Deadly Pursuit (27 page)

47

Jack had a plan, of course. He always had a plan.

The copter was well to the north now, hovering over the lagoon. An observer on board was unlikely to see him from that distance; but to further reduce the risk of being spotted, he kept off the road, jogging through the woods, as he headed south to the plantation house.

Almost two days ago he had escaped from the strip mall in North Hollywood while another helicopter buzzed overhead, quartering the area like a hungry hawk. Now after crossing three thousand miles, here he was again, hiding from his enemies, a field mouse scrambling for cover in the brush.

But still free. Still capable of action. As long as he could move and think, he had a chance.

Kirstie was one card he held. If necessary, he could use her as a hostage to buy himself time, convert a siege into a standoff. A desperate option, which he would exercise only as a last resort.

Better by far to get away. There was a chance of that, too. He saw a possibility of performing another magic trick, a second vanishing act. To slip free of his pursuers’ talons for a second time—sweet, if he could manage it. Very sweet.

And if all his hopes failed, if he faced capture and the unendurable prospect of life imprisonment ... well, the Beretta tucked inside the waistband of his pants still held three rounds, by his count. Enough to finish Kirstie—and himself.

He found the garden and skirted the wall till he reached the western side of the house. Twin diesel generators rumbled there, in a shed outside the radio room. Ten-gallon drums of fuel were stacked in a corner.

Lugging one heavy drum by the handle, Jack climbed through the window Kirstie had smashed. Flies swarmed over the floor near Anastasia’s spread-eagled body, drawn by a pool of congealing blood.

He uncapped the drum. Fuel gurgled out, leaving a wet trail behind him as he made his way through the kitchen and dining room. The can was nearly empty when he reached the living room, awash in virgin daylight slanting through the big arched windows. He kicked scraps of kindling out of the fireplace and baptized them in the last drops of fuel.

Near the fireplace was a bundle of long matches used for lighting tinder. He retreated to the patio, struck a match, and tossed it inside.

The bright wisp of flame descended in a slow-motion loop, graceful as a dying firefly, and dropped into a puddle of fuel at the foot of the mahogany table.

Whoosh
.

The eruption of yellow-orange flame was a second sunrise. Jack stumbled backward, overcome by a rush of intense heat.

Instantly the table was crawling with angry snakes of flame. The paper shades of the chandelier caught fire. The ceiling smoked.

From the center of the garden Jack watched, briefly mesmerized, as the fire spread. Through the living room windows, the sofa and leather armchairs were visible, spitting flame like dragons. Pots burst, flowers crackled. The globe tipped over, a planet ablaze. The miniature schooner on the mantel died in a fury of flame-lashed rigging.

Distant percussive noises like the pops of a cap pistol signaled the explosion of the kitchen’s bottle-glass windows. The floral-print curtains over the French doors flashed out of existence in sheets of whirling sparks. Webworks of filigreed iron decorating the doors and windows began to melt and bend, twisting the artists’ designs into grotesque Rorschach blots.

Jack went on watching, fascinated by the brisk, energetic destruction rampant before him, the triumph of chaos over order, entropy’s last word. It pleased him to have been the agent and midwife of the fire. He liked its mindless hunger, its gleeful rapacity; and he relished, as always, the violent death of beauty.

Turning away at last, he hurried out the garden gate. He pounded down the trail, then veered into the woods when he heard the helicopter’s approach.

Behind him, the Larson house threw off a black column of smoke, spiraling slowly, a tornado garlanded in embers.

The copter was closer now, drawn to the flames like some giant moth. Jack huddled by a royal poinciana, concealed beneath an umbrella of feathery leaves and scarlet blossoms, while overhead the rotor blades whacked the air like giant paddles and the Huey’s turboshaft engine screamed. Wind from the blades gusted through the forest, shaking thickets of shell ginger and kicking up lazy streamers of dust.

Then the chopper passed on, and Jack started moving again.

The row houses were less than a hundred feet away. He dared a breathless sprint under the open sky, gambling that the copter crew would have their attention focused on the blaze.

The door to the shack was still secured. Before leaving, he had removed his belt, looped it around the knob, and nailed it to the door frame with his pocketknife.

He wrenched the blade loose, kicked open the door, and found Kirstie slumped on the floor.

“Get up,” he snapped. “Move.”

She groaned.

“Dammit, move!”

He yanked her to her feet and brandished the knife in her face.

“Do what I say, or I’ll cut you. Understand?”

The threat had no effect. She seemed to be beyond fear.

“Give it up,” she whispered. “It’s over.”

“Uh-uh, sweetheart. I’ve only just begun.” He slipped the knife into the vest pocket of his shirt and hustled her out the door. “Now let’s get going.”

They stumbled away from the shacks. Looking south, Jack saw the chopper descending, its gleaming fuselage gradually eclipsed by smoke and flame.

The cops were landing to explore the house, save anyone inside. Perfect.

He guided Kirstie into a tangle of scrub on the verge of the beach. Together they staggered through the prickly brush, scaring birds and butterflies out of their path. The orange sun, fiercely bright, stabbed at their eyes through breaks in the foliage.

“Where ...” A gasp stole her question. “Where are we going?”

“My runabout. Then the open water. By the time anyone figures out we’re gone, I’ll be cruising down Highway One in another stolen car.”

Kirstie didn’t ask where she would be. Jack imagined she already knew.

48

Lovejoy squinted at the red radiance of the sun, furnace-hot on the horizon. Pelican Key was concealed somewhere in the sheet of glare.

“Smoke.” Pice stabbed a finger at the spray-flecked venturi windshield.

A dark plume bisected the spread of crimson light.

Lovejoy thumbed the transmit button on his walkie-talkie and asked the team leader to report.

“House on the south end of the key just went up like a Roman candle. Pilot already radioed for fireboats. We’re setting down to perform a search-and-rescue.”

“Maintain your alertness. You could be walking into a trap.”

“How bad is this s.o.b., anyway?”

“He’s the devil. And it appears he’s not through raising hell.”

A stiff wind beat at the water. The
Black Caesar
panted on the swells. Curtains of spray burst over the port bow, soaking the foredeck; water gurgled in the scuppers.

Pelican Key materialized slowly out of the sun’s candescence. On a level stretch of ground between the dock and the house’s flagstone court, amid beds of flowers, the Huey crouched on its skid, rotor blades still spinning. A line of tiny figures in dark blue jackets, hunched low, sprinted up the path toward the gate with revolvers drawn.

“Want us to tie up at the dock?” Pice asked.

“No.” Moore scanned the shoreline, using a pair of binoculars borrowed from the control console. “The fire’s a diversion. Like the locked storeroom in the CSGI office.”

Lovejoy had been thinking the same thing. “Circle the island,” he told Pice. “Is there another dock?”

Pice manhandled the wheel, swinging the
Black Caesar
to the northeast. “No. You could drop anchor in the cove, though. Or drag a dinghy aground—”

Moore interrupted.
“Look.”

Perhaps half a mile ahead, a small boat glided away from the beach, trailing a white vee of foam.

“Two persons on board.” Moore adjusted the focus on the binoculars. “Man and woman, I think. Woman is seated in the bow. Blond Caucasian, must be Mrs. Gardner. The man ...”

She strained to get a clear view of him through a rainbowed mist of spray.

“It’s Jack,” she said finally.

“What’s his heading?” Lovejoy asked Pice.

“Due north. Probably means to turn west eventually and come ashore on Windley or Plantation Key.”

“If we give chase, things are likely to get dangerous. I can’t order you—”

Pice brushed aside Lovejoy’s politeness. “No need for orders. I volunteer.”

He slammed the throttles open. The sportfisher plunged ahead.

“He sees us,” Moore said, staring through the binoculars, her voice taut.

The runabout hooked east, into the sun.

“It’s no use, Jack,” Lovejoy whispered. “Your luck has finally run out.”

49

Kirstie sat on the runabout’s sailing thwart and stared blankly at the water rushing past. Flecks of turquoise checkered the swells, dancing amid a flotsam of orange sun-sparkles. Pretty. So pretty ...

“Son of a
bitch
.”

Glancing up, she saw Jack twisted in his seat, his gaze fixed on a sportfisher half a mile astern.

The
Black Caesar
? She thought it was.

He turned toward her. A child’s petulant fury distorted his face—helpless, shaking rage at a world that would not let him have his way.

“First a chopper, now a boat. Got a whole fucking armada on my ass.” He yanked the outboard motor’s throttle arm, and the runabout fetched east. “But I’ll beat ’em anyway. You hear me, Meredith?”

“I’m not Meredith!” she protested hoarsely over the buzz of the engine.

“Yes, you are.” The glittery malice in his eyes hinted at a deeper craziness, an insane obsession rooted at the base of his soul. “For me, you are.”

Behind them, the sportfisher altered its heading. It ran east, accelerating to twenty knots, rapidly narrowing the gap. The lurid light of sunrise smoldered on the choppy water. On the retreating horizon a wide fan of smoke unfolded slowly from Pelican Key.

Jack gathered up the three bags of supplies in the bow and hurled them overboard, lightening the boat. The sportfisher continued to close in.

“You can’t outrun them,” Kirstie said.

“Sure I can.”

“Their boat’s faster than yours.”

“But not as maneuverable. You know the nursery rhyme:
Jack, be nimble; Jack, be quick
...” He flashed a smile at her, a weird simulacrum of the cocky grin that had defined his earlier persona. “That’s me. Nimble and quick. I can slip through the reef, easy as threading a needle. That big mother will run aground if she tries it.”

Kirstie looked past him at the cruiser expanding with a roar of diesel engines. “You won’t even get to the reef.”

“Hey, show a little faith.” That smile again. “I’ve got a way of making them back off.”

He withdrew the Beretta from his waistband.

* * *

Leaning over the safety rail for a better view, training the binoculars on the runabout, Moore saw the pistol come up fast.

Instinctively she pulled back, a split second late.

The bullet caught her left arm below the elbow, shattering her radius and ulna.

Pain walloped her, knocked her reeling to the deck of the bridge.

Blur of action to her right. Pice seizing his Winchester.

What came out of her mouth was one long unpunctuated cry of distress:
“No don’t you’ll hit the hostage!”

“Warning shot,” Pice snapped. He poked the gun barrel past the windshield and squeezed off a round, aiming high.

* * *

The rifle’s report cracked like a stinging hand clap over the water. Reflexively Kirstie ducked.

A strong hand closed over her shoulder and wrenched her roughly off the thwart. Jack thrust her in front of him and screamed.

“Shoot me now, you assholes!” Frenzied exhilaration shredded his voice. “Come on,
shoot me now
!"

He pistoned out his arm, the Beretta pointed like an accusing finger, and fired again.

* * *

Lovejoy was on his way across the bridge to help his partner when the venturi windshield exploded in a cloud of shards.

Pice shielded his face with his arm. Lovejoy, caught off balance, had no chance to protect himself. Crumbs of glass chewed through his face like rodent teeth.

“Jesus.”

He stumbled, blinking blood out of his eyes. For a heart-stopping moment he thought he had been blinded. No. Cuts scored his forehead and cheeks; blood had dampened his eyes only as it spattered.

At the steering console, Pice fired a second warning shot.

Lovejoy ran a handkerchief over his face and crouched beside Moore. He tore off the sleeve of her jacket, then removed his necktie and wound it around her arm at the elbow, making a tourniquet.

“This no-account mother’s gonna kill us both,” Moore said with a twitchy attempt at a smile.

“No chance. We’ve got him on the run.”

At least, he hoped they did.

* * *

The reef wavered on the horizon, a crooked line against a brassy smear of sun.

Jack had hoped the sportfisher would cut her speed, giving him time to find some narrow channel between the rocks.

No such luck. The cruiser was hard astern, bearing down on him like a runaway train.

Well, there was an alternate way of crossing the reef.

He gunned the motor, pushing the runabout to full throttle. The bow lifted. The boat bounced crazily, skimming the water and shooting up fans of spray, as the Yamaha outboard shrilled.

“Some fun, huh?” he asked Kirstie with a bark of laughter.

Her eyes, wide and strangely vacant, stared out from behind a foam-drenched net of hair.

Clutching her closer, ignoring her feeble moan of protest, Jack fired another shot at the sportfisher’s bridge.

* * *

The third bullet blasted a smoking hole in the control console, showering Pice with sparks.

“You okay?” Lovejoy yelled.

“Bastard missed me. Knocked out my oil gauges, is all.”

Lovejoy finished knotting the tourniquet in place. “Lie still,” he told Moore.

“Like hell.” She fumbled her .38 out of her shoulder holster with her good hand. “Where I grew up, a flesh wound is about as serious as a paper cut. We’ve got to give Pice some protection.”

“All right, cover him from here—but stay down. I’ll try to draw Jack’s fire.”

He swung onto the ladder and descended to the weather deck, awash in spray. A sliding door admitted him to the galley. Lurching from handhold to handhold, he advanced to the main cabin, where a companionway ladder lowered him to the forward stateroom.

V-berths were built into the bulkheads. He stood on a berth and opened the overhead hatch, then hauled himself up onto the foredeck. On elbows and knees he wriggled to the stem of the prow.

The runabout was fifty feet away, a speeding arrowhead on a feathery shaft of wake, launched at the red bull’s-eye of the sun.

Lovejoy fired a round well wide of the mark, simply hoping to get Jack’s attention and prevent another shot at the bridge.

* * *

Jack heard the bullet whiz past and caught a glimpse of the man prone on the foredeck, intermittently visible as the sportfisher’s bow lifted and plunged.

The reef was less than a minute ahead. He could afford no further distractions.

Next time the bow swung down, he would take the fucker out.

The cruiser’s bow rose on a swell, then dipped as the wave passed. For an instant the gunman bobbed into view, a perfect target.

Jack pulled the trigger.

Nothing.

The Beretta was empty, the sixteen-round clip finally exhausted.

“Shit.” Jack pitched the gun overboard.

It didn’t matter anyway. If he cleared the reef, the sportfisher couldn’t follow. Either she would be forced into a hopelessly time-consuming detour, or she would founder on the rocks.

* * *

The
Black Caesar
shook with the twin diesels’ vibrations. Glass shards clinging to the windshield frame shivered and fell like melting icicles.

Moore saw the reef and yelled a warning to Pice. “Coral ahead!”

“I know it.” The captain’s voice was calm. “He’s trying to wreck us.”

“Won’t he wreck himself, too?”

“He doesn’t think so. He’s got a daredevil stunt in mind.”

“What have
you
got in mind?”

Pice showed her a grim smile. “Just hang onto that rail when I tell you to. And tell your partner to get below deck.”

* * *

The reef was close now. Thirty seconds.

Jack scanned the line of rocks and saw a short stretch of coral flatter than the main line of the ridge. He jerked the throttle arm sideways, aiming for that spot.

A lightweight craft running at top speed on a rough sea was capable of hydroplaning over a reef, skimming the jagged outcrops without being caught and torn.

It could be done. He’d heard stories of such maneuvers while hanging around boatyards in the Keys many summers ago.

The trick was in the timing. You had to catch a wave, ride it like a surfer, let the rolling carpet of water sweep you over the rocks to safety on the other side.

Ten seconds.

Jack, be nimble
...

* * *

“Peter! Get below!”

Lovejoy heard Moore’s shout in the same moment when the reef appeared out of a whirl of spray, dead ahead.

He scrambled away from the stem and dropped down the hatch.

Through the bulkheads, the big diesels howled like tortured beasts. He gripped the companionway ladder, lacing his fingers between the treads.

What the hell was Pice up to? He seemed to be trying to get them all killed.

* * *

Five seconds.

Jack released Kirstie and pushed her into the bow. He nudged the throttle stick to the right, correcting for a few degrees of leeward drift.

Jack, be quick
...

* * *

“Hang on!” Pice shouted.

Moore grabbed the safety rail with her good hand.

The reef was terrifyingly close. No way they could stop in time. She braced for impact.

Pice rammed the paired throttles into neutral and spun the wheel to starboard.

Lovejoy heard the sudden drop in engine noise, felt the boat’s shuddering turn. In the main cabin, something tipped over with a crash.

He tightened his grip on the ladder, knuckles squeezed white.

Silently he prayed.

* * *

Two seconds.

Jack, jump over
...

One second.

 
...
the candlestick
.

The runabout reached the reef on a crest of surging water and rose, propelled by momentum, lifted on the blanket of spray thrown up by the rocks and rising higher, higher, sailing over the reef in a graceful slow-motion curve.

Somewhere Kirstie was screaming. Jack ignored her. He had done it. He was flying.
Flying
.

The boat’s nose tipped down.

The reef flew up.

He had time to realize he hadn’t cleared the rocks—

Crack-up.

The runabout slammed headfirst into the coral ridge and blew apart in a hail of shattered floorboards and hissing Hypalon tubes.

* * *

Moore clung to the handrail as the
Black Caesar
heeled to starboard, scraping the reef on the port side.

Dimly she was aware that Jack’s boat had broken up.

She hoped Mrs. Gardner was all right.

No more victims. Please.

* * *

The force of the collision catapulted Kirstie out of the runabout. Her world turned somersaults, reef and sky exchanging places, and then the reef was behind her, water rushing up in a kaleidoscopic glitter, cold shock of immersion, and she floundered, gasping, fists slapping the green swells.

Around her bobbed scraps of the runabout, pushed by the wind. Inflation compartments, their seams burst, shriveled slowly like punctured balloons. Splintered driftwood scraped the rocks. The severed stern slowly foundered, buoyancy chambers deflating, the weight of the outboard motor bolted to the transom dragging it down.

On the far side of the reef, the
Black Caesar
hove to. The brawny figure on the bridge was Captain Pice, pointing at her, while beside him a woman in a dark suit jacket shouted for someone named Peter.

It all seemed distant, unreal, an out-of-body experience. Perhaps she hadn’t survived the crash, after all. Perhaps she’d died with Jack.

Jack ...

Had
he died?

And if not—where was he?

Sudden urgency stabbed through her unnatural calm. She turned, scanning the water, and abruptly a huge dark shape filled her field of vision.

Jack rising up, mouth twisted in a snarl, hands reaching out like an animal’s claws.

Kirstie almost found the strength to scream, and then those hands closed off her throat, fingers squeezing, and she was plunged under the waves.

* * *

In his mind, Jack was eighteen again, alone with Meredith Turner in the swimming pavilion, holding her underwater, drowning her, drowning the bitch.

“Fuck you, Meredith,” he rasped as her blond hair fanned and rippled, graceful as a sea anemone.
“Fuck you.”

Something tugged his right leg.

What the hell?

Another tug, and he was yanked below the surface.

Through the crystalline water he saw a taut cable extending from his foot to the submerging mass of the runabout’s stern.

The mooring line. He must have gotten tangled in it when he tumbled free of the boat. One end was cleated to the transom; as the stern descended, the rope was pulling him along.

If he released his hold on Kirstie, he might be able to free himself.

Yes, he might. But he would not try.

We die together, Meredith. I’ll never let you go.

* * *

Sinking deeper. Sunlight fading. The need for air a searing ache in her lungs.

She pummeled Jack, battering his shoulders, delivering weak blows to his head.

No use. His hands still wrapped her neck, a python’s coils, constricting tighter, tighter.

In desperation she raked her ragged nails across his chest, clawing his shirt to tatters.

Buttons popped loose. His vest pocket flapped open. Something compact and shiny spilled out and cartwheeled slowly through the water.

A knife. His Swiss Army knife.

She seized it. Fumbled the spear blade out of its slot.

Instantly the choking pressure on her neck was gone. Jack grabbed her knife hand, held the blade at bay. It glittered between them, silvery in the dimming light.

She struggled to break free of his grip. Impossible. His fingers were iron bars, unyielding.