Cold Around the Heart

by Michael Prescott

  Then the sand erupted again. He was answering her attack with a new barrage of shots. She spun behind the trestle, blinking rain and grit out of her eyes, shooting back until her gun was empty, seeing nothing but muzzle flare, while her eardrums threatened to burst under the insane noise, and she heard her own voice screaming, “Stop it!”—the cry audible only inside her skull.

  Her plea was useless. It wouldn’t stop, it would never stop ...

  But it did.

  He must have emptied his gun again. But he would have more ammo. He would never run out.

  She tried to come up with a plan of action, but suddenly she was all out of ideas. The gunfire had robbed her of night vision and most of her hearing. She was effectively blind and deaf, and she was up against an adversary who could see in the dark.

  If she left cover, she was dead. If she stayed put, she was dead.

  Any way she played it—dead.

  ***

  Pascal dumped the Beretta’s empty magazine and inserted a new one. The procedure was automatic to him. He had done it thousands of times, often practicing blindfolded.

  With his next attack he would get the girl—assuming he had not killed her already.

  The phone in his pocket thrummed. Her phone, set to vibrate so the ring tone would not betray him in the dark.

  Curiosity prompted him to lift his goggles and pluck the device from his pocket. He lifted it in a gloved hand and read the name on the display.

  Slowly, Pascal smiled.

  ***

  Bonnie heeled her last fresh magazine into the Glock, her hands shaky, her fingers slick with rain. The gun was barely more useful than a pacifier at this point. She couldn’t tell where Pascal was, couldn’t fire with any hope of scoring a hit. She could only wait to die, as she had waited in the motel bathtub as a kid.

  Kurt Land must have felt like this when she stood over him in the Pine Barrens, her gun angled at his chest in the sun’s last rays. The fear she’d read in his face—it was her fear now.

  Now she knew why she hadn’t shot him. He had been too much like her. Too much like the surprised and helpless victim she would have been, if the man in the motel room had pulled back the shower curtain and seen her cowering there.

  She thought she had better get away from the trestle. Pascal knew her shots had come from there, and he would be homing in on her.

  Leaving cover, she scrambled south a few yards until she blundered into a high drift of sand, wet and clammy. Cold.

  Cold was what she needed. Pascal was tracking her body heat. Anything that disguised her heat signature would make her harder to see.

  She shoved the Glock into her waistband and dug into the pile, scooping out handfuls of sand. As the cavity enlarged, she burrowed deeper inside, until the hill collapsed, blanketing her.

  Talk about digging your own grave, a voice in her head quipped.

  She told it to shut the fuck up.

  The sand was thick and chilly, and in combination with the waterproof poncho it might—might—be enough to obscure her infrared display. Under the best of circumstances, all Pascal could possibly see was a faint ripple of heat through the cracks. The rain and lightning had to be a distraction, and now she was smothered in natural camouflage.

  And if he saw her anyway …

  Then she might have time for one or two more shots before he took her out. She tightened her grip on the gun, hoping Pascal would make enough noise to give her something to aim at.

  If she had to shoot again, her next rounds would be the last she ever fired, and she intended to make them count.

  ***

  The phone call was brief and businesslike, devoid of emotion. Pascal appreciated that. He made the necessary arrangements and clicked off.

  This new development left him with little time. He must be going. Bonnie Parker had become a strictly secondary concern.

  But surely he could spare another few seconds to finish the job. He would kill her with his next few shots, then leave her body under the boardwalk to gather flies and sand crabs.

  He lowered the goggles, immersing himself in an electronic field of view, and scanned the boards for a last look at the warmth radiating from Bonnie Parker’s living body—a body that would not be living much longer.

  He saw nothing.

  She was gone.

  He paced the boards, peering in all directions. She had to be close by. He had lost sight of her for only a minute. How far could she crawl in that time?

  But she was not there. God damn it, she was not there.

  He could not abandon the chase, not when he was so close. But he had no choice. Parker was not his priority. She never had been.

  Perhaps if he gave his pistol and night-vision gear to Kurt, the rat could finish things for him. Even such a useless weakling ought to be capable of dispatching a trapped and nearly helpless adversary.

  When he turned to the pavilion, this small hope died. The shimmering green fleck in the center of his vision was the figure of a man darting south on the boardwalk, then vanishing down an access ramp to the street.

  The rat had fled. The latest exchange of gunfire must have unnerved him completely.

  That, then, was that. He could not spare the time to nose out Parker now. He had wasted too many precious seconds as it was.

  She would live. So be it. He begrudged her nothing. She had put up a good fight, and she deserved to keep her little life.

  He turned and broke into a run, heading for the exit that would take him to the parking lot across the street.

  CHAPTER 32

   

  Bonnie didn’t know why she was still alive.

  She shouldn’t be. The sand couldn’t conceal her anymore. By now her body heat must have leaked through and become visible to Pascal’s infrared scope, which meant gunfire ought to be streaming down.

  So far it hadn’t. Somehow she was still breathing. She’d heard no footsteps, nothing that would give her a target.

  Why didn’t he just shoot? Why drag it out?

  Come on, you son of a bitch, get it over with.

  She shut her eyes, willing him to fire.

  Nothing happened.

  And gradually the idea came to her that he might be gone.

  She didn’t believe it. It would be a kind of miracle, and she didn’t believe in miracles. Anything that seemed too good to be true was a scam. Her whole life had taught her that.

  He was still up there, maybe hoping to lure her out so he could inflict a nonfatal wound and commence a new round of Q&A.

  But more long moments dragged past, and still … nothing.

  She began to think he really had checked out. Maybe he thought he’d killed her in his last volley. But he would have confirmed it. He was a pro. A pro always got confirmation.

  Well, no. Not always. She hadn’t confirmed it with Kurt Land, had she?

  She pushed her head out of the sand pile.

  “Pascal?” she whispered. Her throat was sore, as if she’d been shouting, and the word was scarcely audible.

  She tried again, louder. “Pascal!”

  Nothing.

  “Hey, asshole!”

  No reply, either in words or bullets.

  Even so, she didn’t move. It felt warm and safe under the sand, and part of her wanted to stay here, just stay and rest. Sleep …

  Screw that. She wasn’t swooning like a goddamned débutante.

  She dug herself free, crawled to the edge of the boardwalk, and emerged into the open. Slowly she stood in the rain and looked around, the Glock traveling with her gaze.

  Pascal wasn’t there.

  He had gone away, and she was alive. It made no sense, but she couldn’t argue with it.

  She was exhausted, wiped out. And a mess—splinters in her hair, rips in her poncho, random cuts on her arms and legs from crawling over shards of seashells and glass bottles.

  She wondered if she really had the heart for this job. Maybe she should get her GED, go to community college,
become a veterinarian or something.

  The rain coursed down around her, washing some of the sandy paste off her poncho. The hood had fallen off her head, and her hair was a ragged mop.

  She made her way to a wooden staircase and climbed up to the boardwalk. Her legs were shaking, her knees watery. Her only thought was that she ought to be dead. Pascal had outplayed her again. He’d held all the cards. He could have finished her. Why didn’t he?

  Maybe he’d heard a siren. Even in the clamor of the storm, someone who lived near the beach might have heard her unsilenced gunshots and called it in. But there were no sirens. There was nothing but the crackle of thunder, the drumbeat of rain on the boardwalk, and the crash of breakers on the beach.

  She looked down. Brass shell casings littered the planks. They glittered in bursts of lightning. Each one represented a bullet that could have made her dead.

  A few yards down the boardwalk glittered something bigger than a shell casing. Her stolen cell phone.

  “Hey, Sammy,” she said, picking it up. The smooth plastic case felt like the handshake of an old friend.

  The phone must have slipped out of Pascal’s pocket unnoticed. Or maybe he had noticed, but had been in too much of a hurry to care.

  Though the screen had a jagged crack, it still lit up when she pressed the power button. She checked the call log. The most recent incoming call had started nine minutes ago and had lasted forty-two seconds.

  The name of the caller: Alan Kirby.

  She stared at the screen, trying to understand.

  “Alan?” she breathed. “Alan called him? What in the name of fuck is going on?”

  Her hand moved. She punched in Alan’s number. His cell phone rang five times and cycled to voicemail.

  She tried Des’s home number, a landline—he didn’t own a cell. The house phone rang and rang. No answer.

  And then she was running.

  Running north through billowing sheets of rain, running for her Jeep, not knowing what had happened, but praying she wasn’t too late.

  CHAPTER 33

   

  Sometime under the boardwalk things had stopped making sense. It was like one of those sci-fi movies where some poor schmuck falls into a wormhole or whatever and ends up in a parallel universe where the Nazis won World War II and the Kardashians have talent. Bonnie tried to puzzle it out as she slammed the Jeep into reverse and skidded out from behind the McMansion.

  Alan had called Pascal, or at least someone using Alan’s phone had called. Okay, start there. She already knew Pascal had one ally, the decoy in the tower. What if he had others? What if he was part of a team, a hit squad, and while she was messing around with him at the pavilion, his buddies were tracking down the Kirbys?

  She had pegged him as a lone wolf. But the guy in the tower proved otherwise, didn’t he? Alan and his friends had sent a team to rescue Mariana Ortiz. Why couldn’t the Colombians have sent a team to exact revenge?

  Say Pascal was part of a team. The other team members found the Kirbys. They called Pascal, using Alan’s phone, to tell him the job was done. Or they made Alan call for some reason.

  Either way, Pascal had to clear out. He couldn’t wait around to finish her off. His partner amscrayed too. All of them heading for the Millstone County airstrip, maybe—she’d heard Pascal reserving the pickup on the phone. He hadn’t specified the number of passengers. He could have been arranging transportation for his whole team.

  It had to be something like that. None of it rang true to her, but she could only assume her intuition was leading her astray. She’d proceeded on the false assumption that she was up against one man, when in fact she was up against three or four or God only knew how many. She never could have won. She could only let the Kirbys get killed.

  And Des too. Her best friend. Her only friend. He must be dead with the others.

  Rage seized her, and she made a silent promise to track down Pascal, no matter what it took. Track him to Chile, to that place in the mountains—what the hell was the name of it? San Alfonso. She’d seen pictures of his villa. She would recognize it again. She’d break in at night and shoot the bastard dead.

  But it wouldn’t bring back Des. Or the Kirbys, formerly the Walkers. They were gone for good.

  She pulled to a stop in front Des’s house. The lights were on, and the front door hung ajar. Not a good sign.

  No neighbors had stirred. Whatever had gone down inside the house had been quiet, anyway. She could hope the killers took their victims in their sleep. No waking up, no final pleas or screams. Just a silenced round to each victim’s head. Like her parents, Tom and Rebecca, slain in the motel room while she listened from the tub.

  Pascal’s Lexus wasn’t in sight. Her Jeep was the only vehicle parked on the street. She was almost certain the bad guys were gone. But she was through making assumptions.

  She grabbed the Ruger carbine from the rear of the Jeep and approached the front door, making no sound, ready to let loose if anyone opened fire on her.

  The door was swinging in the wind and rain. She pushed it inward and stepped across the threshold.

  Nothing seemed out of place in the living room. She headed down the hall. The guest room was probably where it had ended for the Kirbys. Their bodies—all three of them—would be inside, sprawled across the bed, or possibly huddled in the bathroom if they had retreated in there to make a stand.

  Panic room, she thought bitterly. What a stupid, stupid idea. Like you could stop Pascal or any man like him with a goddamn bathroom door.

  She took a breath and entered the bedroom, tensing for the sight of blood and death.

  The room was empty.

  Bedroom, bathroom—empty.

  The bed had been hastily unmade, and she could see the imprint of little A.J.’s head on the pillow. Otherwise, there was no sign that anyone had even been there.

  “Weird,” she whispered, not getting it. She was still in that parallel universe, and things still weren’t making sense.

  She began to nurse a small seedling of hope. Maybe Pascal’s friends had taken the family alive. She couldn’t imagine why. And she didn’t know where that would leave Des. Even if the Colombians wanted all three Kirbys for some unfathomable reason, they wouldn’t want him.

  His bedroom was the next one down the hall. She knew if he was dead in that room, she would lose it, at least a little. She had trouble swallowing and realized the old expression was actually true—you really did get a lump in your throat.

  Pushing past her fear, she entered the room. Des’s bed was mussed, but no worse than the Kirbys’. His chair was nowhere in sight, and neither was he.

  She retraced her steps along the hallway and checked out the kitchen—nothing—and the den—ditto. When she opened the door to the garage, she was almost unsurprised to see that Des’s van was gone.

  They’d cleared out. The Kirby clan and Des. He had to be driving; nobody else could handle the van with its customized controls.

  Had the bad guys forced them to leave in Des’s van? No way. Even in a parallel universe that one wouldn’t fly.

  She was shaking her head in confusion as she returned to the living room. When she glanced into the dining area, she saw a large, heavy sheet of paper torn from one of Des’s sketchpads lying on the table.

  She took the paper in her hands. The sheets contained a few brisk lines of florid handwriting and a signature at the bottom.

  Bonnie read the note, then read it again. And she understood.

  She understood a whole lot of things.

  CHAPTER 34

   

  Pascal drove through the rain, his high beams cutting the darkness. In the twin cones of light, each falling raindrop was a slender, glittering icicle.

  Ahead, a figure solidified out of the night. A female form taking shelter under a maple tree at the corner of First and Garfield.

  Mrs. Alan Kirby, he thought, his lips parting in the flicker of a smile.

  He eased to a stop and
unlocked the passenger door, then waited, letting her come to him.

  Head lowered against the rain, she left the protection of the tree and ran to the car. With her hand on the door, did she hesitate? Perhaps for a heartbeat. No longer.

  Then she was inside, settling into the passenger seat, pulling the door firmly shut.

  She turned to him. Her face was lit in the glow of the ceiling lamp. Her hair was blond now, and she was thinner than he remembered. But nothing essential had changed.

  “Guinevere,” he said tenderly, stroking her cheek.

  She fell against him, hugging his chest and weeping. In his ear he felt the warmth of her breath in time with the kiss of a single whispered word:

  “Lancelot.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Bonnie was still staring at the sheet of paper in her hand when the hum of an engine rose in the driveway. Reflexively she tightened her grip on the Glock before identifying it as the sound of Des’s van.

  She left the house and met the van as it pulled into the garage. Des was at the wheel. Alan rode shotgun, his eyes staring, his face empty. The kid was in the backseat, sound asleep.

  She yanked open Alan’s door and said, “You didn’t find her.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  He shook his head. “No. But we found this.”

  He handed over his cell phone, wet with rain.

  “We figure he made her drop it,” he added lifelessly. “He probably assumed we could track it. Which we could, with GPS. We used Desmond’s netbook.”

  “Where was it?”

  “Two blocks east. On the sidewalk.”

  Alan climbed out of his seat, then reached into the back and lifted his son in his arms. He carried the boy into the house. Bonnie followed. Behind them came the whir of the ramp that would allow Des to get out on the driver’s side.

  “He hasn’t had her long,” Bonnie said as they went down the hall to the guest room. “She called him less than twenty minutes ago.”

  “That’s long enough,” Alan breathed. He placed the boy in bed and tucked him under the covers. “She must have placed the call from outside the house so we wouldn’t hear. That’s why she took the phone.”

  “Right. And it had to be your phone, because it had my number in its memory. She knew he had my cell. She was just waiting for the chance to get hold of the phone and make contact.” Bonnie hesitated. “In the note she said there’d been too many deaths.”