by Kate Aeon
Michael had been quite enthusiastic about those plans while Alan was lying in the backseat of his own car.
His own damned car.
Michael had been waiting for him, hidden down on the floorboard, in the shadows, in the back. Had tampered with the interior light so that it didn’t come on when Alan put the key in the door lock or when he opened the door. And that was all it had taken.
Alan sat in the driver’s seat, and before he could even fasten his seat belt, Michael wrapped a garrote around his throat, jammed the tongue-clip headgear in place, dragged Alan into the backseat, and shoved him to the floorboard. Wired the headgear with two alligator clips and the blinding speed of long practice.
Alan guessed the whole thing had taken less than sixty seconds. The bastard had been faster than a rodeo cowboy in a calf-roping contest, and just as grimly efficient.
And the instant that Alan was secured and helpless, Michael had called Phoebe.
And had driven Alan to a marina, all the while talking to her, telling her what to do, where to go. Alan had listened to Michael’s side of the conversation, trying to form pictures of what was happening to Phoebe. It had been terrifying. And then Michael had cut the tape at Alan’s ankles, frog-marched him through the first gray light of dawn onto a small, elegant yacht anchored in the churning water of the marina, and retaped his ankles. Hooked him back up to the shock box. And there they’d stayed, while Phoebe drove closer and closer. Alan would have done anything to stop Michael, but even if he could somehow have called for help, he had no idea where to tell help to come. Fort Lauderdale was the Venice of America — there were any number of big marinas in the area and countless small ones.
So he prayed. And he tried to reach her with his thoughts, because he didn’t have anything else.
Don’t come, he thought at her. Don’t come here. Save yourself.
But he heard Michael tell Phoebe, “Now get out of the car. You’re going to take a walk on the dock,” and any hope he had that she would flee died.
She’d arrived. All Michael had to do was collect her.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“You’re going to walk onto the farthest pier to your right,” Michael told Phoebe. She looked into the gloom — the water rough, the rain still craning down in hard bursts, the wind gusting.
And she had an idea, though she didn’t know if it was a good idea or a stupid one. Sitting in the parking lot, she held the cell phone in front of her. It had about a third of its battery life left.
But she was pretty sure Michael couldn’t know that.
From the brief picture she’d seen on the monitor, the camera was behind her, aimed out the windshield. Michael would be able to see the back of her head and the traffic in front of her. A limited picture. If she was careful, it would be limited enough to work for her.
So Phoebe turned the ignition off when Michael told her to, but she left the key in the ignition, dangling from the column and pulled just far enough out that the key warning would not go off as she opened the door. When she opened it, wind gusted into the car cabin. She repositioned her body to block the steering column from view and kept her right hand out of sight.
And tapped the key back into the ignition.
The key alarm chimed.
With her finger hooked through the key ring, Phoebe quickly pulled it most of the way back out
“What was that noise?” Michael shouted. Phoebe was having trouble hearing him because of all the wind. She hoped he was having the same problem.
Phoebe tapped the key back in, got the chime, and yanked it out again. “Cell phone battery... dying!” she yelled over the wind. The car’s chime couldn’t sound much like the cell phone’s actual low-battery signal. But she hoped the wind would mask that.
“Cell phone... dying?”
“Yes... breaking up... no sig— ” she shouted, easing her bad leg out of the car.
“FUCK!” he bellowed in her ear, and she turned off the phone.
She didn’t know where Michael was. She got out of the car, which was pointed toward the marina. If she stayed behind it, she would be out of sight of the camera.
She looked left and right for any sort of help.
Saw no one.
Phoebe needed to call 911.
But she couldn’t just stand there. Michael was coming. She could feel it, even if she couldn’t yet see him.
She had only limited places to hide. She couldn’t run, or even walk very fast. She couldn’t crouch down, she couldn’t crawl in the damned dress — the skirt fabric wouldn’t protect her knee the way denim did.
So Michael was going to find her. But maybe she could get the police to come to the rescue first.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Michael ripped the headgear and the tongue clamp off of Alan so hard Alan thought the tip of his tongue might have gone with it. Michael cut the tape around his ankles, dragged Alan to his feet by wrapping an arm around his throat and yanking, and jammed the gun back into his ribs.
“If you puke on me, I’ll make sure you drown in it,” Michael told him, and hauled Alan, stumbling and gasping and partially suffocating, down a narrow corridor and into a small room.
Alan wished he hadn’t seen what was in the room. A big butcher-block table occupied the center; manacles punctuated the four corners of the table. The walls were all covered with the sort of perforated fiberboard that men with garage workrooms use to keep their tools organized — and Michael had used the board, painted glossy white, for the same thing. He had categorized his tools, hung them up in sections, outlined every tool in neat red paint, hand-lettered the name of each tool beneath its space. A place for everything and everything in its place.
But only some of his tools had come from a hardware store. Most of the rest looked like Michael Schaeffer had mail-ordered toys from hell.
Bad things were going to happen in this room, Alan thought, and then Michael shoved a reeking, wet rag up to Alan’s nose and mouth and let go of his neck so that Alan instinctively gasped.
“Breathe deep, asshole,” the bastard said.
And Alan had enough time to think... chloroform.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Phoebe got away from the car, working her way down a snaggletoothed row of parked vehicles and empty spaces until she reached an expensive — and large — van. She leaned against it on the street side.
The wind buffeted her, gusts of rain soaked her. And the cell phone didn’t seem to be doing too well in this area. Or maybe in the bad weather. She could see the signal-strength line on the left that was supposed to go from the bottom of the screen to the top, but that at the moment only showed one little block.
It’s what I have, she told herself. It’ll have to do.
She dialed 911. A voice answered, and she shouted over the wind, “My name is Phoebe Rain! I’m at the Bahia Mar marina! My ex-husband, Michael Schaeffer, is trying to kill me. I don’t have much time — you have to send help! And get Detective Brig Hafferty! He knows what’s going on. Hurry!”
She couldn’t hear what the woman was telling her, so she simply shouted the same information over again, hoping that more of it would get through.
“You have to stay on the line,” she heard at one point.
Phoebe started to repeat the information again, and suddenly Michael was there, smiling at her.
“I’ll take that now,” he said, and held out his free hand. She gave Michael the cell phone, wondering where Alan was and if he was still alive. Michael pitched the cell phone into the churning water behind him.
Michael pointed down the dock.
“Walk beside me, sweetheart. We have a wedding to attend. And then our second honeymoon.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Alan opened his eyes. The bastard was gone.
Chloroform. He’d breathed in some of it, but he’d managed to block his airway with the back of his tongue before he took in too much. And Michael had been in a hurry — hadn’t held the rag in place
long enough to force him to take more breaths. Had failed to completely knock Alan out.
Somewhere outside the yacht, something had gone just a little wrong in Michael’s meticulous plan, and Michael had been in a hurry to correct it.
He’d made one tiny mistake.
Had created one feeble chance for Alan to do something.
Alan took stock of his situation. He lay with his hands numb and bound, his good hand injured, the yacht heaving beneath him, in a chamber of horrors that if he didn’t do something fast was going to be the last place he ever saw. And Michael was either on his way to get Phoebe or he already had her. Alan couldn’t just lie there and die. He had to fight.
He had this one chance.
Alan looked around the walls. Michael had a collection of knives on one set of pegboards, and Alan rolled over until he was beneath them, then managed to get to his knees. His feet wouldn’t hold him. He tried to stand, and fell. But on his knees he couldn’t reach the knives.
He slammed the pegboard in frustration, and it bounced.
Right. No one made expensive luxury yachts with peg-board walls. Michael had added the pegboard, nailed to furring strips of some sort. If Alan hit the board rhythmically, between the strips, he might be able to get one of the knives to bounce off. He might also be able to get one to drop point-down onto his head and punch a hole in his skull. But he was going to have to chance that.
Alan thumped the wall. One AND two AND three AND four, and the blades were all bouncing, but nothing was shaking loose.
Harder. ONE and TWO and THREE and...
A couple of blades bounced free at the same time. One hit the floor and stuck point down in the teak. The other sliced a line across Alan’s left forearm that burned like white-hot hell, but he bit back his scream. If Michael was on the ship, Alan didn’t dare alert him that the chloroform had worn off.
He grabbed the knife with the smaller handle with his mouth, jammed the point of it into one of the holes in the pegboard to keep it steady, and began sawing at the tape around his wrists.
He couldn’t feel his hands. Managed to slice himself a couple of times on both hands, a fact he only discovered once the ropes fell away and blood ran back into his wrists and hands and fingers and started pouring out the holes he’d made in himself.
His hands screamed and burned as life came back to them. He pushed the left one against the pegboard wall, forcing his fingers to straighten until he was actually able to make them move by will and intent. The right one he could flex a little, but with the damage he’d done to himself the day before, it was going to be mostly useless. He fought to get his left hand working, and considered his desperate situation and cursed every second that fled. He staggered to the door of the torture chamber, trying to find his sea legs. Opened it.
Looked left and right. Right looked like it led deeper into the ship. Not the way Alan wanted to go. Left, he thought, would take him back up the stairs and out onto the aft deck.
And from there, maybe he could get some idea of what he could do to save Phoebe.
He could, he thought, take a goddamned weapon with him for starters. The torture chamber was full of them.
He went back, fighting just to maintain his balance, and grabbed a knife that looked sharp enough to use for surgery.
And then, knife handle clamped between his teeth as if he were a pirate, he grabbed walls and doorways with his one working hand and made his way through the corridor. Still no sign of Michael, nor any sound of him. Good. Maybe Michael was having a hard time finding Phoebe. Maybe she’d gotten away. Maybe... just maybe... she’d shot the monster and this whole nightmare was over.
But Alan kept the knife, because he wasn’t a big believer in miracles.
He reached the stairs at the end of the narrow passageway and went up them, still staggering, and poked his head carefully out of the hatch at the end, and looked around. He was in the middle of a sea of masts and riggings, of furled sails and polished teak and brass fittings beneath dark sides, beneath bursts of lashing rain. Hundreds of ships were moored around him, all of them cross-tied against the storm, all of them rocking and bucking against the battering chop of the bay.
Alan had never liked boats, never cared for the ocean, never dreamed of living a sailor’s life. He didn’t find anything in this place that resonated with him except for a deep desire to set Michael’s fucking yacht on fire and watch it burn to the waterline and sink.
Simple wish, but not one he’d be able to carry out.
No sign of Michael. No sign of Phoebe. What was Alan supposed to do? In all directions he could see only yachts and sailboats. He couldn’t wander randomly, hoping to find them and stop them. He didn’t want to leave this damnable boat and have them get back to it while he was somewhere else. If he picked a direction and it was the wrong one, Michael could be gone forever, taking Phoebe with him, before Alan could correct the error.
Nor could he take Michael in a straight fight. Michael had a gun. But even if he didn’t choose to use it, Alan was hurt, and Michael was not only unhurt, but he was bigger and in extraordinarily good shape. Michael had been putting a lot of effort into his physical therapy since waking up from his coma.
Alan could not let himself sink into despair, though despair was certainly the most tempting direction at the moment.
Then inspiration hit. Hit hard. Alan grinned a little, found the gangplank, and made his way onto the dock.
Michael had cross-tied the yacht between two finger piers to keep it from slamming around during the storm.
Alan ran to the first mooring and cast off the line. Then to the aft one on the same side. The boat and gangplank pulled away from the dock, suddenly loose in the rough water.
And still no sign of Phoebe or Michael.
God. What if Michael had lost his temper and just killed her as soon as he found her?
No. Alan couldn’t let himself think that; Michael had been planning his sick reunion fantasy for nearly two years, and he had been obsessive in every detail so far. Nothing Michael had done made Alan think he would deviate an inch from the plan.
Unless someone changed it for him.
Which was where Alan came in.
Alan ran along the dock, around to the other finger pier, and cast the fore and aft moorings there loose as well.
The rough chop of the waves in the marina dragged Michael’s yacht forward, out of its slip, into the open waterway.
“Rule change,” Alan whispered, watching it go.
And then he realized that Michael would still be coming with Phoebe and that, thwarted in his first plan of taking her into his torture chamber to kill her, he was going to do something unpredictable.
Alan had to be in the right place to save Phoebe when he did.
But what was the right place? And how did Alan get there?
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“Where’s your gun, Michael? I can’t believe you’d do this without a gun.”
“I told you that you’d come back to me,” Michael said, and his smile stung her. Memories — hellish memories — washed over Phoebe, and for an instant she felt like she was drowning. That vision she’d had of going into the sea had felt literal, but this was certainly a bitter foretaste of what was to come for her. “I have your friend in a very special stateroom on my yacht, and each thing that you do that I don’t like is going to cost him first. Your phone call to the police is the very first thing I’ll punish him for. But everything can always get worse, Phoebe. Always. So you’re going to walk with me of your own free will. My beautiful little whore, how I have missed you. And only seeing you when you were sleeping and helpless left something to be desired.” He laughed a little. “Awake and helpless is so much better.”
Phoebe was going to go with him. That was the hell of it. He was going to tell her which way to walk, and she was going to walk beside him, or in front of him, or behind him, because he was right. She would not — could not — leave Alan alone with whatever Michael had pl
anned for him while any chance of saving him remained.
She’d called the police. Maybe her 911 call had been enough. Maybe help was on the way. Maybe it would arrive before Michael could get her where he wanted her and do with her whatever it was that he had planned.
Maybe.
But her vision — of the darkness of the sea swallowing her, of the end of her life coming to claim her — suggested otherwise. Suggested that everything she had done had been futile. Every preparation she had ever made against Michael had been of the wrong sort, every step she had taken had been worthless.
She wanted to live. She wanted to be with Alan. God, she had never wanted anything more in her life than a simple future in which she could wake to see someone who cared for her smiling down at her, brushing her hair back from her face. Not someone. Alan. She knew she would want Alan when she was a hundred — that she would be happy with him. That she had been meant to be with him.
And that Fate had played a cruel trick on her. And on him. And that they were never going to have each other. They were going to share the day of their death, perhaps, but nothing more.
I love him, she swore at the uncaring, unseeing force that had made them so right for each other and given them to each other as a joke at the end of one long hell and the beginning of a short one. I love him and I want him, and I would do anything to have him.
Anything.
But if only one of us can survive this, let it be him.
“You’re awfully quiet,” Michael said, watching her. “I thought you’d be all full of threats and fury. I thought you would at least be screaming for help.”
“I called the police,” she said. “They’re on the way.”
