Michael Prescott - Deadly Pursuit

Could it be true? Had Steve rebelled against Jack, redeemed himself? Skepticism competed with a desperate desire to believe.

“Jack’s looking for me. Thinks I went north. But I doubled back to find you. I know you’ve come for the boat.”

A breeze kicked up, and she heard his jacket ripple like a sail. The sparkle of his glasses was the sole identifiable feature in the ink-blot enigma of his face.

“Show yourself. Please. I won’t hurt you. I never wanted to hurt you. I’m not part of this anymore.”

But how could she accept that statement, how could she risk believing anything he said, when this could so easily be a trap?

Still, she had heard gunshots. She was sure she had.

“Please, Kirstie.” His whisper turned sibilant, a hiss. “You’ve got to trust me.”

Trust him? Did she dare?

A few minutes ago, she’d vowed never to trust another person. Now she was being asked to trust Jack Dance’s accomplice.

But he was something more than that. He was her husband.

And she did believe he hadn’t wanted to see her hurt. He’d intervened when Jack was slapping her around. Saved her life, probably.

Whatever his weaknesses and sins, he must still care for her. Now, repentant, he was offering a chance at escape.

“Kirstie? Can you hear me?”

She had to give him the trust he asked for, this one last time.

“Please.”

Had to.

Slowly she stood. She walked forward, out of the cover of the trees, onto the hard coral sand.

“Here I am,” she said in an answering whisper.

The glint of his glasses swung in her direction. “Thank God. Hurry up, get over here.”

She did not hurry. Her steps were slow and measured as she crossed the narrow strip of beach.

“Come on. Come on. ”

The dock was less than fifty feet away. She wished there were a moon. She wanted to see Steve’s face, study his expression. If she could look into his eyes…

Her sandals crunched on coral, a soft, gravelly sound. The sea breeze twined around her bare legs, groping like lascivious fingers. On the horizon burned the lights of Upper Matecumbe Key, distant as the stars, close as the boat that could take her to Islamorada and safety.

She had left cover behind. Here on the yards of bleached sand she was totally exposed, a slender target in a field of white.

Ahead, Steve waited on the dock, motionless, a swatch of night cut out of the larger darkness around him.

A bad feeling, a premonition of some kind, bobbed to the surface of her consciousness. Perhaps because Steve was standing so still, so deathly still, not running to greet her as she might have expected-or perhaps because she was so terribly vulnerable now, and more vulnerable with every forward step-whatever the reason, she felt suddenly as if she were walking down the center lane of a turnpike, traffic rushing at her, horns blaring, a quick, grinding death under a tractor-trailer’s giant tires only seconds away.

She slowed her steps.

“Kirstie! Dammit, what’s taking you so long?”

His strained whisper-something was wrong about that, too. She wasn’t sure quite what.

Time slipped into a lower gear. Seconds elongated, stretching like taffy. The world took on a fantastic clarity; every ripple of starshine on the water, every weave and pucker of the coral beach, every smallest detail of her environment was magnified, brightened, enhanced.

But still she could not see Steve’s face.

“Hurry up!”

She stopped.

There was no reason for it, no logic to it, or at least none she could name; but abruptly her legs would advance her no farther.

On the dock, a blur of motion.

Steve’s right hand peeling back the flap of his jacket. Something shiny in his fist, rising fast.

The gun.

Betrayal.

She pivoted, legs pumping.

Behind her: crack.

Puff of sand at her feet. Chips of coral stinging her ankles.

She ran for the brush, the trees. Just in time she remembered to zigzag.

Crack.

The second shot landed along the straight-line path she’d been running a heartbeat earlier.

Trees close now. Ten feet ahead.

Crack.

Rustle of leaves as the bullet whizzed past her head and struck one of the pines.

Near miss, that time. Inches.

She reached the trees, flung herself headlong into the brush.

Crack.

God, he was still shooting.

“Stop it!” she screamed. “Stop it, you son of a bitch!”

She scrambled wildly through the ground cover, plunging into a dense, concealing thicket of horse nettle, heedless of the plants’ slashing thorns.

Huddled there, shuddering all over, she waited for the next shot.

None came.

Perhaps he was following her. Moving in close for a surer kill.

She dared a look.

Steve remained on the dock. As she watched, he leaned over the side, aimed the gun straight down, and fired a single shot at the motorboat, puncturing the hull.

He was scuttling the boat. Denying her that means of escape. So he and Jack could hunt her down at leisure, take her life at will.

Shivering, she retreated deeper into the brush. She didn’t stop crawling until the dock was lost to sight, the undergrowth around her a solid barricade.

On her knees, she leaned against a rotted log, the corpse of a fallen magnolia. Large black beetles crawled on it. Some detoured onto her hand, her arm. She didn’t care.

“God damn you, Steve,” she said for the hundredth time, but with even greater feeling now.

He was every bit as bad as Jack. No, he was worse.

Jack, at least, had not used her love and trust to lure her into a death trap. Only her husband had been capable of that.

He’s sick, she thought in time with a confused rush of emotions: rage, grief, pity.

Then she shook her head. It wasn’t sickness. Steve was suffering from no delusion; he knew who she was and what she ought to mean to him; and he had tried, repeatedly and cold-bloodedly, to put a bullet in her back.

Had it all been a lie, then? Every moment of their years together? Every smile, embrace, kiss? Every shared secret and whispered confession?

“God…” She began to say the familiar words of her private mantra, but strength failed her. The curse, unfinished, became a kind of desperate prayer.

Crying, she staggered on through weeds and scrub, lashed forward by one thought.

The runabout.

Hidden somewhere.

Perhaps at the cove.

Jack shrugged off Steve’s nylon jacket and slung it into the water with an angry swing of his arm. The eyeglasses followed, vanishing with a splash.

His ruse had nearly worked. If Kirstie had advanced just a few steps nearer…

No point in thinking about that. He would have to try again, that was all.

He checked the Beretta’s clip. Eight rounds left, plus another in the chamber. Plenty of ammo.

Though he hadn’t handled a gun in years, he was confident enough of his ability to hit a stationary target at reasonably close range. As a teenager he had often borrowed his father’s Heckler amp; Koch. 45-well, taken it without permission, actually-and driven out to the woods, where he would practice for hours, unobserved.

He’d been a good marksman then. But now, when it mattered-when he’d meant to pay back that little bitch for the bloody hole in his leg-his every shot had gone wide of the mark.

The stab wound, at least, had almost stopped its painful throbbing. Before leaving the house, he’d inspected the injury, then wrapped his thigh in a strip of bedsheet to stanch the blood. He could walk without limping now.

He turned his attention to the motorboat, fully submerged at last, dragged to the bottom by the weight of the Evinrude outboard. Through the crystalline water its outline shimmered faintly, blurred and strange, a ghost vessel in a dream.