With an Extreme Burning (38 page)

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.”

Turn coming up—sharp right-hand turn. Beyond where the road bent, Amy could see the ocean shining a silvery black in the distance. And closer in, a narrow parking area with a guardrail along its outer border. Guardrail … dropoff, cliff …

“ ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me …’ ”

Chills chased each other along her back. She tried to yell
No!
at him, but her jaw hurt so much she couldn't form the word. She clawed at him, clawed at the wheel; couldn't break his grip. It was as if his fingers had fused with the wheel's hard composition plastic.

“ ‘He leadeth me beside still waters. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures …’ ”

And they were off the road, rumbling over the rough surface of the parking area. Amy's head cracked into the window glass. Instinctively she clutched at the dash, at the hand-bar again, to hold her body in place.

The white horizontal lines of the guardrail rushed at them.

Heaving impact. And then they were airborne.

As soon as Dix saw the Honda careen off the road, he knew it was deliberate: no skidding, no flash of taillights. The mad final act he'd been dreading. He jammed his foot down harder on the accelerator—but it was a reflex action, nothing more. They were still three hundred yards behind the Honda when it crashed through the guardrail.

“Amy!”

Cecca's anguished cry sawed at his nerves. A hundred yards from the turnout he began to pump the brakes, but they were still going a little too fast when the Buick came off the road onto the gravel. The front end tried to break loose into a skid. He fought the wheel, maneuvered the car under control and to a rocking stop halfway across. Cecca was already out and running by the time he yanked at the hand brake.

He expected to hear crash sounds or their afterechoes; he expected to see a burst of flame and smoke from below the rim. He heard and saw neither. Far-off clatterings, that was all. Cecca reached the splintered guardrail first, half turned as he came up and gestured frantically, shouting something that the sea wind shredded. He looked past her—and the despair in him gave way under a rush of hope.

The ground below the turnout, rocky and covered with thick grass and gorse bushes and scrub pine, fell away in a long, gradual slope—nearly a hundred square yards of it—before the land sliced off in a vertical drop to the ocean. The Honda was still on the slope, its erratic downhill path marked by dislodged rocks and torn-up vegetation that had slowed its momentum. What had finally stopped and held it was a pair of boulder-size outcroppings near the cliff's edge. It was canted up on its side, the two upthrust tires spinning like pinwheels in the wind, lodged in a notch between the outcrops. There was enough moonlight for Dix to make out that the sides and front end were caved in but that the top was uncrushed. The car had somehow managed to stay upright after it landed. If it had flipped and rolled, there would be little chance that Amy was alive down there. As it was …

Cecca said something else that the wind tore away, jumped down onto the slope. He was right behind her, then moving past her. The angle of descent wasn't steep enough to require handholds to maintain his footing, and he could see well enough to avoid obstacles in his path. The thing that impeded his and Cecca's progress was the wind. It was strong here with nothing to deflect it, gusting straight into their faces, the force of it like hands trying to push them back. It numbed him, filled his ears with moans and shrieks and the sullen wash-and-thunder of the surf below the cliff. The nearer he got to the edge, the harder he had to struggle through the heaving blow.

When he finally reached the Honda he saw that it wasn't anchored as solidly between the outcrops as it had looked from above. The wind had it and was shaking it like a dog with a toy. The passenger side was the one tilted skyward, at little more than a fifteen-degree angle. He was able to look through the spiderwebbed window glass without much of a stretch.

The interior was thick-shadowed: the crash and slide had knocked out the car's electrical system. He thought he detected movement, but he couldn't be sure. The cracked glass distorted the shapes inside.

Cecca crowded in next to him as he tugged at the door handle, added her strength to his. At first the door wouldn't budge. It was badly dented and he was afraid it was frozen shut. Together they wrenched and pulled at it, the wind burning Dix's eyes, watering them so he was nearly blind. The door gave a little, a little more, and then the latch tore free and they were able to wedge it open. She held it as he wiped his eyes clear, leaned in to feel for Amy in the darkness.

She was twisted down against the driver's seat, half on top of her abductor. Jerry wasn't moving, but she was, struggling feebly to free herself.

Dix grasped her arm. She stiffened, crying out in pain when he tugged on it. He could feel the car quivering under and around him as the wind gusted; he couldn't afford to be gentle. He slid his other hand under her armpit, then braced himself and lifted her. The strain on his arms almost broke his grip, would have if she hadn't been able to help by pushing upward with her feet. Another few seconds and he had her out, safely cradled in his arms.

With Cecca's help he carried Amy upslope, shielding her with his body. The blow at their backs made the climb up easier than the one going down. Still, Amy's weight and the uneven ground surface had his legs trembling by the time they reached the Buick.

It was the only car there. And they were the only people. Highway One stretched black and empty in both directions. As late as it was, nobody had driven along this lonely section in the past few minutes; or if anybody had, they'd either failed to notice what had happened or ignored it. He thought sardonically: Still nobody to help us but ourselves.

He laid Amy gently on the backseat. She was conscious and she seemed alert. Black streaks of blood, a swollen and discolored mouth and jaw, made a Halloween mask of her face. None of her limbs seemed to be broken or dislocated. He stood aside to let Cecca get in and minister to her, question her. There was a blanket in the trunk; he went and got it, shook it out, reached in to drape it over the girl's body.

He asked tersely, “Internal injuries?”

“No, thank God,” Cecca said. “Glass cuts … and I think her jaw is broken.”

“Nothing more serious?”

“Doesn't look like it.”

Urgent to get her medical attention, but not so urgent that a few more minutes would be crucial. He said, “Make her as comfortable as you can. I'm going back down to get Jerry.”

“Get him? Dear God, you're not going to—?”

“Don't worry. I won't be long.”

“Just leave him in the car!”

“I can't.”

The wind had pushed the Honda over a little, so that its two tilted-up tires almost touched the ground. When it was upright again, it would be free of the notch and then it would slide or be wind-prodded over the edge. The passenger door had blown shut; he popped it open, managed to jam it back on its sprung hinges. He leaned in. Jerry Gordon Whittington Cotter was a still-unmoving mass in the driver's seat, the seat belt buckled across his middle. Dix fumbled with the buckle release, then took fingerholds on clothing slick with blood and hauled him up across the passenger seat. When he had Jerry's inert weight on the ground, he half carried and half dragged him a short way upslope. He was exhausted by then. All the muscles in his body seemed to be vibrating with fatigue.

He lowered himself to one knee long enough to cleanse his hands on a tuft of grass, then to put fingers to Jerry's neck. Faint irregular pulse. All right.

Dix stood. One more thing to do before he climbed up to Cecca and Amy. He took the Beretta from his pocket, hefted it on his palm as he looked down at Jerry. And then he hurled it into the teeth of the wind, with just enough strength to get it out over the cliffs edge.

He had learned a lesson tonight. One of those hard lessons that ought to be easy but seldom are.

Guns and revenge were the tools of mediocre men.

And Dix Mallory didn't have to be mediocre anymore.

EPILOGUE

Ashes

Dix sat on the terrace alongside the pool, the sun hot on his bare chest and legs, his head and shoulders shaded by the beach umbrella canted next to his chair. It was a warm day, the temperature in the high seventies—the probable final day of a brief Indian summer. Unseasonable weather for early October, and the reason he hadn't kept to his usual schedule of shutting the pool equipment down on the first of the month. Might as well get the last bit of use out of it before fall took a firmer grip. The forecasters had promised fog tonight, cooler temperatures tomorrow, and a slight chance of showers by Monday night.

Cecca had gone into the house to use the bathroom. Amy was in the pool swimming laps. He felt drowsy sitting there alone in the quiet. Almost relaxed for the first time in a long while. Birds cluttering, the faint sounds Amy made as she stroked back and forth, the faraway pulse of Los Alegres—horns, car engines, kids' voices—filtering up from below. There was a sense of peace in his surroundings, at least, if little enough in him.

He watched Amy swimming. She was graceful in the water, long arms and legs making very little splash. Her underwater turns were particularly smooth. He was a good swimmer himself, but that kind of turn was something he'd never been able to master. Maybe he could still learn. A minor project for next summer.