Michael Prescott - Deadly Pursuit

The swamp folded over him like a nightmare, surrounding him with rank smells and contorted shadows and sinuous shapes that glided through the murk. Clumps of mangroves, their skirts of aerial roots exposed at low tide, formed a labyrinth of twisted trunks and branches. In the narrow channels meandering among the trees, the water had the dark gloss of an oil slick, its surface puckered and dimpled with random bubbles.

This was a prehistoric world, fetid and lush, crowded with mysterious life. Jack almost expected to see Tyrannosaurus come sloshing into view with a bellows blast of breath and a jet-plane roar.

He kept walking. As he did, he ran his hand along the boardwalk’s wooden railing, studied the planks passing by under his feet. He began to feel the first stir of misgivings.

He’d counted on having Pelican Key all to himself. But the boardwalk’s condition was too good, too perfect. It had not been left to rot. It had been repaired-even partly rebuilt, he believed. There were sections where the wood looked new and the nail heads gleamed.

Jack frowned. Was the key occupied? Had old Donald Larson finally restored the old plantation house and taken up residence there, as he’d promised?

“Shit,” he muttered. If he wasn’t alone, he would have to leave in a hurry, before he was discovered.

No point in jumping to conclusions. Maybe the island was inhabited only in the winter months. In that case he could stay until at least the end of September. By then Teddy Lunt should have come through with the documents.

To find out, one way or the other, he would have to take a look at the house and determine if it was presently in use.

He could hardly walk up to the door and knock. But from a vantage point on the beach, he could scope out the place with little risk of being seen. He quickened his steps.

In less than ten minutes, the boardwalk delivered him to the hardwood forest at the center of the island. He hurried along the trail toward the red radiance of the sunrise, intermittently visible through breaks in the foliage.

His shoes crunched on the dry, crumbly soil, frightening small lizards out of his way. Walls of dense shrubbery and trees enclosed the path, forming a tunnel of green. Somewhere a parrot squawked.

The tropical hammock was a showcase of the superabundance of life, nature’s insane fecundity. Things grew everywhere here, even on other things. A palette of varicolored lichens smeared the bark of mastics, gumbo-limbos, and banyans, paint splotches dabbed on by some frenetic, freewheeling artist. Orchids, wild pine, and resurrection fern ornamented other trees, bright as Christmas bows. A tall mahogany tottered, its trunk wrapped in the twisted roots of a strangler fig, slowly smothering in that octopus embrace.

Jack walked on, blinking at the steadily growing brightness of the day. A rabbit flitted through the underbrush and vanished beneath the yellow blossoms of a Jerusalem thorn. Something splashed in an unseen pond. The recesses of the forest seemed impossibly remote, lost in shadows and mist, partitioned by screens of foliage and ropy webs of medicine vine.

The end of the trail was just ahead. He could smell the fresh salt breeze.

The brush thinned. Dark loam gave way to white coral sand. Past a scrim of ferns and waving sawgrass in red bloom, he saw the crimson thread of the horizon. The sky blushed. The sea flamed.

On the fringe of the forest, he halted abruptly. He shaded his eyes, blinked, then leaned against the rough bole of a date palm and stared out into the blinding light.

“Oh,” he said simply.

For just one moment Jack Dance forgot who he was and what he did for fun. He forgot the syringe and his victims’ convulsions and his sweaty exercise afterward with their undressed bodies.

In that moment he was not a killer. He was only a man gazing transfixed at the woman on the beach.

She wore sandals and shorts and a yellow tank top. Her hair was golden, her skin sun-bronzed. Her slender body was limned in fire against the red dazzle of the sun.

She ambled lazily along the irregular line of seaweed that marked high tide, her head thrown back, arms loose at her sides. Plovers scattered before her, comical in their helter-skelter distress.

An enchanting picture. So perfect it might have been posed. The woman belonged on a postcard or a calendar. Anyone looking at her would smile, just as Jack was smiling now, not in lust but in simple aesthetic appreciation.

She knelt to examine something on the beach. A shell. It gleamed in her hand. She put it back, reached for another, and then her gaze lifted and, across a span of thirty feet, she met his eyes.

Slowly she stood. She watched him.

Jack saw the sudden tightness in her mouth, the unnatural stiffness of her body. He saw fear. And seeing it, he remembered himself.

His interlude of rapt contemplation ended instantly, as if a switch had been thrown. No more time for that. There was a job to do.

He stepped out of the brush into the loose pebbly sand and started toward her, still smiling, but his smile held a different meaning now.

From this distance he could not distinguish the color of her eyes. He hoped they were blue.

Even if they were not, he would enjoy watching her face when he took out his pocketknife and buried the spear blade in her throat.

Rigid, breath stopped, Kirstie stared at the man as he emerged from the shadows of the trees.

He was tall-taller than Steve-and about the same age. He wore a denim shirt, blue jeans, black shoes. His careless posture and casual way of walking implied an ample fund of confidence, frequently tapped, instantly replenished.

The man moved toward her, crossing the bleached moonscape of coral sand, his long, sinuous shadow sliding at his heels.

She was abruptly conscious of how alone she was. This walk on the beach was her morning ritual; sometimes Steve joined her, but most often not. Today he’d mumbled something about catching up with her as she slipped out of bed. Most likely he had just rolled over and gone back to sleep.

She looked toward the house. Beyond the trees, at the southern tip of the island, the red-tiled roof glowed like a carpet of embers. The dock stood on the reflected image of itself, a many-legged insect balanced on the surface tension of a pond.

Would Steve hear her if she screamed for help? She didn’t think so. The distance was too great, and the breeze, blowing out of the south, would throw her shouts back in her face.

As calmly as possible she faced the man, her head lifted, shoulders squared.

“This is private property,” she said as he came nearer.

He smiled, a clean white smile full of friendliness but empty of affection. “I’m aware of that.”

He closed to within six feet of her and stopped. For a beat of time they watched each other without speaking.

Overhead soared a brown pelican, a young bird showing a white belly and brown wings. It wheeled toward the sea in search of food, dipped and rose, then dipped again, dark against the blaze of sun.

Hunter and prey, Kirstie thought. The words touched her with their chill.

“If you know it,” she said slowly, “what are you doing here?”

“Visiting.”

“It’s not allowed.”

“I’m not bothering anyone.”

“You’re bothering me.”

“I would think you’d be lonely. You are alone, aren’t you?”

The question pulled her stomach into a tight, acid knot.

She forced herself to keep her eyes focused on his face. A handsome face, in its way. Sharp-featured, faintly cruel. Stubble dusted his cheeks. The breeze flicked listlessly at his unkempt brown hair.

He stared back without blinking, a cool, flinty gaze that raised prickles of gooseflesh on her arms. His hazel eyes sparkled, but not with merriment.