He was standing on the matted grass at the top, legs spread, outlined blackly against the sky.
She stood in frozen disbelief.
No! He couldn't have found her, it wasn't fair, she'd done everything right, she was safe, he
“I told you you couldn't get away, Amy.”
Voice booming above the thrum of the wind, the words like a lash that broke her paralysis. She stumbled away, but now it was like running in one of those mixed-up dreams: somebody chasing you and you ran and ran and got nowhere at all. And at the same time he was flying down the dune's side, long, sliding steps that tore the grass and kicked up spurts of sand.
He caught her before she could get clear of the cratered area. Grabbed her arm, jerked her around. She hissed at him like a cat, a sound she'd never made before, and swung the length of driftwood with all her strength. Hit him with it—low on his body, bringing a grunt but not doing any damage. Off balance, she tried to club his head. It was a weak blow without leverage and he fended it off with his arm. Then he clutched at the wood, caught a grip on it, wrenched it out of her fingers, and hurled it away.
She fought him, still hissing—hands, feet, knees. But she was mired in loose sand and he was too strong for her. He twined his fingers in her hair, whipped her head back with such force that cartilage cracked in her neck.
“Bad girl,” he said.
The whole left side of her face erupted in pain. But only for an instant.
The abandoned development near Manchester State Beach was a wasteland at this hour: lifeless, no lights except at a distant dairy ranch, not even a parked car. The grassy dunes stretched ghostly pale along the left flank of the road. Wind spurts blew sand that ticked against the surfaces of the Buick, fluttered in the headlight beams like will-o'-the-wisps.
Dix's head ached. The strain of driving, pain radiating upward through his neck from knotted shoulder muscles. The last twenty miles had been the hardest, with the urge strong in him to increase his already excessive speed. Only the winding road and the possibility of encountering a highway patrolman or deputy sheriff kept him from giving in to the impulse. Now, finally, the long drive was almost over. And at the end of it, at the cottage, what would they find?
Please let her be there, he thought, please let her be all right.
It was the closest he'd come to praying since his altar-boy days at Old Saint Thomas.
Cecca had been leaning forward, her hands gripping the dash, since they'd turned off Highway One. She said, “The Dunes is on the other side of that sharp bend ahead.”
“Visible from the road?” he asked. He didn't remember.
“Yes. All by itself on higher ground.”
They were halfway through the bend when he saw it, insubstantial-looking on its pilings, like a black cardboard cutout propped up with sticks. Not wholly black, though. Lampglow made a pale rectangle of one of the fronting windows.
Cecca sucked in her breath. He said warningly, “Easy. Maybe Chet's spending the weekend here.”
“No, he was here last weekend, he invited Amy. He wouldn't come again the week after a long holiday —”
Brighter lights seemed to jump out of the darkness, under or behind the cottage. Moving lights—arcing around the building, then separating into two eyelike beams. Car headlamps.
“Dix!”
He gunned the engine. Now the other headlights were making erratic vertical jumps as the car bounced downhill toward the road. It was on a weedy access lane; Dix saw the intersection materialize in the glare of his lights. Saw, too, that they were closer to the junction than the other car. Block it off, he thought, and veered over to the left side of the road. His blights slid over the car's small, lumpish shape, gave him a brief glimpse of the driver.
Cecca cried, “That's Amy's Honda!”
But it wasn't Amy behind the wheel.
The Honda was twenty yards away when Dix skidded the Buick to an angled stop across the foot of the lane. Jerry Gordon Whittington Cotter kept coming without slackening speed. At first Dix thought he would try to ram them out of the way; he yelled, “Brace yourself!” to Cecca. But with only a few feet to spare, the Honda sheered off the lane onto the grass and packed sand that bordered it—Jerry gambling on enough traction to slide him around the Buick and onto the road.
He made it a little farther than halfway before the tires began to slip and spin. The Honda slowed, settled, the engine roaring. Dix threw his door open, fumbling to free the Beretta, and ran to the compact and ripped at the door handle on the driver's side. Locked. Through the glass, in the glow of the dashlights, he could see Amy slumped in the passenger seat. Unconscious? Dead?
No, she was moving one of her arms …
Cecca had pushed up close beside him, was trying to peer inside. She screamed at Jerry, “What have you done to her, you son of a bitch!”
Jerry's strained white face had turned toward them. Astonishment was written on it, and dismay; he couldn't comprehend how they'd known to come here. He mouthed something that Dix couldn't hear over the howl of the engine and the sand-churn of the tires. Dix moved Cecca back to give himself more room, then hammered on the window with the butt of the gun. The glass wouldn't break. He backed off a step, thinking to take aim, thinking: I'll shot you through the window if that's what it takes.
The tires, spinning deeper, caught traction.
The Honda jerked, gained a firmer bite, and slewed ahead out of the soft grit onto the asphalt. It fishtailed violently on the sand film there, seemed on the verge of going out of control. Then it straightened and shot away.
Dix ran back to the Buick. The engine was still running; as soon as Cecca was inside, he snapped the transmission into gear, cut into a sliding turn in the Honda's wake.
Cecca said in a voice caught midway between relief and panic, “Amy … she was in there with him. Could you tell if she—?”
“Alive,” he said, “she's alive.”
But for how much longer? Ahead of them Jerry was already driving faster than Dix dared to, at a deadly, reckless speed.
Amy clung to the hand-bar with her right hand, the edge of the seat with her left, her feet braced hard against the floorboards. Outside, the highway and the few scattered buildings of Manchester hurtled past. He'd been going faster and faster since she'd regained her senses, realized where she was and that they were turning out of Stoneboro Road onto Highway One. Why so fast? Headlights bobbed behind them, not traveling quite as fast but staying pretty close. Was he trying to get away from whoever was in the car back there? The police … was it the police?
She was still woozy and she couldn't think clearly. And the whole lower left side of her face felt as if it were on fire. She could hardly move her jaw. Broken? As hard as he must have hit her, it might be. She couldn't remember the blow or anything until she'd woken up in the car. He must have carried her all the way in from the dunes.
He was saying something, but not to her. Babbling to himself again. Hunched over the wheel, hair all wind- tangled, eyes not blinking—throwing up words into the light-spattered dark.
“How could they have found us? Showing up like that, spoiling, spoiling, always spoiling. Damn their souls! Too late to burn them now. Too late. Only one thing left to do. Cheryl, I'm sorry. Donnie, Angie, I'm so sorry. I should have done a better job of it, I shouldn't have waited so long …”
They were going so fast now, the night was a blur around them. As fast as the Honda would go; it shimmied and groaned and rattled, as if it were getting ready to fly apart at the seams. The road had been string-straight, but now it was starting to wind a little again.
“Forgive me,” he said. “O God, forgive me.”
