able to hold them still enough to hit anything if Ethan returned? I eased my hands back towards my chest to relieve the trembling.
If Ethan had gone to get help for the man he’d shot, more people might be headed my way. Now was my only chance to get away.
I started to rise and then sank back down. Tully’s voice echoed in my head. “Don’t break cover.” One bad night he’d kept us alive with wisdom earned the hard way in Vietnam.
“Don’t break cover” was my mantra now. Frozen in place, I watched the shooter, lying there in front of me, as he died. It wasn’t an easy death. Slowly the guy’s legs stopped moving, and then his body stopped twitching. And then nothing.
Still I waited. There was no sound to help me decide if Ethan was waiting in the dark for me.
CHAPTER 39
Blood ran down my face. I licked a trickle from the corner of my mouth, a metallic taste on my tongue, and then lifted my left shoulder and dried the blood on my cheek with my shirt, afraid to lower the gun long enough to wipe it properly. Time crept by. My cramped muscles began shaking.
Two things became clear to me. First, I couldn’t stay hidden. They’d search until they found me, I was sure of that. The second thing I was positive about was Ethan wasn’t going to let me leave Dancing Lady alive. Ethan didn’t let witnesses live.
I had to come up with a plan, a way of saving myself. But what?
I could only hide as long as it was dark. Maybe not even that long. They had flashlights, and if they got lucky shining them into the jungle of vegetation, they’d discover my hiding place. Moving was risky. And if I did break cover, which way should I run? The pilot was still with the helicopter. Would he be armed? At the very least, he’d warn the others . . . tell them where I was. Could I kidnap him? Force him at gunpoint to take me away? I’d have to surprise him to make that plan work. It was too much of a long shot. So I couldn’t go left. To my right, down the path, Ethan waited.
Behind me, towards the gulf waters, was a dense wall of vegetation, followed by fifty feet of mangroves. If I could push through all of that, it would be easy enough to swim around the island to the dock and the boat that had brought us to Dancing Lady Island. Would they have left a man at the dock? Even if they hadn’t, they’d come after me as soon as they heard the engine start, and Silvio’s little boat was unlikely to be powerful enough to outrun them. I hadn’t heard a boat. But how else could they have got here? Maybe I just hadn’t been paying attention, assuming any sound of an engine was just someone cruising by.
It didn’t matter. Silvio wouldn’t leave the keys in the boat any more than I’d leave the keys in my truck for someone to steal.
I searched for other options. What if I hid in the water until a boat came by and then swam out to it? How could I make them see me in the dark? If I was close enough to call out to them, I risked being run down. Besides, there would be no boat traffic until morning, hours away.
There was still the yacht and its communication equipment.
I checked behind me and to the side, trying to wiggle farther back. If I could get out to the water and swim around the far side of the island to the west, I might be able to get to the yacht and use its radio to bring help. It would take an hour for help to come by boat from Jacaranda.
I’d only managed to wiggle about five feet back into the underbrush. I knew there was no way to get through the mangroves. Even as a child small enough to fit through tiny spaces, no matter how many times I tried, there was no way out through mangroves. And then it hit me. I wasn’t going to be able to call for help. And no one was coming to rescue us.
I settled back on my heels and thought. Improbable ideas tumbled through my mind. In the end it came down to two things, help myself or wait to die. The second thing I decided came as a revelation to me. I wasn’t leaving without Clay. Come what may, we were going together or we weren’t going at all.
Questions piled up. How many men were there? And, the question I most wanted answered, was Clay still alive? Behind me, deep in the mangrove roots, something stirred. Surprised, I gave a frightened peep of terror and then froze, expecting to see Ethan creeping back at the sound.
When nothing happened, I took a deep breath and forced myself to move. Inch by inch, I crept out of the sea grapes until I stood by the dead man. His gun lay inches from his hand. I picked it up, studying it. It was much heavier than the Beretta, but it had a silencer, and that was an advantage. I checked that his gun still had ammunition and then dropped my Beretta into the pocket of my cargo pants.
Sticking to the shadows on the right side of the dark path, I worked my way back towards the house, my heart beating so fast and hard I thought it surely would do me an injury.
CHAPTER 40
At the tennis court I hesitated for a long time. Moving out into the open was risky. Would they have left someone here in case I came back? It seemed likely, but they were two men short: the one I had shot and the one Ethan had killed.
I knelt down and waited, trying to decide what to do. At last I crept around the fenced court. Nothing happened. No one was on guard here.
I crept along the path towards the house. At the edge of the lawn I knelt down again and tried to gather my strength and courage for the dash across the grass. Twenty-five feet across that open area was the only way to get to the house.
I was still hesitating when a shape separated from a deep shadow. I raised the gun, bracing it with both hands, and waited. A flashlight flicked on and the shape became a man. Someone I didn’t know. The light swept from right to left around the perimeter of the lawn, searching. The light reached me, blinding me as I squeezed the trigge
r. The jolt of the gun knocked me sideways.
With a surprised “umph” the man crumpled into a lump on the grass, on top of his flashlight. I scrambled to my feet and waited for someone to appear from the house. Even with the silencer, the gun sounded loud. Surely it would bring someone.
Nothing moved and no one came running. The outline of the body glowed strangely from the illumination beneath it. Staying low and moving swiftly, I ran straight across the thick turf. Past the body on the ground, without stopping to see if he was alive or dead, but praying he wasn’t going to rise up and kill me, I ran.
At the foot of the south stairs I stopped. Remembering the squeak of runners on the decking, I slipped off my runners so they couldn’t give me away.
My eyes strained to see in the dark. Crouched in the shadows, I listened, but there was nothing except the night sounds of nature, just cicadas and tree frogs. Slowly, slowly, pausing on every step, I crept up the stairs, past the pool and up the second set of steps, expecting a head to appear over the railing at any moment. I was ready to take a shot.
Near the top of the stairs I paused, listening intently, before I lifted my head above deck level. No one stood guard. Where were they? Maybe Ethan was the only one left. No, I was sure he’d brought more than three men.
Moving quickly across the deck to the door of Liz’s room, I plastered my body against the wall. Inside or outside? A quick look. That long hall was brightly lit, making it a shooting gallery for anyone at the other end. Darkness offered cover, so outside it was.
I made my way along the gallery, stopping at each glass door, checking inside and then running silently past. When I got to the living room, I realized I’d made a mistake. I should have come upstairs at this end instead of at the south. Here, I had to pass the floor-to-ceiling windows before I could go inside.
6 Martini Regrets Page 21