Deadly Pursuit (10 page)

15

Kirstie intercepted Steve on his way out of the bedroom. He had changed into a bathing suit and was toting a bulky carrying case loaded with two sets of snorkel tubes, face masks, and swim fins.

“Don’t go with him,” she said urgently.

He stopped in the middle of the loggia and set down the case. “What?”

“Out to the reef. Don’t go.”

“Why not?”

She couldn’t say, exactly. There were no words for it. In the kitchen a few minutes earlier, Jack had acted odd again, vaguely menacing—yet when she replayed the incident in her mind, she could find nothing definite to object to.

He had asked if she wanted help with the dishes. Had said he wanted to be liked. A perfectly innocent exchange. Hardly one that should have left her frightened and unsettled.

Yet it had. It had.

“I’ve got a bad feeling, that’s all.”

Steve smiled. “Like a man-eating shark is gonna get me?”

“Not a shark. A snake.”

She turned toward the French doors. Through the sun-streaked glass, Jack was visible in a far corner of the patio, petting the dog.

Steve followed her gaze. His eyes narrowed as he understood.

“Jack ...? Oh, come on.”

The doors were shut, and Kirstie was sure Jack couldn’t hear their conversation, but she pitched her voice low anyway. “He scared me on the beach. He still scares me.”

“I’ve known him for years—”

“No. You knew him—years ago. That’s different. You haven’t seen him since high school.”

“He hasn’t changed.”

“Everybody changes.”

“I don’t notice any difference.”

“Because he’s hiding it.”

Steve studied the floor. “What are you saying?” he asked slowly. “That he’s a psychopath? That he’s luring me to the reef so he can drown me?”

Kirstie felt her scalp prickle. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Listen to yourself.”

“No—you listen to me.” She took his hand. “I’m asking you not to go. Whether it makes any sense or not ... that’s what I want.”

He lifted his head and stared at her for a long moment, then let his gaze travel through the French doors, to rest on Jack again.

“I already promised,” he said softly.

“So break your promise. People do it all the time.”

“Not me.”

Something snapped inside her. “Jesus Christ, when did you get to be so goddamn righteous?”

“Calm down. He’ll hear you.”

She almost screamed at him that she didn’t care what Jack Dance heard. Then self-possession took hold of her, and she bit back the words. She stood unmoving until she could speak quietly, reasonably.

“You won’t even humor me a little?” she said at last.

He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Not when I think you’re being irrational.”

“Then will you at least do one thing for me?” He waited. “Take the gun.”

“The
gun
?”

“Just stick it in your bag. Where you can reach it—if you have to.”

Steve shook his head disbelievingly, then crossed the narrow space between them and embraced her.

“Kirstie ... Jack’s an old friend.”

“I don’t want you to be alone with him.”

“It’ll be all right.”

“You won’t take the gun?”

“Forget the gun. Everything will be fine.” He brushed a wisp of hair off her forehead and smiled. “I’ll be back in an hour. Still in one piece. I guarantee it.”

Useless to argue. She yielded.

“Of course you will,” she breathed, the words toneless, a memorized lesson. “Don’t mind me. I’m paranoid.”

Abruptly he pulled her closer, his mouth meeting hers with surprising urgency. His sudden need, the driving intensity of his desire—she found it shocking, disorienting.

Then he drew back, and Kirstie caught her breath. She searched for something to say.

“What ... what was that all about?”

“Do I need a reason to kiss you?”

“No. No, of course not, but ...” Watching his eyes, she felt her mouth slide into a faltering smile. “Oh, look at you. You got your glasses all smudged up.”

“It doesn’t matter—”

“Sure it does. Let me have them.”

She fogged the lenses with her breath and carefully polished them with a soft tissue.

“You know you can’t see without your glasses,” she said weakly. Some emotion she couldn’t identify quavered in her voice and made it ragged. “You’re ... practically helpless.”

A tremor passed through her hands, and the glasses nearly dropped from her grasp.

“You okay?” Steve asked.

“Just a little worked up, I guess.”

He slipped the glasses back on. He had trouble snugging the stems behind his ears.

Kirstie frowned. “Your hands are shaking, too.”

“It was that amorous interlude we just shared,” he said lightly, then planted a quick social kiss on her cheek, merely an affectionate peck. “Left me kind of unglued.”

He picked up the carrying case and headed off before she could say anything more.

16

Jack’s anxiety had passed, leaving him composed and controlled, by the time Steve stepped onto the patio.

“Ready to go?” Steve asked brightly.

“Sure. As soon as I climb into my suit. Your suit, I mean.”

“I left one in the bathroom, on the towel rack.”

“Be right with you.”

Jack pulled on a pair of red-white-and-blue trunks, concealing the knife, with the blade safely retracted, under the elastic waistband.

It was the same knife he had brought with him to the island on those summer days nearly two decades ago, and now it would slash Steve’s throat. The thought made his stomach clench.

He cooled his face with a damp towel again, then emerged from the bathroom and found the Gardners waiting wordlessly in the foyer. The tension between them was obvious. Kirstie must have been trying to warn her husband not to go, but he hadn’t listened. Part of Jack—a very small part—almost wished he had.

“Suit fit all right?” Steve asked.

“Perfect.”

“All set, then.” A clap of hands. “On the attack—Jack!”

Jack’s smile covered his wince as he echoed the clap. “Ready to go—Steve-o!”

It was a ritual from their high-school days, pleasantly goofy then, painful now. It brought back memories of better times. Unwanted memories.

He followed Steve and Kirstie out the door, then along the flagstone path to the dock. Together he and Steve climbed down the ladder and boarded the motorboat. Kirstie threw off the mooring line.

“Have a good time,” she called, her voice neutral, eyes guarded. She fixed her gaze on Steve and added, “Be careful.”

Steve returned the stare complacently. “Always am.” He settled into the stern and fumbled with the starter cord, smiling at Jack. “Great day, isn’t it? Just like summertime when we were seventeen.”

Jack looked at the blue sweep of sky, the turquoise water, the dancing spangles of sun. His answer, low and bitter, was swallowed by a ripping cough of sound as the outboard motor revved to life.

“Yeah, Steve-o. It’s a perfect day.”

He touched his waistband, felt the shape of the knife.

Throttling back, Steve guided the boat away from the dock, heading east, toward the reef.

Jack looked back once and saw Kirstie still standing at the end of the dock, her hair blown in the wind, her arm cutting the sky in a long, sweeping wave.

17

Anastasia was waiting by the front door when Kirstie stepped back inside the house. The dog whined.

“You miss your buddy Jack?” Kirstie snapped. “Well, I don’t.”

Then she sighed. Kneeling, she stroked Ana’s silky coat. “Sorry, girl. Mommy’s a little worked up right now. And the thing of it is, she’s not even sure why.”

Steve was probably right: she was being irrational. She’d taken an instant, visceral dislike to Jack Dance and had allowed it to color all her subsequent impressions.

Most likely he really was nothing worse than a creep. Not the devil incarnate, just your garden-variety ... snake.

“But how come he had to spoil
our
paradise?” she wondered aloud.

Ana had no answer.

The house seemed disturbingly empty with Steve gone. Empty and quiet. Unwanted phrases slipped through Kirstie’s mind: quiet as the dead, lonely as a cemetery, silent as a grave.

She wandered the rooms restlessly, finding no joy in the bars of sun slanting through the arched windows in the living room or the French doors of the loggia. The cheery tinkle of the fountain in the patio seemed irritating, extraneous, an artificial merriment, like a music box’s tinny rhapsody or the rippling chatter of wind chimes.

She looked for more dishes to wash, but there were none in the kitchen sink. She poured a glass of water and left the water running, pointlessly, wastefully, until she realized she had left it on, just to hear the noise it made. Then with a jerk of her wrist she closed the tap.

Back in the living room she confronted the television set, which had remained off throughout the past two weeks. She had considered it a victory of sorts not to have turned on the set even once, to have lived for half a month without the canned idiocy that was too much a part of modern life.

But now she needed it. The TV was company, and a distraction; she wanted both.

She found the remote control, figured out how to work it. The TV popped on with a buzz and crackle. She flipped through channels, passing game shows and soap operas, before settling on a noontime Miami newscast.

Ana stretched out before the flickering picture tube as if lying by a fire. Kirstie was too fidgety to relax. She circled the room, idly rearranging things—the schooner on the mantel, the potted fern in a corner, the globe near the couch—while the newscasters alternated glibly between happy talk and sober seriousness.

The world, it appeared, had survived her two weeks of neglect. Nothing had changed. The same dreary procession of disasters and senseless tragedies still filled the airwaves.

On the screen, a video graphic read fire; cut to a burned-out housing project on Tenth Street, someone’s mother shrieking in Spanish as a small body was wrapped in sheets and carted away.

Back to the news desk. Another graphic: carjacking. Cut to the scene of a fatal struggle over an automobile, the victim’s remains already gone by the time cameras arrived, the lenses focusing greedily on a smear of blood discoloring the curb.

The news desk again. Graphic: murder.

“Nationally,” the female anchor said, “the manhunt continues for a serial killer now officially linked to the deaths of seven women in six western and southwestern states—”

This wasn’t helping at all.

Kirstie clicked the remote, and the TV shut off.

“I guess listening to the news isn’t exactly the best way to calm your nerves,” she remarked to the room.

Ana cocked her head and panted.

The heat was starting to get to her, or maybe it was tension. Either way she was sweating too much; she felt sticky, grimy. A shower would cool her off.

She went down the loggia, into the bathroom, and found Jack’s clothes neatly folded on the rim of the tub. Lifting them in her arms, she carried them into the master bedroom. As she laid them on the bed, something small and green slipped out of the back pocket of the jeans and fluttered to the floor.

She picked it up. A folded bill—no, many bills. Five twenties, four fifties, four hundreds. Seven hundred and twenty dollars in all. A fair amount of cash to be toting around. It struck her as vaguely suspicious.

Oh, come on. Plenty of people carried more money than this, even when they weren’t on vacation.

Still, she couldn’t help wondering what else Jack had in his pockets. Something incriminating? Proof that her distrust of him was justified? Vindication of her warnings to Steve?

Doubtful. But not entirely impossible.

The only way to find out, of course, was to look and see.

She recoiled from the thought. Search his clothes like a thief? She wasn’t some crooked chambermaid. She was Jack’s hostess. He was her guest.

But an uninvited guest. An unwelcome guest.

Even so, Miss Manners definitely would not approve.

Well ... fuck her.

Harassed by guilt, yet feeling a certain sneaking pleasure despite herself, Kirstie unfolded Jack’s blue jeans, then emptied the pockets one at a time.

In the other back pocket, a wallet. She examined its contents. California driver’s license. An additional $213 in bills of various denominations. Three major credit cards, all in Jack’s name.

Nothing dramatic there. She replaced the wallet and inspected his side pockets. Car and house keys. Antacid tablets in a blister pack. Folded tissues. Loose change.

That was all.

Kirstie released a breath. Disappointment competed with relief. His belongings were thoroughly dull. Not much different from what Steve would carry in his own pockets. No cocaine, no amphetamines, no phony ID or stolen credit cards, no straight razor crusted with blood—

She blinked.

And no knife.

But Jack had carried a knife. She’d seen it. He’d removed it from his pants pocket, stripped a blackberry-bush cane of its thorns, stems, and leaves to make a stick for Ana to fetch.

She checked all the pants pockets again, then searched Jack’s shirt.

Nothing.

He must have taken it—taken it with him—on the boat.

She hadn’t seen the knife when Jack left. And Steve’s bathing suit, the one Jack borrowed, had no pockets.

He’d hidden it somehow. Hidden it on his person.

And now he was out there with Steve, the two of them alone together.

She heard a sudden rapid clacking noise and realized it was her teeth, chattering idiotically.

“Jesus, why didn’t you take the gun? Why were you so stubborn?”

She was addressing her husband, who was not here, who might never be here again.

The room was hot. Of course it was. This was Florida. Everything was hot. But the heat seemed suddenly more intense, stifling, overwhelming—she pressed her hand to her forehead, felt a rush of lightheadedness, a curious weakness in her knees.

Your head. Lower your head.

She leaned over the bed, her head down, until the faintness passed and her heart was not racing in her chest. With effort she cleared her mind of panic and forced herself to think, to be calm and reasonable.

What exactly was she afraid of? Did she honestly think Jack would ... kill Steve?

Crazy.

Even if he had taken the knife, so what? Skin-divers routinely carried knives, which came in handy for digging up artifacts found on the sea bottom, cutting free of entangling boat lines or seaweed, even killing a moray eel if one should bite down on a groping hand.

There were many possible reasons why Jack had thought it best to take the knife with him. The intention to commit some irrational act of violence was the least likely explanation.

But if all that was true, why couldn’t she stop shaking?

She feared Jack, that was why. She sensed danger in him.

People made jokes about feminine intuition, but Kirstie had always believed in it. Women were more intuitive than men, better at reading emotions and gauging a person’s inner state. Perhaps biology had equipped members of her sex with some neurological hard wiring that made them more adept at interpreting feelings, relationships, nonverbal communication—the soft, fuzzy parts of life that most men scorned.

There was nothing soft and fuzzy about Jack Dance. Outwardly he was a smiling, affable rogue. But inside ...

Inside there was something hard and angry and pitiless, something that hungered for power, reveled in pain.

She had never sensed a similar hardness in her husband. And while ordinarily she would be grateful for that, now it made her afraid.

All right, what to do? She could radio for help. Call the police. But by the time she explained the situation, it might be too late. Besides, she had nothing concrete to report. Her fears could easily be dismissed as the products of a hysterical fantasy, as perhaps they were.

But perhaps not. And if not, then Steve was in danger, might already be under attack, might even be dead, and there was nothing she could do, no way to reach him, no way to help—

Wait.

The boat Jack said he’d rented. The dinghy.

He’d beached it at the cove.

The cove was at the other end of the island, but Pelican Key was small, the distance short. She could get there in ten minutes—fifteen at the most.

She’d never operated a boat, any kind of boat, but she’d seen Steve do so when he steered the motorboat to shore. It looked simple enough.

And for her own protection she would do what Steve had refused to do. She would take the gun.

The thought banished the last wisps of fog clouding her brain. She ran around to the other side of the bed, knelt, raised the bed skirt, groped eagerly for the pistol.

It wasn’t there.

But it had to be. Steve kept it under the bed, where he could grab it in an emergency, as he’d done last night.

She searched the floor desperately for over a minute before concluding that the gun really was gone.

“Steve changed his mind,” she whispered. “He took it, after all. Thank God.”

But how could he have done that? When she’d spoken with him in the hall, he’d dismissed the idea. And he hadn’t gone back into the bedroom afterward.

Jack had been in here, though. He had changed into his borrowed bathing suit while she and Steve waited in the foyer.

Had he looked beneath the bed for some reason, found the gun, taken it? No, that made no sense. Besides, he couldn’t have concealed the Beretta in the swimsuit. Too bulky.

So where was the goddamn thing?

Well, maybe Steve hadn’t replaced the Beretta in its usual spot after the false alarm last night. Maybe he’d hidden it in a drawer or something. Or packed it this morning for the trip home.

Wherever it was, she would have to go without it. She couldn’t waste precious minutes on an exhaustive search.

Too much time had passed as it was. Nearly a half hour since the boat’s departure. Anything could have happened by now. Anything.

She was running as she headed out the bedroom door.