Huddled in the cold, drenched with rainwater, Bonnie waited, listening.
Past the noise of the storm, she heard the low creak of a board. A sound like a slow, cautious footstep.
She lay immobile, letting seconds tick by as fingers of rain probed through the cracks and poked chilly fingertips into her scalp.
Another creak, closer than the last. It vibrated through the boardwalk, releasing a trickle of grit from the crossbeam above her face.
He was coming this way. Moving stealthily, on the prowl. Moving directly toward her, as if he had zeroed in on her position.
But it didn’t make sense. Her couldn’t hunt her from above. Couldn’t see her, couldn’t possibly have any idea where she was.
She was trapped under the boards, with barely enough space to roll over, unable to move faster than a crawl. Her only hope was that he was as blind as she was, but he wasn’t. Somehow he knew just where she lay.
Another step. He was close now. Less than ten feet away.
One man, not two. Just one of them was hunting her, and she knew which one it had to be.
He stopped. She waited through a long moment of howling wind and punishing rain.
Very softly, one of the boards creaked, but this was a different sound, a long drawn-out wheeze. Not a footstep. More like someone shifting his weight, altering his stance by a few degrees.
Panic flashed through her, and she knew she had to move, move now.
She flung herself sideways, rolling away, and there was a soft percussive noise and a spray of sand and splinters as a shot impacted the ground where she’d lain a moment before.
She started moving, blindly elbowing her way into the dark.
Above—the tread of his shoes on the boards. Tracking her, following her progress.
He knew where she was. Somehow he knew. He could fire at her whenever he wished. And she couldn’t shoot back because she had no way to pinpoint his position. She might as well have been disarmed.
Not good, Bonnie. Not an ideal situation to be in.
The footfalls stopped again. This time she didn’t hesitate.
She dived to her left, scrambling away from two muffled pops that dropped a rain of splinters on her back.
How could he keep finding her? Did he have X-ray vision, for God’s sake? Could he see right through the planks?
She scrabbled at the ground, clutching up handfuls of loose sand as she drew herself forward. Her heart shuddered in her chest, banging at her ribs. She wasn’t used to being prey.
She knew he was still somewhere above her, remorselessly keeping pace. She couldn’t outdistance him, and if she left the cover of the boardwalk, she would be exposed against the beach with no cover, and he would gun her down, an easy score.
Reverse course, then. Crawl backward, see if you can shake him.
She gave it a go, backing up, glad to be trying something, glad to be thinking. It was hard to think when you were scared, and right now she was more goddamn scared than she had ever been in her life.
She had time to hope she might have lost him, and then she registered a soft scuff on a board, perilously close, and she veered to her right.
The gun coughed again, blowing another hole in the planks, showering her with dust.
God damn it, he was still on her ass.
The shots were quiet; as before, his weapon was fitted with a suppressor, and he must be shooting light loads to keep the velocity subsonic. There were limits to a silencer’s effectiveness, but the shots were muffled enough to pass for firecrackers or coughs of thunder. They got a little louder each time as the suppressor wore out, but at the rate he was closing in on her, he wouldn’t need many more tries.
So think, Bonnie. Stop shivering, damn it, and think your way out of this mess.
She crawled aimlessly. Sweat and raindrops blurred together on her face like tears. Her teeth were chattering. It would be lights out for her in the next thirty seconds or so. She didn’t like it. Getting killed was a real pain in the butt.
The worst thing was that she didn’t know how it was happening, how he could see her. It made no sense. She was invisible.
Invisible—like the infrared beam in the farmhouse. And yet somehow he’d known it was there.
An infrared beam ...
She got it.
It wasn’t anything supernatural. He was using night-vision gear.
The son of a bitch could see her body heat through gaps in the boardwalk.
And that meant there was no place to hide.
***
Pascal was cautious. Of course he enjoyed every advantage. He owned the night. The night-vision headset he had carried in his satchel was his secret weapon—an ITT Exelis binocular system, head-mounted, with an infrared illuminator. He had picked up the equipment in Europe, paying 10,000 euros.
The infrared goggles, like insect eyes, perceived a band of the electromagnetic spectrum alien to human vision. The warmth of the girl’s body showed up on the 40° display as a faint green iridescence, flickering in the cracks between the boards.
He had turned off the Beretta’s laser targeting assist. The laser beam might give her a target. The same professional caution made him keep his distance from his quarry. If he got too close, she might be able to determine his position and squeeze off a lucky shot.
He was content to play it safe. Guided by his enhanced vision, he fired from a distance, hopscotching nimbly from plank to plank, catching glimpses of her body heat, a feeble luminescent trail. She was clever, always changing course, zigzagging like a cockroach. The rain gear she was wearing dimmed her heat signature. The rain itself was another complication; it smeared his goggles, blurring his artificial vision, while flashes of lightning briefly whited out the display.
It was difficult work, tracking the girl—like chasing threads of St. Elmo’s fire on the shifting deck of a storm-tossed vessel.
But he would score a hit before long. It was purely a matter of time.
He glanced at the pavilion, now well behind him, and made out the green glow of Kurt the rat by the doorway to the lobby. The man was waiting, watching, afraid to get too close. His only purpose had been to wriggle like a worm on a hook, luring this one particular fish. Now he was merely a distraction, to be dispatched when this was over.
First things first. Parker.
Though he had grown to respect her, he could not deny that it was her time to die.
***
Bonnie scrambled to the nearest trestle and huddled behind it, trusting the stone arch to conceal her. She had to make herself invisible. She was playing hide-and-seek, and if she lost this game, she wouldn’t get to play again. It hardly seemed fair, though—her in the dark, and him with his goo-goo-googly eyes.
Still, she couldn’t have been showing up very clearly on his infrared display, not with the boardwalk blocking most of her heat signature. If he lost track of her, he wouldn’t know where to pick up the search—
Champagne corks started popping around her. He was firing again. She hadn’t lost him. He was shooting at her position, and only the concrete mass kept her safe as she clung to the cold stone and the sand erupted like geysers. The fusillade went on and on.
Then it ended. His gun must be empty. But he would reload. Then all he had to do was circle around to the side for a clear shot.
Evasion wasn’t working. Escape was impossible. Basically he was going to nail her for sure unless she changed tactics.
So stand and fight. Her only option. Hell, she was better on offense than defense anyway.
She rolled onto her back, pointing the Glock’s barrel upward, unable to aim because she had no target. She pulled the trigger. The pistol kicked in her hands. She fired through the boards, her gun barking, the hollow-point rounds blowing holes in the fake wood.
The reports boomed in the confined space. She pumped out eight shots and paused, not wanting to blow her whole wad on one try.
He might be moving overhead, but if so she couldn’t hear it over the furious chiming in her ears. She allowed herself to hope he’d been wounded—killed, even.
Then the sand erupted again. He was answering her attack with a new barrage of shots. She spun behind the trestle, blinking rain and grit out of her eyes, shooting back until her gun was empty, seeing nothing but muzzle flare, while her eardrums threatened to burst under the insane noise, and she heard her own voice screaming, “Stop it!”—the cry audible only inside her skull.
Her plea was useless. It wouldn’t stop, it would never stop ...
But it did.
He must have emptied his gun again. But he would have more ammo. He would never run out.
She tried to come up with a plan of action, but suddenly she was all out of ideas. The gunfire had robbed her of night vision and most of her hearing. She was effectively blind and deaf, and she was up against an adversary who could see in the dark.
If she left cover, she was dead. If she stayed put, she was dead.
Any way she played it—dead.
***
Pascal dumped the Beretta’s empty magazine and inserted a new one. The procedure was automatic to him. He had done it thousands of times, often practicing blindfolded.
With his next attack he would get the girl—assuming he had not killed her already.
The phone in his pocket thrummed. Her phone, set to vibrate so the ring tone would not betray him in the dark.
Curiosity prompted him to lift his goggles and pluck the device from his pocket. He lifted it in a gloved hand and read the name on the display.
Slowly, Pascal smiled.
***
Bonnie heeled her last fresh magazine into the Glock, her hands shaky, her fingers slick with rain. The gun was barely more useful than a pacifier at this point. She couldn’t tell where Pascal was, couldn’t fire with any hope of scoring a hit. She could only wait to die, as she had waited in the motel bathtub as a kid.
Kurt Land must have felt like this when she stood over him in the Pine Barrens, her gun angled at his chest in the sun’s last rays. The fear she’d read in his face—it was her fear now.
Now she knew why she hadn’t shot him. He had been too much like her. Too much like the surprised and helpless victim she would have been, if the man in the motel room had pulled back the shower curtain and seen her cowering there.
She thought she had better get away from the trestle. Pascal knew her shots had come from there, and he would be homing in on her.
Leaving cover, she scrambled south a few yards until she blundered into a high drift of sand, wet and clammy. Cold.
Cold was what she needed. Pascal was tracking her body heat. Anything that disguised her heat signature would make her harder to see.
She shoved the Glock into her waistband and dug into the pile, scooping out handfuls of sand. As the cavity enlarged, she burrowed deeper inside, until the hill collapsed, blanketing her.
Talk about digging your own grave, a voice in her head quipped.
She told it to shut the fuck up.
The sand was thick and chilly, and in combination with the waterproof poncho it might—might—be enough to obscure her infrared display. Under the best of circumstances, all Pascal could possibly see was a faint ripple of heat through the cracks. The rain and lightning had to be a distraction, and now she was smothered in natural camouflage.
And if he saw her anyway …
Then she might have time for one or two more shots before he took her out. She tightened her grip on the gun, hoping Pascal would make enough noise to give her something to aim at.
If she had to shoot again, her next rounds would be the last she ever fired, and she intended to make them count.
***
The phone call was brief and businesslike, devoid of emotion. Pascal appreciated that. He made the necessary arrangements and clicked off.
This new development left him with little time. He must be going. Bonnie Parker had become a strictly secondary concern.
But surely he could spare another few seconds to finish the job. He would kill her with his next few shots, then leave her body under the boardwalk to gather flies and sand crabs.
He lowered the goggles, immersing himself in an electronic field of view, and scanned the boards for a last look at the warmth radiating from Bonnie Parker’s living body—a body that would not be living much longer.
He saw nothing.
She was gone.
He paced the boards, peering in all directions. She had to be close by. He had lost sight of her for only a minute. How far could she crawl in that time?
But she was not there. God damn it, she was not there.
He could not abandon the chase, not when he was so close. But he had no choice. Parker was not his priority. She never had been.
Perhaps if he gave his pistol and night-vision gear to Kurt, the rat could finish things for him. Even such a useless weakling ought to be capable of dispatching a trapped and nearly helpless adversary.
When he turned to the pavilion, this small hope died. The shimmering green fleck in the center of his vision was the figure of a man darting south on the boardwalk, then vanishing down an access ramp to the street.
The rat had fled. The latest exchange of gunfire must have unnerved him completely.
That, then, was that. He could not spare the time to nose out Parker now. He had wasted too many precious seconds as it was.
She would live. So be it. He begrudged her nothing. She had put up a good fight, and she deserved to keep her little life.
He turned and broke into a run, heading for the exit that would take him to the parking lot across the street.