Michael Prescott - Deadly Pursuit

Anastasia yawned and stretched supine on the patio tiles, her left ear ticking irritably at a mosquito. Kirstie smiled down at her, enjoying the beauty of the animal, the lean limbs and supple angularity of a purebred Russian wolfhound. The dog was three years old, milk white, her long hair the color and texture of fine silk. A bushy tail fanned out behind her like a silvery spray of moon rays.

Poor Ana was exhausted now, after her earlier encounter with the frog. She had discovered it in the garden shortly after sunset. Its madcap hopping had first perplexed her, then driven her frantic with frustration as the frog eluded her pursuit. Finally she’d hounded the frog into the trees on the verge of the garden, where with a final buoyant leap it had vanished into a deep thicket of anemone.

“I still can’t get over how new this place looks,” Steve said suddenly, and she knew his mind had been leafing through a scrapbook of memories again. “When we used to come here, it was like an ancient ruin. Literally uninhabitable. The garden was completely overgrown, and the orchard was a jungle.”

“Orchard?” She’d explored the entire island a dozen times and had seen no evidence of one.

“Oh, it’s long gone now. Swallowed by the forest, I guess. But back in the twenties this was a lime-tree plantation. Where we’re staying was the owner’s place. Those ramshackle row houses about a hundred yards from here-they were the workers’ quarters. I’m surprised Larson didn’t have them bulldozed.”

Kirstie had never asked him about the island’s history; vaguely she’d assumed he wouldn’t know much about it. But she should have known better, shouldn’t she? In many ways this was the most important place in the world to him.

“Why was the plantation abandoned?” she asked, stroking Anastasia’s back with her bare foot.

“The Depression shut it down, and the big hurricane drove off whoever was still here in 1935.”

“Hurricane?”

“It was a monster. Roared out of the Atlantic on Labor Day morning. There was a train running on the old railroad tracks, picking up evacuees. When the hurricane made landfall at Upper Matecumbe, it just knocked that train off the tracks. Eight hundred people died.”

“Eight hundred.” Kirstie drew a breath.

“They were still finding skeletons in the jungle years later… Sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned that.”

“It’s all right. I’m just as glad I didn’t know it before we got here, though.” She shook her head. “That’s a terrible story.”

“It’s not the only one. I don’t know, maybe this part of the Keys is cursed. Sometimes I almost think so. Take the name Matecumbe. Nobody’s certain what it means, but a good guess is that it’s a corruption of the Spanish words mata hombre.”

“Kill man,” she translated uneasily.

“The Indian name was Cuchiyaga, which means essentially the same thing. Then there’s Indian Key, south of here. The Spaniards called it Matanzas: ‘slaughter.’ Legend has it that hundreds of French sailors were massacred by Calusa Indians on that island after their ships foundered on the reef. May not be true, but there was a Seminole raid on the settlement there in the mid-eighteen hundreds. Some of the settlers made the mistake of hiding in wells. The Indians found them and poured in boiling water.”

“My God… Who told you all this, anyway?”

“Jack Dance. I thought he was making up stories, but later I researched the area’s history on my own. It was all true.”

“Were horror stories a principle topic of conversation with him?”

“Not often. His sexual conquests were more frequent seeds of discussion.”

“Yours, too, I guess.”

“I didn’t have much to say on that subject at the time. Certainly not compared with Jack. He was a ladies’ man, even at that age…” He looked away, and his words trailed off.

“Have many people died on Pelican Key?” Kirstie asked, unwilling to let him slip into memories and silence again.

“Not as far as I know. But they’ve had other kinds of bad luck. Remember those salt ponds near the cove?”

“Sure.”

“Somebody tried using them for salt manufacture about 1800. Went bust a few years later. Before that, the island was inhabited by the Calusas. Now they’re extinct. All that’s left of them is their burial grounds and garbage dumps.” He shrugged. “No one prospers here.”

Kirstie frowned, rebelling against this grim inventory.

“You did,” she said. “You prospered.”

“Me? How?”

“You got yourself some good memories. That’s a kind of treasure. Isn’t it?”

He almost delivered some humorous response, then paused.

“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” he said slowly.

“The island may not have been lucky for other people, but it’s been lucky for you.”

“Yes. Yes, I guess it has.”

She saw him smiling calmly, easily, like a man at peace, but the smile did not reach his eyes.

Mile marker 103.

Jack was fifty miles out of Miami, heading south on U.S. 1, driving a stolen Sunbird. The engine hummed and the tires hissed on the pavement, and the endless stretches of the Overseas Highway blurred past.

Through the open window on the driver’s side, warm moist air blew in like wet kisses. Jack tasted salt on his lips and smiled. He’d always loved water, any sort of water. Maybe that was why he’d chosen to drown his first victim so many years ago.

Another green-and-white mile marker slid by. 102. The miles ended at zero in Key West, but he wasn’t going that far.

Far enough, though. Far enough from L.A. and the life he’d led.

He had left it all behind, all the nice things he’d accumulated since his release from prison. His Sony Trinitron. His compact-disc player and mountain of CDs. His expensive wardrobe. His corner apartment with its great view. His car.

Oh, yes, and Sheila, too. Well, that was no great loss.

The feds must be crawling all over his apartment by now, but he wasn’t worried. The only item that could link him with the murders was the syringe, and it would never be found. The law would continue to see him as merely a con artist, a white-collar criminal, hardly a top priority. In a few weeks he would be forgotten. Then he could execute the final stages of his plan.

It had worked beautifully so far.

In Encino, about midway between his home and office, he kept a storage locker, which he’d visited after getting off the bus. He removed two shopping bags, then shut himself in a men’s room stall at Burger King. The first bag contained blue jeans, a denim shirt, and a knapsack; he changed clothes, placing his folded suit in the pack.

The second bag held eyeglasses, a can of mousse, and a thick envelope. He donned the glasses, slicked back his hair, and distributed the envelope’s contents among his wallet and various pockets: ten thousand dollars in twenties, fifties, and hundreds.

When he emerged from the rest room, he was no longer an executive in a business suit; he was a bespectacled youngish man in blue denim, toting a backpack.

A cab took him to LAX, where he bought a one-way coach ticket at the American Airlines counter, paying cash.

His flight was uneventful. The plane touched down at Miami International at 9:47 p.m. Eastern time. He roamed the long-term parking area until he found a Pontiac Sunbird hardtop sedan with an unlocked rear door. Somebody in a hurry had gotten careless.

His Swiss Army knife came in handy when he slipped behind the wheel. An amusingly boyish possession, a relic of his days of camping out on Pelican Key with Steve Gardner, yet practical, too. The knife was innocuous enough to get through airport security, yet potentially useful should one of his victims ward off the needle jab. He had practiced extracting the two-inch spear blade with his thumbnail until he could release it switchblade-fast.