Sinking deeper. Sunlight fading. The need for air a searing ache in her lungs.
She pummeled Jack, battering his shoulders, delivering weak blows to his head.
No use. His hands still wrapped her neck, a python’s coils, constricting tighter, tighter.
In desperation she raked her ragged nails across his chest, clawing his shirt to tatters.
Buttons popped loose. His vest pocket flapped open. Something compact and shiny spilled out and cartwheeled slowly through the water.
A knife. His Swiss Army knife.
She seized it. Fumbled the spear blade out of its slot.
Instantly the choking pressure on her neck was gone. Jack grabbed her knife hand, held the blade at bay. It glittered between them, silvery in the dimming light.
She struggled to break free of his grip. Impossible. His fingers were iron bars, unyielding.
Slowly he pushed her hand back, driving the knife toward her own throat.
He meant to savage her with the blade, kill her with the same knife that had ripped open Steve’s belly in the swamp.
Steve…
Probably dead by now. Or dying, alone in the dark. Because of this man in the water with her, this predator, this venomous snake.
Fury made her strong.
She stiffened her arm, stopping the blade only inches from her neck, and with a final wrenching effort she forced the knife forward, overpowering Jack as he fought to hold her back, and thrust the needle-sharp point into the soft skin below his jaw.
Blood erupted in a black spume. He released her arm, twisted free of the knife, and she stabbed again, gouging his face-again, slicing through his lips-again, grooving a horizontal slash across his forehead-again and again, her arm swinging wildly, while his hands flailed in a useless attempt at self-defense.
Air bubbled from his mouth, mixing with fluttery ribbons of blood. His eyes were wide and confused, and in them she could read his thoughts, his terrified, plaintive protest: This can’t be happening to me!
She thought once more of Steve, then of poor Ana, then of the seven women Jack had bragged of killing, and the knife hacked yet again, butchering his face, the blade carving savagely as fierce ecstasy swelled in her, an orgiastic exultation that craved blood and pain.
In that moment she understood the dark passions that had moved Jack through his days and nights of death. She knew how he’d felt when he claimed each victim’s life.
And she knew there was a part of him in her, in everyone. A part that must be resisted if it was not to be released.
Agony.
His face torn, a dozen new mouths opening to lick the water with tongues of blood.
He gave up trying to fend off the knife’s attacks. The hungry blade would not be denied.
Spasms shook his body. His legs kicked, arms thrashed; he jerked and twitched and flailed, convulsions hammering him out of shape.
His women had died this way. He’d relished their furious contortions, their final shuddering exit from this life.
But now he was the one dying in a spastic tangle of limbs, he was the one going down alone into the dark; and it was no fun at all.
The rope dragged him lower. Kirstie began to slip away. He made a last attempt to haul her with him to oblivion. His bleeding hands found her leg; his fingers closed over her ankle. She kicked free. And then she was above him, out of reach, and he went on dropping like an anchor, cheated of his prize.
Looking up, he saw her in silhouette against the sunstruck surface of the sea. She seemed to hover there, outlined in an aureole of sun. He thought irrationally of those near-death experiences people reported, the angel beckoning to the liberated spirit at the entrance to a tunnel of light.
But this angel wasn’t beckoning. She retreated from him, cruel in her indifference. The light faded. And he was plunging down in an endless, weightless fall, into a pit of night.
Kirstie watched Jack vanish into the gloom. The last she saw of him was his upturned face, incised with a crosshatched intaglio of scars, his eyes wide and staring, mouth stretched in a voiceless scream.
Then he was gone, lost somewhere within a rising cloud of blood; and with him went her anger and her strength.
A wave of weariness passed over her. Her fingers splayed; the knife fell from her grasp to join its master in the depths.
She had almost no energy left. But enough, perhaps, to reach the surface before her last residues of air seeped away. Enough to live.
Kicking hard, she climbed toward daylight.
50
The search-team leader and the chopper pilot were first to reach the row of shacks on the east end of Pelican Key.
To the south, palm trees writhed and twisted like damned souls in the fire’s hot breath. Flames had consumed the Larson house with astonishing rapidity. The smell of gasoline had hung in the air throughout the search team’s brief, dangerous reconnaissance.
When it had become obvious that no one could be left alive in the inferno, the team leader had ordered a retreat from the house, then paired off his people and sent them to search the rest of the island.
He and the pilot approached the first shack in line, service revolvers drawn. They positioned themselves on both sides of the door frame. Silent count of three, and the team leader kicked open the door and pivoted across the threshold.
The shack was empty.
Next door down, same procedure, same result.
Next door, same procedure He froze in the doorway.
Someone was there. Lying motionless on the lower bunk.
“FBI, hands up!”
The figure did not stir.
“I said, put your goddamned hands up!”
Nothing.
He beamed his flashlight at the bunk.
“Oh, Christ.” That was the pilot.
The team leader thought it had been a long time since he’d seen that much blood from just one man.
The two of them moved toward the bunk, less warily now, with nothing to fear. The man they had found was unmistakably dead. His eyes were shut, mouth open, skin bleached of color. Blood had run freely from a wound in his abdomen. It dripped on the floor, monotonous as water torture. A few somnolent, fat flies crawled lazily over the vivid red stains.
“Nice smell, huh?” the team leader observed, sniffing the copperish reek.
The chopper pilot didn’t answer. For six years he had seen duty as a street cop before taking to the air. The lesson had been drilled into him that his first priority in a situation of this kind was to confirm that the subject was deceased.
Conscientiously he pressed his thumb against the dead man’s carotid artery.
He felt a pulse.
“Hey. We’ve got a live one here.”
