Michael Prescott - Deadly Pursuit

Ignoring pain and fatigue, she rubbed harder.

Steve kept the Beretta trained on Jack as the runabout motored slowly away from the dock. Jack steered, easing the throttle arm to port, guiding the boat to the island’s eastern shore. The motor, in low gear, burred softly.

Slowly the lights of the house receded, screened by trees. Lifting his head, Steve saw no moon, only a blaze of stars, diamond bright. Their reflected brilliance shimmered on the water like whirling sparks of fire.

He supposed this would be the shape of his life from now on. Tropical nights, starlit waters, the rustle of palm fronds-and guilt and shame and fear.

Prison had always terrified him. His fear of incarceration with violent, conscienceless men, spurred by his own guilt and by Pete Creston’s vivid stories, had become almost phobic in its intensity.

Yet now he wondered if his fears hadn’t been misplaced. Prison was a waking nightmare, but to forfeit one’s soul, become a man like Jack Dance-wasn’t that a still grimmer version of hell?

You’re not turning into Jack, he said to himself, disturbed by the thought. That’s ridiculous. He’s a murderer, for God’s sake.

A comforting rebuttal, but hardly persuasive. He was aiding Jack. Helping him escape arrest, in order to kill again. He had already allowed his wife to be struck twice, each slap a hard crack of sound like a pistol’s report. And afterward…

He remembered how she’d stared into his eyes, begging speechlessly for help. Help he had refused to give.

No, he wasn’t as bad as Jack. But he was getting there. And the longer they stayed together, the more like Jack he would become.

Unless, of course, Jack killed him first.

Steve pondered that possibility as the runabout approached the white coral beach.

He didn’t think Jack would continue to pose a threat to him once they were safely underway in the Black Caesar. It was Jack’s obsession with Kirstie that was making him crazy now.

At least, Steve wanted to believe as much. But he could be wrong. Jack had never planned on having a partner. Probably he still didn’t want one.

And I’ll have to sleep eventually. Hell, I’m… I’m starting to feel pretty damn drowsy now.

The stress of the day’s events must be catching up with him. There was a peculiar pins-and-needles tingling in his fingertips, a new heaviness in his eyelids.

Better fix some coffee when I get back. A whole pot-and I’ll drink it black.

On Pice’s boat he would have to risk sleep. But he did not dare close his eyes while he and Jack were on Pelican Key. Not with Kirstie a prisoner in the radio room.

The boat brushed the lip of the coral ledge. Jack looked up. “Okay if I get out and haul her in?”

Steve nodded. “We’ll both do it.”

They waded through the shallows, dragging the inflatable onto shore, then carried it farther up the beach into a tangle of brush.

The water revived Steve somewhat. “Cover it up,” he ordered, pleased to be feeling slightly more alert.

“Wait a second.” Jack reached into one of the grocery bags in the bow. “There’s something I want to get.”

Steve lifted the gun. If Jack had stowed a weapon on board…

Click, and a sudden yellow glare. A flashlight.

“Bought it in Florida City.” Jack smiled. “We can use it to find our way back.”

“Terrific. Now cover the goddamn boat.”

Jack camouflaged the runabout with leaves and grasses while Steve watched over him, his finger resting lightly on the trigger. He wished he had the courage to shoot this man, put a bullet in his evil, calculating brain.

But he couldn’t. He needed Jack. That was the hell of it. He’d made his bargain with the devil, and now their fates were inseparably joined.

Inseparably joined. A picture swam into his mind, a television image of conjoined twins, some random memory of a newscast he’d once seen. The infants’ faces blurred, changed, became his own face and Jack’s. Inseparably joined…

The image dissolved into a hallucinatory stream. He felt his eyes closing. It occurred to him that he was drifting toward sleep.

No, impossible. He was standing up. Nobody could sleep standing up. A person had to be in bed to sleep. Sleep and bed, two concepts inseparably joined.

He was… floating…

Jack tossed a last pile of brush on the runabout and clapped his hands. “Done.”

The harsh smack of sound shocked Steve awake. He shook his head to clear his thoughts.

What the hell had happened there? Christ, he’d nearly nodded off. It looked like wading to shore hadn’t done much to revive him, after all. He needed coffee, whole pots of it.

Jack was the one who ought to be fighting drowsiness. He’d taken the sleeping pills.

That last thought-Jack took the sleeping pills-almost suggested an idea to him, some ugly trickery on Jack’s part; but the idea was complicated, hard to grasp, and his mental processes seemed to be growing dangerously torpid.

Jack beamed the flash down the beach. “The trail starts there. We can come around the back way, reenter the house through the patio.”

It was the same trail the three of them had taken early this morning. Steve thought of Ana romping with Jack, fetching sticks for him. His gut tightened, and a spurt of anger squeezed some of the fatigue out of his system.

“All right,” he said brusquely. “Let’s move.”

They trudged along the beach. Jack, in the lead, swept the flashlight’s pale circle across stretches of coral sand, pebbly and pitted and stark, a moonscape in miniature.

“You ever going to put down that gun, Stevie?”

“Not till I feel safe.”

“When will that be?”

Steve frowned, once more blinking sleep out of his eyes.

“I don’t know,” he mumbled. The statement came out slightly slurred. “I don’t know if… if I’ll ever feel safe again.”

Free.

A final jerk of her wrists snapped the worn wire, liberating her hands.

Kirstie stretched her arms, teeth gritted against the pops of pain in her joints, the aching soreness in every muscle.

“God,” she whispered. “Oh, my God.”

She leaned forward, intending to attack the antenna wire that secured her feet to the chair, then experienced a swoon of vertigo. Head lowered, she shut her eyes and fought off ripples of faintness.

Her fingers were numb and clumsy. She fumbled with the knot Jack had tied to bind her ankles. It wouldn’t yield. Wild frustration rose in her and nearly tore a scream out of her throat.

Finally she found the knot’s weakness. It unraveled in her hands. The loop of antenna wire slipped to the floor.

Awkwardly she rose upright. Her knees fluttered. She took a rickety step, then another.

Steve and Jack had left via the front door. She hadn’t heard them come back in. They must still be still out front.

She’d have to leave via the back exit. Hidden in the woods, she could plan her next move.

She glanced around the radio room. The lone window was sealed shut by humidity; Steve had tried to pry it open shortly after their arrival, only to find that it resisted his best efforts.

The patio, then.

Anastasia lay before her, a mottled heap. Kirstie knew she had no time to waste; the men might return at any second, and her opportunity would be lost.

Still, she couldn’t deny herself a last moment with her dog. Kneeling, she stroked the borzoi’s fur, once so smooth and silken, now stiff, bristly, matted with drying blood.

Her hand came away red and tacky. A rather small hand, yet not long ago Anastasia had very nearly fit inside it. Kirstie remembered staying up with Ana on her first night in a new home, patiently waiting out the darkness, holding the tiny, shivering pup close enough to hear the comforting beat of her mistress’s heart.