Ana cocked her head and panted.
The heat was starting to get to her, or maybe it was tension. Either way she was sweating too much; she felt sticky, grimy. A shower would cool her off.
She went down the loggia, into the bathroom, and found Jack’s clothes neatly folded on the rim of the tub. Lifting them in her arms, she carried them into the master bedroom. As she laid them on the bed, something small and green slipped out of the back pocket of the jeans and fluttered to the floor.
She picked it up. A folded bill-no, many bills. Five twenties, four fifties, four hundreds. Seven hundred and twenty dollars in all. A fair amount of cash to be toting around. It struck her as vaguely suspicious.
Oh, come on. Plenty of people carried more money than this, even when they weren’t on vacation.
Still, she couldn’t help wondering what else Jack had in his pockets. Something incriminating? Proof that her distrust of him was justified? Vindication of her warnings to Steve?
Doubtful. But not entirely impossible.
The only way to find out, of course, was to look and see.
She recoiled from the thought. Search his clothes like a thief? She wasn’t some crooked chambermaid. She was Jack’s hostess. He was her guest.
But an uninvited guest. An unwelcome guest.
Even so, Miss Manners definitely would not approve.
Well… fuck her.
Harassed by guilt, yet feeling a certain sneaking pleasure despite herself, Kirstie unfolded Jack’s blue jeans, then emptied the pockets one at a time.
In the other back pocket, a wallet. She examined its contents. California driver’s license. An additional $213 in bills of various denominations. Three major credit cards, all in Jack’s name.
Nothing dramatic there. She replaced the wallet and inspected his side pockets. Car and house keys. Antacid tablets in a blister pack. Folded tissues. Loose change.
That was all.
Kirstie released a breath. Disappointment competed with relief. His belongings were thoroughly dull. Not much different from what Steve would carry in his own pockets. No cocaine, no amphetamines, no phony ID or stolen credit cards, no straight razor crusted with blood She blinked.
And no knife.
But Jack had carried a knife. She’d seen it. He’d removed it from his pants pocket, stripped a blackberry-bush cane of its thorns, stems, and leaves to make a stick for Ana to fetch.
She checked all the pants pockets again, then searched Jack’s shirt.
Nothing.
He must have taken it-taken it with him-on the boat.
She hadn’t seen the knife when Jack left. And Steve’s bathing suit, the one Jack borrowed, had no pockets.
He’d hidden it somehow. Hidden it on his person.
And now he was out there with Steve, the two of them alone together.
She heard a sudden rapid clacking noise and realized it was her teeth, chattering idiotically.
“Jesus, why didn’t you take the gun? Why were you so stubborn?”
She was addressing her husband, who was not here, who might never be here again.
The room was hot. Of course it was. This was Florida. Everything was hot. But the heat seemed suddenly more intense, stifling, overwhelming-she pressed her hand to her forehead, felt a rush of lightheadedness, a curious weakness in her knees.
Your head. Lower your head.
She leaned over the bed, her head down, until the faintness passed and her heart was not racing in her chest. With effort she cleared her mind of panic and forced herself to think, to be calm and reasonable.
What exactly was she afraid of? Did she honestly think Jack would
… kill Steve?
Crazy.
Even if he had taken the knife, so what? Skin-divers routinely carried knives, which came in handy for digging up artifacts found on the sea bottom, cutting free of entangling boat lines or seaweed, even killing a moray eel if one should bite down on a groping hand.
There were many possible reasons why Jack had thought it best to take the knife with him. The intention to commit some irrational act of violence was the least likely explanation.
But if all that was true, why couldn’t she stop shaking?
She feared Jack, that was why. She sensed danger in him.
People made jokes about feminine intuition, but Kirstie had always believed in it. Women were more intuitive than men, better at reading emotions and gauging a person’s inner state. Perhaps biology had equipped members of her sex with some neurological hard wiring that made them more adept at interpreting feelings, relationships, nonverbal communication-the soft, fuzzy parts of life that most men scorned.
There was nothing soft and fuzzy about Jack Dance. Outwardly he was a smiling, affable rogue. But inside…
Inside there was something hard and angry and pitiless, something that hungered for power, reveled in pain.
She had never sensed a similar hardness in her husband. And while ordinarily she would be grateful for that, now it made her afraid.
All right, what to do? She could radio for help. Call the police. But by the time she explained the situation, it might be too late. Besides, she had nothing concrete to report. Her fears could easily be dismissed as the products of a hysterical fantasy, as perhaps they were.
But perhaps not. And if not, then Steve was in danger, might already be under attack, might even be dead, and there was nothing she could do, no way to reach him, no way to help Wait.
The boat Jack said he’d rented. The dinghy.
He’d beached it at the cove.
The cove was at the other end of the island, but Pelican Key was small, the distance short. She could get there in ten minutes-fifteen at the most.
She’d never operated a boat, any kind of boat, but she’d seen Steve do so when he steered the motorboat to shore. It looked simple enough.
And for her own protection she would do what Steve had refused to do. She would take the gun.
The thought banished the last wisps of fog clouding her brain. She ran around to the other side of the bed, knelt, raised the bed skirt, groped eagerly for the pistol.
It wasn’t there.
But it had to be. Steve kept it under the bed, where he could grab it in an emergency, as he’d done last night.
She searched the floor desperately for over a minute before concluding that the gun really was gone.
“Steve changed his mind,” she whispered. “He took it, after all. Thank God.”
But how could he have done that? When she’d spoken with him in the hall, he’d dismissed the idea. And he hadn’t gone back into the bedroom afterward.
Jack had been in here, though. He had changed into his borrowed bathing suit while she and Steve waited in the foyer.
Had he looked beneath the bed for some reason, found the gun, taken it? No, that made no sense. Besides, he couldn’t have concealed the Beretta in the swimsuit. Too bulky.
So where was the goddamn thing?
Well, maybe Steve hadn’t replaced the Beretta in its usual spot after the false alarm last night. Maybe he’d hidden it in a drawer or something. Or packed it this morning for the trip home.
Wherever it was, she would have to go without it. She couldn’t waste precious minutes on an exhaustive search.
Too much time had passed as it was. Nearly a half hour since the boat’s departure. Anything could have happened by now. Anything.
