She gave the Glock to Ally. “Load it.” Amazing how much effort was required even to speak a few words. “Just … just pop in the clip.”
Ally did so. Trish accepted the Glock with a nod.
Dimly she knew the girl wanted reassurance, but she had none to offer.
She’d messed up. Panicked. Now the killer knew how to find her. He could approach from any direction, fire at will. Even now he might be closing in.
She tried to focus her eyes, couldn’t. There were two and three of everything, and the edges of her vision were graying, and her ears still rang with the gun’s reports.
Nearly blind, nearly deaf, nearly crippled, nearly unconscious …
Nearly dead.
Blair circled southwest, putting distance between himself and the spot where the bird had burst into flight. On elbows and knees he approached his quarry from behind.
There.
Twenty feet away. Glitter of blonde hair visible through the rushes.
Robinson. Beside her, the girl.
They were hunkered down in a shallow pit, an improvised hiding place, their backs turned.
He could nail them both, as easy as killing two baby birds in a nest.
The man knew where they were.
That thought kept beating in Ally’s brain as she scanned the dark, looking everywhere at once.
He knew where they were. They had lost the element of surprise. It was an ambush no longer.
Ahead, the shore, flat and empty.
On both sides and behind-rushy thickets, five feet high, dense and opaque.
Anything could be hidden in that jungle of grasslike stalks. Anything.
“Keep your head down,” Trish whispered.
“I just-“
“Down.”
Reluctantly Ally shrunk deeper into the hole.
Now she could see nothing but four sandy walls and, at her side, Trish-clutching the gun close to her chest, hunched forward as she searched the dark with bleary, blinking eyes.
Ally’s grip on the arrowhead was painfully tight, the obsidian’s sharp edges chewing into her palm.
She had thought it was a good-luck charm. She’d been wrong.
Her luck-and Trish’s-finally had run out.
The girl had dropped out of sight, but Blair’s prime target was still within view.
Balanced on his elbows amid the tall, concealing stalks, he steadied the Glock in both hands.
Touched the pressure switch.
The laser beam printed an amber bull’s-eye on the back of Trish Robinson’s head.
Memory flash.
Cain in the living room, targeting Trish’s face. Pinpoint of light stamped on her forehead between her deep blue eyes.
Amber light.
Ally saw the same light now, a red-orange luster highlighting the blonde tangle at the nape of Trish’s neck.
“Look out!”
Her cry and her lunge were simultaneous.
She pulled Trish downward, wrenching her head sideways.
Whip crack. Sand erupting in a gritty spume.
Behind them. He was right behind them.
No time to think, no time for calculation.
Trish thrust both hands over her head, elbows bending as she pointed the Glock upside down, the barrel grazing the rim of the pit, and she fired.
Recoil slammed into her wrists, forearms, shoulders, as she pumped the trigger again and again and again. She felt the multiple impacts vibrating through her teeth and the bones of her skull.
Her shots were blind. She ought to conserve ammunition. Ought to play it safe. But she couldn’t stop her finger from flexing, couldn’t stop the gun from spitting out round after round, couldn’t stop even though she was screaming, or was it Ally who screamed, or both of them together
The sudden silence when the slide locked back on an empty chamber was shocking somehow, like the unreal stillness at the eye of a storm.
Shaking, she lowered the gun, its last round expended.
Past the chiming in her ears she heard Ally sobbing.
Nothing else.
She leaned forward, head hanging, and let blood swim back into her brain. She had no idea how long she held that position, blinking at retinal flashes and hearing the ring of bells.
When her vision cleared and it seemed she would not pass out after all, she eased herself half upright and risked a look.
The man lay in the rushes twenty feet away. She saw his hands, ungloved, pale and limp, and his gun lying nearby, and she smelled the copper-penny odor of blood.
He was dead. No doubt of it.
She had killed a man. Maybe two men. Two lives taken. Two heartbeats stopped.
Sudden tremors hurried through her. She heard a low whimpering sound, the complaint of some wounded animal, but she was the one making the noise, and she couldn’t seem to stop.
On her shoulder, the light pressure of a touch. Ally’s hand.
“You had to,” Ally whispered. “You didn’t have any choice.”
Trish knew that. But the brittle logic of the argument made no headway against the reality of that ruined face … those bloody hollows where eyes and nose and mouth had been … the permanent erasure of a human being.
Slowly she laced her fingers through Ally’s.
“He wasn’t much older than you.” Her own voice surprised her-a stranger’s voice, throaty and aged “Maybe eighteen.”
“He would have killed us both.”
“Yes.”
“So … so that makes it okay. Doesn’t it Doesn’t it”
Trish gave no reply.
60
Cain heard the shots die away as he swung out of the van.
A distant fusillade. From the island. Had to be.
Turning in a full circle, he scanned the unlit parking lot, empty of vehicles save for the Chevy van and the battered Porsche. A plastic bag skated the asphalt, flitting from stripe to stripe like a game piece advancing on a giant board.
Tyler was nowhere in view. Tired of waiting, he must have taken up his position near the phones.
Of course, it was possible no ambush would be necessary. The last barrage of shots might have finished the job.
Cain unclipped his ProCom and activated channel one.
