“Last chance, Claire.”
“No!” She flung more words at him, called him a son of a bitch and something else he didn’t listen to, and then he was outside.
Immediately the door banged shut behind him and he thought he heard the bolt slide home. He had a fleeting moment of concern for her. But she was beyond his help now. Shelby was his main worry, his only worry.
He stood studying the darkness, not thinking about Claire Lomax anymore. No light of any kind visible from here. The storm had lost some of its wildness; the wind had died down to intermittent thrummings, the rain to a light, misty drizzle. Even though it was well after nightfall, it didn’t seem quite as cold as it had earlier. The boom and crash of the surf was all there was to hear.
His throat and mouth were dry, otherwise he was all right. A voice in his head reminded him that it didn’t make any difference how he felt or thought he felt, he could still have another attack any minute. But he could drop dead waiting in the cottage, too. Anybody could suddenly drop dead any time … coronary, stroke, massive cerebral hemorrhage. You could get run over by a car or break your neck in a fall. You could get shot by a lunatic. If he didn’t survive tonight, at least he’d die doing something important for the first time in a long time—die a man instead of a helpless invalid.
He made his way to the open gate. Visibility was poor—he could barely see where he was going—but he wouldn’t put the flash on until he made sure Lomax wasn’t roaming somewhere in the vicinity. He groped out past the carport, careful of his footing. Down the short drive to the half-flooded lane.
Still no lights anywhere.
He turned right on the lane, holding the poker down along his right leg, the flashlight in his left hand. The torch was necessary now or he’d run the risk of stumbling over something, hurting himself in a fall. He aimed the lens down at his feet, flicked it on and held it so that the pale yellow blob was no more than a yard ahead of him, just far enough to pick out obstacles to be avoided.
The Prius was parked close to the fallen tree. Macklin detoured around it, playing the flash over the pine’s trunk and branches, looking for a way to climb over that wouldn’t require too much effort. One place toward the upper end looked manageable, but when he tried it, a branch heavy with decayed cones snagged his coat and forced him to back off. He found a different spot, tried that. Another dead branch broke under his foot as he stepped up and over; he saved himself from sliding onto the splintered end by digging the tip of the poker into wet wood.
When he was down on the other side, he leaned back against the bole to rest. His pulse rate had climbed with the effort and there was a tightness like a contracting band inside his chest. Not now, he thought, not now! Slow, shallow breaths. The tightness didn’t get any worse and there was no pain. A minute, two minutes … and his heart beat more slowly, the clamping sensation eased.
He made himself slog ahead at the same pace as before. The light picked out a torn-off pine bough six or seven feet long lying half on the lane, half in the stream of rainwater that gushed alongside it. He sidestepped the bough, into a gradual left-hand curve, and when he was halfway through that the outer reach of the shaft touched something else in the roadway.
It was just a shapeless lump until he closed the gap and the light brightened on it, gave it definition. Macklin pulled up short. Not an object—a man. Lying crumpled there, one arm outflung as if it were pointing down the lane. He took two more steps and then he could see the bare head, the rain glistening on the pink scalp visible through the close-cropped hair.
Lomax.
Fell, hit his head, knocked himself out?
Cautiously he moved up close, around the huddled body. The light was on Lomax’s side-turned face then—on the open eye staring up blankly into the drizzle, on the gaping hole in his throat.
Christ! Dead. Shot, from the look of the wound. Dead for a while, long enough for the rain to have washed away most of the blood.
Macklin shook his head to clear it. Shelby? he thought then. Ran into Lomax here, he pulled that gun of his and there was a struggle and it went off? That must be it. And after it happened she must’ve continued onto the highway—which meant she was all right, she hadn’t been hurt.
He almost turned back. Lomax was no longer a threat to Shelby, or to him or Claire; there was no reason to continue risking cardiac arrest out here in the rain and cold.
But then he thought: If that’s what happened, where’s the gun? It wasn’t anywhere near the body, and when he moved Lomax enough to shine the light under him, he didn’t find it there either. Shelby wouldn’t have taken it with her … she wouldn’t have any reason to with Lomax dead.
He lifted the light off the body, fanned it around and then moved farther along the blacktop. The appearance of the car parked beyond the jog surprised him almost as much as finding Lomax’s corpse. He took a few steps toward it—and the torch beam glinted off the bar flasher on the vehicle’s roof.
What was a sheriff’s cruiser doing here?
Macklin went ahead to the cruiser, ran the light over it and through the side window. Empty. He made a three-sixty sweep with the torch: no sign of anybody in the area. Maybe Lomax hadn’t died in a struggle with Shelby, maybe he’d been shot by a deputy … but then where the hell was the deputy?
He tried the driver’s door, found it unlocked, jerked it open and poked his head and the light inside. And when he saw what lay on the passenger side of the front seat, his breath caught, his heartbeat jumped and stuttered.
Shelby’s purse.
T W E N T Y - S I X
HE COULDN’T MAKE UP his mind what to do with the woman. Or with the deputy.
So much weird shit happening all of a sudden, coming at him from different directions the way it had in that desert hellhole halfway around the world. Everything quiet, smooth-running since before the holidays, nobody bothering him so he could go on about his business unmolested, and then … bam!
Started to get weird when he found that guy dead in the Porsche down the coast—shot in the head and left on that overlook by somebody else—and had to beat it out of there quick before one of the police patrols came along. But that was nothing compared to all the heavy-duty crap that’d gone down tonight. First the deputy showing up, then the woman, then that drunken bastard up on the lane—one, two, three, out of the storm, out of nowhere, all in less than a couple of hours. It was like being ambushed by mongrel-dog snipers, the ones that came at you from doorways and basements and collapsed buildings when you least expected it.
He’d handled it all so far, the way he’d handled the snipers in Iraq. You did what you had to do to protect yourself, stay alive. You blew them away.
Except that he didn’t want to do that to the woman and the deputy. The guy up on the lane hadn’t given him any choice, ranting like a buck-wild recruit and then pulling a sidearm, for Chrissake, forcing him to use the Glock, get in the first kill shot. React or die. Justifiable self-defense. But these two weren’t armed and they weren’t his enemies. Blow them away and he’d be guilty of murder, and he wasn’t a murderer. Soldier on a mission. Preservationist. But a cold-blooded psychopath? No freaking way.
Oh, he could try to rationalize it. Threats to his safety … popping them was just another kind of self-defense. Like that afternoon in Baghdad when he and Charley Stevenson had been on patrol in what was supposed to be a secure neighborhood; were about to recon an abandoned store, watchful as always but not watchful enough because all of a sudden Charley’s head exploded. Standing right there next to him, blood and brains and bone splinters flying everywhere. He didn’t remember going into the store, just being in there and flushing the two civilians, middle-aged guy and a kid in his teens, no weapon in evidence but no question one of them had fired the burst that killed Charley, so when the pair started to run he’d burned them both. React or die, the officers drummed that into you from the get-go and you never forgot it. Only that time, in his dead-check afterward, he’d found an empty Tabuk assault rifle that made his kills righteous. Mongrel-dog snipers, two and out.