Jeanine had disappeared.
Chapter 69
THAT DIDN’T JUST HAPPEN.
Inside the wall-to-wall-crowded Grand Central Starbucks, I stood at the milk and sugar stand by the window.
Bathed in sweat, I tried to keep myself from hyperventilating.
Peter? Here? Now? How was that possible?
I didn’t know. I was having trouble breathing, let alone thinking.
When I wasn’t looking out over Lexington Avenue, I had my head craned around at the shop’s side window and side door, which opened onto the train station’s corridor. If Peter came in, my plan was to run screaming through the door back into the train station’s main concourse and try to flag down one of the many antiterror cops. I shivered like a cornered rabbit.
I hadn’t even gotten down to Key West, and already I was playing a game of hide-and-seek, with my life as the prize.
Maybe I was just being paranoid, I thought, scanning the passing faces beyond the plateglass window. Couldn’t it have been somebody who just looked like Peter? I was heading down to Key West now, after all. Peter was certainly at the forefront of my mind, not to mention embedded in my subconscious. Maybe my overstressed brain had jumped to the wrong conclusion.
Then again, maybe not!
I needed to act. I looked across Lexington. I could actually see my town car, idling outside my office building. I quickly fumbled open my bag. I took out the card that the driver, a very pleasant West Indian man who called himself Mr. Ken, had given me.
“Hi, um, Mr. Ken?” I said. “This is Nina Bloom. Were you able to get my package from my office?”
“It’s right here in the front seat beside me,” he said.
“Great. Do you see the Starbucks on the west side of Lex in front of you? I’m right here by the window. Would you come over and get me?”
“On my way,” he said.
“Thanks, Mr. Ken,” I said to him in person when I bolted across the sidewalk and dove into the car ten seconds later. And thank God for cell phones, I thought.
I locked the door before I scrunched down low in the seat.
Mr. Ken raised an eyebrow at me in the rearview mirror.
“Did you forget your coffee, Ms. Bloom?” he said in his lilting accent.
“Oh, I already drank it, thanks,” I lied, glancing out the window, panicked. “If we could head out to JFK now, Mr. Ken, that would be really great.”
I scrunched down even farther in the seat. I didn’t breathe again until Mr. Ken hit the gas.
Chapter 70
ON THE CORNER of 42nd Street and Lexington, Peter stood scanning faces. He looked frantically up the unbelievably crowded street in front of Grand Central. Nothing. No ivory jacket. Not across the street or anywhere. He’d screwed up. His rat had found her hole.
What a bust! He’d had her, and then he’d lost her again.
As he stood there fuming, a memory bubbled up. It was of his first and only bow hunting trip with his dad in New Hampshire when he was seven. He was in the forest taking a leak when an enormous black bear appeared ten feet in front of him. Before he could yell out, there was a thwap from his dad’s compound bow, and the shaft of an arrow popped out of one of the bear’s eyes. The animal dropped like a tipped-over piece of furniture.
His father climbed down from the blind and knelt over the fallen monster, inhaling loudly as he wafted the blood aroma into his face like a chef over a pot. Peter had almost wet himself when his dad suddenly grabbed him and shoved his face down toward the blood-splattered bear until they were nose to black-and-bloody nose.
“This life, you either get the bear,” the crazy drunken bastard had said in his French Canadian accent, “or the bear gets you. Your choice, yes?”
Exactly, Peter thought.
At least he knew Jeanine lived in New York City, knew that she worked somewhere around here. Hell, knowing that she was still alive was enough. Catching up with her wasn’t an if anymore, it was a when.
His phone rang. He glanced at the screen. His wife, Vicki.
Horns honked as he stared up at the endless windows, his rage cooling now, replaced by his hunter’s natural, cold patience.
“Don’t worry, I’m going to get that bear somehow, Pop,” Peter said as he lifted his phone. “Always have. Always will.”
Book Four. THE PRODIGAL WIFE RETURNS
Chapter 71
I DIDN’T KNOW what time it was when I woke with a start, spilling Justin Harris’s court transcripts.
The plane that I was now on was a tiny fifty-seater. I’d had an hour layover in Atlanta before getting on the disconcertingly small aircraft.
After I put Harris’s folder away, I looked out the tiny window, wondering how close we were. There was nothing but water underneath us now, as silver and bright as tinfoil under the harsh Southern sunlight.
As I was staring at the light, the butterflies in my stomach woke up and got right back to work.
It was Florida light. Key West light.
Was I safe now? Hadn’t I left Peter back in New York? I didn’t know.
I looked up as the cabin speaker tolled out a musical bong, and the stewardess announced that we were about fifteen minutes out. Across the aisle, a decent-looking, fair-skinned man of about fifty smiled at me. He wore Bermuda shorts and a gray NYU gym shirt and had wavy strawberry blond hair.
He was Australian and quite drunk. I knew these things because he’d tried to hit on me by the gate in Atlanta. Under other circumstances, I probably would have let him. I certainly could have used a drink.
“To paradise,” Crocodile Dundee said with a goofy theatrical flourish as he raised his plastic cup to me. I smiled politely before looking away.
More like Paradise Lost for me, I thought, staring back out the window. I made out the line of a large structure beneath us.
I closed my eyes, my stomach suddenly seizing up, my teeth and ears aching with tension. Clammy sweat stuck my shirt to my back as the coffin wall of the fifty-seater plane suddenly felt like it was bearing down on me, burying me alive.
The structure I’d spotted was the Overseas Highway. The same Overseas Highway where the Jump Killer had almost murdered me nearly two decades before. As if that weren’t heart attack–inducing enough, as the plane descended, the white hot Florida light began sparking off fishing boat after fishing boat, each one a carbon copy of the Stingray Peter sailed.
I shouldn’t have come here, I thought, instantly overcome with terror. This was stupid. I was stupid. I’d escaped from hell. Why was I going back?
“Oh, I’m so sorry, honey,” a Southern voice cooed in my ear. It was the stewardess, a short, sturdy blond woman in her early fifties. She held my hand. “I can see it in your face. Don’t worry. Everybody gets airsick sometimes. Even me. Is there anything I can do for you?”
Turn the plane around, I felt like telling her. But was that even safe? Did I have anywhere to hide now?
As she snapped open a vomit bag, I heard the landing gear hum down. I felt its jolt beneath my feet as it locked into place.
Then black stars lit across the inside of my closed eyelids as I threw up. With an embarrassingly loud and drawn-out retching sound, I returned the airline’s complimentary honey-roasted peanuts and Diet Coke. When I glanced across the aisle again, my Aussie buddy was intently studying his in-flight magazine.