by Brian Harper
The transmission was fading in and out as the road twisted. Cain stopped the van and keyed the talk button on his ProCom.
“Blair. Get it under control.”
“Control” That single word was packed tight with grief and anger and contemptuous disbelief. “Screw you, Cain. I don’t give a shit about control. Only thing I care about is Robinson.”
“Blair-“
“I’m doing her. Swear to God, I’m taking her out!”
“Blair” Cain said. “Blair”
No response.
“Get down, get down!”
Ally hunkered in the pit. Trish slid after her, spirals of lightheadedness swimming like moonbeams in her brain. She tried to chase them away as she huddled with the girl, listening tensely as the boat droned nearer.
When it was close, she risked a peek over the rim.
The FireStar surged toward the shallows, then veered east and flashed into profile, paralleling the shoreline.
Pilot at the helm. The seat beside him-empty Or was there a slumped figure, one arm trailing in the water, the head lolling
She remembered how the man in the port seat had stopped firing abruptly. She’d thought he was reloading.
No. She’d hit him. Perhaps even killed him.
“Robinson!”
The pilot. His scream thin and ragged. Did he see her No, impossible. He was shouting in the direction of the island, that was all.
“I’m coming for you! You should’ve let me drown!”
The sentry at the dock.
Flash-card image in her mind: a reddened face, a glare of distilled hatred.
Her heart worked harder. A new rush of dizziness washed over her. She tightened her grip on the pistol.
“Big mistake, Robinson!” He was still screaming, the cries etched raw by his damaged throat. “Big mistake!”
The boat plowed out of sight, circling east.
“Which one is that” Ally asked in a hush.
Trish licked her lips, so terribly dry. “The guy who loaned me the belt.”
“Oh.” Ally swallowed. “Sounds like he wants it back.”
In the idling van Cain repeated Blair’s name, knowing it was useless.
Tyler’s voice, shaken and distant: “He switched off, boss. He’s at the island. Robinson and the girl must’ve jumped ship.”
Cain started driving again, holding the radio in one hand and steering with the other. “You in the picnic area”
“Yeah. I’ll be in position if they come ashore. You send Mrs. Kent to a better place”
“She got a phone call from the governor.”
“That’s real disappointing.”
“Also real temporary. We’ll do her when we’re done backing you up.”
A snort. “I don’t need your help. I can handle the rookie.”
Lilith grabbed her own radio. “Like you handled her when you put her in the lake”
“Hey, fuck you-“
“She should be dead by now, okay You had your chance. Now it’s our turn.”
Cain caught Lilith’s gaze in the glow of the dashboard. He shook his head curtly.
Internal dissension was not what they needed now.
Discipline. Stability. Teamwork.
“Keep it together,” he mouthed to Lilith, too low to be heard over the air.
Lips pursed, she turned away.
“We’re all getting a little hot,” Cain said into his radio. “Need to cool off, take it easy, right”
“Right.” Tyler was agitated, but Cain knew he was a pro. He would swallow the insult.
“We’ll be there soon. Maybe you won’t need us. Maybe Blair will whack Robinson and save all of us the trouble. If not, she’ll have a regular welcoming committee ready to greet her when she makes landfall.”
“Hell, boss”-Tyler tried for humor-“you just want a chance to smoke the Mouseketeer yourself.”
Cain had to smile. “You got that right.”
58
“Where are they going” Ally peered in the direction of the fading engine noise.
“Circling around,” Trish said, the words coining with curious slowness. “I think only the pilot is a threat. The other one looked … hurt.”
“One’s enough. What did he mean, you should’ve let him drown”
“I-uh-I kind of saved his life.”
“Saved his life”
“CPR. Mouth-to-mouth.”
“Are you crazy” Ally bit her lip. “Sorry.”
“I’m sorry too. I didn’t think it would work out … like this.” Trish cleared her throat. “Can you loosen the tourniquet for me”
“So soon”
“I … I can’t feel my leg anymore.”
“Oh, God.”
She fumbled at the knot, finally got it undone.
“Am I bleeding” Trish asked.
Ally gently explored the area around the wound. “Not much. A lot less than before.”
“Good.”
“I didn’t think it would stop this fast.”
“It was venous blood, not arterial. That sort of wound can heal pretty quickly if you …” Trish paused as if losing her concentration, then shook her head. “If you keep the pressure on,” she finished.
Ally frowned. “What’s the matter”
“Little dizzy. Nothing to worry about.”
For the first time Ally heard the flutter in her voice. “You’ve lost a lot of blood, Trish.”
“I’m okay.”
Ally hoped so. Because if Trish passed out now, they were both dead.
No further conversation for a moment. In the new quiet between them. Ally became aware of a larger stillness.
“Hear it” she whispered.
“What”
“Boat motor-it’s gone silent.”
Trish blinked, listening, then slowly nodded. “He’s here.”
The island was small and flat and treeless, overgrown with rushes, knee-high, chest-high, head-high, rippling in random patterns, swaying like the tresses of hula dancers in the chance rhythms of the wind.
Frogs croaked in a dismal chorus. A bird’s titter mocked the night.
On hands and knees, Blair Sharkey crawled.
The leaves of rushes stroked his face like loose sheets of paper. His forearms and calves squished in deep pockets of ooze. Filth encrusted him, a second skin.
He estimated the island’s size at no more than an acre. Maybe two hundred feet at its widest point. He could quarter it inch by inch, yard by yard, in no time at all.
He would find his prey.
Heart pounding.
Vision blurred.
Hands numb.
Trish had felt this way once before-after running two miles uphill at the academy on an unseasonably warm day. Her drill instructor made her lie supine until the faintness passed.
Dehydration and fatigue brought on the symptoms that day. Tonight she could add gunshot trauma and blood loss to the mix.
Lying prone, she’d been all right. But when she crawled into the pit, that lightheaded feeling had started, subtly at first, but growing worse.
She needed to lie down again, or at least put her head between her knees. But she couldn’t, not as long as she was huddled in this hole.
Okay, then. No medals for quitters. She would just have to tough it out. No medals for quitters. Stay strong, stay alert. No medals for quitters.
Her mantra helped a little. Fear helped more. The fear that kept her body supercharged with jolts of adrenaline.
Her enemy was near. She could sense it.
But she didn’t know where.
Blair had already covered much of the island’s eastern perimeter.
If Robinson and the Kent girl had come ashore at the north end, and if Robinson’s injury had limited her movement, then they would be close by.
Insects piped and trilled. The rushes whispered in a breath of breeze, cool and damp. Or perhaps it was Gage’s ghost that moved among the reedy stems.
Blair
had never thought much about such matters. He supposed anything was possible.
Stay with me, bro, he told the ghost. You don’t want to miss what’s coming up.
The low clicking, like distant castanets, was the chatter of Trish’s teeth.
Ally studied her from inches away. Her face was pale. Sweat trickled out of her hair and beaded on her eyebrows, her lips. The gun in her hands wavered like a kite on a gusty day.
In the closeness of the pit, Trish’s trembling transmitted itself to Ally’s own body. Abruptly she recalled her silly fear that Trish wanted her to dig a grave. It didn’t seem silly anymore.
A grave was what it was, a grave for them both. In the morning they would be found here dead-like Marta-dead and buzzing with fat blowflies.
“Hold on, Trish,” Ally whispered, the words so soft she was sure they went unheard. “Please hold on.”
Things were very simple sometimes. She was fifteen. She didn’t want to die.
Blair’s imagined contact with his brother strengthened him. He crawled faster.
He could taste it now. Could almost see Trish Robinson sprawled facedown in the dirt, her brains red and strewn. Could almost see—
Explosive noise, rapid-fire beats, the nearby rushes rustling madly.
What the hell
For a wild moment he was sure he’d been discovered, sure Robinson was shooting at him, peppering the brush with bullets.
Then he understood.
Not bullets. Only a bird, nesting in the rushes, startled by his approach, bursting out of cover into the open air.
He caught a breath, then heard a new sound.
Gunshots.
Real gunshots this time.
And close.
Sudden commotion due east, and without thinking Trish swung sideways, impelled by panic and a desperate need to lash out, and she fired blindly into the night, four shots, five, then nothing, the magazine empty, her ears ringing, and overhead, brushing past the stars-a flutter of wings.
“Did you get him” Ally asked eagerly.
Shake of her head. “Bird.” Her own voice was barely audible over the violent clangor in her skull. “Just a bird.”
In the dark, among the rushes, Blair smiled.
The bird had drawn Robinson’s fire. Purple muzzle flashes had erupted like fireworks thirty yards to the west.
He’d pinpointed her position.
He had her now.
59
Tyler counted a half dozen shots, echoing from the island.
Was it Robinson who’d fired Or Blair Or both
No way to know. But if Blair was dead, Robinson could take Blair’s boat and reach the picnic area in a couple of minutes.
Cain and Lilith still weren’t here. To hell with them.
He didn’t need any damn backup. He could take care of the cop all by himself. Was looking forward to it, in fact.
Pocketing his binoculars, he hurried down the trail into a labyrinth of trees.
The Glock was out of ammo.
Trish removed the empty mag, then fumbled a spare out of her dump pouch and tried to heel it in. Ordinarily a simple operation, but not now. Weakness and confusion cheated her of dexterity.
She gave the Glock to Ally. “Load it.” Amazing how much effort was required even to speak a few words. “Just … just pop in the clip.”
Ally did so. Trish accepted the Glock with a nod.
Dimly she knew the girl wanted reassurance, but she had none to offer.
She’d messed up. Panicked. Now the killer knew how to find her. He could approach from any direction, fire at will. Even now he might be closing in.
She tried to focus her eyes, couldn’t. There were two and three of everything, and the edges of her vision were graying, and her ears still rang with the gun’s reports.
Nearly blind, nearly deaf, nearly crippled, nearly unconscious …
Nearly dead.
Blair circled southwest, putting distance between himself and the spot where the bird had burst into flight. On elbows and knees he approached his quarry from behind.
There.
Twenty feet away. Glitter of blonde hair visible through the rushes.
Robinson. Beside her, the girl.
They were hunkered down in a shallow pit, an improvised hiding place, their backs turned.
He could nail them both, as easy as killing two baby birds in a nest.
The man knew where they were.
That thought kept beating in Ally’s brain as she scanned the dark, looking everywhere at once.
He knew where they were. They had lost the element of surprise. It was an ambush no longer.
Ahead, the shore, flat and empty.
On both sides and behind-rushy thickets, five feet high, dense and opaque.
Anything could be hidden in that jungle of grasslike stalks. Anything.
“Keep your head down,” Trish whispered.
“I just-“
“Down.”
Reluctantly Ally shrunk deeper into the hole.
Now she could see nothing but four sandy walls and, at her side, Trish-clutching the gun close to her chest, hunched forward as she searched the dark with bleary, blinking eyes.
Ally’s grip on the arrowhead was painfully tight, the obsidian’s sharp edges chewing into her palm.
She had thought it was a good-luck charm. She’d been wrong.
Her luck-and Trish’s-finally had run out.
The girl had dropped out of sight, but Blair’s prime target was still within view.
Balanced on his elbows amid the tall, concealing stalks, he steadied the Glock in both hands.
Touched the pressure switch.
The laser beam printed an amber bull’s-eye on the back of Trish Robinson’s head.
Memory flash.
Cain in the living room, targeting Trish’s face. Pinpoint of light stamped on her forehead between her deep blue eyes.
Amber light.
Ally saw the same light now, a red-orange luster highlighting the blonde tangle at the nape of Trish’s neck.
“Look out!”
Her cry and her lunge were simultaneous.
She pulled Trish downward, wrenching her head sideways.
Whip crack. Sand erupting in a gritty spume.
Behind them. He was right behind them.
No time to think, no time for calculation.
Trish thrust both hands over her head, elbows bending as she pointed the Glock upside down, the barrel grazing the rim of the pit, and she fired.
Recoil slammed into her wrists, forearms, shoulders, as she pumped the trigger again and again and again. She felt the multiple impacts vibrating through her teeth and the bones of her skull.
Her shots were blind. She ought to conserve ammunition. Ought to play it safe. But she couldn’t stop her finger from flexing, couldn’t stop the gun from spitting out round after round, couldn’t stop even though she was screaming, or was it Ally who screamed, or both of them together
The sudden silence when the slide locked back on an empty chamber was shocking somehow, like the unreal stillness at the eye of a storm.
Shaking, she lowered the gun, its last round expended.
Past the chiming in her ears she heard Ally sobbing.
Nothing else.
She leaned forward, head hanging, and let blood swim back into her brain. She had no idea how long she held that position, blinking at retinal flashes and hearing the ring of bells.
When her vision cleared and it seemed she would not pass out after all, she eased herself half upright and risked a look.
The man lay in the rushes twenty feet away. She saw his hands, ungloved, pale and limp, and his gun lying nearby, and she smelled the copper-penny odor of blood.
He was dead. No doubt of it.
She had killed a man. Maybe two men. Two lives taken. Two heartbeats stopped.
Sudden tremors hurried through her. She heard a low whimpering sound, the complaint of some wounded animal, but she w
as the one making the noise, and she couldn’t seem to stop.
On her shoulder, the light pressure of a touch. Ally’s hand.
“You had to,” Ally whispered. “You didn’t have any choice.”
Trish knew that. But the brittle logic of the argument made no headway against the reality of that ruined face … those bloody hollows where eyes and nose and mouth had been … the permanent erasure of a human being.
Slowly she laced her fingers through Ally’s.
“He wasn’t much older than you.” Her own voice surprised her-a stranger’s voice, throaty and aged “Maybe eighteen.”
“He would have killed us both.”
“Yes.”
“So … so that makes it okay. Doesn’t it Doesn’t it”
Trish gave no reply.
60
Cain heard the shots die away as he swung out of the van.
A distant fusillade. From the island. Had to be.
Turning in a full circle, he scanned the unlit parking lot, empty of vehicles save for the Chevy van and the battered Porsche. A plastic bag skated the asphalt, flitting from stripe to stripe like a game piece advancing on a giant board.
Tyler was nowhere in view. Tired of waiting, he must have taken up his position near the phones.
Of course, it was possible no ambush would be necessary. The last barrage of shots might have finished the job.
Cain unclipped his ProCom and activated channel one.
“Blair You nail ‘em”
No response. He tried channel three, the original frequency.
“Blair Come in, Blair.”
The radio startled Trish when it came alive with Cain’s voice. Apparently the unit was water-resistant. It had survived immersion in the lake.
“Don’t answer,” Ally said, fear in her eyes.
Shaking off shock and fatigue, Trish unclipped the radio. “Got to.” She cleared her throat. “I have an idea.”
“You read me, Blair”
Movement at Cain’s side. Lilith appeared, a dark angel materializing out of the night.
“Blair” he inquired for the last time, already having given up hope.
