She tried, tried with all her strength, to turn and look up to see his face, to call out for help, but her body refused to follow her brain’s command.
She couldn’t turn, couldn’t speak, her neck and face burned by the wool of the rug, her mouth open as she tried to breathe, blood across her lips and cheek.
When the first, vicious kick landed, perfectly aimed at her kidneys, Hailey screamed out in pain, but the scream went muffled into the carpet and then, with the next excruciating kick, the dark gray swirls disappeared. Hailey Dean’s world went black.
37
St. Simons Island, Georgia
IT WAS NEARLY 3 A.M., AND THE GUERRILLAS WERE ASSEMBLED IN THE stealthiest and most mysterious black outfits they could muster, hoping to blend into the night like the cat burglars they’d seen on TV. Clustered amid the pines outside Palmetto Dunes Luxury Living, they were locked and loaded, primed and ready for the moment they’d waited for their whole lives.
There would be plenty of time ahead to plan an overall strategy for a meaningful deterrent strike at the mastermind of Palmetto Dunes Luxury Living. But for now, for tonight, the guerrillas were taking a notorious page from the Vietcong’s book.
A sniper attack was the only obvious choice for a successful strike against a power much greater than the guerrillas: a construction company out of Atlanta with big money backing.
From behind the cover of dense pine saplings, twelve pairs of eyes were trained on the solitary guard inside his shack. Biding their time, they waited, poised, for just the right moment to attack.
“Anybody seen him before?” Virginia asked in a whisper.
None of the twelve were sure who he was, although they speculated in minced whispers, until it dawned on Renee.
“I know who he is! He’s the guy that works security for the Brunswick Wal-Mart.”
“He must’ve gotten a serious pay increase,” Ken chimed in. Ken was an authority on many, many subjects, and apparently the compensation at Wal-Mart was one of them. “I happen to know for a fact the security guards at Wal-Mart eat free at the Wal-Mart grill.”
Free lunch or no free lunch, in exchange for the speculated pay raise, he was now sitting alone in a glorified outhouse at three in the morning, watching TBS.
But there he sat, apparently mesmerized by a late-, late-, late-night TBS showing of Conan the Barbarian.
After fifteen minutes or so of keen surveillance, Virginia was convinced the guard was actually going to watch Conan the Barbarian in its entirety, so there was no use waiting for him to fall asleep. The good news was he was so engrossed in the movie he wouldn’t possibly notice any movement outside.
Virginia gave the command.
The guerrillas obediently slipped through the pines.
Without speaking, they moved on, past the guardhouse-then stopped short, all of them, all at once.
There it loomed, about twenty yards ahead: a horrible, manmade clearing where once there had been a series of graceful, sweeping dunes.
They simply stood, gazing at the scarred landscape.
Then Virginia gave a firm nod.
They stepped out of the pines to begin the endless task of dragging Palmetto Dunes Luxury Living-the whole kit and caboodle, load by load-to the water’s edge
Thin pine slats lay precisely over the ground to mark the outlines where cement would be poured. Now they were yanked away and placed on bedsheets they’d brought from home. Along with the slats went the strings that had been measured, cut, and staked with an engineer’s unquestioned accuracy. Every vestige of orange marker was untied from surrounding trees. Bag upon heavy bag of dry concrete mixture was lugged across the sand.
Against all their deepest, heartfelt convictions against littering in any form, they heaped it all there on the shore. Mother Nature would have the morning tide take most of it, wave by rhythmic wave, out to sea and, ultimately, to the ocean’s floor. In a matter of hours, the fishies would be gnawing delicately at the stripped-down boards, still smelling of sweet pinesap.
38
New York City
“HAILEY. CAN YOU HEAR ME AT ALL? HAILEY, WAKE UP.”
Hailey heard it all, but from far away. She thought Fincher had been standing over her, calling her name, but then he disappeared. Hailey’s eyes opened to a pale-green hospital room, the faint smell of medicine hanging in the air.
Dana was standing beside her.
“What…happened?” she whispered. Even her throat hurt.
“You fell and knocked yourself out, Hailey. You took a really bad blow to the head.”
“What? Where? What are you doing here? Where are we?”
“You were in my office.”
Right. Dana’s office…
It was all so fuzzy, though.
“Where are we now?”
“The hospital. You’ve been out for hours, and I’ve been worried sick. How do you feel?”
Hailey opened her mouth to answer, but Dana shook her head. “No, don’t try to talk. Now that you’re awake, I’ll call a doctor to come check on you.”
“Dana, don’t, I’m fine.” She tried to sit up to prove her point, and a sharp pain shot through her torso.
Tears sprung to her eyes and spilled down her cheeks.
“See? You are not fine!”
She sank back against the pillows. “You said I hit my head, but it’s my side that’s killing me. What happened to me, exactly?”
“How would I know? I wasn’t there! I can’t believe you don’t remember it all. Meanwhile, I’m a wreck, Hailey, nothing but a wreck! I swear I’m going to have a breakdown over this whole thing and-”
“If you don’t tell me what-”
“Okay, okay, o-kay…here’s what happened. I’m minding my own business, as always, on my way home after one of those horrible singles mixers at MOMA, I don’t know why I even bothered to go, they’re always disasters, and besides, I do have Greg, but he was busy last night, and like I always say, you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket, am I right about that?”
“Right,” Hailey said weakly, knowing Dana expected a response. It hurt to speak. It hurt to breathe.
“So I stopped back at work, thinking he might have come by and left a note on the door, because he’s done that before, and I found you lying in my office, out cold. You lost a lot of blood, too, on the rug. Don’t worry though, I think the dry cleaner can fix it. You split your head wide open on the coffee table. I know you have really low blood pressure. You must have passed out. Or maybe you tripped and fell-my office was kind of a mess-but how did you get those horrible bruises down your ribs and hips? What are you, a professional stunt girl, too? You must have done one crazy flip.”
My office was kind of a mess…
Suddenly Hailey sat up in bed again. A sharp pain sliced through her head and an incredible ache pierced her ribs, but she barely noticed.
The Post article.
“Oh my God, Melissa.” She felt sick to her stomach, and the warm taste of vomit came up her throat and to the back of her mouth.
“No…I’m not Melissa. Hailey, it’s me, Dana.”
“No, Dana, it’s Melissa…”
“No, you’re Hailey. Haaay-leee. Oh, my God. I’ll go get a doctor.”
“Dana, no…”
The door opened abruptly, stopping Dana in her tracks.
A tall, angular man in his late thirties, looking too weather-beaten and deeply tanned for a New Yorker, came in uninvited. His face was hard, with a cool glint in a pair of icy-blue eyes and a square, seemingly immovable jaw. Dana turned on him. “Excuse us, this is a private room.”