O’Donnell leaned forward, hands clasped against the tabletop. “You don’t have an attorney, Ms. Davis. You can barely afford to pay your bills. We know that your houseboat was moored behind Richard’s place and then you moved it to the marina, and then you left Cedar Key. Why?”
Okay, this guy was beginning to piss her off. “I told you why. Rich changed. One of these evil ghosts claimed him. And one of them is in Sam Dorset, the editor of the paper, and that’s the reason he tried to rape me. After it happened, Rich advised me not to call the police, ‘not to make waves,’ as he put it. And when I called the police chief—Frank Cole, another guy I’ve known practically my whole life—he told me he wouldn’t arrest Sam until he’d slept off his drunk. Drunk or sober shouldn’t make any difference. Frank was one of the first who got taken.”
O’Donnell popped another mint in his mouth, pushed to his feet, and retrieved the iPad. “We appreciate your candor, Ms. Davis. We’ll be back later with further questions.”
Delaney, she noticed, wasn’t as quick to get up. “Excuse me,” she snapped. “Time is of the essence here. My son has been missing for … I don’t know how many hours … and you’re telling me you’ll be back later? Do you have children, Agent O’Donnell?”
His blank look told her he didn’t.
“What about you, Mr. Delaney? Do you have kids?”
“Yes. But I don’t see what—”
“Put yourself in my shoes.” She was nearly shouting now. “Your kid is missing in a quarantine zone, evil ghost shits have seized the locals—”
“And we saw those giant crows over the island,” Delaney finished, his voice quiet, tense. He impaled O’Donnell with his eyes, just daring him to issue an order to shut up.
He didn’t. O’Donnell looked like a man perched at the edge of an abyss, his eyes sort of wild as he sucked hard on his mint. “We don’t know what those crows are about. We don’t even know if they were crows. They were too big for crows. Enough about the crows, Bob.”
Crows? Kate didn’t know what he was talking about. It didn’t matter. Delaney seemed to be in her court, but apparently couldn’t say much with O’Donnell around. “I’d like to make the call to which I’m entitled. Immediately. Unless you charge me with something—or unless you plan to Baker-act me and send me to a padded cell—I have the right to an attorney.”
“Cedar Key is under FEMA and CDC jurisdiction now,” O’Donnell said. “Martial law. And that means that your civil rights are suspended.”
With that, he headed for the door. Delaney held back, his eyes locked on hers, and reached into the pocket of his jacket. He withdrew something and pressed it into her hand. He seemed to hold her hand longer than necessary to pass her a slip of paper, his beautiful, dark fingers a shocking contrast to her pale skin. She slipped the piece of paper into the back pocket of her jeans and Delaney moved swiftly after O’Donnell without looking back.
When the heavy door shut again, the lock clicking into place, Kate ran over to it and hammered her fists against it, shrieking, “Hey, assholes, I’m entitled to an attorney…”
Her voice echoed. Useless, it was useless, she thought, and pressed her fists to her forehead, then began to walk again, faster, faster, her meditative state just beyond her or behind her, a shadow, out of reach. Didn’t matter. She just needed to walk, to move, to find a spot in this little space where the video camera mounted inconspicuously in the corner couldn’t see everything she did.
Could they hear her, too?
She assumed they could. She assumed they could peer through her clothes at her naked body, too. TSA, hello. I am not your local terrorist. The terrorists have arrived and guess what? They look like us, they could be us when we’re dead.
Kate slid under the cot, lay there on her stomach, and dug out the slip of paper Delaney had passed her. She unfolded it, smoothed it out against the floor. “Rocky safe. Liberty will find you. Wayra”
She squeezed her eyes shut and held the note against her heart. “Rocky safe.” But how had Delaney gotten this? Kate pressed her forehead against her hands, the note crumpled in her fist.
* * *
A long time later, a noise awakened her. It took her a moment to realize she was under the cot, hiding from the security camera, the piece of paper wadded up between her cheek and her hand. She quickly shoved it down inside her sock and turned her head, watching the feet of the man who entered her room. Large feet. His shoes, a pair of worn dock shoes, looked to be a size eleven or larger.
“Kate?”
“It’s not a locked-room mystery, Delaney,” she said. “There’re only so many places in a room this size where I might be.” She slid out from under the cot, brushed the dust bunnies from her jeans, sat back on the edge of the cot, and just glared at him.
“We can speak freely,” he said softly.
“Yeah?” She gestured at the supposedly hidden video camera in a corner of the room. “Stupid is as stupid does.”
He laughed. “It has a new loop.”
“Why?”
He grabbed the back of one of the chairs and jerked it over closer to the cot. He flipped it around, sat down, rested his forearms along the back of it. “Because a hawk dropped that note at my feet.”
Liberty.
“Help me understand what’s going on, Kate.”
“Excuse me, Agent Delaney. You’re probably a really smart guy, but you wouldn’t be able to grasp what I’m talking about, okay?”
“Really? Well, let’s put that to the test. You and Richard, or Rich, as you’ve called him since grade school, became lovers when his marriage fell apart. He’s basically a nice guy, but you aren’t in love with him. He was company, the sex was good. When you were a kid, your mother worked at the hotel. Your old man was local color, an interesting guy whose passion was fishing. It wasn’t catching the fish that mattered to him, but the ritual—alone in a boat, beneath a glorious sky, a Hemingway moment.”
“Hemingway. Totally overrated. And how the hell do you know any of this?”
“It’s my job.”
“With this ISIS agency that I’ve never heard of?”
“Right.” Delaney shrugged off his pack, set it between his feet, unzipped it, and brought out a pale blue and gray jumpsuit. “Put that on. And get this around your neck, where it’s visible.” He handed her a fed ID with a fake name on it. “We’re outta here.”
She cupped the ID in her hand, shocked to see her photo on it. “And how do I know this isn’t a trap for me?”
“When I held your hand a bit too long? That’s what I do. I read people that way. I get it, okay?”
“Get what, exactly? Spell it out, Delaney. Right now, I’m not even sure what I get and don’t get.”
He rubbed his hand over his face. “A redhead—Maddie—gave you something, a note, a warning. An old man came to your houseboat and warned you. He gave you weapons, too. That’s when you moved your houseboat out of the marina to one of the other islands. You had so many warnings but you just kept going along with everyone else’s agenda.”
All true. She’d had ample warnings, and kept ignoring them, hoping they were wrong. “You’re a psychic for the government?”
“A remote viewer.”
“Isn’t that a fancy name for a psychic?”
“Pretty much, although there’re some subtle differences.”
“And why’re you helping me?”
“Because I believe you.”
“How long have I been here?”
“Nearly twenty-four hours.”
“Shit.” Rocky. What’s happened to you, where are you, did Wayra find you? She quickly slipped on the jumpsuit, flipped the hood over her head, fixed the ID badge so that it was visible. “What’s this mean for you, Delaney? If you’re caught?”
“I can kiss my life and career good-bye.”
Kate followed him out of the room, into a dimly lit hallway. They were in a small concrete building with graffiti on the walls, a place she recognized that h
ad once been used to store supplies for the fishing pier. She had played here as a kid, and somewhere on these walls, her ten-year-old self had scrawled her name.
They left through the back door, and in her first few moments outside, in a large parking lot, Kate filled her senses with the familiar smells of water, salt marsh, spring. A flock of silhouetted birds flew across the twilit sky. She didn’t see a fence, soldiers, guards, nothing to indicate martial law. Just a single-wide trailer that stood to the west of the parking lot, which held two rows of electric carts and government vehicles. Delaney chose a cart with several boxes on the backseat, a broom and mop resting across them.
“I’ve got a canoe stashed in the salt marsh about a mile from here.” His voice held a softness that seemed contradictory for a man of his height and size.
“Where’re all the guards? FEMA? The CDC?”
“Set up right where the quarantine begins.” He drove the cart out of the lot, onto State Road 24. “We’re about a mile beyond that.”
“O’Donnell didn’t buy my story, did he?”
“O’Donnell understands that some very weird shit is going on, but evil ghosts are a stretch for him.”
“But not for you.”
“Frankly, I found it much stranger that a hawk delivered a note intended for you and knew to drop it in front of me.”
“She’s a smart hawk, for sure. But I agree with you. It’s strange even for her.”
“The hawk is your pet?”
“Not a pet, exactly. My son rescued her last year, and ever since she just hangs around the houseboat.”
“Who’s Wayra?”
A dog that followed me home and turned into a man. “He was helping me look for Rocky. We went into one of the houses on the runway, where Rocky’s girlfriend lives, thinking he might be there with her. But we found a naked couple dead in front of the fireplace. They had bled out. Wayra knows a lot about these brujos, that’s what he calls them. He’s here because of Maddie. The ghost inside of her is one of the ancient brujos of Esperanza, Ecuador. She and Wayra are old adversaries.”
“You realize how nuts that sounds?”
“Yes.” And she hadn’t even gotten to the part about a shapeshifter. She decided not to mention it. “It also happens to be true.”
“But how do you know this guy?”
“I met him when he arrived in Cedar Key.” Not a lie, exactly, but not the whole truth. “He helped me get out of the café the night of the fire. He apparently found Rocky.”
Lights hit the cart’s side mirrors. Delaney bit at his lower lip. “Shit. Another cart. Reach into the box right behind you, Kate, open the duffel bag, and grab one of the weapons and extra clips.”
She twisted around, pushed the mop and the broom onto the road, opened the box. It held handguns, clips, handcuffs, handheld radios, a couple of cell phones. She plucked out a pair of nine millimeters, all the extra clips, passed Delaney the gun and half the clips.
“You know how to shoot that?” he asked.
“Probably better than you do. That colorful figure you mentioned—my dad?—knew as much about guns as he did about fish. Look, you don’t have to put yourself at risk. Tell O’Donnell I took you hostage.”
“He wouldn’t believe it.” Delaney turned abruptly into the trees on the right, killed the cart’s headlights, and they both hopped out. He pulled a duffel bag from each of the boxes and they dashed through the trees, working their way farther north along the marsh, distancing themselves from the cart.
Their shoes sank into mud and muck, branches slapped her in the face, she heard fish jumping nearby. It was nearly dark now and she could barely make out the canoe. Fitted with an electric motor, it was tied to the branches of a scruffy bush, half hidden in the tall reeds along the water, the paddles on the floor. They dropped the duffels inside, she quickly got in, and Delaney pushed them off the beach and started the motor. It purred and quickly took them into the tallest reeds. Minutes later, a voice rang out. O’Donnell. “Delaney, don’t be an idiot! The cutters are blocking your way outta here.”
“Is that true?” Kate whispered.
“I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. We have a way out. It took me most of the day to set this up.”
O’Donnell kept shouting, his voice echoing through the darkness and across the water. An airboat came into view, the top of it about even with the top of the reeds. Once the tide came in, though, it would be visible. “That’s where we’re getting off.”
“Hardly subtle.”
“It’ll do the trick.”
They brought the canoe alongside the airboat, and Delaney killed the engine. He steadied it as she got out, passed her the duffels, then removed the electric engine and climbed aboard. He stashed the duffels and engine in a deep aluminum box anchored to the floor of the boat, dug out two pairs of goggles and two pairs of headsets. He passed her one of each. “Put those on.”
She put on the goggles, slipped on the headset, they climbed into the tall seats, and moments later, the airboat exploded out of the marsh and into open water, engine roaring. The Zodiac tied behind their seats lifted into the wind like a sail, then throbbed like a giant heart against the floor of the airboat. A pair of Coast Guard cutters tore after them, but the airboat screamed onward, outpacing the cutters.
Bugs splattered against the windshield, smeared across her goggles. When they ripped through another marsh, Kate slapped her hand over her nose and mouth to keep the bugs and caterpillars out. “Where’s your houseboat?” Delaney shouted over the racket.
“Sea Horse Key, directly west of Snake Key,” she yelled back. “Go around the inside of Atsena, it’s shorter, and may be too shallow for their boats.”
The airboat swerved west, engine shrieking, a rising furl of water curving on Kate’s side of the boat. She gripped the edges of her bench, terrified she might slide off into the water. As they shot away from Atsena Otie, she glanced back. In the light of the stars, she could see that one of the cutters was stuck, beached, and the other had slowed considerably. She couldn’t hear their engines, not over the din the airboat made, but imagined they were straining.
“Keep going straight,” she hollered. “The tide’s low and there’s a marsh coming up on your side where we can ditch the airboat and take the Zodiac.”
He flashed a thumbs-up. Kate wished he could turn off the airboat’s brilliant spotlight, but the risk of accident was too great if they couldn’t see where the hell they were going. She kept shouting directions, turn here, turn there. When they reached the marsh, Delaney immediately turned off the engine, the lights. The darkness swallowed them, the airboat bobbed like a cork in the shallow waters, the night sounds closed around them.
Kate tore off her goggles, and she and Delaney stood at the same moment. Without uttering a word, they worked as if their brains were completely in synch. She retrieved the duffels, paddles, and engine, and he untied the Zodiac and dropped it alongside the airboat. He fitted the engine onto the back of it.
Just before Kate climbed down into the Zodiac with one of the duffels, she glimpsed a much smaller boat racing toward them. Delaney saw it, too. “Hurry, hurry,” he whispered. “Get in.” Then he drew a dark green tarp over the airboat, either end resting against the reeds.
It was too shallow here to use the engine, so they paddled fast, away from the airboat, and paused at the edge of the marsh, watching the smaller vessel. It had slowed and now moved south around Snake Key, probably checking out the mangroves in the cove. “I say we wait a few minutes,” she said softly.
“Total agreement.”
“You plan well, Delaney.”
“I had plenty of help.”
“From?”
“RV.” He parted the reeds with his hand so that he had a better view of the boat. “I actually saw you the day I shook O’Donnell’s hand outside of Gainesville, when Sanchez informed me he was going rogue. I saw myself interrogating you, then I was alone with you, asking about a note a hawk dropped at my fee
t. When I saw that hawk this morning, that’s when I knew what was going to happen. Yesterday, after you were brought in, I made a point of touching O’Donnell and saw myself readying an airboat.”
“Did you see how it turns out?”
“Uh, no. O’Donnell suspected I was reading him and moved away from me.”
The boat rounded the tip of Snake Key and they lost sight of it. “Let’s move to the other side of the marsh and head for Sea Horse,” she suggested.
“We’ll have to paddle until the water’s a bit deeper and we’re out of this shrubbery.”
They paddled, but it wasn’t easy. The shrubbery was thick, the leaves like saws. Some of the reeds had snapped in two and their pointed ends scraped and clawed against the sides of the Zodiac. Even though the boat was made of Hypalon, a durable plastic material, a puncture by one of these reeds would create a slow leak and they would probably sink before they got to Sea Horse. “You have any glue for this sucker, Delaney?”
“Nope. This part was a rush job. How far is it to Sea Horse?”
“From here, less than two miles. But it’s all open water.”
Kate heard something and at first thought it was another airboat. But Delaney touched her arm and pointed upward. A chopper swept in low across the gulf, its searchlights burning a path through the darkness, the whoop of its rotors growing increasingly louder. They pushed back into the marsh and Delaney slid lower in the boat. The Zodiac barely accommodated him when he sat up straight, but now his legs came along either side of her and his feet hung over the end. Kate leaned back against him, her head resting against his chest, his hands on her arms. He dropped his head back, and through the tips of the reeds, they watched the chopper make a wide circle around the marsh that hid them.
“Delaney, when you saw me in this vision or whatever it was, did that mean that what you saw would absolutely happen?”
“Never. In remote viewing, you only see what’s most probable at the moment you see it.”
He suddenly drew his fingers through her hair, a touch so gentle, so soft, that Kate felt it all the way to the tips of her toes.
Ghost Key Page 25
