… the candlestick.
The runabout reached the reef on a crest of surging water and rose, propelled by momentum, lifted on the blanket of spray thrown up by the rocks and rising higher, higher, sailing over the reef in a graceful slow-motion curve.
Somewhere Kirstie was screaming. Jack ignored her. He had done it. He was flying. Flying.
The boat’s nose tipped down.
The reef flew up.
He had time to realize he hadn’t cleared the rocks Crack-up.
The runabout slammed headfirst into the coral ridge and blew apart in a hail of shattered floorboards and hissing Hypalon tubes.
Moore clung to the handrail as the Black Caesar heeled to starboard, scraping the reef on the port side.
Dimly she was aware that Jack’s boat had broken up.
She hoped Mrs. Gardner was all right.
No more victims. Please.
The force of the collision catapulted Kirstie out of the runabout. Her world turned somersaults, reef and sky exchanging places, and then the reef was behind her, water rushing up in a kaleidoscopic glitter, cold shock of immersion, and she floundered, gasping, fists slapping the green swells.
Around her bobbed scraps of the runabout, pushed by the wind. Inflation compartments, their seams burst, shriveled slowly like punctured balloons. Splintered driftwood scraped the rocks. The severed stern slowly foundered, buoyancy chambers deflating, the weight of the outboard motor bolted to the transom dragging it down.
On the far side of the reef, the Black Caesar hove to. The brawny figure on the bridge was Captain Pice, pointing at her, while beside him a woman in a dark suit jacket shouted for someone named Peter.
It all seemed distant, unreal, an out-of-body experience. Perhaps she hadn’t survived the crash, after all. Perhaps she’d died with Jack.
Jack…
Had he died?
And if not-where was he?
Sudden urgency stabbed through her unnatural calm. She turned, scanning the water, and abruptly a huge dark shape filled her field of vision.
Jack rising up, mouth twisted in a snarl, hands reaching out like an animal’s claws.
Kirstie almost found the strength to scream, and then those hands closed off her throat, fingers squeezing, and she was plunged under the waves.
In his mind, Jack was eighteen again, alone with Meredith Turner in the swimming pavilion, holding her underwater, drowning her, drowning the bitch.
“Fuck you, Meredith,” he rasped as her blond hair fanned and rippled, graceful as a sea anemone. “Fuck you.”
Something tugged his right leg.
What the hell?
Another tug, and he was yanked below the surface.
Through the crystalline water he saw a taut cable extending from his foot to the submerging mass of the runabout’s stern.
The mooring line. He must have gotten tangled in it when he tumbled free of the boat. One end was cleated to the transom; as the stern descended, the rope was pulling him along.
If he released his hold on Kirstie, he might be able to free himself.
Yes, he might. But he would not try.
We die together, Meredith. I’ll never let you go.
Sinking deeper. Sunlight fading. The need for air a searing ache in her lungs.
She pummeled Jack, battering his shoulders, delivering weak blows to his head.
No use. His hands still wrapped her neck, a python’s coils, constricting tighter, tighter.
In desperation she raked her ragged nails across his chest, clawing his shirt to tatters.
Buttons popped loose. His vest pocket flapped open. Something compact and shiny spilled out and cartwheeled slowly through the water.
A knife. His Swiss Army knife.
She seized it. Fumbled the spear blade out of its slot.
Instantly the choking pressure on her neck was gone. Jack grabbed her knife hand, held the blade at bay. It glittered between them, silvery in the dimming light.
She struggled to break free of his grip. Impossible. His fingers were iron bars, unyielding.
Slowly he pushed her hand back, driving the knife toward her own throat.
He meant to savage her with the blade, kill her with the same knife that had ripped open Steve’s belly in the swamp.
Steve…
Probably dead by now. Or dying, alone in the dark. Because of this man in the water with her, this predator, this venomous snake.
Fury made her strong.
She stiffened her arm, stopping the blade only inches from her neck, and with a final wrenching effort she forced the knife forward, overpowering Jack as he fought to hold her back, and thrust the needle-sharp point into the soft skin below his jaw.
Blood erupted in a black spume. He released her arm, twisted free of the knife, and she stabbed again, gouging his face-again, slicing through his lips-again, grooving a horizontal slash across his forehead-again and again, her arm swinging wildly, while his hands flailed in a useless attempt at self-defense.
Air bubbled from his mouth, mixing with fluttery ribbons of blood. His eyes were wide and confused, and in them she could read his thoughts, his terrified, plaintive protest: This can’t be happening to me!
She thought once more of Steve, then of poor Ana, then of the seven women Jack had bragged of killing, and the knife hacked yet again, butchering his face, the blade carving savagely as fierce ecstasy swelled in her, an orgiastic exultation that craved blood and pain.
In that moment she understood the dark passions that had moved Jack through his days and nights of death. She knew how he’d felt when he claimed each victim’s life.
And she knew there was a part of him in her, in everyone. A part that must be resisted if it was not to be released.
Agony.
His face torn, a dozen new mouths opening to lick the water with tongues of blood.
He gave up trying to fend off the knife’s attacks. The hungry blade would not be denied.
Spasms shook his body. His legs kicked, arms thrashed; he jerked and twitched and flailed, convulsions hammering him out of shape.
His women had died this way. He’d relished their furious contortions, their final shuddering exit from this life.
But now he was the one dying in a spastic tangle of limbs, he was the one going down alone into the dark; and it was no fun at all.
The rope dragged him lower. Kirstie began to slip away. He made a last attempt to haul her with him to oblivion. His bleeding hands found her leg; his fingers closed over her ankle. She kicked free. And then she was above him, out of reach, and he went on dropping like an anchor, cheated of his prize.
Looking up, he saw her in silhouette against the sunstruck surface of the sea. She seemed to hover there, outlined in an aureole of sun. He thought irrationally of those near-death experiences people reported, the angel beckoning to the liberated spirit at the entrance to a tunnel of light.
But this angel wasn’t beckoning. She retreated from him, cruel in her indifference. The light faded. And he was plunging down in an endless, weightless fall, into a pit of night.
Kirstie watched Jack vanish into the gloom. The last she saw of him was his upturned face, incised with a crosshatched intaglio of scars, his eyes wide and staring, mouth stretched in a voiceless scream.
Then he was gone, lost somewhere within a rising cloud of blood; and with him went her anger and her strength.
A wave of weariness passed over her. Her fingers splayed; the knife fell from her grasp to join its master in the depths.
She had almost no energy left. But enough, perhaps, to reach the surface before her last residues of air seeped away. Enough to live.
Kicking hard, she climbed toward daylight.
50
The search-team leader and the chopper pilot were first to reach the row of shacks on the east end of Pelican Key.