Uncharted (42 page)

Karyn turned to him, a trace of unguarded tenderness in her eyes. “You can’t spend fifteen minutes underwater without air, either, but the three of you did. We shouldn’t have survived the boat accident, but we did.”

Mark and Lisa erupted in howls of protest. “It wasn’t fifteen minutes,” Lisa insisted. “It was like, no time at all.”

Kevin leaned back and closed his eyes, then opened them as a random thought occurred. “Wait a minute, what about John? And the captain and his kid? They’re not here.”

As Karyn laced her fingers in the old children’s game, he could almost hear her thoughts:
Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the
door—but where are the people?

She met his gaze. “Maybe the captain and John and the boy are in heaven. Maybe they’re the ones who respected that bag of seed.”

Lisa inhaled an audible breath, then burst out in a laugh. “Oh, come
on
. You think that heathen captain is in heaven while I’m not? I’ve gone to church my entire life! I’ve cared for my parents and other people’s bratty kids—”

“We all know what you’ve done.” Kevin kept his voice low and soothing. “Karyn’s rambling, that’s all. This isn’t hell, and you haven’t missed heaven. As long as you’re breathing, you’re alive and there’s hope.”

“That’s it.” Mark stood and brushed sand from his shorts. “I’ve heard all I can take in one sitting. I’m going for a walk to keep my muscles from binding up.”

“You may not want to hear it, but I think I’m right,” Karyn called after him. “I hope I’m wrong; honest to God, I do.”

40

Mark stomped across the dunes as though he would trample them into submission. The wet shirt fabric offered no protection from the sharp stones that jabbed at his bare feet, but he welcomed the pain, relished it, because he wanted to master it as he had mastered every challenge of his life.

Though he tried to concentrate on his walk, the subject of the group’s conversation flooded his mind. How could Karyn take leave of her senses? Of all the women, she had always been the most levelheaded. She knew what she wanted, she went out and got it, and she wasn’t afraid to make sacrifices along the way. When Kevin held her back, she dumped him. When she realized she wasn’t glamorous enough for Hollywood, she went to New York. She’d been wise with her money and shrewd with publicity. She had controlled everything in her life until today.

He hated to admit it, but a dart of terror had shot through him when she suggested they might be dead. In all his adventures, legal and illegal, he had never been frightened. Tense, yes; excited, definitely. But afraid? Never. He hadn’t known genuine fear since those dark days when his stepfather used to terrorize him with a baseball bat. All that had ended when Mark grew strong enough to wrest the bat away and repay his stepfather’s abuse with interest. The police blamed
that
death on a burglary gone awry, but that summer afternoon Mark had sworn never to be frightened again. He’d kept that vow until a few weeks ago, when David had managed to awaken terror with an incomprehensible dream—

He’d been sitting in his boat, the
Spensive Toy
, while a beautiful brunette reclined on the cushions at the stern. The boat drifted in the brackish current of the Banana River, its twin outboards silent. To Mark’s right, the lights of Merritt Island gleamed through a fringe of ancient oaks; to his left, the stark lights of commercial Cocoa Beach outlined the shore.

He crouched at the stern and pressed his lips to the warm pulse at the brunette’s neck. He didn’t remember where he’d found her or how he’d lured her to the boat; enough that she was here and willing to be playful. After the roofie kicked in, she’d be putty in his hands.

“Hey,” she murmured, the soft slur of alcohol in her voice. “I’m thirsty.”

“After all that?” He wasn’t sure how much alcohol she’d ingested, but her breath was scented with beer, and a splash of wine had stained one of the abbreviated triangles of her bikini top.

“I need water,” she said, pushing herself up. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

He sighed heavily to let her know of his displeasure, but he wasn’t ready to reveal his power. No sense in irritating a beautiful woman in the pregame warm-up.

So he watched the rhythmic tilt of her bikini bottom as she stepped through the hatch and disappeared into the galley. He’d wait.

He tipped back his head and stared at the sky, where stars twinkled like diamonds in a clear night. A full moon in the east lit the deck, and a soft wind scented the warm air with salt water and the slight tang of motor oil.

He closed his eyes as the woman rummaged in the hold. He shouldn’t have let her go below; he should have offered to get her a glass of water. If he sat here much longer, he’d be liable to nod off, and
that
would never do. Mark Morris did not sleep when adventure awaited, no sir. Mark Morris was always ready, always prepared.

Mark lifted his head as footsteps scuffed the wooden stairs. He smiled in anticipation, but the figure emerging from the shadows wasn’t 36-24-36, but gray haired, stocky, and masculine.

Surprise whipped his breath away. “D-David Payne?”

Payne’s face split in a wide grin. He nodded, then gestured to a book in his left hand.

Mark straightened on the bench. “How in the world did you get aboard?”

When David pointed to the book again, Mark laughed. This had to be the booze at work, and he knew how to compensate for fuzzy perceptions. David’s appearance must be an omen—this would be one of those rare evenings when events turned on a whim and the boundary between reality and fantasy was no wider than a thread.

“Aw, who cares.” He chuckled, wondering what David thought of the brunette in the hold, but his old friend kept miming a message and pointing at the book.

Mark shook his head to sharpen his muzzy thoughts, then sat on his hands and leaned toward his visitor. “David, old pal, you’re gonna have to speak up. I never was good at reading lips, not even when you were trying to feed me answers in class.”

The apparition stepped forward, not stopping until he loomed over Mark. Mark didn’t like being overshadowed, not even by the image of an old friend, so he pushed himself up and stood close enough to punch his college roommate.

“Now, Dave,” he said, surprised to hear a slur in his own voice, “let’s start over. Suppose you explain what you’re doing here—but before you do, tell me what you did with the girl. Things were beginning to get interesting, if you know what I mean.”

He winked and shifted to elbow his old pal in the ribs, but there was something so forbidding about David’s expression, so downright
serious
, that Mark changed his mind and moved backward, stumbling over the built-in storage chests along the stern.

“Whoa!” He teetered on one leg, his arms pinwheeling, and fully expected David to catch him. But David’s hands were occupied with that blasted book, so Mark fell onto the bench. Sitting there, rubbing the back of his shin, he glared up at his unexpected guest. “What is
with
you, man?”

David continued his infernal pointing.

Mark closed his eyes and braced his hands on the chests. He was probably imagining this entire scene, but drunk or not, his patience had evaporated. He stood and lumbered toward the wheel, determined to leave this haunted stretch of river.

“I don’t know where you came from,” he said, not looking over his shoulder, “but I’m going to start the engine and head for home. When I turn around, I expect you to be gone and the woman to be stretched out on the cushions. Okay?”

He had taken no more than three steps when David moved toward him from the right. Startled by the soundless apparition, Mark staggered left, lost his balance, and toppled over the side.

Blackness surrounded him, and the sound of water filled his ears. For an instant he panicked, not knowing which way to swim, then he remembered to relax and drift with the bubbles. A moment later his head broke the surface. He blinked the brackish water from his eyes and saw David on the boat, holding the book in a stream of moonlight.

“Hey!” Mark’s mood veered to anger. “Do something useful, and throw me a stinkin’ line, will you?”

David didn’t respond, but the current picked up and pulled the boat southward, toward the juncture of river and sea. Mark cursed and began to swim, but when he lifted his head to catch a breath, the gap between himself and the
Spensive Toy
was wider than ever.

He swam until his arms ached and his legs felt like iron pillars, then he treaded water and watched the
Spensive Toy
shrink to a white dot and vanish in the moonlight.

A frustrated scream ripped the back of his throat. This couldn’t be happening. Mark Morris did not lose control, not now, not ever. He controlled the employees who worked for him; he controlled the women he dated and married; he controlled the extremely special girls he escorted to his secret room. He even controlled the alligators in the pond behind his house—when they saw him on the bank, they came running.

But he could not control the darkness encroaching on his field of vision. He also couldn’t control the warm wetness leaking from his bladder.

When he had awakened in a frisson of horror, he found his pillow damp—not with river water, but with terrified tears.

No, no, they couldn’t be dead. He knew death; he had summoned it, courted it, and toyed with it. One of his victims had expired five times; each time he blew breath into her lungs, pumped her chest, and brought her back, only to inflict terror again. Like a ringmaster in a macabre circus, he snapped his whip and death obeyed, so
that
lethal creature could not have attacked and conquered him.

Imagine
him
, dead! He snorted a laugh and placed his hands on his hips as he looked across the sea. The ocean had attempted to take his life today, but he had refused to surrender it. The sea had thrust him down, scraped him across a jagged ocean floor, held him under with forceful rip currents and pounding waves. But he’d filled his lungs with oxygen and pushed himself to the surface, beating back death’s long arm.

He was not going to die on this trip. He would die in his bed or on Florida’s death row. He’d enjoy the serenity of a long life or the infamy of a notorious one, but he was not going to pass into oblivion on some inane trip to an obscure island.

Karyn had lost touch with reality. She had spent too much time surrounded by fake people on fake sets. Lorinda Loving, her silly soap opera character, lived in a crazy world, and some of that craziness had seeped into Karyn’s mind.

He turned to look at the group huddled by the fire. Now that the raft had shattered, he couldn’t help feeling a sense of responsibility for the loss. Their best hope now lay in the signal fire; fortunately, it still burned. If there was another way off this island, he’d need time to find it.

But he
would
find it. Failure was not an option.

Karyn stiffened as Mark approached, his chin lifted and shoulders squared in unconscious arrogance. He wore a no-nonsense expression, so he’d be giving them new orders. Obviously, he hadn’t believed a word of her theory.

She shifted her gaze to Kevin as a new weight of sadness fell on her shoulders. If she was right, Sarah was an orphan. Her foster placement would most likely be permanent unless a distant relative or friend volunteered to adopt her. Karyn shuddered at the thought. Her mother was too elderly to raise a teenager, and although Karyn loved her actor friends, none of them was qualified to raise a fifteen-year- old girl. Kevin, as far as she knew, had no real friends outside his corporate circle.

None of his bimbos would want to raise his daughter.

“I’m thirsty,” Susan said, her voice flat and inflectionless. When Mark looked at her with accusing eyes, she lowered her head. “Sorry. It slipped out.”

“We need to make finding water a priority.” Mark’s gaze narrowed as his dark eyes strafed the circle. “We’ll forget the raft for now, because we need water to replenish our strength. Once we’ve had some time to renew and rest, we can build a more stable vessel.”

Susan gave him a black look. “Karyn
told
you to find a pot.”

“And we’ll look for one, but that’s really a last resort. We need to find a source of fresh water.”

Lisa pressed her palms over her eyes as if they burned with weariness. “We’ve looked for water. We’ve looked everywhere.”