Part 16 (2/2)

Mark's hands remained locked around the steering wheel, and his eyes were riveted on the road. The car's engine howled in her ears. Wind sang in the seams of the windows. They were half a mile behind the pickup when the tail lights winked out in a single instant. Mark slowed sharply, but he was still going forty miles an hour as the straightaway ended in a rightward curve. The car yawed left. He yanked down on the wheel. Hilary was afraid they would roll, but the tires grabbed the pavement, and he accelerated safely out of the turn.

That was when she saw a huge dark shape immediately ahead of them. The pickup truck was parked sideways, blocking the road at the end of their headlight beams.

There was no time to stop.

'Oh, no,' she gasped.

Chapter Twenty.

Cab drove through the deserted streets of the town of Fish Creek and parked outside the guest house near the harbor. It was a quaint village of candle shops and cafes on the west coast of the peninsula, choked with tourists in August, but quiet on a midweek evening in March. He'd rented a two-story apartment. The smell of the bay was sweet as he got out of his Corvette, but he didn't linger in the freezing air. He let himself inside and climbed the stairs to the main level of the apartment, which had a full kitchen, a fireplace, and a balcony that looked out on the water.

He was paying for it himself. He didn't apologize for the luxuries he'd known his whole life. His money - or his mother's money, to be precise - helped him deal with the ugliness of the world. Sometimes, when he was drunk enough to be honest with himself, he also acknowledged that his money allowed him to build a hiding place wherever he went. A pretty cage.

Cab turned on the oven in the apartment's kitchen. He'd found a restaurant on the north side of town that sold vegetarian quiche, and he'd ordered it to go, along with a bottle of Stags' Leap Chardonnay. He deposited the quiche on foil lining a baking sheet and put it in the oven, then located a corkscrew and opened the wine. He found a gla.s.s in a cabinet above the stove and poured the wine almost to the rim. With the Chardonnay in hand, he dimmed the lights in the apartment and switched on the gas fireplace. He settled into the leather sofa, put up his long legs, and drank the wine in gulps as he watched the fire.

He thought about calling his mother. They texted each other several times a month, but he hadn't actually heard her voice in six weeks.

It was the middle of the night in London, so he used his phone to send her a message instead.

Cold as h.e.l.l here. Lonely but beautiful. See pic. C.

He attached a picture he'd taken with his phone on the crossing from Was.h.i.+ngton Island, with the angry water against the gray sky and the forested coastline of the peninsula looming ahead of him. His rented Corvette had been the only vehicle on the ferry. Right now, in the empty guest house, he felt like the only man alive in the town of Fish Creek.

He was accustomed to that sense of isolation. He thought of it as being homeless with a roof over his head. If he were back in his condominium in Florida, he would have felt the same way.

His mother had extended an open invitation to join her in London. Neither one of them had anyone else in their lives who really mattered. Even so, he'd resisted moving there, because he didn't know if he was ready to stop running. Whenever he looked back, he saw Vivian Frost chasing him. He still needed to exorcize her ghost. That was something his mother didn't understand, because he'd never told her the truth about Vivian's death.

Cab finished his gla.s.s of wine. He got up, checked the quiche in the oven, and poured another gla.s.s before sitting down again. He watched the gas fire, which burned in a controlled fas.h.i.+on, never changing. Fire wasn't like that. It was volatile and unpredictable, twisting with the wind, sucking energy out of the air. It was also, he knew, a particularly excruciating way to die. Hilary Bradley may have been blowing smoke his way with her story about Harris Bone, but she was right about one thing. If you were capable of burning up your wife and children, then you were the owner of a cold, dead soul, and you would feel little remorse watching the life flicker out of a girl's eyes on the beach.

Then again, he'd felt no remorse himself watching Vivian die. Not then. Not until later.

Cab got up restlessly and took his wine with him. He walked to the west end of the apartment and pushed open the gla.s.s doors that led to the balcony. He went outside, where the wind shrieked and cut at his face. The empty boat docks of the harbor were below him, and street lights glowed in haloes along the waterfront.

He thought about Hilary Bradley and realized he was annoyed with her. He was used to being the smartest person in the room, and he had the sense that she was every bit as smart as he was. He didn't like it that she had put a finger squarely on his vulnerability without knowing anything about him. It also bothered him that he experienced a glimmer of jealousy at the idea that she was so deeply in love with another man. It was an unwelcome reminder that his own life was emotionally and s.e.xually barren. When he did have s.e.x, it was generally the end of a relations.h.i.+p, not the beginning. He'd even gone so far as to pay for s.e.x on a few occasions when he was living overseas, in order to be free of any complications.

'Cab.'

He heard the voice, but he didn't move or look around, because he knew it wasn't real. It was just the echo of a ghost. Vivian had always had this way of wrapping her Spanish-tinged British accent around his name, so that it came from her lips like a prayer. She'd said it that way so many times. When she recognized his voice on the phone. When she was under him and her body was arching with one of her violent o.r.g.a.s.ms. When she was on her knees on the beach, pleading for her life. Begging him to spare her.

Cab.

That was the last word she'd ever spoken.

She disappeared on a Tuesday.

They had planned to meet for paella and Mahou at a street cafe north of the Diagonal, but Cab sat there alone for an hour, watching the crowds for her face. She never arrived. When he walked to her apartment six blocks away, everything personal to her had been stripped. The kitchens and bathrooms stank of bleach. It was as if she had never existed. She left nothing behind.

The next morning, black smoke poured skyward from the shattered windows of the Estacio-Sants train station. Twenty-seven people died.

The Spanish police needed only four hours to identify the terrorist behind the bombing. Cab knew he'd been played for a fool when he saw the CCTV feed from inside the station. The grainy footage showed Diego Martin, an American fugitive wanted for gang murders in Phoenix, arm in arm with Vivian Frost.

Diego Martin, who had led Cab and the FBI on a chase to Barcelona. Diego Martin, who had used Vivian to spy on Cab.

There had never been any love in Vivian's heart. Only s.e.x and betrayal. Only lies.

That night, Cab drove north. He brought his gun. He knew what no one else did; he knew where they'd gone. A few days earlier, he'd found reservations for a rented house on a secluded beach near the rocky coast of Tossa de Mar. It was the ideal hideaway for two criminals on the run.

Vivian and Diego.

He arrived after midnight on one of the most serene nights imaginable. The gentle breeze off the Mediterranean was warm, the air was scented with flowers, and moonlight flooded the beach. He climbed down the sharp hillside to the sheltered cove and quickly realized that he wasn't alone by the still water. They were there. He could see them on the sand. Entwined. Vivian on top, her back to him, displaying an ivory expanse of naked skin sloping from her neck to the cleft of her b.u.t.tocks. He heard the guttural noises from her throat, so intimately familiar to him, and even now, after everything, her abandon could arouse him. They were fifty yards away, in the wet sand, close enough for the surf to lap at their bodies.

He lifted his gun as he walked closer. He thought he had the element of surprise, but he was young and out of his head with anger.

Diego's hand moved with the speed of a snake. Cab dove into the surf as bullets screamed past his head. When he spun back with his own gun, Diego already had Vivian in front of him. His gun was at her temple. Diego lurched out of the sand, dragging Vivian with him.

'You want to kill me,' Diego said, 'but you have to kill her first.'

'Do you think that's a problem for me?' Cab asked.

'I know this woman. I know what she does to you.'

'Cab,' Vivian pleaded. 'Cab, I'm sorry. Let us go.'

He stared at her. She was naked, her body lit up by the moonlight, shadows under her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Streaks of sand clung to her damp skin. The natural thing would have been to fold her up in his arms and lower her to the beach and make love to her.

'Drop the gun,' Cab said, 'or I'll kill you both.'

'I don't think you will,' Diego replied calmly. 'You'd let me kill you if it meant saving this wonderful wh.o.r.e.'

Vivian begged. 'Cab, please.'

He kept the gun steady in his long, outstretched arms. 'Viv, you know he's going to kill you, don't you?'

'Cab,' she whispered. 'Just go.'

'Why do you think he brought the gun to the beach, Viv? Just because the police might come? Come on, you're smarter than that. This man travels solo. He was going to let you make love to him one last time, and then he was going to put a bullet in your head.'

Diego began to back up in the sand.

'Once he's safe, you're dead, Viv,' Cab told her.

He could see her blue eyes. They were always the same - smart, cool, and infinitely calculating. She knew he was right. It made him feel good to realize that she'd been betrayed too. Her eyes dipped to the sand, and he understood; she was about to drop out of his arms. Her legs buckled, she fell, and there Diego was, head and torso exposed. Cab fired four times, in his chest, neck, eye, and forehead. What he enjoyed most was the surprise. The disbelief. As if it had never occurred to Diego that this woman could ever betray him.

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