by Brian Harper
He could see no one at the helm or in the stem. Possibly they were slumped in their seats, leaking blood.
Like Gage.
The island met the lake in a cluster of boulders, velvety with moss. Breathing hard with strain. Ally escorted Trish through the rocks onto dry sand, then set her down behind a clump of crowfoot, speckled with pale yellow flowers half hidden among the ragged leaves.
With dulled relief Trish saw that their path was concealed by rocks and weeds. They had left no visible tracks.
She tried to remember her CPR training. Pressure points. Stop the blood flow. Right.
Weakly she ground her fist against her inner thigh, hoping to constrict the femoral artery.
“Oh, God. Oh, God …”
Still the same words from Ally, accompanied by grimaces and moans as she tore off Trish’s left trouser leg and exposed her calf, a mound of ravaged flesh, lumpy and mangled and black with blood.
“Looks bad.” Ally’s voice quavered up and down the scale. “Does it hurt Jeez, what a stupid question.”
“It hurts,” Trish whispered, pain nearly cheating her of breath.
“You’re all bloody everywhere.” The girl’s fumbling fingers touched the wound. Trish stiffened, swallowing a scream. “I found a hole. No wait-think there’s another one below it. They got you twice, you were shot twice.”
“Only once.” Trish was crying now, unable to stop herself. Tears watered her world like a hard rain. “Bullet went in and out. Forget about that. You’ve got to start digging. Dig a hole in the sand.”
“A hole” Terror bloomed in Ally’s face. “Like … a grave”
Trish managed a weak, abortive chuckle. “Hiding place, that’s all. Foxhole. Right now we’re too exposed.”
“Got to help you first.”
“No time, they’ll be back any second.”
“You’ll bleed to death. I’ll tie off the wound.”
“It’s all right, there’s a pressure point, I’ve got my hand on it.”
“Well, it’s not working. You’re still bleeding. You’re bleeding worse than before.”
“Look, forget me, I’ll be fine-“
“You won’t be fine, you need help-“
“There’s no time.”
“You can’t keep bleeding like this!”
“Leave me alone and start digging, God damn it!”
“I won’t. Just shut up. Shut the fuck up.” Now Ally was crying too, crying soundlessly without sobs. “I won’t let you die.”
All the fight went out of Trish then, and she let her head fall back in defeat.
“We’ll both be dead,” she said in an exhausted whisper, “unless we get under cover.”
Sniffles from Ally. “Then we’ll be dead. I don’t give a shit. I’m doing this.” She tore her dress, stripping off a three-inch ribbon of fabric at the hem. “So shut up. I’m doing it.” She wrapped Trish’s left knee. “Just shut the fuck up, all right All right”
Trish nodded slowly. “All right.” She almost smiled. “You’ve got a mouth on you, kiddo, you know that”
“Yeah, well.” Ally wiped her eyes with the back of her arm. “Guess that’s what I get for hanging out with cops.”
55
A padlocked gate protected the picnic-area parking lot. Tyler approached it at sixty miles an hour.
High beams gleamed on the rusted gate poles. A wall of wire mesh flew at him.
Impact.
The gate blew open, and the Porsche burst through. Heavy links of chain, snapping free, fractured the windshield. The coupe’s front end sagged, mangled in the collision.
“Sorry, baby,” Tyler muttered.
Killing the cop named Wald had troubled him not at all. Taking out Robinson and the girl would be a kick.
But abusing a sixty-thousand-dollar set of wheels-now, that was just unconscionable, it really was.
The Porsche skidded to a halt amid yards of white-striped asphalt. Tyler killed the lights and motor, and then he was out of the car, running hard, bloodlust roaring.
He reached the head of a trail that twisted down a shelved hillside to the lake shore. Leaning against a tree, he scoped out the lake, its mirror-smooth expanse black and glossy like wet pitch, visible over the treetops and the roof of the snack shop.
There. The jet boat-moving slowly, slowly, a wounded thing.
Astern, keeping a wary distance, was a second boat, the one Blair must have hotwired.
Tyler licked his lips. Were the ladies hurt Dead
He checked his watch. 9:42.
By now Cain should have whacked Mrs. Kent. If the Sharkey boys could finish off their end of the job, the night’s festivities would be successfully concluded.
It had better work out that way. And soon.
He’d waited long enough to be a millionaire as it was.
Ally knotted the tourniquet.
More pain, a lightning strike through her leg, and Trish groaned.
“Too tight” Ally asked.
“No, it’s okay. How’s the bleeding”
“Not so bad now.”
“Elevate the wound. That should help.”
Ally eased the injured leg onto a flat rock, then wiped her hands on the tattered hem of her dress, leaving red stripes.
Trish kept her hand on the pressure point near her groin. “You’ll have to loosen the tourniquet in five or ten minutes. If it stays on too long …” She didn’t finish.
“What’ll happen” Ally asked fearfully.
“I could lose the leg. Below the knee.”
“It could be amputated”
“Don’t worry about that.” Trish tried to sound calm. “We’ll just have to keep an eye on it, that’s all.”
“Maybe … maybe I did the wrong thing, huh I mean, what do I know about this”
“You did fine. Ally. You probably saved my life. I was being stupid.”
“Brave.”
“There may not be much difference.” Trish felt her mouth slip into a smile. “Now will you dig the hole”
“Hey, digging’s my thing, remember”
Trish lay on her back, listening to Ally burrow in the sand, and thought of the damage to her leg-the lean and shapely leg she’d admired in the mirror, the leg that had known a man’s caress-shattered now, butchered meat.
Guns. She hated the evil things.
Amputation really was possible. From her first-aid training she was aware that a tourniquet should rarely be used at all, and almost never to stanch bleeding below the elbow or knee. The limb could be lost.
Still, she hadn’t lied to Ally. The blood loss had to be stopped. She couldn’t afford to go into shock. Amputation was a chance she had to take.
She knew that. With cool objectivity she could calculate the risks. But there was another part of her, not cool, not objective, only a shrill scream in the back of her mind, and it was insisting that she didn’t want to lose the leg, didn’t want to lose the leg, please, if anybody was listening up there, she didn’t want to lose the leg….
With effort she tuned out that voice and tried to assess the damage.
She didn’t think any bones were broken, and the blood hadn’t been spurting, so apparently there was no arterial hemorrhage. The Black Talon must have passed cleanly through the fleshy part of the calf, the gastrocnemius muscle, the short trajectory allowing no time for the trademark barbs to retract fully. Probably it had entered low, exited high …
A shudder snaked through her as she realized how close the bullet had come to shattering her knee. An inch or two higher, and there would have been a compound fracture and a ruptured artery. The combination of crippling pain and rapid blood loss surely would have been fatal.
As it was, if the leg could be saved-and it had to be saved, please, God, she didn’t want to lose the leg-then probably she could recover something close to full mobility. A limp Maybe. Lack of sensation, diminished strength Probably.
Her career as a police officer might have ended tonight. Well
, the job was turning out to be sort of stressful anyway.
She heard herself laughing, a soft manic sound.
“Trish” Ally interrupted her excavation of the beach. “You … you okay”
“Hanging in there, partner.”
Eyes closed, she let the laughter segue to fresh tears.
Blair tracked the Sea Rayder as it continued slowing.
Ten miles an hour.
Five …
Finally it puttered to a stop. The boat lay on the placid water, as small and lightweight as a toy in a child’s bath.
Warily he steered around the mini-jet, checking it out from all angles.
Empty.
Impossible. They couldn’t have gotten away.
But they had.
Beside him Gage moaned. Blair looked at his brother, and pity lanced him.
The kid was rolling his head from side to side in a steady rhythm. Soft grunts escaped his lips, barely audible even with the FireStar throttled back to a low idle.
Blair knew what Gage was doing. It had been a childish habit of his brother’s at the age of four or five.
At night he would sing softly in the lower bunk, rolling his head relentlessly in time with nonsense songs chanted under his breath, until slumber quieted him.
Blair, two years older, had called him a baby for doing it. But Gage had been a baby then, hadn’t he
And he still was. Blair Sharkey’s baby brother-singing himself to his last sleep.
56
It took Cain longer than he expected to locate the van in the woods. He hadn’t realized the clearing was so far from the road, and he kept stopping to see if he had blundered off the trail.
Finally he saw the familiar outline of the GMC Safari, its dark green finish melding with forest shadows. “There it is.”
“Really got you rattled, hasn’t she”
That was Lilith. Cain turned to her. “Rattled”
“Never seen you like this.”
“You think I’m scared of her” He laced the question with incredulity. “The Girl Scout The Mouseketeer”
Lilith simply studied him, eyes narrowed, and abruptly he saw himself from her perspective-dripping sweat, panting raggedly, fists clenched.
“I’m not scared,” Cain said.
But he wondered.
Still digging. Ally watched Trish warily.
When her laughter stopped, her breathing became more regular. Frighteningly regular, a prelude to sleep. If she slipped into unconsciousness, she might never wake.
“You found the body,” Ally said, pawing sand, “didn’t you”
Trish blinked, groggy. “What”
“Marta’s body. You’re the one who found it.”
“How …” She swallowed. “How could you possibly guess that”
“You said the killer left her in the weeds. It sounded like you’d seen her there.”
“You’re pretty perceptive, you know.”
Ally smiled. “Growing up in a dysfunctional family kind of keeps you on your toes.”
She shoveled out another heap of sand, then climbed in, squatting, and began making space for two.
The sand was dark and wet. Handling it was like kneading clay in pottery class. She sank her fingers in deep and scooped out great handfuls of ooze and flung them away.
Trish had fallen quiet once more.
“So how’d you find her” Ally asked, disregarding courtesy.
A low groan as Trish shifted her weight. “After she disappeared, I wasn’t supposed to go off by myself anywhere. But I did. I went to the farmhouse I told you about.”
Ally paused in her work. “He killed her there”
“On the porch. Keep digging.”
“Right. Sorry.” She resumed scooping out sand. “But you found her in the weeds.”
“He dumped her out back where she wouldn’t be discovered too soon.”
“Were you looking for her”
“No, I only wanted to be alone. She’d been missing for three days, and I was worried, scared, and the farm was a quiet place where I could think. I went wandering through the field … and then I heard this buzzing, very loud. Blowflies, big bluebottles, a whole cloud of them spinning over a spot where the weeds had been trampled.”
She said nothing for a moment. Ally widened the hole and waited.
“I told myself it was a dead rabbit,” Trish whispered finally. “But maybe … maybe I knew what it really was. Anyway, something made me look closer. The flies-I can still see them, like … glitter, confetti. She was lying face up, jump rope around her neck. It’s a joke, 1 thought; she’s sticking out her tongue at me. But she never moved, and her eyes-there was a roach-it was crawling on her eye …”
“I’m sorry, Trish.”
There was no answer, and this time Ally expected none.
Grimacing at a sudden, salty burn of tears, Blair guided the FireStar alongside the Sea Rayder. Pistol in hand, he climbed over the gunwale into the smaller boat.
Blood streaked the stern’s fiberglass cover.
Robinson had lain prone in the stem as she fired aft. He’d gotten her-but there was no way of telling how badly she was hurt.
Now she and her little friend were gone. Must have dived overboard after rounding the island. It was doubtful they could swim to the far shore. Presumably they’d taken refuge on the island itself.
He boarded the FireStar, climbed behind the wheel again.
Gage was silent and still, and for a moment Blair thought his brother had drifted off to sleep.
Then he saw that it was much more than that, and much less.
“Gage.” The word uninflected, a mere sound, not a name. “Hey, Gage, man.”
There was no response, just as Blair had known there would be none.
He sat down heavily on the helm seat. Touched the luster of blood on his brother’s neck.
The stain, though wet, was a trickle no longer. The flow of blood had stopped.
“Gage …”
Abruptly Blair hated the gloves he wore, the layer of black leather between his fingertips and his brother’s face.
With savage impatience he stripped off the Isotoners, flung them overboard. They floated away like lily pads, shiny in the dark.
With his naked hands he caressed the familiar contours of Gage’s cheek. Peeling back an eyelid, he saw a brown iris, round as a marble.
He and Gage used to flick marbles, laying bets on their skill. Blair always won, because he was the older brother, and older brothers could do anything. Older brothers were like God.
“But I’m not,” he whispered. “If I was God, I’d bring you back. Give you some sense, so you wouldn’t get mixed up in this shit.”
He lowered his head, overcome by self-hatred and the first guilt he had ever known.
“Christ, Gage, why’d you listen to me Why’d you want to be like me”
Then his perspective shifted, guilt receding, as he saw that he was wrong.
It wasn’t his fault. The rookie cop-she’d fired the fatal shot. She was the one responsible. Not him.
“Not me,” Blair whispered, head lifting.
His throat hurt, a memory of the handcuff chain gouging his larynx. She’d ambushed him in the water, outmaneuvered him on shore. She’d trussed him like a broiled chicken and swiped his gear and left him with his ski mask wadded in his mouth. She might have cost him his share of five million dollars if tonight’s operation didn’t come off.
And she’d killed Gage.
Blair raised his head, and the noise he made, the awful noise forcing its way out of his throat, past pain, past weakness, was an animal’s roar.
He slammed the throttle home, spun the wheel, and the FireStar swung south.
Toward the island … and vengeance.
Ally wondered if she should have pressed Trish so hard. Probably not. Still, she did seem more alert now. And—
Something sharp bit her clutching hand, wrist-deep in mire.
A shell Not many m
ollusks in a freshwater lake.
Retrieving the item, she lifted it into the starlight.
“Hey, look what I found.” An inch-long wedge of obsidian, opaque at the center, nearly transparent at the flaked edges. “It’s a Chumash Indian arrowhead, the smallest kind, what they call a small-game point.”
Trish turned her head, focused her stare, and showed a weak but genuine smile. “Pretty cool.”
Ally fingered the slender teardrop-shaped artifact, barely three-eighths of an inch at its widest point, rounded at its base, tapering to a cruel point at the other end. A work of craftsmanship, delicate yet deadly.
“The Chumash used to live around here,” she said. “Then they sort of disappeared. Nobody knows what happened to them.”
She didn’t know her face was shining with excitement until she saw its glow reflected in Trish’s eyes.
“You know something, kiddo” Trish widened her smile. “You’ll be a great anthropologist someday.”
Ally felt herself flush with pleasure. She clutched the arrowhead tight.
“It’s a really rare find,” she whispered. “Maybe our luck’s starting to change.”
From across the lake rose the burr of a boat engine.
57
Tyler lowered the binoculars and exhaled slowly.
The job was done. Had to be.
He had seen the mini-jet adrift, no movement visible on board. Had seen the other boat stop alongside. Had seen the pilot, probably Blair, check out the jet boat and then speed south, in the direction of the Kent estate.
The Sharkeys would hardly be leaving the area if Robinson and the Kent girl were still alive.
Slowly he unclipped his transceiver and talked on channel one. “Blair, Gage-confirm your kills.”
A pause. Then Blair’s voice, half obscured by engine roar.
“The only one killed is Gage, God damn it!”
Cain and Lilith heard the sizzle of radio chatter as the van swung out of the woods onto Skylark Drive.
“She shot him,” Blair went on, his voice chewed ragged by hysteria. “She shot Gage, that rookie bitch.”
