If by “help out,” you mean “save my life,” I thought. “Thank you so much,” I said.
The woman shook her head. “Well, c’mon,” she said, boarding the truck and waving me up.
Mike, the driver, was bald and had a Hemingway-esque curly white beard. His head was down on the wheel, and he was breathing heavily when I entered the cab. And his agitated face was whiter than his beard.
“I’m so sorry, sir,” I said to him.
He just shook his head as his wife closed the door.
“Told you this run to the Keys would be interesting, Mike,” the woman said. “Keep your eyes peeled for any more youngsters napping in the middle of this goddamn road.”
I looked out the window at the water as the truck crunched into gear and we rolled out. I couldn’t see anything along the concrete bridge wall. There was no movement in the water, no movement in the brush. The Jump Killer must have been hiding underneath the side of the bridge, I realized. Like a troll, I thought, still dizzy with panic.
After a minute, as the truck began to pick up speed, Mary Ann rummaged in the berth behind her and handed me a towel. Wrapping myself in it, I wriggled up against the passenger door and stared out at the stars sliding past. The lights of the road ahead curved out over the dark water like spots on a connect-the-dots sheet.
What would the next dot be? I wondered. More ruin, no doubt. More horror. More pain.
Because I was cursed, I thought. Wherever I went, death and craziness homed in on me. I seemed to emit a scent that attracted these things.
I tried to figure out why that was. Was it something in my nature? My inherent gullibility?
As we roared around a long curve of the Overseas Highway, out on the water to my right I suddenly saw a small, distant light. It was the tiny running light of a small anchored sailboat.
Or Ramón Peña, I thought as my ten-ton eyelids began to drop. It was the soul of the man I had run over and allowed Peter to sink in the ocean. Ramón was the reason for my bad luck, the reason why I would always be hounded. Peter wasn’t the only one with blood on his hands.
I deserved to be haunted, I thought, and then I finally, gloriously, passed out.
Book Three. NEW YORK NINA
Chapter 50
I SIT IN WHITENESS, getting ready for my wedding. I’m wearing a fluffy white robe and white curlers in my hair. Even the separators between my freshly polished toenails are a chaste virginal white.
I smile as I suddenly notice the white roses that cover the bathroom’s entire countertop. They glow almost painfully in the undiluted Florida light that fills the room.
As I put the finishing touches on my mascara in the makeup mirror, there’s a pounding on the door.
“Come out with your hands up!” Peter says through a bullhorn. “And those little panties of yours held high!”
I begin to laugh but stop as I hear the coughing sound of a gas engine being started with a rip cord. Is it a lawn mower? I think, turning toward the door.
Immediately bits of wood explode inward, spraying my face, and I see the tip of the chain saw as it cuts a slot in the door. As I watch, the spinning blade disappears, and through the hole a face appears, like Jack Nicholson’s in The Shining. I think it’s Peter, but it’s not. It’s the almost Asian face of the Jump Killer.
“How’s my fair Nina?” he says, flashing me his white capped teeth.
As I turn to run, I trip on the lip of the tub. I grasp the edge of the shower curtain, but the rings pop off the rail one by one, and I fall backward into warm water. As I scramble up, I see it’s not water at all but blood, and in the tub beside me, spooning like a honeymooning couple, are the dead bodies of Elena Cardenas and Ramón Peña.
Covered in blood, I scream, flailing as I see that half of Ramón Peña’s face is missing, the white of his skull stark against the sea of red.
I woke up. Struggling to catch my breath, I looked up into darkness while my heart clubbed the inside of my chest. And I really thought I was going to have a heart attack when I saw a dark figure was hovering above me.
“Angel of Death,” I spat out.
“Mom?” Emma said, clicking on my bedside lamp.
My eyes burned as she started shaking my shoulder.
“Wake up, Mom,” she said. “We both overslept. I can’t find my new AE shirt. You know, the nice blue one? Jeez, you’re covered in sweat. Are you sick? Don’t tell me you’ve got the swine flu?”
I wish, I felt like telling my daughter as I pulled the sheet over my head. You could get over the swine flu. I mopped my clammy brow on the other side of my pillow.
My recurring nightmares, on the other hand, were the gift that kept right on giving.
Even after almost twenty years.
“Oh, I know,” Emma said. “Too much champagne at my party last night. That’s it. You’re hungover.”
Emma was teasing, of course.
“Ha, ha, wise girl,” I said, lifting the cover and suddenly smiling. “Your blue shirt’s crisply ironed on a hanger in my closet, Little Miss Sweet Sixteen. And you’re welcome for last night’s party. It wasn’t like it was expensive or anything. I think it was worth having to eat cat food when I’m old, don’t you?”
Emma stuck out her tongue. I stuck out mine right back. Emma and I were close, like sisters and best friends put together, only better. We even shared clothes. Which pissed her off. I guess it would piss me off a little, too, to have a mother who could fit into my jeans.
“As if you’ll ever be old,” Emma said, climbing into the bed and wrapping me in a headlock. “You know how many of my stupid friends’ mothers asked if you were my older sister? Even some of Mark’s Collegiate buddies were checking you out. It’s really not fair. Isn’t Snow White supposed to be the fairest one of all? Come on, Evil Queen. Step aside already.”
“Never,” I said with a cackle.
Again, Emma was teasing. Due to a death-march regimen of treadmilling and starvation, at forty I was just still in the ballpark of merely pretty. Emma, who had inherited Peter’s dark, beguiling looks on the other hand, was already nearly six feet tall and a heart-melting beauty.
I wasn’t the only one who thought so, either. Every once in a while, she’d get legit offers for modeling from friends of friends. Which I told her that I’d let her do over my dead body, of course.
As much as we were friends, I was very protective of her. Probably overly so. I didn’t care. I knew what the world was like, how precarious, how quickly and completely destruction could follow from just one false move.
Emma was going to have a good life, a normal life, a safe life. It was all that mattered.
“The last thing I’d worry about is your looks, kiddo,” I said, knocking on her head with a knuckle. “Now, that brain of yours, well, that’s another story.”
I ducked as she swung my pillow.
“Shit!” I screamed as I finally glanced at my iPhone charging on the night table and saw the time. “Why didn’t you tell me we were so late!?”
Chapter 51
IT WAS POURING RAIN four hours later when, umbrella-less, I decided to race from my triple-parked taxi toward the crowded Aretsky’s Patroon on East 46th Street. Not good. It was only a hundred feet or so, but I got completely and utterly hosed in the monsoon.