She didn’t listen. Another step, and now she was facing him from an arm’s length away. Beads of golden fire, the reflected glow of the chandelier bulbs, glittered on the lenses of his glasses, masking his eyes.
“I don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself involved in,” she said, “but you’re not a murderer.”
He raised the gun, the muzzle pointed at her chest.
“And even if you are,” she added, “you won’t kill me.”
She brushed past him, into the kitchen, and then she was walking swiftly toward the door to the radio room, refusing to look back.
Steve’s shout rose after her. “Where are you going?”
“To contact the police.”
There. It was said. Let him shoot her now, if he wanted to.
Nothing happened.
She stepped into the radio room, out of the gun’s range, and then abruptly she lost the comforting perspective of distance and snapped back inside herself.
Her composure shattered. Violent tremors radiated through her body. Her shoulders popped and jerked.
It took all her remaining strength to turn on the overhead light, to slide the chair away from the table, to sit, to find the radio’s power switch and flip it up.
Then the microphone was in her hand, and she was spinning the channel-selector dial, searching for a distress frequency, wishing she could stop her teeth from chattering so badly.
29
Steve felt as if someone had reached inside him and scooped out all his guts, leaving him eviscerated, hollow.
He stood in the doorway, staring across the length of the kitchen, and thought of horror movies, the dead roused to a shambling semblance of life. Those meandering zombies, glassy-eyed and stiff-limbed-he was one of them now, a walking corpse.
Jack moved to his side and followed his gaze.
“I can’t shoot her,” Steve said. “You know that.”
“I know.”
“So it’s over.” He wasn’t sure whether to be frightened or relieved. He seemed past the point of feeling anything at all.
“No, it isn’t.”
“She’s talking to the police right now.”
“Don’t count on it.”
Steve turned to him. “Why not?”
“Because I think of everything, Stevie.” Jack smiled. “Remember that.” He went through the doorway. “Come on. Let’s collect your wife. She’s got a date with Mr. Sandman.”
Steve took his arm roughly, animated by a brief spurt of living energy. “But not Mister Twister.”
Jack shook himself free. Smiled again. A cold, reptilian smile. “Of course not.”
He headed through the kitchen, sauntering with the lazy suppleness of a man in complete, unquestioned control.
Steve let a moment pass, then-reluctantly but inevitably-followed.
The radio was an old Kenwood model with separate transmitter and receiver components. Chester Pice had shown Kirstie how to use it two weeks ago, when she and Steve had arrived on Pelican Key.
In an emergency, Pice had said, all she had to do was dial either the UHF frequency 243.0 or the VHF frequency 121.5, then broadcast a request for help. Easy enough.
Except it wasn’t working, dammit. It wasn’t working.
She sat hunched over the transmitter, frantically twisting the channel-selector dial through a series of full rotations.
No frequency numbers appeared on the LED display. She couldn’t tune in any channels. The thing was broken. Worthless.
She spun the dial once more with a savage jerk of her wrist.
Still nothing.
Desperately she fought to restrain her fear, to suppress it as she’d done earlier, but this time she couldn’t overpower the crazed, wailing terror rising in her, shaking her as if with palsy, chopping her thoughts into witless fragments, reducing her nearly to screams and tears.
This was too much, too damn much. The radio had to work. For it to malfunction now was simply unfair.
“No fair,” she babbled, “no fair at all.”
Dimly she was aware that she was talking-thinking-like a frightened child.
Stop it, stop it right now. Deal with this. And figure it out.
She focused her thoughts, tried to think the problem through.
Were all the components connected? She couldn’t find any loose wires.
How about the antenna feed line? Oh, hell, it looked okay, too.
One of the knobs on the transmitter’s face was labeled POWER amp; WATTAGE. Maybe that was the problem. Not enough power.
She dialed the wattage higher, tried the channel selector again.
No luck.
She was out of options. There was nothing else she knew how to do.
“Come on,” she whispered, furious at the radio for failing her when she needed it. “Damn you”-she banged her fist against the side of the transmitter- “come on!”
Behind her, soft laughter.
She whirled in her seat, and there was Jack, leaning against the wall just inside the doorway, chuckling mirthlessly. And a yard behind him-who else but his buddy, his ally, Steve, stiff and shell-shocked, his face unreadable.
Slowly Kirstie set down the microphone.
“What did you do to it?” she asked Jack, her voice dulled by a sudden crushing onset of despair.
“A little minor sabotage.” His fixed smile made his face a comic mask. “Simple, actually. I lifted off the cover of the transmitter and found the VFO. Variable frequency oscillator, I mean. This one was a Colpitts circuit, wired to the tuning knob. I tore it apart. Just reached in with my fist and ripped out the circuitry. Not the most sophisticated way to attack the problem, but it worked. You can still pick up signals-I didn’t mess with the receiver-but as for transmitting, forget it.”
“I see.”
“Bottom line: you’re cut off from the outside world, Mrs. Gardner.”
“I see,” she said again.
“Where did you learn about radios?” Steve asked.
Jack answered without turning. “In prison. Shop class.”
Kirstie wasn’t listening anymore. She heard only the dull throb of the twin generators outside, the sound pulsing through the thin exterior wall like an echo of her own heartbeat.
Her gaze slid away from Jack, briefly exploring the room.
No back door. A window in the side wall, but it was sealed shut by dampness.
The doorway to the kitchen was the only usable exit, then.
She took a breath, rose from the chair. “Well, it looks like I’ll have to talk to the police in person.”
Jack went on smiling. “Now, how do you plan to do that?”
“I’ll take the motorboat.”
“No chance.”
“I’m going.”
