Blood Kin (37 page)

There was another loud crack, and a bullet pierced the surface of the water just to her left. Bailey's heart leaped, and she couldn't keep from gasping.

“Just wanted to remind you that I could put an end to it all quickly, if you'd like,” Grace shouted. “To be merciful. As I said before, I'm not a monster.”

Bailey strained against the ropes, pulling until she
felt as though she'd yank her arms from her sockets. “What do you want from me?” Her eye was beginning to swell just above the place where the giant fly had bitten her. The bump burned like a wasp sting, but one ankle came free, and joy surged in her chest.

A whisper rose from behind her. “Bailey, listen to me. Do exactly as I say.”

She moaned, a sound she hoped would tell him that she'd heard—that she would do whatever he asked.

“How good an actress are you? You've got to pretend you're drowning. Take hold of the rope, under the water, where it's tied to the post. Can you do that?”

She coughed. She didn't have to act. The loss of blood from where Grace had shot her and the dull pain from the wound had sapped every ounce of strength from her body. Another minute and the water would be over her nose.

“Struggle. Turn to the right as far as you can and pretend to faint. Let your head fall forward into the water.”

She coughed again.

“I'm going to cut the rope, and then I'll give you something to breathe through. Just like a straw. Can you do that?”

She groaned.

“Do just as I say, but when I start shooting, dive as deep as you can, and swim to the left and away from the cabin. The water's deepest there near the far bank. Stay under until you reach the reeds. Do you understand?” he murmured.

She let her head drop, just a little, just far enough that her nose and her mouth went under, but she could still hear. He was directly behind her, so that her body blocked Grace's view of him.

“Don't try to find your way out of here. Find a deep
spot in the marsh and hide. Don't make a sound until you hear me calling you or you see uniformed police. Help will come with search-and-rescue dogs. Do you understand me?”

She sighed and let her body go limp. She took a final breath of air, and the last thing she heard before the incoming tide rolled over her head was Daniel's reassuring voice.

“Trust me, babe. Go deep.”

She grasped the rope, realized that she was no longer tied to the post, and pulled herself under. How long could she hold her breath? Not long. What would she do when—

Something shiny pierced the water in front of her. There was a muted
ping
but no pain. She did as Daniel had ordered. Panic clawed at her chest and throat. Blood drummed in her head.

His fingers touched her cheek. Gently Daniel inserted a reed between her lips, and instinctively she sucked. Sweet air filled her mouth and lungs. She grasped his arm, and squeezed it once.

Abruptly, silently, he was gone. She waited, mentally counting off the seconds as long as she could before taking hold of the reed with one hand and exhaling a second time.

Suddenly the water around her exploded in a burst of silver rain. A larger gun boomed off to the right. Clutching the precious reed in one hand, she dove for the mud bottom and kicked as hard as she could. Both ankles were free. She opened her eyes, but the water was too muddy to see more than a few inches in front of her, so she closed them again and swam for her life.

She struck something solid with her left hand, hard enough to hurt, grabbed it, and pushed herself off. She
fought her way into the reeds, no longer able to swim, clawing, scrabbling until total exhaustion brought her to a halt, blocked by what seemed like an impossible barrier of foliage that towered over her.

Shots continued to ring out. The crack of the rifle—the louder boom of a larger-caliber weapon. She tried to pinpoint the location, but water and mud clogged her ears. She raised her head and gulped in mouthfuls of blessed air. Instantly mosquitoes and flies buzzed and circled, landing on her hair and exposed skin, but she paid them no heed.

Something croaked in the reeds—almost a coughing noise—and Bailey caught the flash of brown feathers as a bird nearly the size of a chicken scurried away into the morass. A duck quacked off to her left, and she realized that the shooting had stopped.

Bailey waited. Mosquitoes feasted on her cheeks and shoulders until she thought to scoop up handfuls of black mud and smear it over her skin. No-see-ums—tiny biting flies—crawled into the corners of her eyes. She clamped her lids shut and rubbed mud on them. She strained to hear another shot, Daniel's voice, anything but the
ribbit-ribbit
of frogs, the incessant drone of insects, and the honking of a vee of geese in the sky.

Nothing.

Bailey knotted her fingers around a handful of roots, rested her head on a handkerchief-sized patch of grass, and fell asleep. She didn't open her eyes again until she heard a helicopter hovering overhead.

There was a light. It seemed as bright as the moon. The searchlight swept through the marsh. Far off she heard barking. “Here! I'm here!” she cried, but her voice was lost in the whirl of helicopter blades. “Don't go!” she shouted. “Don't leave me here!”

The sound of the helicopter grew fainter. Gradually it faded.

“No.” She sobbed. “No. Don't . . .”

She was alone once more. All around, the marsh seemed alive with the sighing of the wind, the gentle swish of water, the splash of fish, and the rustling of small creatures in the undergrowth. The mosquitoes renewed their assault, and she reapplied her mud armor, flexed her cramped fingers, and shivered in the cold.

Daniel hadn't come for her. Either Grace had killed him, or they'd killed each other. The truth was too bitter to face. She might as well have died there in the incoming tide as lie here and be nibbled to death, as she'd wished on Grace Catlin. If Daniel was alive, he would have found her by now.

Unless he needed her . . . Unless he lay somewhere, bleeding, perhaps looking up at the same stars and wondering why she hadn't come for him. Bailey struggled up out of the water, ripped off handfuls of leaves from the surrounding grasses, and rubbed her arms and legs until the worst of her shivering ceased.

She had to go back. The cabin was her point of reference. But she'd lost all sense of direction. How could she find her way if she didn't know north from south, or up-creek from down?

She strained to hear the sound of a boat motor, the bark of a dog. Daniel had promised dogs would find her, hadn't he? He wouldn't have lied to her. All she had to do was wait until morning, find her way back to the cabin and . . .

And what then? What if they'd given up the search? Moved on to another island without even—

“Bailey!”

Faint. So faint she might have imagined it. “Please,
God,” she murmured, “let it be him. Let it be my Daniel.”

A splash. Another fish? Was that what she'd heard? A deer swimming the creek? A wild dog? Were there wild dogs out here?

“Bailey! Where the hell are—”

“Daniel! Daniel!” she screamed. “I'm here. I'm here!”

She wiggled and squirmed through a clump of reeds, tripped and fell into water again. And when she splashed her way to the surface, she saw the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen in her life—Daniel Catlin illuminated in the moonlight, paddling toward her in some sort of tiny primitive boat.

She swam toward him. Every inch of her body ached; she was cold to the core of her bones, and she felt as though she were a hundred years old, but she'd never felt as strong or as lighthearted.

“Damn, babe, but you're a Tawes, all right. I've been hunting you for hours.”

Then his arms were around her, and he was pulling her over the side into the wooden boat and covering her muddy face with kisses. “I thought I'd lost you, babe.”

She squeezed him as tight as she could, heedless of the pain in her injured arm, no longer caring about the mud or the insect bites or the threat of Grace and her gun. She clung to Daniel, inhaling his earthy scent and savoring the feel of his warm body against hers. “You're not dead,” she blubbered. “I thought you must be dead, or . . . or you would have found me.”

“I told you to hide,” he said between kisses, “not go Indian on me. Are you sure you're not a ghost, woman?”

She ran her hands over him, over his face and hair,
and felt him flinch. “You are hurt,” she said. “Are you shot?”

“Nothing a few blood transfusions and a new heart won't fix.”

“Daniel?”

“Shh, shh,” he said, pulling her against him again. “I'm teasing you. I'll be fine. She hit me once in the left calf, grazed my head, and nicked my right upper arm in that first barrage. Damned bird. I thought I had the drop on her. I think I've got a bullet in my thigh too. Lucky for me she had the twenty-two and not the three-oh-eight.”

“Grace . . . did you . . . Is she dead?”

“I hit her. I know I did. I found a blood trail. She's somewhere on this island, but I doubt if she's got enough left in her to come after us tonight. The police helicopters probably sent her into hiding.”

“If she's alive.”

He nodded. “If she's still alive.” Gently he settled her in front of him on the bottom of the boat. “Careful. The dugout won't sink, even carrying two of us, but we don't want another dip tonight.”

“Can you find your way out of here?” she asked, kissing his left arm and his bare chest.

“Out and home again, if some overanxious waterman doesn't shoot us before we reach Will's skiff. I talked to Cathy's husband, Jim. Every waterman on the bay is hunting for you, babe. And I don't doubt they've searched every inch of Tawes. By daybreak they'll be hunting the beach for our bodies.”

“The authorities?”

“I imagine they're out, too. But it will be fishermen, crabbers, farmers, the people who know this place like the back of their hands who'll stand the best chance of
finding us. Not just from Tawes, but from Deal, Crisfield, Smith, the Eastern Shore. We may have our own way of doing things, but we look after our own.”

“I don't care if they do shoot me,” she said, nestling against him. “All I want is to be warm and dry and . . .”

“And what?”

“Have you hold me.”

“All you had to do was ask.”

“Daniel?”

“Yes, babe.”

“I'm asking.”

The first rays of dawn were breaking over the trees when Daniel watched a medical technician wheel Bailey's limp body off the helicopter pad at Peninsula General in Salisbury and through the wide doors to the emergency room. He refused a wheelchair and followed them, clutching a wool blanket around his shoulders and ignoring the shouted questions of the TV reporter who'd appeared outside just as the helicopter was touching down.

“Can you verify that this is the kidnap victim?” the young black woman demanded. “What can you tell us about her injuries? Has the alleged perpetrator been apprehended?”

Two uniformed Maryland state troopers closed ranks behind Daniel. “There are questions we need to ask as soon as you . . .”

But Daniel's eyes remained fixed on the stretcher ahead of him, which was being wheeled through another set of double doors and into a curtained-off area. When he'd found her, Bailey had seemed in good shape, despite the bullet hole in her arm, but once they reached Will's skiff she'd collapsed. One minute
he'd been stripping off her wet clothing to wrap her in a plastic tarp so she could warm up, and the next she'd seemed to go into shock. She'd slipped in and out of consciousness in the helicopter, and from what he could hear the medics saying, her vital signs weren't the best.

He could have felt better himself, but Bailey was all that mattered now, not finding Grace Catlin or seeing to his own injuries. Everything in the world centered on that one small woman behind the blue-striped curtain, and he didn't have the slightest intention of moving more than a few yards from her side until he was certain that she was in stable condition.

A dark-haired man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck stepped from another cubicle. “Mr. Catlin?”

Daniel met the physician's gaze. “Go to hell, Lucas,” he said quietly. “Get out of my way. Turn around and walk out, or I'll call that reporter in here and blow your cover so high you'll be spending the rest of your career counting counterfeit DVDs in Outer Mongolia.”

“That's a bad attitude,” Lucas answered, taking a step closer. “Not wise, not after what you—”

Daniel dropped the blanket and shoved the agent into the nearest open door, which fortunately led to a small toilet. He stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind them. “What the hell is going on? What are you doing here?”

“Tying up loose ends. You know how David hates loose ends.”

“How many times do I have to tell you that I had nothing to do with Marshall's blackmail or his death?”

Lucas glared at him.

“I imagine that if you looked hard enough, you
could find a dozen people who wanted to be rid of him, including his own political party. If I found out about the drugs, who else knew?”

“Exactly. You're a loose cannon. What's to keep you from deciding to sully the senator's reputation, or to topple a house of cards and bring down—”

“To hell with them all,” Daniel said. “Do you think I care about that now? I walked away from it, but I keep my word. Whatever I found out or didn't find out when I was part of the agency, it's buried as deep as Marshall.”

“You keep going back to the senator, Danny. Why is that?”

“He made a deal with the devil, and his note came due. I didn't kill him.”

“You took Marker's death to heart. And the woman's.”

“Mallalai? Nobody forced her to strap a bomb to her waist and blow up that coffeehouse. I was wrong about her—about who she was and what side she was on. She was as much of a terrorist as Joe Marshall. The difference is, she did it for her ‘holy war.' He did it for the money.”