Deadly Pursuit (24 page)

Her mind had time to form one word:
snake
.

Then—pain.

A shock wave of glassy, wrenching pain in her forearm just below the elbow.

Her fingers splayed. She let go of the snake and slid a foot lower on the mass of roots. Somewhere a siren started wailing, its cry high and ululant, ripping the night air.

Thrashing wildly, the snake whipsawed its head and bit again, fangs drilling into the meat of her right shoulder.

The siren climbed in pitch, whooping breathlessly.

Another roiling twist of its body, and the snake clamped down on the tender skin above her left breast.

She threw back her head, dazzled by pain. The siren, oddly, had taken on the quality of a human voice, or nearly human, a voice shrilling with the outraged, plaintive terror of a child.

“Get it off me, get it off me, get it off!”

Its fangs were twin syringes sinking deep. She beat at the long writhing body with her fists. The snake lashed backward, and in a frozen instant she saw it clearly: the broad, flat head, the lidless eyes bisected by vertical pupils, the mouth stretched wide to expose shining fangs and surreal pinkish-white lips.

White mouth. The thought floated like a bubble just at the level of consciousness. It has a white mouth.

Then the bubble popped, the idea was lost, as the snake lunged again.

She dodged it. Her sudden sideways movement sent her tumbling backward into the water with a splash.

It showed its fangs once more, challenging her, then slowly unpacked itself from the jungle of roots where it had lain in ambush. Coil by coil its ponderous, impossibly long body unkinked, while its head nosed languidly toward the water.

She watched, numb with trauma, wondering blankly if it meant to come after her and finish the job.

Finally the snake’s full extension was presented to her like an unrolled carpet. How long was the goddamned thing? Five feet? Six? Thick, too—not ropelike—an undulating cylinder of muscle, nearly as large in diameter as her lower leg.

The snake slipped into the water, lung inflated, head and neck lifted above the surface. For an eerie moment it seemed to regard her out of one cool, unwinking eye.

Then it glided off into the murk. She followed it with her gaze until it had merged with black water and vaporous air, like some evil spirit of the swamp that had briefly materialized out of mud and rot and miasma, only to surrender its form and return, ghostlike, to its essence.

In the near distance, violent splashing.

Turning, she saw a faint yellowish glow.

Jack’s flashlight.

She remembered the siren’s wail that had split the night.

No siren, of course. Screams. Her own voice raised in cries of blind panic. She’d given away her position, and now Jack was coming for her. Coming fast.

He was swimming like a maniac, chopping the water with wild, vigorous strokes. Already his flashlight’s beam tickled the branches of dead mangroves at the other end of the channel.

She clawed at the roots, trying again to find a handhold, but her fingers wouldn’t work right—they were spastic and uncoordinated, her muscles still fluttering with the aftereffects of trauma—the roots kept slipping from her grasp.

Light dazzled her.

Turning her head, she looked blinking into a yellow glare.

“Evening, Mrs. Gardner!” Jack called cheerfully. “Funny meeting you here.”

He was wading in the shallower part of the creek, flashlight in one hand, gun in the other. Black water retreated from him in lazy ripples as he took a final step toward her.

Slowly he lifted the gun, taking aim.

Kirstie waited, breath stopped. No way out for her, not now. She wondered how the bullet would feel as it chewed through muscle and bone.

“Count of three, sweetheart!” He was laughing. “One! Two!”

The flashlight jerked sideways.

A splash—Jack facedown in the water—a muffled crack as the gun discharged into the muddy bottom, launching a geyser of sediment.

In the moment before he’d meant to shoot her, he’d lost his balance somehow. Slipped on the wet mud, maybe. Or had the snake gotten him, too?

She didn’t know, couldn’t guess. Some kind of miracle had taken place, and she was in no position to argue with it.

This time her hands found purchase in the roots. She hauled herself out of the water.

Ducking under the mangroves’ leafless branches, she kicked a deadfall of rotted timber out of her way and plunged blindly into the night.

40

For a confused moment Jack had no idea what was happening.

He’d been about to fire when a sudden impact from behind had hurled him headfirst into the water.

The gun had punched a hole in the creek’s thick sediment and gone off. Recoil and the spray of mud and water kicked up by the shot had shocked him into releasing both pistol and flashlight.

Now he groped for the Beretta, half buried in the mire.

Slam
.

Another collision, and he was shoved sideways, out of reach of the gun.

He spun around, twisting free of whatever shapeless thing was trying to get him in its grasp, then surfaced, gasping.

A yard away, Steve surfaced also.

Wet hair was plastered to his forehead. His eyes squinted comically to compensate for the loss of his glasses. In his hand was the Beretta, caked with black muck.

The two men faced each other, hip-deep in the shallows.

“God damn,” Jack breathed. “Thought you’d be out of action by now.”

Steve shook his head. “I’m still in the game.”

Jack glanced toward the thicket of mangroves where Kirstie had been cornered. She was gone.

“Well, congratulations, Stevie. Looks like you rescued your precious wife from certain doom. I wouldn’t have missed her at that range.”

“I know.”

“So what now? You plan to shoot me?”

“Yes.”

“Just like that? In cold blood?” He raised both arms, displaying his empty hands. “When I’m no threat to you?”

“You’re always a threat, Jack. To me and Kirstie and everybody else you come in contact with. Remember that coral snake we found in the bathtub of the plantation house when we were teenagers? It was dead, but it could still bite. That’s you. You never give up.”

“Tough talk.” Jack forced a smile. “But you won’t shoot me. You can’t. Not like this. In a fight, sure; you nearly nailed me back at the house. But now that I’m disarmed and willing to surrender, you’re not going to gun me down. Your conscience won’t let you.”

“Wrong, Jack,” Steve whispered, and looking into his eyes. Jack was suddenly cold, chilled by what he saw there, the pitiless intensity of that gaze. “My conscience won’t allow a thing like you to live.”

The Beretta steadied, its muzzle focusing like a lidless eye on Jack’s chest from three feet away.

Jack gazed into that small black hole and saw eternity.

So this is it, he thought numbly. Well, fuck it. I’ve had my fun.

Steve’s finger flexed, squeezing the trigger.

A dull, muffled click.

Misfire.

Jack allowed himself no time to think or feel. Instinct drove him.

He snapped his leg out, pistoned a kick at Steve’s midsection, felt a thud of solid contact. Steve doubled over, and the gun sailed free, vanishing with a splash.

Instantly the Swiss Army knife was in Jack’s hand, spear blade extracted with a flick of his thumbnail.

Now. Go for the kill.

With a ululant war whoop, the cry of a predatory animal, he flung himself on Steve and thrust the blade between his ribs.

Steve stretched his mouth in the shape of a scream. Only blood came out. It stained the water in coiling purplish swirls.

Jack wrenched the knife free and stabbed again, sticking Steve in the abdomen, then jerked the blade clockwise, turning it like a screwdriver.

“You son of a
bitch
,” Jack hissed. “Why’d you make me kill you, you stupid son of a bitch?” He rammed the knife in deeper, burying it up to the handle. “We could have been partners if you hadn’t fucked it up!”

Dimly he was aware of an acid burn in his eyes, which might have been tears.

Steve tried once more to release the scream caught inside him. Racking convulsions choked it off.

Jack hung on to the knife, riding Steve in the choppy water as his body bucked and thrashed.

Then abruptly Steve went limp, breath sighing out of him.

Jack thought of Anastasia dying in the radio room just a few hours ago. It seemed strange that this man he had known, this man who had been the best friend of his adolescence, should die no differently from a dog.

He waited, but there was no further movement, no hint of life.

Panting hard, coughing up salt water, Jack dragged Steve’s body onto a mound of mangrove roots and deposited it there like a sack of trash.

His hands closed over the knife handle. He pulled, trying to work the knife loose. The job was unexpectedly difficult. For some reason his strength seemed to have left him, and the burn in his eyes was more painful than before.

In fits and starts the blade inched free. Jack dipped it in the swamp water, then washed his bloody hands.

“Hell, Stevie.” The croak of his own voice surprised him. “You asshole. You stupid fuck. I didn’t really want to. You made me. I had no choice. You stupid, stupid bastard.”

He had never experienced remorse over the other lives he’d taken. Grief and regret were weaknesses. Empathy, personal feelings of any kind toward another human being—a crippling handicap.

Steve, though .. . Good old Stevie ...

He shook his head. There was no point in blaming himself. Steve could have lived if he hadn’t been so obsessively concerned about his wife. He’d let love warp his judgment, jeopardize his own safety. Now he was dead, and soon Kirstie would join him. His quixotic self-sacrifice had accomplished nothing.

Jack squared his shoulders, blinked away the moisture in his eyes.

Strength, cunning, and viciousness ruled this world. Love and loyalty purchased only death. Steve should have learned that lesson. Instead he’d clung to his comforting delusions, his ridiculous romantic self-aggrandizement, and finally paid for his stupidity with his life, as he’d deserved.

Yes. As he had deserved.

Reassured, his personal code reconfirmed, Jack turned his back on the cat’s-cradle webbing of the mangroves’ stiltlike roots and the motionless figure lying there.

Submerging, he recovered the Beretta, then manually retracted the slide. The chamber was clogged with thick, gluey mud; an empty shell casing was lodged inside.

Jack shook his head slowly, a thin smile printed on his lips. Such a little thing, the casing of an expended round, and yet it had saved his life—and ended Steve’s.

Easy enough to see why the gun had misfired. The Beretta had been mired in mud when it accidentally discharged. Recoil had opened the breech, and instantly mud had flooded the chamber, preventing ejection of the shell case. While the casing was still in place, another round could not be fed into the chamber, and no shot could be fired.

Jack dug out the shell case and, after a moment’s hesitation, pocketed it; an ounce of metal that had saved his life ought to serve nicely as a good luck charm.

With a fingernail he scraped the chamber, then closed the breech and cocked the gun.

There was nothing else to salvage. The flashlight was useless now, its internal parts corroded by water, the bulb dead. Well, he could do without it. Dawn was near.

He waded in the direction of the boardwalk, intending to find Kirstie and finish his night’s work.

At a bend in the channel he looked back. Steve was a dark, unmoving shape almost lost amid the meshwork of shadows and the snarled net of roots.

“So long, old buddy,” Jack whispered.

Then he turned away, vaguely annoyed with himself for this last nostalgic indulgence, and moved on, becoming one with the dark.

41

Kirstie had almost given up hope of escaping from the swamp. The maze of waterways was bewildering, incomprehensible. She might be swimming in circles for all she knew. The boardwalk had vanished; perhaps it had never existed. Perhaps all this was a dream, a fever dream; or perhaps she was dead already—killed by Steve on the beach or by Jack in the swamp—dead and sentenced to an endless prison term in hell.

She swam on, aimlessly, hopelessly, limbs flailing in ragged, uncoordinated strokes that churned up a foamy wake.

God, there
had
to be a way out of this place. The swamp wasn’t even big; swimming in a straight-line path, she could traverse it in a few minutes. But there were no straight lines here. Every channel was insanely contorted, bent and folded and turned back on itself, impossible to navigate.

I’ll die here, she thought. I’ll die, and no one will ever find my body. And the mangroves will build new root systems over my bones.

She could picture it—a skeleton woven into the web of roots—a skeleton with her face.

Don’t.

With a shudder she rejected the image. No point in thinking like that. Defeatism was wrong—perversely ungrateful, in fact—after the inexplicable miracle that had saved her life only a short time ago.

She kept going. The water seemed thicker now, heavily clouded with silt. Beating her way through it was like swimming in mud.

Her right arm curved forward in another breaststroke, and her fingers sank into something soft and oozy. A bank of wet clay.

Another dead end? No. Not this time.

She let out a sound midway between a sigh and a chuckle, a sound expressive of all the relief she had ever felt.

She’d made it. She’d reached the shallows at the border of the swamp. Dry land ahead.

“Oh, thank God,” she mumbled in a blurred sleepwalker’s voice. “Thank God, thank God, thank God.”

Struggling through the thick, viscid mire, she half staggered, half crawled out of the water.

Around her, a few buttonwood trees formed a transitional zone between the red and black mangroves and the live oaks and mahoganies that grew in drier soil.

She shambled a dozen yards from the swamp, hoping to escape the worst of the mosquitoes, then collapsed, exhausted, at the base of a mahogany. She lay there, coughing weakly, her head in her arms.

Rest, she thought vaguely. Just for a little while.

Her whole body hurt. She had more aches than muscles.

If she lived through this, she was going to get fat and lazy. She never would work out again.

The thought made her smile.

Then slowly the smile faded as she became aware of a new kind of pain, throbbing throughout her right side.

The bite wounds in her arm, shoulder, and chest burned like splashes of acid.

Shaking herself alert, she examined the twin punctures in her forearm. The site was swelling noticeably, the surrounding flesh turning an ugly purple.

An infection? No, this was something different. Something worse.

White mouth.

The thought startled her, words from nowhere.

The snake had a white mouth.

And it swam with its head out of the water.

Those details held some significance her dazed mind could not quite grasp. She struggled to make herself see.

White mouth ...

Cottonmouth.

The cottonmouth swims like that.

“Oh no,” she whispered. “No.”

The snake was a cottonmouth, a water moccasin, and it had bitten her. Bitten her three times, with each bite burying its fangs deep.

Its hollow, venom-injecting fangs.

Poisoned. She had been
poisoned
.

And even while she struggled so desperately to live, she was slowly dying inside.