He was passing the sofa now. A good place for Jack to conceal himself. Almost imperceptibly, he increased the pressure of his index finger on the trigger.
The dining room was less than five feet away. If he could get through the doorway, he could slap the wall switch, light the chandelier, then flush Jack out of hiding.
Only a few more steps…
Behind him, a burst of white light. A female voice.
“-never wash my car again?”
The television. Sound blaring. Phosphorescent picture tube throwing a pale, inconstant glow over the room.
He spun toward the set. Jack must be hiding there, must have hit the on-off switch by accident, given himself away.
But where was he? Where the hell was he?
On the margin of his vision, a flicker of steel.
He lurched sideways, and the knife ripped past him, the blade coruscating in the light as it tore hungrily at his sleeve.
Steve pivoted to face Jack, pointed the gun.
“That’s right.” A male voice now. “With the patented Dirt Eater-”
His forefinger flexed.
The Beretta bucked in his hand.
A crash of sound.
Jack, twisting forward.
I shot him, Steve thought as his ears rang and the room changed color from blue to red to magenta in the television’s glow.
No. Wrong. Jack wasn’t collapsing on the floor. He was lunging over the sofa, the knife stabbing wildly.
“-you can say good-bye to expensive visits to the car wash-”
Steve seized Jack’s knife hand, held the blade at bay. He tried to shoot again, but powerful fingers were already clutching his wrist in a death grip. Jack’s face filled his field of vision, surreal in the stroboscopic light.
“-and wet, sloppy do-it-yourself jobs in the driveway!”
Jack stretched his mouth in a voiceless roar. He fought to free his knife hand from Steve’s grasp. Steve held on, the Beretta rendered useless, pointed at the ceiling. The two men danced a ragged, stumbling waltz.
“Thanks to Dirt Eater’s miracle technology-”
Jack slammed Steve up against the wall. His glasses flew free, and the world lost focus.
“-you’ll keep your car looking showroom clean-”
Jack drove Steve’s gun hand into the wall-again-again-shocking his knuckles with jolts of pain.
“-and it takes less than ten minutes a week!”
The Beretta was slipping from Steve’s slick fingers.
Jack rammed his arm against the wall, and a blaze of heat burst from his elbow to his wrist.
“Dirt Eater works great on all kinds of finishes-”
Helplessly, Steve let the pistol fall.
Jack released him, grabbed at it.
“-and on fiberglass bodies, too!”
Steve’s foot blurred. He kicked the Beretta across the room. It skated noisily on the tiles.
Jack socked him hard in the gut, driving breath and strength out of him, then jerked his knife hand free.
The blade arrowed forward. Steve flung himself sideways, out of its reach, and dived to the floor.
Too late he realized he’d moved in the wrong direction, away from the gun.
“So if you want to give your car that fresh-from-the-dealer shine-”
Jack saw his mistake, scrambled for the Beretta on the other side of the room.
Steve grabbed the TV stand, pulled himself to his feet. Backlit by the picture tube, he made a perfect target.
“-try the new Dirt Eater-”
Jack picked up the gun.
“-the best thing to happen to the automobile-”
Steve spun behind the television.
“-since gasoline!”
Jack fired.
The TV set exploded in a cascade of pinwheeling glitter.
Jack shielded his eyes as sparks swarmed over him like angry fireflies.
Steve darted into the dining room. Here darkness was total. The breeze on his face told him the direction of the patio doorway.
He ran outside into a mist of starlight filtering through the latticed roof of the pergola. Without his glasses he perceived most objects as watery smears. The wash of bone white before him was the upended lounge chair; he remembered skirting past it on his way into the house.
He’d had the gun then. He’d still had a chance against Jack. Now he was disarmed, and he and Kirstie were doomed.
Clambering over the chair, he risked a backward look. Jack wasn’t following, not yet.
The garden gate was still locked; he’d climbed the low wall to get inside. Now he lost a handful of seconds groping blindly for the latch.
He was sure Jack was behind him. Probably had him in the Beretta’s sights.
Again he glanced over his shoulder. Still nothing. No movement, no footsteps, no sign of pursuit.
Then he was sprinting down the trail, while around him the tropical night rustled and buzzed and shrilled, jungle-movie noises, the soundtrack of a nightmare, and suppose all of this was only a nightmare-yes-and soon he would wake, Kirstie beside him, Anastasia curled on the floor near the bed, everything fine and normal. He rises from bed, he turns on the morning news-Mister Twister has been nabbed by the FBI in Salt Lake City, and he’s not Jack Dance, he’s a different man entirely, Steve’s fears were unfounded, silly-how could Jack have murdered Meredith or anyone else? Good old Jack? Ridiculous. He’s no killer, and Steve hasn’t been concealing a homicide all these years, and so there’ll be no more awful dreams like the one had last night, the one where Jack was loose on Pelican Key and Steve was running, running…
Falling.
The dirt path tore the tender skin of his palms as he sprawled on hands and knees. Pain shocked him back to reality.
His mind had drifted off again, anchorless, rudderless. Drifted into fantasy and hallucination.
A new wave of the sedative was spreading through him. The capsules were the time-release variety; some of the granules had been absorbed immediately into his bloodstream, but others were still in his digestive tract, where they would be broken down in successive phases over the next several hours.
If he could prevent any further absorption of the sedative, the dose he’d already assimilated would wear off quickly enough.
He looked around him. Jack was nowhere in sight. For the moment, then, he was safe.
With a final effort he lurched to his feet and staggered down the trail, toward the beach.
He knew what he was looking for. He only hoped he could find it in a world of darkness and fog.
Steve was gone by the time Jack reopened his eyes and blinked away the blue retinal afterimages spotting his vision.
Must have left via the French doors in the dining room. No time to hunt him down now. Without the gun, he was no longer a serious threat or an urgent priority.
Kirstie was Jack’s main concern at the moment.
She would almost certainly be making her way around the house, toward the dock. When she reached it, she could take the motorboat to Islamorada.
Fortunately, the dense brush would slow her progress. Jack still had time to intercept her.
Still, she would be wary about approaching the dock. Somehow he would have to get close enough to squeeze off a clean shot.
Or perhaps-he smiled with the beginning of a thought-perhaps he could make her come to him.
35
Kirstie’s arms were red with scratches, her legs peppered with insect bites. She had no idea how long she’d been thrashing through the brush or how near she might be to the dock.
Jack hadn’t come after her. She was quite sure of that. And twice she’d heard what had sounded like a gunshot from the direction of the house.
Had Steve shot Jack? Was it possible?
She was hardly planning to go back and ask.
The night was hot and wet, the moonless sky bright with stars. Around her stretched a tangled waste of wildflowers, creepers, and sporadic eruptions of slash pines, their glossy needles gleaming like bundled knives. Birds screeched and hooted in the dark.