“No time now. He’s coming, he’ll be here any minute.”
“Quick then … get a knife, cut me loose.”
Macklin sidestepped the wounded deputy—recognized him, Ferguson—and stumbled into the kitchenette. Didn’t have to open drawers to find a knife; there was a wooden block of them on the sink counter. He exchanged the flashlight for a long-bladed carving knife, stumbled back out to the sofa.
His hand was shaking so badly he was afraid he might add another cut to Shelby’s already torn and bloody flesh if he tried to slice through the duct tape one-handed. He propped the shotgun against the sofa, stripped off his right glove, then held the knife in both hands to steady it as he steered the blade to the narrow gap between her wrists.
As he began sawing, she said with awe in her voice, “You came all this way on foot? Miracle you made it …”
“I’m okay.”
Damn knife blade was dull; he sawed harder. Nicked her in his haste—a line of fresh blood slithered along one wrist.
“Is he on foot or in the cruiser?”
“Cruiser.”
“Pray he doesn’t notice the shotgun’s missing, it’ll put him on alert.”
“Who the hell is he?”
“Coastline Killer. Hurry, Jay!”
One more cut and her hands were free. She took the knife from him, sliced the tape around her ankles, then reached for the pump gun. He tried to take it from her; she said, “No, let me have it, you’re in no condition,” and came up off the bed with it in her hands. She looked shaky, but not as shaky as he was.
He said, “Shell in the chamber,” and she nodded. She knew how to handle the weapon; you couldn’t do emergency work around cops for ten years without having seen a riot gun being used.
Rising sound of a car engine outside. Headlight glare slid obliquely over the front of the cabin, across the window.
Shelby said, “Get out of the way, Jay, over by the stove.”
He didn’t argue. His tank was almost empty; he’d been running on scant reserves for some time now. He shoved himself upright, made it over to an old armchair by the wood stove and leaned heavily against its back, straining to get his breathing under control.
Shelby moved past the deputy to the right side of the room, at an angle to the closed door; stood there with the shotgun leveled, her legs spread and her hands steady now. Frozen tableau for half a minute. Then the door opened and a blond man Macklin had never seen before came inside. Hadn’t noticed the pump gun was missing from the cruiser, hadn’t been put on alert, just walked right in.
The blond man saw the empty sofa, stopped abruptly at the same time Shelby said in a sharp commanding voice, “Stand still, soldier! I’ll blow your head off if you don’t do what you’re told.”
He stiffened, staring at her with surprise on his wet face; then the surprise shifted into tight-lipped anger, then into something else for a second or two, then to no expression at all. His posture seemed to turn even more rigid, into a military erectness—both arms flat against his sides with the still-burning flashlight pointed at the floor, shoulders drawn back, chin up, eyes straight ahead and unblinking.
Shelby ordered him to unbutton his coat, take it off and let it drop on the floor, then to lie facedown on the sofa, hands behind his back, feet together. “If you don’t obey orders, you’re a dead man. I mean it, Joseph.” Then she said something Macklin didn’t comprehend. “I’ve got a soldier’s courage, remember? And you know soldiers don’t make idle threats.”
“I know,” the blond man said. Just that, nothing else.
The round boyish face was still expressionless. Macklin, exhausted, not tracking too well anymore, thought that he must have misread what he’d seen there before the blankness set in.
It had seemed almost like relief.
E P I L O G U E
N E W Y E A R ’ S DAY
THIRTY-SIX HOURS NOW, every one a blur.
Shelby sat in the waiting room at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, drinking coffee to stave off fatigue and remain alert. As far as she knew Jay was still in the OR—it seemed like he’d been in there half the day. The head staff surgeon who was performing his bypass operation had been cautiously optimistic. Jay’s coronary had been relatively mild; the damage to his heart didn’t seem to be as severe as it might have been given his night prowl through the lag end of the storm. But any number of things could go wrong during major surgery, and there was always the chance they might find further blockage that hadn’t been revealed by the tests.
That kind of thinking wasn’t making the wait any easier. She made an effort to blank her mind, or at least to shift it into a state of semiawareness. No good either way. The concern for Jay kept intruding. So did the dulled memories of Wednesday night.
Some of the details of what she’d endured between the time of Jay’s heart attack and his arrival at the cabin had already begun to fade. She’d been over them so many times she’d lost count, with various law officers and the first wave of media vultures, and yet it was as if it had all happened months ago. A form of mental self-protection, she supposed. The more awful an experience, the quicker the mind sought to bury it under layers of scar tissue.
The rest of that long night was a little clearer in her memory—for the present, anyway. A time of organized chaos. Douglas’s term for an intense Saturday night in ER. (Douglas. Her feelings for him still uncertain and unresolved. But this wasn’t the time to be thinking about them. Or about anyone except Jay.)
But yes, organized chaos was just what it had been. Jay holding the shotgun and telling her how he’d found her while she taped Joseph’s wrists and ankles. Joseph lying with his face turned away from them, as docile as if he’d been drugged … no, as if he were a resigned prisoner of war who wanted as little as possible to do with his captors. Helping Jay out of his wet clothes, then getting him comfortable in the bedroom while she checked his vital signs. Using the radio in Ferguson’s cruiser to report the situation and ask for medical assistance. Cutting the semiconscious deputy loose and tending to his head trauma as best she could. Finding out from Jay that it was Brian Lomax, not Joseph, who’d killed Gene Decker; that Claire was hiding somewhere in or near the cottage, and why. Waiting for what seemed like hours, but was only about thirty minutes, for the Basic Life Support ambulance operated by the Seacrest Volunteer Fire Department to arrive, along with a caravan of sheriff’s department and highway patrol officers.
Watching a bundled-up Jay and the wounded deputy being whisked away toward Fort Bragg in the BLS ambulance because the weather was still too poor for a medevac helicopter to land at Seacrest. Answering a seemingly endless string of questions before one of the deputies finally drove her to Fort Bragg. By then the BLS ambulance had rendezvoused with an Advanced Life Support ambulance at Albion, Jay had been hooked up to a cardiac monitor and had an IV started and been fast-driven to Mendocino Coast District Hospital, which had a landing pad that allowed helicopters to land even in stormy weather, and then transferred by Reach 1 to Santa Rosa Memorial’s cardiac care center.
Another string of questions for her at the Fort Bragg sheriff’s office. An interminable two-hour car ride to Santa Rosa. New rounds of Q&A with the staff at SR Memorial, with Lieutenant Rhiannon at the local highway patrol office, and then, briefly, with the members of the media swarm she wasn’t able to avoid. Four hours of restless sleep in a motel room, all she could manage despite her exhaustion, and back here to the hospital for more waiting.
One long continuous blur. It was a wonder she could remember any of it, think clearly at all.
If Jay came through the surgery all right—and he would, he would—the worst was past. Something else was past, too, or she was pretty sure it was: her fear of the dark. If that hellish night hadn’t cured her nyctophobia, nothing ever would.