Borrowed Angel

by Heather Graham

  A cloud shifted, and a small amount of moonlight shone down upon them. When they had first left the village, she had thought about braving the water to escape him. He must have read her mind, for as soon as they turned around the first hummock, he had ceased to paddle and had brought his knife against her throat, demanding her hands. Now they were tied before her with thin strips of rawhide, which chafed and tore her skin. She hadn’t a prayer in the world.

  He smiled at her, seeing her face in the moonlight. “You didn’t want to go swimming anyway, not here and not at night. Look over there at that log—only it’s not a log. Put a juicy morsel like you into the water, and that log will come alive faster than you can spit. They’re mean, gators are. Did your boyfriend warn you about that? Even if you made dry land, that gator could come right after you, and fast.”

  She shivered although she didn’t want to. He leaned close to her, and he had that awful look in his eyes again. He might like women—he had said that he liked her—but he liked killing more than anything else, she was certain about that.

  “Eric and I are old friends,” he said. He waited for her to respond. When she didn’t, he kept talking. “Leif and I went to school together, did he tell you that? Man, those Hawks, they just excelled at everything. Everyone knew that they wouldn’t be sitting around in any kind of poverty. When they were kids, all the adults talked about what the Hawks would bring to the council. They were the promise of our people. Kind of makes you a little bit sick, huh? They went off to college; they got to be football stars—and the nation don’t give a damn about what color you are as long as you can carry a pigskin ball over a goal line! Then Eric went off to Vietnam, and he was a hero all over again. It wasn’t that smooth for me. My old man was a no-account trash who had a night’s fun with an Indian girl at a festival and then took off. Mom picked a last name out of the phone book—Jacobs. It has a good ring. It looked good the first time I was arrested. I never could get the right numbers in bingo, and so I just decided to take the pot without them. I wasn’t loved by the tribe like the Hawks, so I went behind bars. Then I started up with Maynard and Fitz. They were in on a house razing deal. We got together real good when they found out just how well I knew the swamp—and just what could be hidden in it.

  “You want to know something that was true? As much as I hated those Hawks, I didn’t want to kill them on the night of the holdup. It was just that Leif Hawk wasn’t going to let it be. And now—now there’s Eric. And this is him and me. And he is going to die tonight.”

  Ashley laughed suddenly because she was so horribly nervous. “I think you might have missed your mark. We had a bit of an argument, remember? He’ll probably stay away all night. And when he finds me gone in the morning, he’ll think that I just left him. It’s what he’s been expecting me to do.”

  She felt a new chill seize her as Jacobs slowly shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. He’ll figure out that something is wrong right away.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I killed the cat, remember?”

  “Oh!” Feeling sick, she lowered her head. She swallowed and tried very hard to control her panic. She had been in rough spots before. Tine Elliott had kidnapped her at gunpoint to get to Tara. He had threatened her life, but she hadn’t become a helpless victim. She had fought back—and help had come.

  But this was different. This was the swamp. This was a darkness worse than anything.

  Yet she didn’t want Eric to try to rescue her. Because Jacobs meant to kill him. And then her.

  “It’s not much longer, Ashley,” Jacobs told her.

  She shook her head. “You’re a fool. You escaped. You should have left the state, you should have sailed to the islands, you should have hidden—”

  “It isn’t easy for a half-breed Indian to blend with the rest of humanity, lady,” he said dryly.

  “Out west—”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m going one way or the other. Florida is tough, if you haven’t noticed. My death certificate has been signed. They’ll get to me sooner or later. I didn’t escape to live.”

  “Then—”

  “I escaped for revenge. And I’m going to get it.”

  She lowered her head again and tried not to cry. There had to be some way out of this. Eric wasn’t a fool, he wouldn’t come alone.

  “Ah, hope springs eternal in the human breast!” Jacobs laughed. “If he comes with a friend, count on it, the friend will die right along with him.”

  She tossed back her hair. “What if he comes with an entire S.W.A.T. team?”

  Jacobs stopped paddling. He leaned forward. “S.W.A.T. teams are loud, even if one could get out here right now. You have to know the swamp, honey. But if he does come with a pack, well then…” His voice trailed off.

  “Then what?”

  He shrugged. “Then I kill you. Just like his wife. Four bullets to the chest. And he may not be dead himself, but life will be over for him. He’ll know then that he’s just hell on women, and that will be that.”

  He was going to kill her anyway, no matter what.

  “We’re almost there,” he told her. “Just up ahead. That nice dry hummock there. See the little shack. For weekend hunters. White boys. They come out here and shoot up beer cans. Big men. They don’t know the first thing about hunting.” He hesitated. “But Eric does. That’s why we’re going to play real safe.”

  The canoe scraped the edge of the bank. In the darkness she could barely make out the tiny cabin and what was beyond it. There was water around them, and there seemed to be a bog of deep black muck and high saw grass to the left.

  There was death in the darkness. Alligators were nearby, and deadly snakes. But Eric had been right when he had told her that there was still no creature as deadly as man.

  “Get up careful—” Jacobs began.

  But Ashley was already standing, causing the canoe to dip and sway. She had never been so scared in her life—and never been more blindly determined. She wasn’t going to help him kill Eric. She’d rather take her chances with the swamp.

  “I said—” Jacobs continued, but it was too late. The canoe capsized, and they both fell into the murky waters in the pitch-black of the night.

  * * *

  Eric suddenly stiffened where he sat in the front of the canoe. He raised his paddle and lifted his hand so Brad would do the same.

  “What is it?” Brad barely mouthed the question.

  “I don’t know. Something,” Eric said. He turned off the flashlight and sat very still.

  They both heard it—a splash. Then, from somewhere not far ahead, a scream. It was high and long and shrill, filled with terror and pain. Ashley.

  Eric’s jaw constricted and his stomach went tight as a drum. He drove his paddle into the water and raced along the water.

  Ashley screamed again.

  This time, her cry was choked to a stop. Eric could hear the sounds of splashing water, of fighting in the long grasses not a hundred yards away.

  He sank his paddle deeply into the mud, bringing the canoe to a halt. He turned to Brad. “Can you face him down? And I’ll come around.”

  Brad hesitated. They’d worked together before, and they’d been a good team. Then, Eric had swaggered calmly out to do the luring. He had helped saved Wendy’s life.

  The waters here were deadly. Eric intended to plunge into the canal, Brad knew it. They could both figure what had happened. Ashley had tried to escape, and now she was struggling for her life.

  “Go on,” Brad said. “I can handle my part.”

  Eric nodded. “Thanks.” Silently he stepped over the edge of the canoe and sank in the water.

  “Hey,” Brad said.

  Eric surfaced, watching him.

  “I was going to tell you to be careful, but you can be meaner than any gator I’ve ever come across when you’ve got the mind to be.”

  Eric smiled. He grasped Brad’s hand for a moment, then plunged back in the water.

  And he disapp
eared into the night.

  * * *

  “You stupid bitch! I should plug you right now, I should do away with you this very second!”

  Ashley had barely dived into the blackness before he’d had his hands on her. His fingers gripped her hair, and he dragged her back to the surface. She came up gasping for air, then screaming for dear life.

  Surrounded by the muck and the saw grasses, she kicked at him with fury and desperation, screaming again.

  And he dragged her down deep in the water. Her lungs began to burn. She felt her head spinning and a blackness more complete than any other falling upon her. She nearly opened her mouth to inhale the water into her searing lungs when he jerked her up at last. This time, she kept quiet. She choked and coughed and didn’t have the breath left to whisper, much less scream.

  He jerked her against him hard, staring into her eyes. “Don’t do it again. I don’t have to kill you, you know. Plenty of people know my face. I die if I kill you, and I die if I don’t. If I get Eric Hawk, I might feel generous. I might let you live. And then—” He paused, and Ashley wondered why.

  Then she saw the snake.

  It was slithering in and out of the grasses to their right. It was large. Desperately, she tried to remember what Eric had told her. Rattlers like hummocks. So did coral snakes. There were only four poisonous snakes down here, and one of them liked water.

  The cottonmouth…

  Neither of them was breathing. They both stared at the creature as it silently streamed through the water toward them. They both watched….

  The snake ignored them. It continued moving. In another second, it disappeared.

  “Nice place, the swamp. You like it here, Ashley?” Jacobs whispered to her at last.

  She started to shiver. She couldn’t help it. She desperately wanted to get out of the water.

  Abruptly, Jacobs set his knife against her throat. “We’re going to move now—” he began, but then stopped. He swung her around in front of him in the waist-high water. Ashley didn’t understand. Then she saw the faint light and heard the dip of a paddle in the water.

  “Playtime!” Jacobs whispered against her neck. “And I’m not quite prepared the way I wanted to be, thanks to you. Come on, now, move!”

  He started dragging her to the shore. They didn’t make it. A voice called out in the darkness.

  “Jacobs!”

  It wasn’t Eric. It was Brad.

  Jacobs swore furiously. “Get the hell out of here. You come any closer, and the girl is dead.”

  “How do I know that the girl isn’t dead already.”

  Jacobs pressed his knife against her flesh. “Say something, sweetheart.”

  “I’m—I’m alive, Brad.” She hesitated just briefly. “But don’t come any closer. All he wants to do is kill us all and—” she broke off, screaming in pain as Jacobs knotted her hair viciously into his fist.

  “You stay where you are because I want Eric Hawk. And I’ll kill her if I don’t see him out here alone in a matter of minutes. You got that.”

  There was silence out on the water. Ashley felt something move against her legs. She swallowed, terrified of the steel against her throat, wretchedly aware of the death that lurked in the water.

  “I mean it!” Jacobs claimed. “You get that half-breed out here now—or she dies!”

  She felt something sure and hard against her leg.

  Suddenly the water beneath her exploded. She screamed as she was torn from Jacobs’s grasp and sent flying farther out into the water. She sank low, then surfaced, thrashing and panicking. All around her, the water was still exploding, splashing wildly.

  Then she realized why. No snake had touched her leg. It had been Eric. He had reached them from beneath the surface of the water and had wrenched her from Jacobs’s grasp before the madman’s knife could sink into her flesh.

  And now he and Jacobs were engaged in deadly combat. She couldn’t even tell who was who in the consuming darkness as the men fell and sank, then rose, gasping.

  Ashley strained to see. Jacobs had Eric in a headlock and was pulling him down again. Eric locked his fingers on Jacobs’s arms, dragging him forward. They sank together again. They rose, apart this time. Eric cast himself against Jacobs. They fell.

  They moved closer and closer to the shore, fists flying. Jacobs caught Eric in the jaw, and he went down, splashing hard, his grunt of pain seeming to echo in the night.

  Ashley screamed.

  She heard the lap of the water and realized that Brad was coming up with the canoe. “Ashley, shut up!” he warned her.

  “Brad, do something! He’s going to kill him—”

  “Ashley, just stay very still.”

  She stared at Brad in horror, then realized that something was slithering by her again. She stood very, very still, and tried not to hear the sickening crunches of the vicious fight taking place just yards away.

  The snake was back. It was circling her and swimming around and around her.

  “Dead still, Ashley. Do you understand me? Blink, if you do.”

  She blinked. She didn’t move. The sounds of the fight faded behind her.

  Eric burst from the surface a split second before Jacobs. It was the advantage he needed. He blinked once and saw Elizabeth, dead, in her pool of blood.

  He slammed his fist into Jacobs’s face with all the strength in his body. He heard bone crack, then Jacobs went down, his eyes closed.

  Jacobs’s jaw was broken, Eric thought impassively, but he wasn’t dead.

  He should go back to Brad and get a gun and blow Jacobs’s head away.

  He clenched his hands into fists at his sides.

  He still believed in the law. He had bested Jacobs bare-handed and should hand this murderer back to the police. He would meet his fate in the electric chair, or rot forever on death row. He wouldn’t escape again.

  Something hot and horrible inside of Eric wanted to kill Jacobs in the worst way. He knew that he had killed in the war. But he had never murdered.

  And he had to believe in the law. His father had taught him that law was the dividing line, and man’s belief in it made him civilized, and separated him from the savage. It had nothing to do with color or creed or race; it was about right and wrong.

  Jacobs was dung, and he might be better off dead. He probably would be dead soon.

  But it wasn’t for Eric to be judge and jury—or play God. He exhaled slowly and turned around. He needed to call Brad over so that they could tie Jacobs up. Once he awakened, he wouldn’t hesitate to try to murder Eric again.

  But when Eric turned, he forgot Jacobs.

  He saw Ashley in the water. She was dead still, and Brad was talking to her very quietly, his Magnum aimed at the water. But he seemed to be having difficulty getting a fix on his target.

  A snake. With antivenom, she could survive a bite. Except that they were deep in the swamp, and it could take a long time to get back to the village.

  “Ashley!”

  He hadn’t meant to speak; her name escaped him.

  Ashley heard her name called out with a horrible anguish, and she realized that it was Eric. He was alive. There was no more motion in the water, just the silent, deadly dance of the snake.

  She felt movement near her. Eric was making his way toward the canoe. Brad was speaking to him very softly. “I can’t get a fix on it.”

  “Give me the gun.”

  “Be still,” Brad whispered.

  “Ashley, dead still!” Eric warned her, just as Brad had done.

  And the water exploded all around her as a shot was fired. She screamed when pieces of snake carcass and snake blood splattered her.

  Then she was pulled up, by strong arms. She looked up and discovered deep green eyes, full of care and anguish and concern, staring into hers.

  One of Eric’s eyes was already sporting a bruise. Blood trailed from his nose and his jaw. She wanted to ask him what had happened to Jacobs, but when she opened her mouth, no sound came. Sh
e wanted to smile, too, because Brad was there, looking down at her with the same concern.

  “Jacobs,” she mouthed.

  “He’s worse than I am,” Eric promised her.

  Then her eyes widened suddenly, because she could see what they could not.

  Jacobs might be worse than Eric, but he wasn’t down. He was coming at them again, his knife poised high.

  She screamed out the warning just in time. Eric ducked as Jacobs rose from the water. Eric turned around in the bottom of the canoe, Jacobs rose from the water. Eric turned around in the bottom of the canoe, ready to fling himself at the assailant.

  But it wasn’t necessary.

  Another shot rang out in the darkness. Jacobs, stretching high with his lethal knife glinting evilly in the moonlight, suddenly opened his eyes and mouth wide. He looked down at the huge hole burning in his chest.

  Then he pitched forward into the water.

  Stunned, Eric, Brad and Ashley turned around.

  Willie Hawk was balanced carefully on his knee in the canoe that now came toward them. He carried a shotgun, and the muzzle was still smoking. Wendy was behind him, rowing.

  Willie nodded to them, then looked impassively down into the water. “Never kill in anger; it’s bad for the heart. You can take a life only to save a life. And that’s good for the heart. Come on, now. It’s time to get back. Eric, you’re going to need a hospital. Marna is at Wendy’s—and Brad’s house. The police will come soon enough.”

  He turned around and smiled at Wendy. “Let’s go home.”

  They returned to the village with Jacobs’s body.

  Wendy insisted Eric had three broken ribs, maybe more, and made him lie down in the hut. She gave Ashley instructions on binding his chest. Eric protested, of course; he was a lousy patient. And there wasn’t a moment for him and Ashley to have even a single moment alone together. Brad explained everything that had happened with Harrison Mosby, and she was sorry to hear that greed had brought about the downfall of so many. Then she was furious to hear that she would have been murdered herself.

  She was also grateful to Eric. He had saved her from the jaws of death not once, but twice.