Reilly 12 - Show No Fear (28 page)

T
HE SURF CAUGHT
N
INA AND SLAMMED HER AROUND.
H
ER
heart seemed to have temporarily stopped. There was no pain, just the awesome shock. She knew this cold, had surfed in it, but seldom without a wet suit. Fifty-two degrees on average. Survival time limited. She had five or ten minutes before she would need to save herself.

Her fingers froze into paws, good for dog-paddling and little else. She thrashed through the water. And found the hair.

But it was all she could do to hang on to it. Remy seemed beyond struggling. Her eyes were closed. The ocean dragged at them, the rip current urging them farther out to sea. A wave crashed over them; then the backwash, as it receded, pulled the body in her arms away. Flailing around in the inky pool, tangling with the kelp, Nina made her fingers search. After a moment that seemed like an eternity, she caught hold of sodden clothing, rose to the surface to breathe, and pulled the wet head out of the water for a second.

Remy thrust her arm up, balled her fist, and socked Nina hard. A rolling ten-footer caught and lifted them both. Propelled forward, rolling like a rock downhill, Nina stumbled out onto the beach and began to run up and down looking for Remy. For a long time she saw nothing. Someone was shouting far away.

Nina, the wind flapping her wet shirt, caught sight of Remy three or four hundred feet out. She ran back into the sea, puffs of white clouds against a starry night making it all look lustrous, unreal.

This time, she remembered to dive under the waves, get out past the breakers, where she could float for a moment while she froze to death. She lay on her back, arms and legs cramping. No sign of Remy. Nina was still too close in.

Picking up the same rip, she rode it like a sports car on a smooth road straight out to sea this time. The salt in her wounds felt excruciating, her limbs moving like a broken machine, her eyes stinging.

You’re not gonna get away and die, she kept repeating to herself.

Looming before her, she saw Remy’s uncanny white face circling around and around out there.

Nina called all her swimming experience into play. She counted her strokes, concentrating on making each one count, moving quickly across the waves with her powerful arms, resting her hurt shoulder when she could, oblivious to her own pain. She swam parallel to the rip now, getting back in control. Reaching a spot in front of Remy, Nina slid through the waves once more toward the hair tangled and glowing in the dark.

In a moment, she had her fingers ensnared in Remy’s hair. In her fatigue she pushed Remy underwater for a second. This galvanized the other woman, who came up sputtering and swinging. Nina tried to remember how to knock out drowning people so they could be towed to shore. She had the training, she just couldn’t get her thoughts together anymore. She took an awkward poke at Remy’s jaw. She connected with nothing and noticed with detachment and shock that Remy was laughing through her frozen mouth.

“Trying to save me?” Remy coughed through the water. She tried to get her hands around Nina’s neck, but Nina was stronger and fought her off. “Then we’ll go—together.”

“No!” Nina spat out water. “Stop! We’re both going to die out here!” She tried again to get a tow hold, but Remy was scratching her now, in the face, on the arms, anyplace she could touch. A wave
broke over them both, but Nina held on to the drifting white nightie.

Remy put her arm on top of Nina’s head and pushed her under with amazing strength. “You first!” Nina swallowed a mouthful of water, then pushed her way up from under the other woman’s hand. It was incredibly difficult to exert pressure of any kind when they were practically weightless. She pulled herself up by grabbing Remy’s shoulders, climbing her.

Remy sank, and when she bobbed up again, her face twisted with wrath. Treading water in a moment of sudden calm, the two exhausted women faced each other. “Give up?” Remy taunted, and the skull reappeared in her face, stark bone above lips frozen into a grin. She vomited out a spurt of water, hurled her long arms out toward Nina, but too late. Nina was faster in the water, more assured than on land. She swam swiftly out of reach.

When she turned around, Remy was gone. Nina swam in a frenzied line back and forth along the shore searching.

Nothing. Dark water pulling her down. She was so tired. Easier to let go.

N
INA FELT STRONG ARMS PULLING HER IN.
S
HE MUTTERED
and kicked at them. “Remy’s out there. I won’t go in without her, goddamn it. She’s not allowed to die—”

Jack was fresh and strong. He caught her up and pulled her to the shore.

Pulling her arms up and turning her on her side, he tried to make her comfortable for the next few seconds while she coughed and spit up water. He grabbed his jacket where he had left it on the sand and covered her with it. Nina was starting to black out and barely felt Jack yanking at seaweed tangled in her hair. Cursing, he let go and stood up.

“Remy!” he shouted toward the ocean, his voice a piteously small squawk in the roar of wind and surf. He walked to the edge of the water, waded in until the water was waist deep, calling again in all directions, but no head appeared, no hand. The waves continued to crash and the sky continued its glorious light show.

Nina was sitting up, rigid with shock. Her eyes too scanned the horizon. When Jack tried to help her off the beach, she shouted and raged incoherently. He pulled her up the stairs to the road. Stuffing her into the backseat of his car, he found a beach blanket
in his trunk and tucked it around her. A hand was beating on the window.

He rolled his window down. “Jesus, Paul. Remy’s still out there somewhere! Do something!” Paul took one look at Nina, nodded, and ran to the beach.

Jack turned on the heater in his car and began to drive toward the hospital.

“Jack, take me home,” Nina said. She sat up and grabbed him by the hair, repeating, “Take…me home,” through clenched teeth.

“I’ll take you to my place, honey, it’s closer, and we’ll figure it out from there,” she heard him say, and then she lapsed into shivering that reminded her of childbirth, a natural force completely beyond her.

Five minutes later they arrived in the Highlands. In the dark backseat, her head lolling against the upholstery, her face puffed purple, Nina looked like a drowning victim. Jack didn’t want to wake her up. He debated again turning toward the hospital. She hadn’t been unconscious in the water, but he knew she was in danger. He tried to pick her up, but she cried out in some pain, so he half woke her. Then he saw the welts on her body, the fresh blood in her hair, the wounds that seeped. They lumbered up the porch steps. Wet, cold, and cursing, he said, “Where are the goddamned keys!” He located them in the planter.

Once inside the empty cabin, he wrapped Nina in a dry blanket while he called the Coast Guard rescue number, then turned up the thermostat and lit a fire. He put a kettle on the stove to heat. Nina was lying on the couch with a sleeping bag over her, shivering violently, and Jack remembered reading that shivering was a good sign. He woke Nina again nevertheless to satisfy himself that she was still alive and marched her into his bedroom. Her clothes seemed soldered to her body. He peeled as much away as he could, lifting first her legs off the bed to pull off the pants, then supporting her back with one arm, tugging at the shirt. “What the hell’s happened here?” he mumbled as he worked on her. The seaweed had dried in her hair. He left it.

Tucking her under a thick comforter, piling a few extra blankets on top for good measure, he put in a call to his own doctor, whose service assured him he would call back right away. “Emergency. Urgent,” he told them, trying to find the right words. “Life-and-death.” He stripped off his own wet clothes and pulled on his sweats, shivering quite a bit himself, though he wasn’t feeling cold. Adrenaline still surged through him.

He brewed some tea. When he returned to the bedroom, he found her standing beside the bed, rummaging in a dresser drawer. “Get back in that bed,” he commanded. “Either you stay right here or I shackle you to the bed.”

Her teeth chattered uncontrollably. “Don’t leave, Jack. Don’t leave yet.”

He held her head against his sweatshirt until she was quieter. “Can you talk? What happened?”

“She tried to kill me.” Nina sputtered out a few more words.

“Because she missed a deadline? A stupid, shitty mistake she made? She killed two people and attacked you? No, no.”

“Yes.” Nina closed her eyes.

Paul arrived a few minutes later. “The Coast Guard told me you called from here.” He wanted to see Nina. When he saw her sound asleep on the bed sprinkled with sand and seaweed, face puffy with bruises and cuts, he yanked Jack out of the room.

“We couldn’t find Remy. The rescue boats arrived with searchlights.” Paul spoke like a man without feeling, but his hands were shaking too much to hold his cup. He put it down. Jack watched his old friend’s face crumble. “We got there too late.”

“Listen, Paul. Nina just told me the most incredible story—”

When Jack’s doctor showed up, Jack left Paul in the living room, his head in his hands.

The doctor woke Nina. Plucking her eyelids, probing with tiny lights and forcing her to answer questions to which she replied dully, he said, “You should have taken her straight to the hospital.”

He explained that she was in shock with a dangerously low body temperature. She needed fluids intravenously. She needed to
be warmed slowly, in a place where they were equipped to deal with hypothermia.

Would she die without that treatment? Jack asked. The doctor, exasperated, said, “Maybe.” So they waited for an ambulance.

The paramedics lifted Nina expertly onto the gurney and wheeled her out. She stopped them, motioning to Jack and Paul, saying so softly, as if talking to herself, that they leaned in to hear, “Richard tried to blackmail her. He’s the only other person who saw the paperwork except Astrid—she doesn’t read what she types.” Nina clutched at Jack.

“Ninety days. She missed the deadline.”

R
EMY HID UNDERWATER FOR AS LONG AS
J
ACK AND
N
INA
were still in sight, coming up quickly just to gulp breaths of air. When they finally left the beach, she crawled out of the water, creeping up the edge of the beach in case anyone was watching. But she found herself bloated with salt water and colder than she had ever been, sluggish, shivering uncontrollably, and knew she was very ill.

She lay for quite a while on the hillside behind a small pine tree trying to gather her strength, but the rest seemed to have the opposite effect, leaving her enervated, barely able to move. The cold air swirled around her as she shook out of control on the rocks for a long time, then made her way up the hill to the street. She wished she had time to change her clothes, but she couldn’t take the risk. She had to leave right now. This was a time for intense self-discipline. She spotted Paul’s car parked by her house, but he was down on the beach, she could see him like a moving pin dot.

Her keys were gone, lost in that wild battle with Nina. She was exhausted and slow, searching underneath her car for the extra key. She hadn’t had time to throw her suitcase in before Nina surprised her, but she always kept a day bag with spare clothes in the trunk, and cash and a credit card in her glove compartment.

Her body shook so she could hardly stand. With great difficulty she opened her car door. Once inside, she took her time pulling out onto the street, not wanting to draw attention to herself from the beach below. Some people down there were looking for her body. She would have laughed if she could, but she was concentrating on her clumsy fingers, trying to steer.

Flipping a lever, feeling the blast of cold air, she remembered that the heater had broken again. Another challenge to surmount, that was all. Confidence was everything. If she wasn’t so numb, so clumsy, so slow—the police weren’t even following her yet. She thought she had at least an hour to get somewhere before an all-points went out on her car. Monterey Airport wasn’t likely to have flights out at this hour; anyway it was too small, much too dangerous. San Francisco would be better, more anonymous, but that might mean another hour on the road and she didn’t think she had that kind of time.

She settled on San Jose International Airport, turning onto Highway 68 east, watching nervously for cruisers. None appeared.

The shaking had slowed into occasional wracking spasms, and she felt sleepy. She couldn’t afford to stop and find something dry to put on. She willed herself to stay awake, turning on the radio, listening for news. Nobody mentioned her. After she got onto Highway 101, she headed north, driving easily up the hills, past the Red Barn flea market, like a movie set in the night. She had stopped feeling cold at all now, but her hands kept slipping off the wheel and her eyes weren’t focusing well on the speedometer.

Mustn’t get pulled over for speeding—as the car mounted the last hill before the descent into Gilroy, it choked once and went dead. The stupid thing was out of fucking gas.

She pulled to the side of the road. Before she had time to think what to do, she saw the Highway Patrol cruiser in her rearview mirror. She leaped from the car, taking just enough time to slam the door behind her. She ran, cutting her bare feet on rocks, until she found cover behind a stand of eucalyptus trees. The patrol car pulled up behind her car and parked.

She watched from far away as the officer called in her license
number. She heard him talking on his car phone, reading it out loud, waiting for them to tell him he should find her. She dragged herself as far as she could up the hillside toward the piles of granite that would hide her better. Finding a dark hole between two icy boulders, she crawled inside, wishing for the first time not to be so thin, so dangerously numb.

“I’m afraid,” she thought, experiencing the darkness around her, the small alien noises of the night. She wasn’t shivering at all anymore, though she seemed to feel a distant aching all over.

She looked up. No stars, clouds over her eyes. She was not the type to give up. She would hide until the policeman left and make a new start. She was good at that. She tried to lean forward to see around the rocks to the road below, but discovered she couldn’t. She commanded and her body refused. With amazement she recognized that she would not be able to leave this hole, that her only hope was to call for help. Her mind, now loose, slow, failed her. It began knitting colorful webs around pictures of her life in Chicago and California.

She played with the pictures, amused herself with changing the colors and images, thought once of Klaus—something nice for the old man—stopped fighting.

And let the sleepy cold and dark carry her home.