Catherine Coulter: Riptide

“Damnation,” Adam shouted. “Becca, are you all right?” He leaned over and slapped her face. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here. Damn, the drapes are on fire now.” He scrambled on his knees to where Thomas lay on his back. He shook him. “Thomas, open your eyes. That’s it. Now, can you make it?”

Thomas just smiled at him. “No, unfortunately not, Adam. I think this is the end of the line for me. Get Becca out of here. Tell her I love her.”

“Don’t be a jackass,” Adam said. “We’re all getting out of here. Come on, you can do it.” He wrapped an arm around Thomas and jerked to his feet, pulling Thomas with him. He started to lift him over his shoulder.

“No, not yet,” Thomas said, the pain flooding over him now, drawing at his brain, making everything darken, darken. “No, dammit, we’ll get out of here. Becca, get yourself together! I’m not going to lose you now.”

Becca was sitting now, shaking her head, trying to breathe. She heard agents yelling outside, prayed they wouldn’t try to come into the burning room, prayed they’d be ready to pump a hundred bullets into Mikhail when he came out of the house. She said, “I’m okay. Just give me a second, just a moment.” She stared at her father. “Mother left me. There’s no way you’re going to leave me now. I’ll help you, Adam.” Together, one of them on each side of him, they managed to get the door open and drag Thomas into the hallway. The flames were whooshing up high behind them, thick, incredibly hot, smoke gushing out of the room. No time, Adam thought, just no bloody time to put it out.

All of them were coughing now from the smoke. “Let’s move,” Adam said. He pulled the bedroom door closed after him, but it was too late. The fire was already eating away at the hallway carpeting.

“If he isn’t dead yet,” Adam said, “they’ll get him the instant he gets out of the house.”

Becca was panting with effort and coughing at the same time. “I had my gun strapped to my leg, but it didn’t matter,” she said, coughing. “Are you all right, Daddy? Don’t you dare talk about dying again. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you, Becca,” Thomas said, and his chest was on fire, just as the fire raged around them, it raged inside him. He knew he couldn’t last much longer. He didn’t want to leave her, not yet, please God, not yet.

“Just a little farther.”

They heard a whoosh of flames behind them. The smoke was dense and black now. “We’ve got to hurry,” Adam said. He didn’t ask, just picked up Thomas and eased him over his shoulder. “Becca, get downstairs. I’m right behind you.”

A shot rang out in the thick smoke. Adam felt the punch in his arm, sharp, hard. He didn’t loosen his hold. “Jesus, Becca, get down, crawl. I don’t want him to shoot you.”

But Becca had her Coonan in her hand. She stepped behind Adam and fired back through the smoke in the direction of the shot. There were three more shots. Then silence.

“He must be back near the bedroom, Adam.” And she fired off another shot. “That’ll keep him away. Get my father out of here. Oh God, the walls are on fire. It’s bad, Adam. Hurry! Save my father!”

Adam felt his arm pulsing with raw pain, weakening as he carried Thomas down the front stairs. He felt an instant of dizziness, then shook his head, coughed, and kept moving. He felt a strange pulling in his back, weird, but nothing really. Thomas was now unconscious. He prayed he wasn’t dead. He heard another shot, then another, but nothing all that close.

“I’m right behind you, Adam. Go, quickly!”

He didn’t realize Becca wasn’t with him until he was out the front door and two agents had lifted Thomas from his shoulder. “Jesus, a chest wound. Get the paramedics over here!”

“The fire department is on the way,” Gaylan Woodhouse said, running up, his gun still at the ready. “My God, you’re shot, too, Adam. Hey, Hawley, get over here. We need some help.” Adam stood there holding his arm, his teeth gritted. And now, of all things, that pulling in his back, it was bringing him down.

“Where the hell is Krimakov?” Savich shouted.

“Becca,” Adam said, looking around wildly. “Becca?”

“Jesus,” Hatch said, running to Adam. “He got you in the back, boss. Did you know you got shot in the back? Oh God, hurry, let’s get him down.”

“Becca,” Adam said, frantic now, and he knew he was barely hanging on. “Where’s Becca?” He saw the flames billowing out of the upstairs windows. The beautiful ivy that nearly covered that side of the house was on fire.

“Thomas shot Krimakov,” Adam said to Gaylan Woodhouse and Hawley, who were bending over him. “He’s got to still be inside. Maybe he’s unconscious or dead. Jesus, where’s Becca? Please, you’ve got to find her.”

The walkie-talkie boomed out, “No one has tried to come out of any windows or the back of the house.”

“Get Krimakov,” Gaylan shouted. “Dammit. GET HIM!”

Becca, oh God, where was Becca? He wanted to go back into that house to find her. He had to, had to, but he just couldn’t move. The fire wasn’t only in the house now, it was inside him and it was eating its way out. The pain in his back held him utterly locked in place. He couldn’t move.

“Oh my God,” an agent shouted. “Up there!”

“It’s Becca,” Gaylan Woodhouse whispered. “Oh, no.”

Adam did move, suddenly, with a spurt of strength he didn’t know he had. He roared to his feet. He followed everyone’s eyes to the roof of the house and felt his heart drop to his feet. No, please Jesus, no. But it was Becca, on the roof of the burning house.

“Becca!”

There were at least a dozen people standing in the front yard, looking upward. Then everyone was silent, still.

There, highlighted in flames, stood Becca, in her white nightgown, her bare feet spread, holding the Coonan between her hands.

“Becca,” Adam shouted, “shoot the fucker!”

But she didn’t. She just stood there, pointing the Coonan at Mikhail Krimakov. He was holding his arm, blood dripping through his fingers. Blood also dripped down his cheek from a head wound. He was leaning over, as it was nearly beyond him to straighten. What had happened to his gun? Oh God, Adam couldn’t believe what he was seeing, would have given five years of his life if he could have changed it, if he could even have moved, at least tried to save her. But there was nothing he could do. He saw an agent raise a rifle. “No,” he said, “don’t try it. He’s off at an angle. Don’t take the chance of hitting her. Where are the firemen?”

Flames had caught the roof on fire now, licking out of the balcony off Thomas’s bedroom. It wouldn’t be long now until the flames ate the roof and sent it crashing into the house, until it was too hot on the roof for her to stand there, barefoot.

He heard her then, speaking loudly, very clearly.

“It’s over,” Becca said to the young man not eight feet from her. “Finally, it’s over. You lost, Mikhail, but the cost was too high. You killed eight people, just because they were there.”

“Oh no, I killed many more than that,” he said, raising his head, panting with the pain. “They didn’t count, any of them. I used them, then of what possible use were they to me?”

“Why didn’t you stop when your father died in that car accident?”

He laughed, he actually laughed at her. “It wasn’t an accident, you stupid bitch. I killed him. He wanted me to stop this, said I’d already done enough, that this was just too much. He’d turned soft, he’d become a coward. I killed him because he’d become a weakling. He wasn’t worthy any longer. He betrayed my beloved mother’s memory. Yes, I clouted him on the side of the head and drove him in his car over a cliff.”