by Blake Crouch
“He’ll kill you,” she said. “Even in prison, he can get to you.”
“Are you talking about Mr. Estrada?”
She nodded.
“You don’t see it yet, do you?”
“See what?”
“It was Javier who put this whole thing together, Letty. There was never any painting. No drug in your mouthwash spray. I told him about this last experience I wanted to have before I went away, and for a very significant price, he brought you to me.”
Letty felt a surge of hot bile lurch out of her stomach—anger and fear.
She fought it back down.
“Johnny…”
“What? You going to beg me not to do this? Try to test the limits of my conscience? Good luck with that.”
“It won’t be how you think. It’s not some great rush.”
“See, you don’t understand me. I have no expectations of feeling one way or another. I just want to have done it. What’s a richly lived life that has never caused death? You ever killed someone, Letty?”
“Yes.”
“How was it?”
“Self-defense.”
“Kill or be killed?”
She nodded.
“Well, how was it?”
“I think about it every day.”
“Exactly. Because you had a true experience. And that’s all I want. This is how it’ll work. I’m going to wait right here for five minutes. Give you a head start. See, I don’t just want to kill you, Letty. I want to hunt you.”
“You’re as evil as they say.”
“This is not about good and evil. I’ve lived dangerously all of my life. I want to continue to do so on this final night, when it counts the most. My security team is on their way down the dock as we speak. They’re going to anchor my speedboat a quarter mile out. My yacht is staying in the marina in Key West for the night. It’ll just be you and me on the island. I know you can’t swim, Letty. That was one of the requirements that, unfortunately for you, landed you this job. So there are no ways off this little island.”
“I have a son,” she said.
“Haven’t we covered that already?”
“Johnny, please.” Letty stood up slowly and moved forward with her arms outstretched, hands open. “Has it occurred to you that you aren’t thinking clearly? That you have all this emotion swarming around inside of you and—”
Fitch pointed the revolver at her face and thumbed back the hammer.
“That’s close enough.” It wasn’t the first or the second or even the third time she’d had a firearm pointed at her. But she’d never got used to that gaping black hole. Couldn’t take her eyes off it. If Fitch chose to pull the trigger in this second, it was the last thing she’d ever see.
“You destroyed thousands of lives,” she said, “but you aren’t a murderer, Johnny.”
“You’re right. Not yet. Now you have four minutes.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Letty raced down the spiral staircase.
Drunk.
Terrified.
Still trying to wrap her head around what had just happened.
Only one conclusion. Javier had played her.
Sold her out.
She passed the second floor and ran down the remaining steps into the living room. Straight to the cordless phone on a bookshelf constructed from pieces of driftwood. She grabbed the handset off its base, punched Talk.
Fitch was already on the other end of the line. “I’m afraid that’s not going to work, Letty. Three minutes, thirty seconds. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight…”
I need a weapon.
She dropped the phone and turned the corner into the kitchen. She started yanking drawers open.
As she pulled open the third, she saw it lying on a butcher-block cutting board next to a pile of onion and garlic skin. A chef’s knife with a stainless handle and an eight-inch blade.
For ten seconds, she stood in the remnants of Angie’s cooking, trying to process her next move. So much fear coursing through her, she felt paralyzed.
There were dishes everywhere.
A tart cooling on the granite beside the oven.
Water dripping from the faucet.
Every second slipping by like the prick of a needle.
Fitch expected her to run. To chase her across the island. So should she stay in the house? Hide in a bedroom on the second floor and let him wander around outside in vain?
Decide. You can’t just keep standing here.
Grabbing the knife, she bolted across the room into the foyer. Jerked open the front door. Slammed it shut after her. She shot down the steps, wondering which way to go. The shore seemed like a bad idea. She headed into the interior of the island, staying off the path, fighting through the undergrowth. Gnarled branches clawed at her arms. Ripped tears in her Chanel dress. Her bare feet crunched leaves and tracked through patches of dirt. She’d barely made it fifty yards when a blinding pain seared the sole of her right foot.
Letty went down, clutching it.
In the moonlight that filtered through the leaves, she studied the damage. The underside of her foot had been starred with a dozen sandspurs. She began pulling them out one at a time. Wincing. Wondering how many minutes she had left. Less than two? Less than one?
The sound of the front door creaking open on its salt-rusted hinges answered her question.
She looked up.
All she could see was the top half of Fitch standing on the deck. When he reached back to shut the door, she noticed that he wore a strange-looking hat. He moved out of view, the steps groaning as he descended.
Letty dug the last few spurs out of her foot.
She could hear Fitch approaching.
Footsteps and heavy breathing.
She didn’t move.
Figured Fitch had to be walking up the path. It didn’t sound like he was thrashing through undergrowth.
Letty inched back farther into the shadow of the scrub oak. Tucked her chin into her knees and tried to make herself as small as possible.
Fitch passed within twenty feet.
She crouched there listening until his footfalls could no longer be heard.
Letty crawled out from under the oak and came to her feet.
Total silence.
The stars shining.
The moon still climbing in the sky.
She knew what the shore on the dock side of the island was like from that sunset stroll. A narrow strip of beach lined with vegetation. No place to hide.
She moved slowly through the scrub oak, taking care that her shoulders didn’t brush against the branches. She crested the midpoint. The island sloped gently down to the opposite shore. This side struck her as more wild. There was no beach. Just mangroves all the way down to the water.
She squeezed her way through the slim trunks. The mangroves grew more densely clustered as she neared the shore. Letty crawled on hands and knees now. The foliage above her head so thick, it blotted out the sky. Only splotches of moonlight scattered across the ground.
She went on until the trees were too close to go any farther.
They boxed her in like prison bars.
Lying on the ground, her body twisted between the mangroves, she finally breathed deep and slow.
The temperature hovered in the upper sixties, but she was shivering, covered in sweat. Her dress had been shredded as she climbed through the mangroves. It hung from her shoulders in tatters.
She felt good about this spot. Considering that it was dark, she was all but invisible. And Fitch would have a hell of a time reaching her. She couldn’t imagine the old man, who had at least ten inches on her, fitting through this grove of tightly packed trees. How big had he said this island was? Fourteen acre
s? Best-case scenario, she could hole up here for the night. Fitch had to report to prison tomorrow. If she could survive until then…
Letty glanced at her watch. The tips of the hour and minute hands glowed in the dark.
Seven thirty.
She should’ve been meeting Javier at the east end of the island with fifteen million dollars in a plastic tube. This should’ve been the most exhilarating, life-changing score of her life. Instead, she was being hunted down like a dog. Because she’d put her faith in a psychopath. Because, again, her judgment had failed.
Something niggled at her.
A seemingly small fact she was overlooking.
A rodent scurried through some leaves nearby.
A mosquito whined in her ear.
What was it?
No flashlight.
That was it.
Fitch hadn’t brought a flashlight outside with him. When she’d glimpsed him walking down the steps, she’d expected to see a light wink on. But it never did. And then he’d just strolled up that path in the dark like—
Her breath caught in her chest.
Like he could see.
She sat up.
That wasn’t a strange-looking hat he’d been wearing. Those were night-vision goggles.
Thirty, forty yards away—impossible to know for sure—Letty heard branches rustling.
It was the sound of something big coming her way through the underbrush.
Get out of here now.
Letty started pushing her way through the labyrinth of mangroves. By the time she broke free onto higher ground, her little black dress dangled from her by a thread.
An oak branch beside her face snapped off.
The gunshot followed a microsecond later.
A boom like a clap of thunder.
And she was running.
Arms pumping.
Gasping.
Driven by pure instinct.
She ducked to miss an overhanging branch, but another one caught her across the forehead.
Blood poured down into her face.
She didn’t stop.
There were lights in the distance.
The house.
She veered toward it. At least inside, Fitch wouldn’t have the sight advantage he held right now.
Letty came out of the scrub oak and onto the dirt path that cut down the middle of the island. For three seconds, she paused. Hadn’t had this much physical exertion in months. Her lungs screamed. She could hear Fitch closing in.
Letty opened up into a full sprint as she approached the house.
She reached the stairs, grabbed the railing.
Three steps up, she stopped. Maybe it was a premonition. Maybe it was just a feeling. Something whispered in her ear. You go in that house, you won’t ever come out alive.
She backed down the steps and stared into the darkness under the stairs. Where is the last place in the world he would expect someone to hide who can’t swim? She thought.
Her eyes fell upon the snorkel set hanging from a nail driven into the concrete.
She grabbed the snorkel and mask and took off running toward the east end of the island—the only side of it she hadn’t seen.
She shot back into the scrub oak. Glancing over her shoulder, she spotted Fitch coming into the illumination of the floodlights mounted to the deck. He pulled off the goggles to pass through the light. Held them in one hand, that giant revolver in the other. A big, sloppy grin spreading across his face like a kid playing cowboys and Indians.
Another fifty yards through the oaks, and then Letty was standing on the shore in her strapless bra and panties. Her Chanel had been ripped off completely.
The water looked oil-black.
She could hear Fitch coming.
Wondered how much time she had.
Wanted to do anything but wade out into the sea.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Letty pulled on the mask and stepped into the water. It was cool, just south of seventy-five degrees, and shallow. She took invisible steps, no idea if the next would plunge her in over her head or shred her feet on coral.
By the time she’d gone thirty feet out from the shore, the water came to her knees. At fifty feet, it reached her waist. She stopped, couldn’t force herself to take another step. Hated the feel of it all around her, enclosing her. Reminding her in so many ways of death.
Fitch stumbled out of the oaks and onto the beach. He stood profiled in the moonlight. He was looking all around as Letty jammed the snorkel into her mouth and slowly lowered herself into the sea. Struggling not to make a splash or a ripple.
The water rose above her chest.
Then her neck.
Up the sides of her face.
Daddy, please.
She could breathe, but still she felt as though she were drowning. No sound underwater but her own hyperventilation as she sucked air down the tube at a frantic pace.
Her knees touched the sandy bottom of the ocean floor.
The claustrophobia was unbearable.
Even with her eyes wide open, she couldn’t see a thing.
Lifting her right arm, she fingered the top of the snorkel. It stuck two inches out of the water. She pushed with her knees, rose up slowly until the top half of the mask peeked above the surface.
Fitch still stood on the shore, staring in her direction.
She dipped back under.
It was unbearable.
Nine years old.
The cool and the dark of it.
By herself at night in the singlewide trailer she shares with her father. He comes home from the bars. Drunk and angry and alone. He loves to take hot baths when he’s drunk, but Letty has beaten him to it. He finds her soaking. With their water heater on its last leg, it will take two hours to heat enough for another bath. In a rage, he shatters the fluorescent bulb over the sink and locks her inside. Tells her through the door that if she gets out of that bath before he says she can, he’ll drown her in it.
It’s wintertime. Four hours later the water is cold and the air temperature in the bathroom even colder. Letty sits with her knees drawn into her chest, shivering uncontrollably. She’s crying, calling for her father to let her out. Pleading with him for forgiveness.
Toward dawn, he kicks the door in. From the smell of him, he’s somehow drunker than before.
She says, “Daddy, please.”
It happens so fast. She doesn’t even see him move. One minute she’s shivering and staring up at him. The next, he’s holding her head under the frigid bathwater, telling her what a bad girl she is to make him so angry. He’s beaten her before. He’s come after her with a broken beer bottle. With his belt. With his fists. With other things. But she has never believed she was going to die.
Because there was no warning, she didn’t have a chance to take in a full breath of air. Already, bright spots are blooming behind her eyes, and she’s struggling, kicking. Wasting precious oxygen. But his boot heel presses down hard against her back. Pinning her to the fiberglass. He holds her head down with two hands. Even drunk, he has the strength of an ox. The build of a diesel mechanic. She is no match. Every second passing so slowly. Panic setting in. Thinking, He’s going to kill me. He’s really going to kill me this time.
The fear and the horror meet in a single, desperate need. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. She can’t help it. Can’t resist the pure, burning desire. She takes a desperate breath just as her father jerks her head out of the water by her hair. “Think you learned a lesson?” he growls.
She nods, apologizing as she bawls hysterically out of the only emotion her father has ever caused in her—fear.
There are other nights like this. A handful of them are worse. She will never learn to swim. Will alway
s fear the cold, dark water. Will never understand, despite a thousand sleepless nights, why her own father hated her.
And, like that nine-year-old girl, a part of her still believes it was her fault. Some flaw in her emotional chemistry. And nothing she can do, no amount of logic, no quantity of love from anyone, will ever make her stop believing it.
Letty came up suddenly out of the ocean.
If Fitch saw her and shot her, so be it. But she couldn’t stand another second underwater.
He was gone.
She spit out the snorkel’s mouthpiece. Took several careful steps toward the shore, until the water level had dropped to her thighs. She stared down the north and south beaches. It was too dark to see much of anything.
Backing away again, she settled down into the water until only her head was above the surface.
Waited.
Five minutes slipped by.
Twenty.
It was beyond quiet.
She watched the moon on its arcing path over the island.
So thirsty. Her head pounded from the booze.
After a long time, she heard footsteps.
Letty backed into deeper water and lowered herself once more until only her eyes were exposed.
Fitch trudged up the north beach and arrived at the end of the island. He stopped and waited, listening.
Letty forced herself back under.
When she came up a minute later, Fitch had started down the south side of the island.
Fitch has to report to prison tomorrow. If I can survive until then…
She returned to that comforting thought she’d had in the mangroves. The idea that if she survived until tomorrow, until Fitch was gone, she would be in the clear.
Is this another assumption that’s going to get me killed?
Fitch’s security detail had played a part in this. Exactly how much they knew was uncertain, but they were culpable. Fitch’s life would be over tomorrow, but theirs would carry on. If the old man didn’t close the deal, could she really expect this force of ex-military contractors to leave this loose thread dangling?
