“Not bad,” she said. “I could see that.”
“It’s fractal. My strategy.”
“Excuse me?”
Dallas tried to explain. “When you’re down in a little eddy current of a fractal arm, you can’t see the larger pattern it belongs to. You may not even be aware there is a larger pattern. All you get are those little separate details of the hook-curve you’re meandering around in. So, Gurtz’s gate is oscillating on some pattern of its own. We just need to see it. We know the farthest out it went was Hallandale, and then it started heading back south.”
“Gurtz says he thinks you’re onto something.” Charlotte’s voice sounded hopeful.
Dallas and Buster spent the morning combing neighborhoods near the airport with no results, eventually working their way south toward downtown Miami. By mid-afternoon, footsore and overheated, they met Charlotte for food at a Calle Ocho sidewalk café in Little Havana that Dallas liked to frequent when he was a student at FIU and had spending money. Charlotte treated them to pork-stuffed tostones rellenos and tres leches cake. With good food in his stomach and a sea breeze drying his sweaty face, Dallas felt better. He poured ice water from his glass into the empty salsa bowl and put it down for Buster, who noisily lapped it up, ice and all.
“I dunno, maybe I was wrong about the gate coming back. It made perfect sense to me this morning.” He watched a couple of old-timers playing chess at a table nearby. Beyond them, a young black girl with very green eyes stared at Dallas. It was a pain in the ass to have to be suspicious of everybody around them, but if the assassin was in a human body, he could be stalking them right now and they wouldn’t even know it.
“What do you think, keep heading south toward Coconut Grove?”
Charlotte drove them back to the financial district around Brickell Avenue and parked in the company lot. They wandered among the glass and steel towers for a block or two when Buster suddenly yelped in surprise. He took off trotting, Dallas and Charlotte running to catch up. “After him! Down that street!”
They ran flat out, Buster catching the scent and then losing it.
“It’s here, I know it!” Charlotte gasped, as Dallas leaned against the side of an office building, trying to catch his breath. “It’s circling southward, like you guessed.”
They chased the trail of the drifting gate down to Bicentennial Park. It occurred to Dallas that if the damned thing sailed out over open water, they were SOL. Besides which, the sun would be setting before long — a few street lights were starting to come on, and the Art Deco magenta pylon lights along the split lanes of the MacArthur Causeway cast rippling ribbons of color across the bay all the way to Watson Island.
Dallas was about to give Gurtz some grief for being such a half-assed sorcerer when he heard Charlotte mutter under her breath. “Oh shit.”
In Dallas’s current experience, he knew exactly what that meant.
“Where?”
“Can’t course the direction exactly, but Gurtz says his scent is strong near the causeway.” Buster was trembling and growling, his nostrils blown wide.
Behind them, a lone figure came up the cracked sidewalk. Dallas retreated onto the causeway’s pedestrian corridor. The stranger advanced, walking steadily. Dallas quickened his pace. “Hoof it. I don’t like his looks.”
They headed over the causeway at a trot. The incline wasn’t overly steep, just enough to prevent them from seeing beyond the top of the bridge. Dallas took a quick look over his shoulder. The guy behind them was still there, but not gaining on them. They’d nearly crested the bridge when another figure came into view, walking toward them from the other direction. A nice looking guy, hands in his khakis, he came quickly along the walkway. As they passed he nodded and smiled, a familiar face. Instantly a thin whine like a dentist’s drill erupted as the man stooped and slashed at Charlotte, the splitter shearing across ribs and belly. Without hesitating, Dallas grabbed her and did the unthinkable. He jumped.
It took longer to hit the water than he would’ve thought, but maybe time dilated when you were in shock. Clutching Charlotte’s body tightly to his chest, they hit the water hard and sank for terrifying seconds as everything went cold and black. Silently giving thanks to all those high school swim meets that had pushed his aquatic skills to the limit, Dallas crested the surface quietly, trying to spread as few ripples as possible. He was drifting under the causeway, close to one of the gigantic pylons and some yards nearer land than the point from which he’d jumped. He was a strong swimmer and under normal circumstances wouldn’t have given a second thought about swimming the distance to the shoreline ramp where the causeway met land, but holding a mortally wounded friend made it a wholly different game. He had no problem swimming laps in the clear, chlorinated pool at his high school, but navigating the dark turbulent waters of Biscayne Bay at dusk ranked right up there with his most favorite nightmares. Buster’s snout broke the surface not far from them.
Like a light switch flipped on, he suddenly remembered where he’d see the assassin — Charlotte’s, Marilyn’s, apartment — the friendly next door neighbor. He should’ve known. But he hadn’t quite got the hang of being on the run back then, so he hadn’t been suspicious enough. He shuddered to think that he might have actually gone into the guy’s apartment for drinks… and body parts? He shoved those thoughts aside and concentrated on staying alive.
A powerboat bore down on them, so close he could see the pilot’s face in the glare of the pylon display lights, his head tilted back chugging a beer and oblivious to anything in the water he might run over. Dallas had always considered the nighttime show that defined the MacArthur decorative lighting project as uselessly garish as the rest of Miami Beach, but tonight it kept him from floundering around in complete darkness. The wake from the cigar boat washed him up against the horizontal concrete span between two pylons. Spluttering, he held Charlotte’s head above the waterline and bit down on the pain as barnacles encrusting the pylon raked his back and shoulder. Buster whimpered and treaded water beside them.
“Hold on,” he whispered. “I won’t let them kill us.”
The distant drone of the Miami Coast Guard’s small search and rescue vessel got louder and filled the space near the bridge as a searchlight played over the water. Within seconds, it caught him in the eyes.
A radio crackled. “Yeah, we found them. Pulling alongside now.”
Dallas counted the seconds as the rescue boat idled closer. A crew member leaned over the side and tossed him an inflated ring like a giant peppermint lifesaver. “Are you all right? Can you grab on?” Dallas hooked his free arm over the ring and felt the tug as he was pulled in toward the boat.
“Got a couple of 911 calls from people who saw you go off the bridge. That’s a sixty-foot drop or so. You fall or get pushed?”
Dallas was shaking so hard he could barely get the words out. “W-whack job up there slashed my friend. She’s bleeding to death, n-need a doctor.”
It didn’t take seconds for the Coast Guard rescue crew to assess the situation. The guy at the helm made another call on his radio, while the crew helped Dallas, Charlotte, and Buster aboard. The man who seemed to be in charge turned to Dallas. “Closest 24/7 emergency service is a few miles upriver. I just put in a call — the ambulance’ll be waiting for us at the dock.”
He shook out a blanket and wrapped it around Charlotte. “People are crazy, you know?”
“D-did you spot anybody up on the bridge, near the top?” Dallas’ teeth clacked together, mostly from the adrenaline shock of jumping and dropping such a long way down. Who would’ve thought the water would be so cold this late in May?
“No, but we alerted the police. They’ll catch him before he can get off the causeway. Who would want to hurt someone like that? It’s inhuman, ain’t it?”