Michael Prescott: Deadly Pursuit

“Want us to tie up at the dock?” Pice asked.

“No.” Moore scanned the shoreline, using a pair of binoculars borrowed from the control console. “The fire’s a diversion. Like the locked storeroom in the CSGI office.”

Lovejoy had been thinking the same thing. “Circle the island,” he told Pice. “Is there another dock?”

Pice manhandled the wheel, swinging the Black Caesar to the northeast. “No. You could drop anchor in the cove, though. Or drag a dinghy aground-”

Moore interrupted. “Look.”

Perhaps half a mile ahead, a small boat glided away from the beach, trailing a white vee of foam.

“Two persons on board.” Moore adjusted the focus on the binoculars. “Man and woman, I think. Woman is seated in the bow. Blond Caucasian, must be Mrs. Gardner. The man…”

She strained to get a clear view of him through a rainbowed mist of spray.

“It’s Jack,” she said finally.

“What’s his heading?” Lovejoy asked Pice.

“Due north. Probably means to turn west eventually and come ashore on Windley or Plantation Key.”

“If we give chase, things are likely to get dangerous. I can’t order you-”

Pice brushed aside Lovejoy’s politeness. “No need for orders. I volunteer.”

He slammed the throttles open. The sportfisher plunged ahead.

“He sees us,” Moore said, staring through the binoculars, her voice taut.

The runabout hooked east, into the sun.

“It’s no use, Jack,” Lovejoy whispered. “Your luck has finally run out.”

Kirstie sat on the runabout’s sailing thwart and stared blankly at the water rushing past. Flecks of turquoise checkered the swells, dancing amid a flotsam of orange sun-sparkles. Pretty. So pretty…

“Son of a bitch.”

Glancing up, she saw Jack twisted in his seat, his gaze fixed on a sportfisher half a mile astern.

The Black Caesar? She thought it was.

He turned toward her. A child’s petulant fury distorted his face-helpless, shaking rage at a world that would not let him have his way.

“First a chopper, now a boat. Got a whole fucking armada on my ass.” He yanked the outboard motor’s throttle arm, and the runabout fetched east. “But I’ll beat ’em anyway. You hear me, Meredith?”

“I’m not Meredith!” she protested hoarsely over the buzz of the engine.

“Yes, you are.” The glittery malice in his eyes hinted at a deeper craziness, an insane obsession rooted at the base of his soul. “For me, you are.”

Behind them, the sportfisher altered its heading. It ran east, accelerating to twenty knots, rapidly narrowing the gap. The lurid light of sunrise smoldered on the choppy water. On the retreating horizon a wide fan of smoke unfolded slowly from Pelican Key.

Jack gathered up the three bags of supplies in the bow and hurled them overboard, lightening the boat. The sportfisher continued to close in.

“You can’t outrun them,” Kirstie said.

“Sure I can.”

“Their boat’s faster than yours.”

“But not as maneuverable. You know the nursery rhyme: Jack, be nimble; Jack, be quick…” He flashed a smile at her, a weird simulacrum of the cocky grin that had defined his earlier persona. “That’s me. Nimble and quick. I can slip through the reef, easy as threading a needle. That big mother will run aground if she tries it.”

Kirstie looked past him at the cruiser expanding with a roar of diesel engines. “You won’t even get to the reef.”

“Hey, show a little faith.” That smile again. “I’ve got a way of making them back off.”

He withdrew the Beretta from his waistband.

Leaning over the safety rail for a better view, training the binoculars on the runabout, Moore saw the pistol come up fast.

Instinctively she pulled back, a split second late.

The bullet caught her left arm below the elbow, shattering her radius and ulna.

Pain walloped her, knocked her reeling to the deck of the bridge.

Blur of action to her right. Pice seizing his Winchester.

What came out of her mouth was one long unpunctuated cry of distress: “No don’t you’ll hit the hostage!”

“Warning shot,” Pice snapped. He poked the gun barrel past the windshield and squeezed off a round, aiming high.

The rifle’s report cracked like a stinging hand clap over the water. Reflexively Kirstie ducked.

A strong hand closed over her shoulder and wrenched her roughly off the thwart. Jack thrust her in front of him and screamed.

“Shoot me now, you assholes!” Frenzied exhilaration shredded his voice. “Come on, shoot me now!"

He pistoned out his arm, the Beretta pointed like an accusing finger, and fired again.

Lovejoy was on his way across the bridge to help his partner when the venturi windshield exploded in a cloud of shards.

Pice shielded his face with his arm. Lovejoy, caught off balance, had no chance to protect himself. Crumbs of glass chewed through his face like rodent teeth.

“Jesus.”

He stumbled, blinking blood out of his eyes. For a heart-stopping moment he thought he had been blinded. No. Cuts scored his forehead and cheeks; blood had dampened his eyes only as it spattered.

At the steering console, Pice fired a second warning shot.

Lovejoy ran a handkerchief over his face and crouched beside Moore. He tore off the sleeve of her jacket, then removed his necktie and wound it around her arm at the elbow, making a tourniquet.

“This no-account mother’s gonna kill us both,” Moore said with a twitchy attempt at a smile.

“No chance. We’ve got him on the run.”

At least, he hoped they did.

The reef wavered on the horizon, a crooked line against a brassy smear of sun.

Jack had hoped the sportfisher would cut her speed, giving him time to find some narrow channel between the rocks.

No such luck. The cruiser was hard astern, bearing down on him like a runaway train.

Well, there was an alternate way of crossing the reef.

He gunned the motor, pushing the runabout to full throttle. The bow lifted. The boat bounced crazily, skimming the water and shooting up fans of spray, as the Yamaha outboard shrilled.

“Some fun, huh?” he asked Kirstie with a bark of laughter.

Her eyes, wide and strangely vacant, stared out from behind a foam-drenched net of hair.

Clutching her closer, ignoring her feeble moan of protest, Jack fired another shot at the sportfisher’s bridge.

The third bullet blasted a smoking hole in the control console, showering Pice with sparks.

“You okay?” Lovejoy yelled.

“Bastard missed me. Knocked out my oil gauges, is all.”

Lovejoy finished knotting the tourniquet in place. “Lie still,” he told Moore.

“Like hell.” She fumbled her. 38 out of her shoulder holster with her good hand. “Where I grew up, a flesh wound is about as serious as a paper cut. We’ve got to give Pice some protection.”

“All right, cover him from here-but stay down. I’ll try to draw Jack’s fire.”

He swung onto the ladder and descended to the weather deck, awash in spray. A sliding door admitted him to the galley. Lurching from handhold to handhold, he advanced to the main cabin, where a companionway ladder lowered him to the forward stateroom.

V-berths were built into the bulkheads. He stood on a berth and opened the overhead hatch, then hauled himself up onto the foredeck. On elbows and knees he wriggled to the stem of the prow.

The runabout was fifty feet away, a speeding arrowhead on a feathery shaft of wake, launched at the red bull’s-eye of the sun.

Lovejoy fired a round well wide of the mark, simply hoping to get Jack’s attention and prevent another shot at the bridge.

Jack heard the bullet whiz past and caught a glimpse of the man prone on the foredeck, intermittently visible as the sportfisher’s bow lifted and plunged.