Michael Prescott - Deadly Pursuit

“You never take naps,” she said, her mouth pinched in a worried way.

“Guess the diving tired me out.”

“You weren’t asleep.”

“I was just nodding off when you came in.”

She sat on the bed, took his hand. Her touch was gentle, her fingers very soft. He remembered kissing her hand on the night he proposed.

“Are you cold?” she asked.

“Cold? No.”

“Then why are you wearing your jacket?”

Before lying down, he’d changed back into his long pants and shirt, then donned a blue nylon jacket to conceal the Beretta tucked into his waistband.

“Thought I was getting a little sunburned,” he said lamely.

“Indoors?”

He feigned a smile. “You can’t be too careful. Where’s Jack, anyway?”

“Around.” She leaned closer, and he could smell her fragrance-not perfume-salt and perspiration and the indefinable scent of her hair, hair that had been his pillow so many times. “I wanted to talk to you about him.”

He waited, gazing up at her, marshaling his strength for more lies. The wash of sunlight on the ceiling haloed her in a golden aureole. Silly thoughts of angels flitted like schoolboy fancies through his mind.

“He took his pocketknife with him to the reef,” she said.

“How did you know that?”

“I went through his clothes.”

His head lifted. “What?”

“It was wrong, I know, but… well, some money fell out of his pants pocket. Seven hundred dollars in cash. I thought that seemed suspicious. It made me curious.”

“What’s suspicious about carrying cash on a vacation?”

“Nothing, I guess.”

“You think he stole it or something?”

“Of course not.”

“Jack Dance, the notorious bank robber, on the run from the law.” He laughed, but it came out wrong, not laughter at all. Dry coughing sounds.

“All right,” Kirstie snapped, “maybe I was being ridiculous, but I searched his damn pockets and the knife was gone. He took it. Why did he do that?”

“He always carries a knife when he dives. Safety precaution.”

“Did you know he had it?”

“Sure. I saw him strip some gulfweed off the anchor line.”

Jack’s own lie had come out of his mouth. Steve felt slightly sickened, as if the two of them had shared a kiss.

“Oh.” Kirstie frowned. “Guess I was wrong, then.”

“Were you afraid he was going to… attack me?”

“I don’t know what I was afraid of.’

“Jack’s harmless. Stop worrying about him. He’s a great guy.”

Ribbons of images threaded his thoughts: Meredith Turner as she’d looked in her yearbook portrait, newspaper photos of the women Mister Twister had picked up in bars. Harmless. A great guy. His stomach knotted.

“I looked for the gun,” Kirstie said quietly. “It wasn’t under the bed.”

“I already packed it.”

“Where?”

“One of the suitcases.” He deflected further questions by asking one of his own. “What do you want it for? You planning to shoot Jack the next time he does something suspicious?" He put a nasty sarcastic lilt in the last word.

“I just want to feel safe,” she answered coldly. “And I don’t.”

“Because of your overactive imagination.”

“Because I don’t trust your friend-and because I can’t seem to communicate with you.”

“We’re communicating right now.”

“No. We’re not.” She got up and stood looking down on him. “What’s going on here? Why are you acting this way?”

“What way?”

“You’re not yourself.”

“I told you, I’m just tired, that’s all.”

“Your behavior is… off. Strange.”

“Christ, all I’m trying to do is lie down for a while.”

Kirstie studied him for a long moment. A glimmer of dampness trembled on one eyelash, her only confession of pain.

“I’ll leave you alone, then,” she said finally. “Sorry to disturb your rest”

She did not slam the door when she left. The cold snick of the latch bolt was worse. It conveyed the quiet finality of a death rattle.

Steve shut his eyes again.

God, he wanted to be out of here. Wanted this to be over.

He pictured himself on the flying bridge of the Black Caesar, speeding recklessly toward the Bahamas in a stinging cloud of spray.

Despite Jack’s best salesmanship, the escape plan still struck him as a crazy fantasy. He had no confidence it would succeed. But the alternative was prison, prison for life, and he couldn’t face that. Death would be better. He would kill himself before he let a cell door clang shut behind him forever.

So those were his options now, the total range of possibilities open before him, shaping the rest of his days. A fugitive’s hounded existence or a bullet in the head.

Rolling on his side, he curled into a fetal pose, shivering all over, his face buried in his arms.

He’s lying.

Kirstie strode into the living room, circled it twice, and flopped down on the sofa.

He’s lying. The words beat in her mind with the repetitive insistence of a song lyric. He’s lying. He’s lying.

A gossamer fall of sunlight burned white stripes on a fern’s glossy leaves. Outside, a breeze shivered through the hedges and set the garden gate creaking. Anastasia, sprawled before the cold fireplace, favored her mistress with a cool glance and an interrogative whine.

All right, so he was lying. That much was certain.

But what exactly was he lying about? And why?

A vague scenario took shape in her imagination like the outline of a movie plot. Jack had found the gun. Somehow he was using it to intimidate Steve, forcing him to go along with something Steve didn’t like.

Great theory.

Except Jack was absent at the moment. Nothing prevented Steve from hustling Kirstie and Anastasia onto the motorboat and fleeing to Upper Matecumbe Key.

No, whatever he was doing was of his own free will.

Besides, there was no longer any particular reason to suspect Jack of criminal behavior. Had he wanted to hurt Steve, he could have done so at the reef. Could have stabbed him with the knife. Could have killed him.

But he hadn’t. Which proved he was no threat, regardless of her intuitive forebodings.

Of course it did.

She got up, paced. Anastasia watched her, fascinated by her restless prowling.

The living room was normally her favorite spot in the house. Today it was a cage. The decorative ironwork on the windows had become the bars of a cell. The thick, moist air was suffocating; it clogged her lungs.

She found herself drawing rapid, shallow breaths and forced herself to stop. Hyperventilating wouldn’t help.

Too much nervous energy. That was her problem. Well, there ought to be some way to work it off.

The garden. She’d amused herself several times in the past two weeks, pulling weeds and trimming shrubbery. The work was by no means necessary-the Larson heirs paid a maintenance crew to attend to the upkeep of house and garden-but she’d found it relaxing.

Some relaxation was precisely what she needed right now;

In the kitchen she collected scissors, work gloves, and a small plastic bag for cuttings. She carried the stuff into the garden and set to work, humming to herself.

The tune, she realized with a small shock, was “Stranger in Paradise.”

It fit. But who was the real stranger? Jack… or Steve?

Jack switched off the radio when he heard Kirstie’s footsteps in the kitchen. He sat stiffly in the straight-back chair before the worktable, listening to the rattle of drawers, a hummed melody that diminished with distance, and finally the muffled closing of a French door in the dining room.

Then there was no sound but the throb of the generators through the thin wall and the answering beat of his heart.