Nevertheless, face-to-face with Rose, recklessly determined to have an answer at any cost, fiercely insistent, Joe pressed his question: “Where’s Nina?”
“Dead,” she said, seeming to wrench the word from herself.
“Like hell she is.”
“Please, Joe—”
He was furious with her for lying to him, as so many others had lied to him during the past year. “Like hell she is. No way. No damn way. I’ve talked to Mercy Ealing. Nina was alive that night and she’s alive now, somewhere.”
“If they know we’re in this building,” Rose repeated in a voice that now shook with urgency, “they can remote us. Like the Delmanns. Like Lisa. Like Captain Blane!”
“Where is Nina?”
The elevator motor rumbled to life, and the cab began to hum upward through the shaft.
“Where is Nina?”
Overhead, the banquet room lights dimmed, probably because the elevator drew power from their circuit.
At the dimming of the lights, Rose cried out in terror, threw her body against Joe, trying to knock him off his feet, and clawed frenziedly at the hand that he had clamped over the lower deadbolt.
Her nails gouged his flesh, and he hissed in pain and let go of the lock, and she pulled open the door. In came a breeze that smelled of the ocean, and out went Rose into the night.
Joe rushed after her, onto a twenty-foot-wide, eighty-foot-long, elevated wood deck overhung by the restaurant. It reverberated like a kettledrum with each footfall.
The scarlet sun had bled into a grave on the far side of Japan. The sky and the sea to the west were raven meeting crow, as feathery smooth and sensuous and inviting as death.
Rose was already at the head of the stairs.
Following her, Joe found two flights that led down fourteen or sixteen feet to the beach.
As dark as Rose was, and darkly dressed, she all but vanished in the black geometry of the steps below him. When she reached the pale sand, however, she regained some definition.
The strand was more than a hundred feet across at this point, and the phosphorescent tumble of surf churned out a low white noise that washed like a ghost sea around him. This was not a swimming or surfing beach, and there were no bonfires or even Coleman lanterns in sight in either direction.
To the east, the sky was a pustulant yellow overlaid on black, full of the glow of the city, as insistent as it was meaningless. Cast from high above, the pale-yellow rectangles of light from the restaurant windows quilted part of the beach.
Joe did not try to stop Rose or to slow her. Instead, when he caught up with her, he ran at her side, shortening his stride to avoid pulling ahead of her.
She was his only link to Nina. He was confused by her apparent mysticism, by her sudden transit from beatific calm to superstitious terror, and he was furious that she would lie to him about Nina now, after she had led him to believe, at the cemetery, that she would ultimately tell him the full truth. Yet his fate and hers were inextricably linked, because only she could ever lead him to his younger daughter.
As they ran north through the soft sand and passed the corner of the restaurant, someone rushed at them from ahead and to the right, from the bluff, a shadow in the night, quick and big, like the featureless beast that seeks us in nightmares, pursuer through corridors of dreams.
“Look out,” Joe warned Rose, but she also saw the oncoming assailant and was already taking evasive action.
Joe attempted to intervene when the hurtling dark shape moved to cut Rose off — but he was blindsided by a second man, who came at him from the direction of the sea. This guy was as big as a professional football linebacker, and they both went down so hard that the breath should have been knocked out of Joe, but it wasn’t, not entirely — he was wheezing but breathing — because the sand in which they landed was deep and soft, far above the highest lapping line of the compacting tide.
He kicked, flailed, ruthlessly used knees and elbows and feet, and rolled out from under his attacker, scrambling to his feet as he heard someone shout at Rose farther along the strand—“Freeze, bitch!”—after which he heard a shot, hard and flat. He didn’t want to think about that shot, a whip of sound snapping across the beach to the growling sea, didn’t want to think about Rose with a bullet in her head and his Nina lost again forever, but he couldn’t avoid thinking about it, the possibility like a lash burn branded forever across the surface of his brain. His own assailant was cursing him and pushing up now from the sand, and as Joe spun around to deal with the threat, he was full of the meanness and fury that had gotten him thrown out of the youth boxing league twenty years ago, seething with church-vandalizing rage — he was an animal now, a heartless predator, cat-quick and savage — and he reacted as though this stranger were personally responsible for poor Frank’s being crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, as if this son of a bitch had worked some hoodoo to make Frank’s joints swell and deform, as if this wretched thug were the sole perpetrator who had somehow put a funnel in Captain Blane’s ear and poured an elixir of madness into his head, so Joe kicked him in the crotch, and when the guy grunted and began to double over, Joe grabbed the bastard’s head and at the same time drove a knee upward, shoving the face down into the knee and jamming the knee up hard into the face, a ballet of violence, and he actually heard the crunch of the man’s nose disintegrating and felt the bite of teeth breaking against his kneecap. The guy collapsed backward on the beach, all at once choking and spitting blood and gasping for breath and crying like a small child, but this wasn’t enough for Joe, because he was wild now, wilder than any animal, as wild as weather, a cyclone of anger and grief and frustration, and he kicked where he thought ribs would be, which hurt him almost as much as it hurt the broken man who received the blow, because Joe was only wearing Nikes, not hard-toed shoes, so he tried to stomp the guy’s throat and crush his windpipe, but stomped his chest instead — and would have tried again, would have killed him, not quite realizing that he was doing so, but then he was rammed from behind by a third attacker.
Joe slammed facedown onto the beach, with the weight of this new assailant atop him, at least two hundred pounds pinning him down. Head to one side, spitting sand, he tried to heave the man off, but this time his breath was knocked out of him; he exhaled all of his strength with it, and he lay helpless.
Besides, as he gasped desperately for air, he felt his attacker thrust something cold and blunt against the side of his face, and he knew what it must be even before he heard the threat.
“You want me to blow your head off, I’ll do it,” the stranger said, and his reverberant voice had a ragged homicidal edge. “I’ll do it, you asshole.”
Joe believed him and stopped resisting. He struggled only for his breath.
Silent surrender wasn’t good enough for the angry man atop him. “Answer me, you bastard. You want me to blow your damn head off? Do you?”
“No.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“Going to behave?”
“Yes.”
“I’m out of patience here.”
“All right.”
“Son of a bitch,” the stranger said bitterly.
Joe said nothing more, just spit out sand and breathed deeply, getting his strength back with his wind, though trying to stave off the return of the brief madness that had seized him.
Where is Rose?
The man atop Joe was breathing hard too, expelling foul clouds of garlic breath, not only giving Joe time to calm down but getting his own strength back. He smelled of a lime-scented cologne and cigarette smoke.