With Every Breath (27 page)

had barged into her condo, Gina had still been on her feet. Dripping blood all over the hallway, but standing there, waiting for her friend. Then, to hear Cassie tell it, her eyes had rolled back in her head and she had swooned.

She’d robbed herself of her finest hour, Joe thought angrily. She’d been unconscious by the time he’d arrived.

That made his mouth twist into a cruel smile. She’d wake, wondering if he had come. She’d rouse eventually to the sinking disappointment that she had not been able to warn him that he was always and forever hers.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

His heart slammed. Standing there, watching the chopper lights fade into the night sky, Joe realized that she’d have to spend at least a night in a psychiatric ward after this stunt. He thought there were certain legal avenues he could use to convert that one night into three. He had to check into it, had to find out what they were and how to use them. He fully intended to keep her under psychiatric care for as long as possible.

She’d finally get help. Maybe she’d finally let him go. At the very least, he thought, a decent psychiatrist might loosen her claws, and then he could fight the rest of the way free on his own.

For the first time in years, he thought maybe he needed to do that. He finally turned away from her condo to go back to the Pathfinder. Then he froze.

There was still a cop car down in the street, although everyone should have left. He stared at it, feeling his breath go as though someone had slammed a fist into his gut in a sucker punch. Christ, no. If Lou was there, then Maddie was up at the house alone.

He looked at his watch even as he ran, hobbling. He reached the car and wrenched open the door. Forty-seven minutes. He’d left her forty-seven minutes ago.

"What the hell are you doing?" he snarled.

Lou came awake groggily. "Huh? What?" "Goddamnit, I told you to go back to The Wick! I told you to stay with Maddie Brogan!"

"I didn’t... I thought..." Lou Paul grimaced. "I got a hangover, Joe, felt like shit all day."

"Drive," Joe bit out, getting into the car. His knee wouldn’t allow him to drive, not the way he needed to drive then.

"It ain’t my fault! I didn’t—"

"Drive the fucking car!"

Lou jumped, then he drove.

Maddie had no choices.

She realized that with some cold, still, dispassionate part of her mind. She was going to die. And that would be all right, just as long as Rick didn’t get Josh.

Time, she needed time. She needed to give Josh precious minutes to get as far away as he could. Then she heard his voice nearby, an odd gurgling sound of terror. It was too close.

He hadn’t left without her.

She let loose with a despairing wail and fought like a banshee. She took Rick by surprise, just for a second. She’d been limp, compliant, stalling him before she’d known that she did have a choice, just one choice. She could let him kill her, or she could get away from him long enough to get to Josh, to make him understand that he had to run.

Rick would shoot her, but somehow she would get the words out first. She would make Josh understand. And maybe Rick would be preoccupied enough with her death that Josh would have time to get away.

She turned into Rick in the heartbeat that his grip in

her hair was still slack. She raked her fingers down his face, then, in a burst of inspiration, gouged her thumb into his eye. He bellowed, cursing her, and she finally pulled free, leaving hair in his hand, leaving him sprawled on the table. He clutched his face, and Maddie ran.

Josh was still in the kitchen, gasping in that strange, keening, hitching sound she’d heard. Precious seconds passed while she fumbled with the lock on the back door and Rick hollered and the table thumped as it hit the wall. Can't get it. I’ll never get it open in time. She waited for, expected, a gunshot, but maybe Rick still couldn’t see. Then the lock was free, and they spilled out onto the deck. She lifted Josh bodily, throwing him over the railing.

"You’ve got to run, baby," she gasped. "No matter what happens to me, ran!"

Josh cried out as he landed in the sand, a voice out of her dreams. It was a sound, a real sound, and it was both glorious and horrid. Damn you, Rick, for ripping it all open again. Why couldn’t you just let me go?

Maddie scrambled after Josh, falling awkwardly. She got to her feet just as she heard the table crash inside. Again? What was he doing in there? She groped for Josh, lifted him, and ran with him when he still wouldn’t go on his own.

Her shoulders did not feel the strain. She felt nothing, not the beat of the cold wind on her skin, not the ragged tear of breath in her lungs. Run. She scrambled up one dune, almost losing her grip on Josh. Can’t put him down yet. Even carrying his weight, she could run faster than he could. She struggled, forcing her legs to go faster, climbing the next dune by bending forward, tears burning her eyes.

Josh was sobbing, too. She skidded down the other

side of the dune on her heels and finally came to a dazed, confused stop.

She tried to listen for sounds of pursuit. For a moment she could hear nothing over the roar of her heart in her ears. It boomed like thunder, dragging her rushing blood behind it. Then—there—the tread of a footstep, a rustle of beach grass, louder and closer than the sound of the wind threading itself through it.

He couldn’t shoot her, she thought, because he had lost her. He didn’t know where they were anymore.

If she kept going west, she would get to the big houses on the other side of The Wick. There would be a telephone there. But she thought she had swerved when she had come off the deck, and didn’t know if she was heading west or north.

She couldn’t wait any longer, couldn’t take the chance. Maddie pushed on.

She hadn’t realized how tall the reeds were in the center of the little island. They disoriented her until she wailed out loud in frustration, then bit back on her voice. Stupid, stupid. He’ll follow my sound. Josh’s fingers dug into her back as he held on to her.

The sand beneath her feet turned gummy, wet. The center of The Wick was nothing but marshes. Except . . .

Her heart started hammering even harder. She remembered this. She did. She remembered.

She stopped and looked around again. There would be more solid ground to the north, she realized. Where is north? Please, God, let me find it.

She angled a little bit to her right. She plunged through the sand, her feet sucking up mud, until each movement was impossibly weighted, the strain of every step dragging at her bones.

Something—driftwood?—cracked and splintered close behind her. He was getting closer.

The ground began to dry out. The reeds began to thin again. She found the path. She had known it would be there, right there, where the sand got solid again.

She turned left on it and began running again. Angus’s shack.

That, too, was where she had known it would be, a thing of corrugated metal and abandoned plywood. The smell hit her first, and her throat closed tightly and suddenly against nausea. It was the odor of rotting fish, mingled with excrement. Her stomach heaved, but she struggled to the gaping opening that was the door, finally letting |osh slide from her arms.

"Angus," she moaned. "Help me. Help us."

Angus wasn’t there.

Maddie peered inside, at a leaning cot piled with soiled bedding. A wood-burning stove sat in the comer. Trousers and shirts were hung with surprising precision and neatness on hooks on the wall.

Familiar. All achingly, eerily familiar.

She backed out again and began pulling on Josh’s hand. "Come on," she managed, her voice a harsh breath. "We’ll go this way. The path leads to the west side."

There was silence behind them.

Her heart whaled hard against her chest. Rick had definitely lost her tracks in the marshes, she realized. Thank you, God, thank you. That would give her a little extra, precious time.

She needed lights, people, voices, the safety and sanity of civilization. She had to get somewhere where Joe could find them.

Joe.

Thoughts of him were like a beacon in the night. He would help her. He would make things right again. She kept on.

Chapter 22

The front door of Maddie’s house was open when Lou turned hard into the drive, the tires spewing up stones. Joe was out of the car before it had stopped, his heart plunging sickeningly.

Not a good sign.

"Give me your gun," he rasped, reaching a hand back into the car.

Lou handed it to him.

Joe avoided the stairs, taking the ramp up onto the deck, then stepped instinctively to the right side of the door. Some long-forgotten, unused memory came back to him from a special training course at the academy.

Don’t make a target of yourself. He reached out with his good leg and kicked the door open a little wider.

There was pure silence inside.

He felt that soft, airy feeling in his chest again, as he had on the day Lucy died. He was in the process of losing something again that could never be replaced, and there was nothing he could do about it, nothing at all.

"Police!" he shouted, his voice too strained, too blatantly terrified.

Nothing happened inside. Not a scrape, no movement, not even a breath.

He moved into the door fast, bracing himself, his gun leveled. His knee screamed as he half bent it and allowed it to take his weight. The living room was undisturbed. He stepped inside slowly, his eyes roving, his ears straining to hear something over his own hammering heart.

There was still no sound. He moved into the dining room.

"Ah, Jesus," he moaned.

The table was crashed over on its side. The chairs were broken, splintered, trashed. The blood was all on the wall behind the table. Somewhere nearby would be Candle Island’s first body. Or bodies.

Jo£ gagged like a rookie. Sweet Jesus, was it Maddie? Josh? Both of them?

He no longer felt his knee as he moved into the kitchen. He went through it, around into the living room again, and down the hall. He peered into the bedrooms, the bathroom. He knew they weren't there. The silence was too complete, too solid.

He went back to the kitchen, to the telephone.

Ellsworth, Washington County, somebody, he had to call somebody. He wasn’t equipped for this. Christ, he didn’t have a coroner. He didn’t even have a goddamned sober doctor.

He picked up the phone. It was dead again.

"Jesus Christ," he muttered, but he wasn’t really surprised.

Maddie finally saw the lights of the big houses. They paled the western sky and winked through the reeds.

She and Josh trudged on, no longer able to run. Josh was so out of breath he could no longer even cry.

"All right, baby, it’s all right," she whispered. "We’re almost there. We’ll be fine."

She’d been saying that since they’d left Angus’s shack. It had become a litany. She realized almost distantly that she wasn’t even stammering. She felt safe in the reeds. Intellectually, she knew now that they’d never be safe again until Rick was picked up, behind bars. But hidden in the big dunes, in the reeds, she’d felt the innate comfort of being on her own turf anyway, even if he was in there somewhere with her.

The feeling didn’t dissipate until they came up on the west-side road. She stopped suddenly and pulled Josh backward. He made a wordless sound of surprise.

"I need ... something," she whispered. "I need ..." A rock.

It came to her just as her hand closed over one. She looked up again at the house directly across from them. It was huge, a sprawling contemporary, wall upon wall of glass. Chandeliers glimmered in various rooms. Light streamed out of the place, golden white and beckoning.

She hefted the rock and clutched it tightly, and they started across the road. At the slightest hint that Rick was lying in wait for them on this west side, she would hurl it at all that glass. She would crash the rock right into the pristine, perfect home, then she would scream and scream until someone heard her.

But as they hurried across the road, no one stopped them. No one was about. Where had he gone, she wondered?

Maddie scowled, her head starting to pound as hard as her heart. On some level she knew that this didn’t make any sense. Rick was smart. In order to have found her, he would have to have discovered that The Wick Road was round. He would have to know that sooner or later she and Josh would come out on it somewhere.

Maybe he was waiting for them on the north loop. Please, God, let him be on the north loop.

She dragged Josh up the walkway toward the house, stumbling, and suddenly she was enervated. Strength, rationality, everything seemed to sluice through her, washing down, draining out of her, until she swayed. She held on to Josh as much for her own support as to offer him comfort and leaned heavily against the big front door as she pounded a fist on its wood.

When the door opened, she almost fell inside.

Strong hands caught her, gripping her upper arms, steadying her again. She looked up into a pair of sea blue eyes beneath a thatch of thick, snow-white hair. And memory crashed in on her all over again, so sharp it was painful. She knew this man.

"You’re T-Tony Macari," she breathed.