a tangle of brush.
The water revived Steve somewhat. “Cover it up,” he ordered, pleased to be feeling slightly more alert.
“Wait a second.” Jack reached into one of the grocery bags in the bow. “There’s something I want to get.”
Steve lifted the gun. If Jack had stowed a weapon on board…
Click, and a sudden yellow glare. A flashlight.
“Bought it in Florida City.” Jack smiled. “We can use it to find our way back.”
“Terrific. Now cover the goddamn boat.”
Jack camouflaged the runabout with leaves and grasses while Steve watched over him, his finger resting lightly on the trigger. He wished he had the courage to shoot this man, put a bullet in his evil, calculating brain.
But he couldn’t. He needed Jack. That was the hell of it. He’d made his bargain with the devil, and now their fates were inseparably joined.
Inseparably joined. A picture swam into his mind, a television image of conjoined twins, some random memory of a newscast he’d once seen. The infants’ faces blurred, changed, became his own face and Jack’s. Inseparably joined…
The image dissolved into a hallucinatory stream. He felt his eyes closing. It occurred to him that he was drifting toward sleep.
No, impossible. He was standing up. Nobody could sleep standing up. A person had to be in bed to sleep. Sleep and bed, two concepts inseparably joined.
He was… floating…
Jack tossed a last pile of brush on the runabout and clapped his hands. “Done.”
The harsh smack of sound shocked Steve awake. He shook his head to clear his thoughts.
What the hell had happened there? Christ, he’d nearly nodded off. It looked like wading to shore hadn’t done much to revive him, after all. He needed coffee, whole pots of it.
Jack was the one who ought to be fighting drowsiness. He’d taken the sleeping pills.
That last thought-Jack took the sleeping pills-almost suggested an idea to him, some ugly trickery on Jack’s part; but the idea was complicated, hard to grasp, and his mental processes seemed to be growing dangerously torpid.
Jack beamed the flash down the beach. “The trail starts there. We can come around the back way, reenter the house through the patio.”
It was the same trail the three of them had taken early this morning. Steve thought of Ana romping with Jack, fetching sticks for him. His gut tightened, and a spurt of anger squeezed some of the fatigue out of his system.
“All right,” he said brusquely. “Let’s move.”
They trudged along the beach. Jack, in the lead, swept the flashlight’s pale circle across stretches of coral sand, pebbly and pitted and stark, a moonscape in miniature.
“You ever going to put down that gun, Stevie?”
“Not till I feel safe.”
“When will that be?”
Steve frowned, once more blinking sleep out of his eyes.
“I don’t know,” he mumbled. The statement came out slightly slurred. “I don’t know if… if I’ll ever feel safe again.”
33
Free.
A final jerk of her wrists snapped the worn wire, liberating her hands.
Kirstie stretched her arms, teeth gritted against the pops of pain in her joints, the aching soreness in every muscle.
“God,” she whispered. “Oh, my God.”
She leaned forward, intending to attack the antenna wire that secured her feet to the chair, then experienced a swoon of vertigo. Head lowered, she shut her eyes and fought off ripples of faintness.
Her fingers were numb and clumsy. She fumbled with the knot Jack had tied to bind her ankles. It wouldn’t yield. Wild frustration rose in her and nearly tore a scream out of her throat.
Finally she found the knot’s weakness. It unraveled in her hands. The loop of antenna wire slipped to the floor.
Awkwardly she rose upright. Her knees fluttered. She took a rickety step, then another.
Steve and Jack had left via the front door. She hadn’t heard them come back in. They must still be still out front.
She’d have to leave via the back exit. Hidden in the woods, she could plan her next move.
She glanced around the radio room. The lone window was sealed shut by humidity; Steve had tried to pry it open shortly after their arrival, only to find that it resisted his best efforts.
The patio, then.
Anastasia lay before her, a mottled heap. Kirstie knew she had no time to waste; the men might return at any second, and her opportunity would be lost.
Still, she couldn’t deny herself a last moment with her dog. Kneeling, she stroked the borzoi’s fur, once so smooth and silken, now stiff, bristly, matted with drying blood.
Her hand came away red and tacky. A rather small hand, yet not long ago Anastasia had very nearly fit inside it. Kirstie remembered staying up with Ana on her first night in a new home, patiently waiting out the darkness, holding the tiny, shivering pup close enough to hear the comforting beat of her mistress’s heart.
“You’re a good dog, honey,” she heard herself whisper now, though she knew the time was long since past when such words could matter. “A good, good dog.”
Tears misted her vision. She was reminded, absurdly, of how peeling onions always made her cry.
Enough of this. Time to get moving. Come on, now.
She stood, wiped her eyes, and left the room without looking at Ana again.
Her sandals clicked on the kitchen floor, the faint noise loud as an alarm bell in her ears. Leaning against a counter, she removed the sandals, then held them in one hand and proceeded barefoot.
Not only her hearing but all her senses seemed heightened, unnaturally acute. She perceived every detail of the room: the hum-rattle-hum of the refrigerator, the smudges of grease on the stove’s burners, the dinner dishes still soaking in the sink, where she had left them four hours and a lifetime ago.
In the middle of the kitchen she stopped, arrested by a thought.
Dinner dishes. Silverware.
Knives.
There were knives in the drawer near the sink. Some were steak knives, long-handled, with serrated blades. Good weapons.
She was by no means sure she could actually… stab someone…
But it would be good to have the option.
She stepped up to the drawer, pulled it open.
Blood shouted at her. A small pool of blood, crusted over, nearly dry, and centered in it, Jack’s Swiss Army knife, the wicked spear blade still extended, striped in red-brown streaks.
In her mind she saw it all again: the casual swipe of Jack’s hand, the blade slitting Ana’s throat like a letter opener, the dog’s racking convulsions.
Shock propelled her backward. The drawer came with her, sliding out of its frame. It crashed on the floor. Knives, forks, spoons scattered across the tiles in a ringing spray of metal.
A loud noise. To her ears, deafening. It would have been easily heard outside the house.
If the men were on the front porch, as she assumed, then they must be coming for her now.
