sun.
Moore hailed him with a shout, barely audible over the engine roar. “Mr. Pice!”
“Miss Tamara Moore! Want a lift?” She nodded. “Well, hop aboard!”
A yard of water separated the dock from the moving boat. Lovejoy hesitated, muttered a quiet scatological protest, and sprang nimbly onto the gunwale. Moore took a breath and followed. She was grateful to land without a sprained ankle.
“Why don’t you talk to him, see what prompts this early-morning excursion?” Lovejoy fumbled his walkie- talkie out of his pocket. “I’ve got a call to make.”
Moore climbed the ladder to the flying bridge. She waited until Pice had maneuvered the Black Caesar clear of the dock, then asked, “You remembered something about Jack Dance, didn’t you?”
He grunted an affirmative. “Woke up an hour ago, and it was clear as glass. Fellow by the name of Steve Gardner mentioned Jack to me. He and his wife are finishing up a two-week stay in the old Larson house.”
“Are they the only people on Pelican Key?”
“Yes. Or at least… I hope they are.” Pice throttled forward, guiding the sportfisher between the buoys that marked the harbor entrance. “I got on my radio at home, tried to raise them. No answer.”
“Why didn’t you call the sheriff’s department?”
“Prefer not to trouble them till I’m sure there’s a good reason. This could be a false alarm. The radio room in the Larson place is nowhere near the bedroom. If the Gardners were asleep-and most folks are, at six a.m.-they wouldn’t hear it. Figured I’d check things out for myself.”
“Alone? That would have been dangerous.”
“Not quite alone.” He pointed to a Winchester Model 70 carbine laid carelessly on the bench behind the helm seat. “Brought a friend.”
“Well, now you’ll have a whole bunch of friends.” The voice belonged to Lovejoy, joining them on the bridge. He turned to Moore. “I radioed the search-team leader, requested a flyover of Pelican Key.”
“They know which island it is?”
“Chopper pilot seems to. He says that he fishes these waters when he’s not flying.”
“A Huey can do more than a hundred miles an hour. It’ll get there before we do.”
“The sooner, the better.”
Pice left the harbor and steered southwest, chased by a strong breeze out of the north that raised a heavy chop on the water. The straits would be rough.
Watching the shoreline blur past, Moore wondered if this was the same route Pice had taken when he delivered the Gardners to Pelican Key two weeks ago.
Had the couple stood on this bridge, where she and Lovejoy were standing now? Had Steve Gardner thought of his earlier visits to the Florida Keys, the carefree times he’d spent with his friend Jack? Jack, whom he’d lied for, under oath. Jack, who’d made his first kill at age eighteen and had gone on killing ever since.
The real question was how well Steve really knew Jack, how many of Jack’s secrets he’d learned or guessed, and what secrets of his own he’d kept hidden from the world-perhaps even from his wife.
His wife…
Moore turned to Pice, leaning over the control console, his face lit by dawn’s ambient glow and the lighted dials and gauges. “Describe Mrs. Gardner to me.”
Pice opened the throttle a little further, and the tach needles climbed. “Attractive woman. Blond. Nice smile, pleasant way about her. Kirstie’s her name.”
“What color are her eyes?”
“Her eyes? Blue, I think. Yes. Blue.”
Moore gripped the handrail tight, blinking against a fine mist of spray. She had no idea what was going on, how Steve and Kirstie Gardner fit into this puzzle now so nearly pieced together. But suddenly she was afraid.
Seven women had died. Eight, counting poor Meredith Turner. There could not be another.
Please, God. There could not.
As the Black Caesar swung east into Tea Table Channel, the red-orange rim of the sun burst through the horizon, setting the sea aflame.
46
Their embrace might have lasted a minute, an hour. They clung to each other, swaying slowly like dancers.
“It’s all right, Steve,” Kirstie murmured in a soothing tone. “Everything is all right.”
His breath was damp on her neck. “Forgive me.”
“I do. I do.”
The words felt like a second marriage vow.
Abruptly his knees weakened; he sagged in her arms. She helped him to the bunk and sat him down like a weary child. He slumped against the wall, eyes half shut.
Under the ragged remnants of his shirt, a faint trickle of fresh blood was visible. Droplets pattered on the bunk, red rain.
She looked him over more carefully. Blood had soaked not only his shirt but his pants, even staining the Nikes tied incongruously to a belt loop. His feet, bare like her own, were raw with lacerations.
He was not a dead man, as she’d thought. But he was close. So close.
She touched his cheek. His eyelids fluttered. He blinked at her, then noticed the incisions in her arm and shoulder, ugly and swollen and ringed with purplish vesicles.
“What… what happened?” he croaked.
“Snake bit me.”
He nodded. His mouth curved into a brief, rueful smile. “Me, too.”
She knew which snake he meant. “Have you been… shot?”
“Stabbed.” The word was a hoarse rasp. “Jack left me for dead. In the swamp.”
The swamp.
In her mind she saw it again: Jack plunging forward, the gun firing harmlessly.
At the time she had attributed her survival to some sort of miracle. And now it appeared she’d been right- only it had been a different order of miracle from what she’d imagined.
It had been Steve. Risking his life to knock Jack off his feet and prevent the fatal shot from reaching its target.
But if Steve had saved her-if he had been willing even to die for her-then why…?
“Why did you try to shoot me?” she whispered.
“Shoot you?” He lifted his head, honest bewilderment in his eyes.
“On the dock.”
“I was never near the dock.”
“Dammit, I saw you.”
“It must have been Jack.”
She almost made some sharp reply, then hesitated. What had she seen, exactly? Steve’s nylon jacket, the glint of his eyeglasses, the gun.
He was wearing neither the jacket nor the glasses now. And the Beretta-Jack had that, didn’t he? He’d had it in the swamp.
“Oh, God,” she whispered. “It was him.” And she had hidden in the black waters as Steve pleaded for her to answer. So much blood and pain could have been saved, so much horror. “If I’d known…”
“Doesn’t matter now. Listen.” Every word, every breath, cost him an obvious effort. “We can still get away.”
“How?”
“Jack’s runabout. I helped him hide it. I was on my way to it when
… when I saw your footprints in the dirt.”
