“Well, there’s no hurry,” he says.
“Because we should tell her where we’re leaving the kids, you know.”
“Yeah,” he says, and nods, and takes a long drag on the cigarette.
They are silent for several moments.
Out on the water, a fish jumps.
Then all is still again.
“Are we going to just leave them here on the dock?”
“No, that wasn’t my plan,” he says.
“Because I thought we were getting under way…”
“That’s right.”
“…soon as it got dark.”
“Right.”
“Which is pretty soon, Eddie.”
“I know it is.”
“So where are we going to leave the kids?”
“You see…” he says, and then stops, and shakes his head.
She looks at him.
“They saw me,” he says.
He draws on the cigarette.
“They know I’m alive,” he says.
She is still looking at him.
“We can’t turn them loose,” he says.
“We can’t take them with us, either, Eddie. The police’ll be looking for them everywhere we—”
“I know that.”
“We have to let them go, Eddie.”
“But we can’t,” he says.
“Then what…?”
He draws on the cigarette again.
“We’ll move out in about five minutes,” he says, and looks at the luminous dial of his watch. “We’ll head straight out to the Gulf.”
“I don’t understand. What about…?”
He does not answer.
He turns away from her penetrating gaze and tosses the cigarette overboard. Its glow arcs against the sudden blackness of the night and hits the water with a brief dying hiss.
They get to the ferry landing just as the boat is about to leave. Alice pulls the truck into a parking space alongside a red Taurus. Carol jumps out and first begins waving and shouting at the lone dockhand who is already tossing lines aboard, and next at the pilothouse to let the captain know they’re here. Alice slams the door shut on the driver’s side. They both run for the dock.
“Take it easy, you’ve got time,” the dockhand says.
The ferry carries passengers only, no cars. There are perhaps half a dozen people aboard when the captain gives a final warning toot on his horn and begins backing away from the dock. He makes a wide circle, coming around, and then points the boat’s prow toward Crescent Island, some thousand yards across the inlet.
Ten minutes later, the boat is docking on the island side.
The night is balmy and still.
Eddie has already started the engines.
The Sundancer is idling at the dock.
The two women come striding out of the darkness beyond, moving rapidly toward where he is crouched over the forward line. He does not recognize them until the dockside stanchion lights pick them up, and then he sees that it is Alice and her sister, Carol. He shakes his head and smiles because Alice looks so utterly ridiculous and helpless, her left foot in a cast, limping across the dock like a cripple. And then he sees the pistol in her hand, and the smile drops from his face. He loosens the line from its cleat and tosses it aboard. In the next instant, he leaps aboard himself, and reaches into a locker alongside the wheel.
“Where are the kids?” Alice shouts.
He is already behind the wheel.
Alice does not raise the pistol in her own hand until she sees that what he’s taken from the locker is a gun.
“Put it down!” he yells.
The thirty-two is shaking violently in her fist.
“Give me the children and leave,” Alice says. “You’re Edward Graham now, you can forget all this.”
“But will you?” he says, and smiles thinly. “Will your sister? Will the kids?”
The gun in his fist is a nine-millimeter Glock. It looks very large and very menacing, and it is pointed at her head.
“You know the penalty for kidnapping in the state of Florida?” he asks.
His tone is almost conversational. He could be giving a little talk on the wisdom of investing in growth stocks.
“You can leave Florida,” she says. “Take your girlfriend and—”
“My wife,” he corrects.
“Your…?”
“Kidnapping is a life felony, Alice. If they ever catch up with us…”
“No one will even try, Eddie. Just let the kids go!”
“Well, no,” he says, “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
And throws the engines into reverse.
She hears a click in the dark.
Is there a safety on the gun?
Has he just thrown off a safety?
She hears two simultaneous voices.
“Don’t, Eddie!”
“No, Daddy!”
The first voice is the voice Alice has heard so many times before on the telephone, the voice of the woman she came face-to-face with outside the Shell station’s ladies’ room, the woman she now sees again, rushing up from below, holding out her hand beseechingly to Eddie. His wife, Alice thinks. His wife.
The second voice is a voice Alice has not heard since the morning they learned that Eddie drowned out on the Gulf.
The second voice belongs to her dear son, Jamie.
“Don’t hurt Mommy!”
His son’s voice has no effect on him. He still has the Glock in his right hand, pointed at Alice’s head. His left hand is still steady on the stainless steel wheel as he starts to maneuver the Sundancer away from the dock.
This is the man who once matched her foot to a midnight blue slipper.
This is the man she once loved with all her heart.
She squeezes her eyes shut.
Opens them again at once, and fires.
Fires another time.
And yet another.
Blood spurts on his yellow windbreaker. She sees him crumpling over the wheel. The boat swerves back and bangs violently against the dock. She throws down the gun, and leaps onto the boat, and rushes to her son where he stands trembling just outside the slatted wooden doors leading below. The black woman whose name she still does not know says nothing. Her eyes are darting, calculating.
“Mom?”
Ashley comes from below, her eyes wide.
She glances once at her father where he lies slumped and still over the stainless steel wheel smeared now with his blood. Then she, too, rushes into Alice’s arms.
The black woman hesitates a moment longer, and then suddenly leaps ashore.
“Gee, no,” Carol says, and points the pistol at her head.
They have called all the real estate agents and condo rental offices they could find in the Yellow Pages, and have even visited one personally, but have not come up with any information on a blonde and a black woman having rented any kind of dwelling at any time during the past two months. Or at any time at all, for that matter.
So there is nothing to do now but make love again.
Rafe reflects afterward, as they both lie spent and damp on rumpled sheets in Jennifer’s bedroom, that there’s a certain time of day in Florida when a hush seems to come over the entire land. The traffic seems to come to a halt, the streets are all at once deserted, even the insects and the birds seem to fall suddenly still. Overhead, the ceiling fan rotates lazily, scattering dust motes climbing shafts of silvery moonlight. Lying on his back beside her, Rafe thinks that maybe it’s this way everywhere in the world after you’ve just made love to a beautiful passionate woman, maybe there’s just this, well, this sort of serenity that comes over you. A stillness that causes you to believe your heart has stopped, causes you to believe that maybe you’re even dead. And causes you to think.