Sail (21 page)
HURRY!
Ellen sprinted to her rented Honda and slammed the hood shut. After climbing in, she snapped her wrist hard against the key and gunned it. The puny four-cylinder engine instantly squealed its disapproval.
Talk about a mismatch! Could she even catch up to the Mercedes, let alone follow it?
She sure as hell was going to try.
The Mystery Man was the break she needed, she was pretty sure of it. She knew he didn’t look kosher. As for Carlyle, she’d catch up with him later—not a problem, thanks to the transmitter.
No, the problem lay straight ahead, speeding down the dirt road. That Mercedes was already a blip on the horizon. Soon she wouldn’t be able to see it at all.
Or maybe not.
Ellen blinked with disbelief.
The blip was getting bigger.
No lead foot for the Mystery Man; it was more like helium. He was taking his own sweet time.
That probably had something to do with the quality of the road, she thought.
While Carlyle had left the same way Ellen had come, the Mystery Man was heading the other way, fittingly into the unknown. It was a dirt road, bumpy and winding. Not a building in sight. Not even a sign or a billboard. If Billy Rosa’s bar was isolated, this direction was damn near off the map.
Suddenly Ellen had to do what she least expected: hit the brakes. She was getting too close to the coupe and had to pull back lest she arouse suspicion.
Where are we going, Mystery Man?
He wasn’t telling, not yet.
One mile became another, and another and another. Ellen’s eyes stayed focused on the back of the Mercedes. Her mind, however, began to drift. Out of nowhere she heard a voice from her past. It was her grandfather, as if he were sitting right next to her, riding shotgun. In his thick, raspy staccato he was invoking one of his favorite expressions.
Take the devil you know versus the devil you don’t.
Back in those days, when Ellen was a young girl, she never really understood what it meant. That’s probably why she forgot about it.
Until now.
Ellen glanced down, peeking through the steering wheel at the speedometer. The Mystery Man was puttering along at no more than thirty miles an hour. Wherever they were heading, they weren’t in any hurry.
Then, in a flash, all that changed. The Mercedes took off like a missile, all 500 horsepower firing at once. Before Ellen could speed up, it was gone behind a wall of dust.
Shit!
Ellen’s foot found the gas, but it was probably a lost cause. No contest, right? She couldn’t see the Mystery Man now. She couldn’t see
anything.
Including the bullet heading straight for her head.
AN INCH.
Maybe two inches.
That’s how close she came to dying on the dirt road somewhere in the Bahamas.
The bullet ripped through the windshield, buzzing Ellen’s right ear amid shards of broken glass. She had no idea what was happening. Until . . .
Duck!
Dead ahead, the Mystery Man was standing squarely in the middle of the road, staring down the barrel of a 9-millimeter Beretta.
As he fired again, Ellen flung herself against the seat, her foot jamming the brake pedal.
Smack!
went her forehead against the glove compartment as the car slowly skidded to a stop.
For a second she lay there, her head throbbing, the brainwaves scattered. She listened for another shot. It didn’t happen right away. Instead she heard something worse.
Footsteps.
He was coming for her.
My gun! Where is my gun?
She reached down her right leg. She could feel the shin holster, the rippling grain of the worn-out leather. But no gun.
She never kept it strapped. It must have fallen out!
The footsteps stopped. Ellen twisted in a panic, looking up at her driver’s side window. There he was! He was right there!
His body blocked out the setting sun, a badass eclipse if ever there was one. He raised his arm, cocking the gun with absolutely no remorse in his eyes. This guy, this Mystery Man, had clearly killed before.
And he was about to do it again.
No!
Ellen threw the car’s shift in reverse, her foot hopscotching from the brake to the gas. Suddenly a second shot shattered the driver’s side window.
Am I dead? Badly wounded?
No. He missed!
Accelerating backward now, she kept her head tucked just below the dash. With one hand she gripped the steering wheel, struggling to keep the car straight if she could. With the other hand she searched frantically for her gun, feeling blindly under her seat.
There!
She wrapped her fingers around the grip and pulled it up to her side. The chill of brushed steel had never felt so good.
Then, spinning the steering wheel like a top, she threw the car into a seemingly endless three-sixty. One wall of dust deserved another.
It’s my turn, you son of a bitch.
THE DIRT ROAD WAS no longer a road—it was more like a Kansas-style tornado.
With the dust funneling round and round, Ellen peeled off her second three-sixty, backing up the car about a hundred yards.
She threw it into park for all of five seconds, just long enough to lift her feet and kick out what remained of the front windshield. As the glass splintered across the hood she raised the gun.
Then she hit the gas.
The little blue Honda choked and sputtered its way past thirty, forty, fifty miles an hour. When it finally emerged through the dust, it was pushing past eighty!
Are you still there, Mystery Man? Are you waiting for me? Well, here’s a little surprise for you. Today you’re going to get shot, not me!
The split second she saw him, Ellen started firing. He was still smack in the middle of the road, precisely where she’d left him. Only there was one big difference now. His gun wasn’t visible.
The psycho was standing there, not firing back. What? Did he have a death wish?
Fine! She had no problem giving him exactly what he wanted.
Ellen was a crack shot, but shooting from a speeding vehicle over a bumpy road wasn’t exactly target practice at the range. On her third pull of the trigger, though, her brain made all the necessary adjustments.
She was locked in.
But then she watched as the Mystery Man pulled the Beretta from behind his leg.
DEVOUX WHIPPED HIS ARM FORWARD, locking the elbow before firing just one shot.
Bull’s-eye!
With a thunderous
pop
the right front tire exploded, shreds of rubber spinning wildly round and round as the little car weaved out of control.
The rest was pure physics. He could tell she was trying to hit the brakes. It didn’t matter.
You’re way too late for that, sweetheart. It’s all over—you just don’t realize it yet.
The two left tires lifted off the ground. Then it was all four. Her car launched into the air, flipped once, twice, and then landed with a crushing thud upside down, the roof buckling into a zigzag of twisted metal.
The engine hissed as flames shot out from the grille, the smoke black and thick. As the dust settled, Devoux stood and watched with his gun still drawn, waiting for any sign of life.
What he saw was her hand, streaked with blood, reaching out from the driver’s side. She was clenching the dirt; she was trying to pull herself out.
Scrappy little thing, isn’t she?
Though not for much longer. Devoux began to walk forward, then to jog. It was time to finish her off, DEA agent or not.
It had to be done. She was a loose end, a fly in the ointment, and a risk he could ill afford to take. As long as she was alive, she’d be looking for the goods on Peter Carlyle, and she just might find something.
That’s when he stopped short.
Coming fast up the dirt road was another car. He was about to have company, an eyewitness, maybe even plural.
But there was still time. He fixed his eyes back on Agent Ellen Pierce, about to run over and shoot her dead.
Shit.
Her other hand was reaching out of the overturned car. This one was holding her gun. Slowly, clumsily, she was taking aim at him again.
Time to go.
Devoux retreated to his Mercedes and fishtailed as he sped off. Looking in the rearview mirror, he could see a shaky and bloodied Agent Ellen Pierce stumbling to her feet, staring down the road at him.
Kill ya later, sweetheart.
LIEUTENANT ANDREW TATEM hightailed it into the emergency room of Princess Margaret Hospital in Nassau and was immediately escorted to a nearby examining room. That was one of the fringe benefits of being a man in uniform and an officer. Most people dropped everything in order to help you. It was a good thing.
The message relayed to him from the headquarters of the Bahamas Air Sea Rescue Association, BASRA, was only that Ellen Pierce was at the hospital. He didn’t know why. He didn’t even know whether she’d been hurt or it had been someone else.
That little mystery got solved the moment he saw her lying in the bed. It was her all right, and she was clearly a patient. Cuts, bruises, lots of bandages from head to toe.
“Christ, what happened?” he asked.
“Car trouble,” she said, her sense of humor still intact. “Flat tire, actually.”
Ellen described her showdown with the pistol-packing Mystery Man from Billy Rosa’s bar. She had no doubt that Carlyle had arranged to meet him there. As to why exactly, she wasn’t sure, but she had her suspicions, none of them good.
So did Tatem.
“We can’t let him fly out of here in the morning,” he said. “We’ve got to ground him.”
“Believe me, I’ve been lying here trying to figure out how we can. Legally, that is.”
Tatem rolled his eyes. “You almost got killed today. At least to buy us some time, I think your office would understand if we concocted something to keep Carlyle on the island. Don’t you agree?”
Ellen shot him a sheepish look.
“What’s wrong?” asked Tatem. “What am I missing here?”
She glanced over his shoulder, making sure they were alone. The nurse in the hallway seemed safely out of earshot. Besides, her vote didn’t count.
“You see, technically I’m not here,” said Ellen.
“I don’t follow.”
“Let’s just say that my boss back in New York didn’t exactly share my concerns about Peter Carlyle. I’m kind of . . . on vacation down here.”
Tatem rolled his eyes again, her confession sinking in. “Let me get this straight—you contacted me on your own? You’re flying solo on this, with no clearance?”
“Bingo.”
“I hate bingo. Christ, that’s why you wanted me to play airport courier for you. You couldn’t be seen with Peter Carlyle.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll make it up to you. I don’t know how yet, but I will.”
“I’ll make sure you do,” he said, allowing a smile. Above all else, Agent Ellen Pierce certainly showed initiative, and guts. He liked that. She was trouble, sure, but his kind of trouble. Never mind that she was also very attractive—even all banged up in a hospital bed.
“Here’s the problem,” she said. “If Carlyle somehow has it in for his family, the only way to ground him would be to lock him up. To do that, we need evidence.”
“Which we don’t have, of course. Do we?”
“Not yet.” She thought for a second. “Wait, what about that life jacket your guys found, the burned one? How fast can we have it tested for explosives?”
“That depends. You plan on bringing anyone up to speed? The feds, perhaps?”
Ellen shook her head.
“I didn’t think so,” said Tatem. “The Coast Guard isn’t exactly an investigative unit, although I do know a pretty decent lab guy in Miami. Figure eighteen hours— twenty-four.”
“Good enough, I guess.”
“And in the meantime?” he asked. “What are we supposed to do?”
“Simple,” she said. “We pray your Coast Guard boys find the Dunne family before that bastard Carlyle does.”
PETER WAITED IN HIS HOTEL ROOM the next morning until he heard the five magic words. At 9:15 his phone rang. “You have a FedEx package,” said the front desk. Now he had everything he needed.
Securing a private plane had been no problem. In fact, he had his pick of aircraft. Under the guise of being Good Samaritans, about a dozen aviation leasing outfits were willing to offer—for free, no less—the use of one of their planes.
Of course, their real motivation just might be the gobs of free publicity they would attract thanks to this ultra-hyped media story.
Everyone’s an opportunist, right? Nothing new about that. Greed is always at the core of human nature.
By 9:45 Peter was out on the tarmac at Pindling International, performing the requisite visual inspection of his loaner plane. It was what they called an amphibian, able to take off and land on both the ground and the water.
Slowly he circled the aircraft. The Coast Guard had probably begun its new search at the crack of dawn, but Peter didn’t care about its head start.
Good luck, fellas. You’ll need it.
While its complex computer models were busy trying to reconcile a bogus EPIRB signal, a found life jacket, and the migrating habits of giant bluefin tuna, Peter’s search area would be based on the one thing the Coast Guard didn’t have: the actual coordinates of where
The Family Dunne
went down.
Peter climbed aboard the plane and strapped himself in. Even in the private confines of the cockpit he still felt the need to glance left and right, like a kid about to cheat on his math test, before going over his flight plan one last time, reviewing exactly how he should commit the murders. The preflight checklist followed. All instruments and gauges were operational. Everything responded. No glitches. At least, it seemed that way.
Peter wasn’t a hundred percent focused on his instrument panel and he knew it. He also couldn’t help it. His mind was elsewhere. It was impossible not to dwell on Katherine and the brats, namely on what he had in store for them. His
post
flight checklist.
1. Kill them all, whoever had survived the explosion.
2. Bury the bodies.
3. Pretend to search the area for a few more days.
4. Tearfully give up, undoubtedly before tons of news cameras from around the globe.
The voice of the tower crackled through Peter’s headset. “Mr. Carlyle, you are cleared for takeoff on runway A-three. On a personal note, here’s hoping you find your family.”
Peter thanked the voice from the tower, grinning behind his sunglasses.
Be careful what you wish for, pal.