Bonnie didn’t know why she was still alive.
She shouldn’t be. The sand couldn’t conceal her anymore. By now her body heat must have leaked through and become visible to Pascal’s infrared scope, which meant gunfire ought to be streaming down.
So far it hadn’t. Somehow she was still breathing. She’d heard no footsteps, nothing that would give her a target.
Why didn’t he just shoot? Why drag it out?
Come on, you son of a bitch, get it over with.
She shut her eyes, willing him to fire.
Nothing happened.
And gradually the idea came to her that he might be gone.
She didn’t believe it. It would be a kind of miracle, and she didn’t believe in miracles. Anything that seemed too good to be true was a scam. Her whole life had taught her that.
He was still up there, maybe hoping to lure her out so he could inflict a nonfatal wound and commence a new round of Q&A.
But more long moments dragged past, and still … nothing.
She began to think he really had checked out. Maybe he thought he’d killed her in his last volley. But he would have confirmed it. He was a pro. A pro always got confirmation.
Well, no. Not always. She hadn’t confirmed it with Kurt Land, had she?
She pushed her head out of the sand pile.
“Pascal?” she whispered. Her throat was sore, as if she’d been shouting, and the word was scarcely audible.
She tried again, louder. “Pascal!”
Nothing.
“Hey, asshole!”
No reply, either in words or bullets.
Even so, she didn’t move. It felt warm and safe under the sand, and part of her wanted to stay here, just stay and rest. Sleep …
Screw that. She wasn’t swooning like a goddamned débutante.
She dug herself free, crawled to the edge of the boardwalk, and emerged into the open. Slowly she stood in the rain and looked around, the Glock traveling with her gaze.
Pascal wasn’t there.
He had gone away, and she was alive. It made no sense, but she couldn’t argue with it.
She was exhausted, wiped out. And a mess—splinters in her hair, rips in her poncho, random cuts on her arms and legs from crawling over shards of seashells and glass bottles.
She wondered if she really had the heart for this job. Maybe she should get her GED, go to community college, become a veterinarian or something.
The rain coursed down around her, washing some of the sandy paste off her poncho. The hood had fallen off her head, and her hair was a ragged mop.
She made her way to a wooden staircase and climbed up to the boardwalk. Her legs were shaking, her knees watery. Her only thought was that she ought to be dead. Pascal had outplayed her again. He’d held all the cards. He could have finished her. Why didn’t he?
Maybe he’d heard a siren. Even in the clamor of the storm, someone who lived near the beach might have heard her unsilenced gunshots and called it in. But there were no sirens. There was nothing but the crackle of thunder, the drumbeat of rain on the boardwalk, and the crash of breakers on the beach.
She looked down. Brass shell casings littered the planks. They glittered in bursts of lightning. Each one represented a bullet that could have made her dead.
A few yards down the boardwalk glittered something bigger than a shell casing. Her stolen cell phone.
“Hey, Sammy,” she said, picking it up. The smooth plastic case felt like the handshake of an old friend.
The phone must have slipped out of Pascal’s pocket unnoticed. Or maybe he had noticed, but had been in too much of a hurry to care.
Though the screen had a jagged crack, it still lit up when she pressed the power button. She checked the call log. The most recent incoming call had started nine minutes ago and had lasted forty-two seconds.
The name of the caller: Alan Kirby.
She stared at the screen, trying to understand.
“Alan?” she breathed. “Alan called him? What in the name of fuck is going on?”
Her hand moved. She punched in Alan’s number. His cell phone rang five times and cycled to voicemail.
She tried Des’s home number, a landline—he didn’t own a cell. The house phone rang and rang. No answer.
And then she was running.
Running north through billowing sheets of rain, running for her Jeep, not knowing what had happened, but praying she wasn’t too late.