My eyes are locked on Wendy, who lies on her back, eyes open and fixed on the sky, a large bubble of blood on her lips. As I stare, my captor pulls up his gun and shoots her again, this time in the side. She doesn’t make a sound.
I try to yank my arm free, but he swings the gun in a quick savage arc against my forehead, and the world blanks out for a moment.
“Move or I’ll kill you right here!”
A jumble of thoughts: his tremendous strength; his lack of hesitation in shooting Wendy, as John predicted; the realization that this is no random attack, that he shot Wendy to get to me, that he wants me alive; that this is him - the kidnapper, the UNSUB, the motherfucker who took my sister. There’s no hunting him anymore. He’s hunting me. And he has me.
As he drags me toward the streetcar tracks, I notice one man in the parking lot who’s not lying prone on the gravel. Both his arms are leveled in our direction, and I’m starting to duck when I recognize John Kaiser.
“Jordan!” he cries. “Drop!”
As I start to fall, my captor jerks me in front of him like a shield. John moves left, angling for a shot, but I’m in his way. The man holding me throws up his free arm and fires three times quickly in John’s direction. John spins, trying to avoid the shots, but his spin continues to the ground and he does not get up.
“Dead cop,” says the voice in my ear. The barrel of his pistol touches my temple. “Move.”
He wants me in the parking lot. I can’t let him get me into a car. My mind flashes onto the gun John gave me, but it’s lying useless in its holster in my rented Mustang, parked at the FBI office. The only weapon I have is the knowledge that the man holding me doesn’t want to kill me here. He has a much more exotic fate in mind.
I fire my elbow into his rib cage, earning a crack and a howl of agony. His arm goes limp for an instant, and in that instant I wrench myself loose and run back toward Wendy, an image of her gun in my head. But as I near her I realize she’s lying on top of the still-holstered weapon. If I stop to turn her over, he’ll catch me. There’s no cover here but the river, so I lunge left, toward the wooden steps that lead down to the water. As I reach the top step, a shot rings out behind me.
“Don’t make me kill you!”
I’m silhouetted on the edge of the steps like a duck in an arcade, and I can’t possibly reach the water in one leap. I’m going to have to wait for a better chance.
As I turn back, he marches up with the gun, his dark eyes blazing. He looks a little older than I am, with a shock of salt-and-pepper hair and a deeply lined face. I’ve never seen his face, but I recognize the dark light in his eyes, from places I prefer not to remember.
“We’re going to my car,” he says. “If you fight, I’ll shoot you in the spine. You’ll go limp as a rag doll, and I’ll have to carry you, but you’ll still be nice and warm between the legs and you’ll still make a pretty picture for the man.”
The icy conviction in his voice paralyzes me, wiping out every emotion but terror. Seizing my arm, he pulls me back across the walkway, his eyes full of purpose.
Thirty yards away, John lies on his stomach, struggling in vain to reach his knees. When we pass him, my attacker will fire a bullet into him, just as he did with Wendy. My limbs are heavy with the inevitability of nightmares -
“Jooordan!”
The scream stops me cold, and in some sliver of a second I know it came from Wendy Travis’s throat. Twisting my neck, I see her lying on her stomach, propped on her elbows, her pistol clenched in both hands, her eyes shining brightly through the blood and rain. An arm whips around me to aim at her, but I bat it aside and throw myself as far away as I can.
Orange flame bursts from the barrel of Wendy’s gun.
An explosive grunt sounds beside me. My attacker staggers, then pulls his gun back up. Wendy’s gun spits again. He bellows in rage and pain, then charges her with blind fury. Wendy fires again but misses, and he starts shooting, round after round. He misses four times, but then Wendy’s head snaps back and I’m screaming in denial, knowing in my bones that she’s gone.
He turns back to me, but he’s wounded and can’t move well. Blood has matted the teal Polo to his chest and shoulder. From twenty yards away, he raises his gun and points it at me. My eyes are full of tears, and I can see that he’s abandoned his plan. He means to kill me now.
The gun wavers, steadies, then flies skyward as thunder booms behind me and ricochets back from the far shore. I whirl to find John kneeling at the edge of the levee, his.40-caliber automatic leveled with absolute stillness.
“Hit the bricks!” he yells.
I dive onto the walkway, and John empties his clip, blast after blast roaring across the river, the echoes of his first shots smashing into the reports of the later ones. When I look up, my attacker is gone.
As the last shot fades, I crawl across the bricks to Wendy, hoping it’s not too late. The hair at the back of her head is a mass of blood and brain matter, and my heart knots against the truth. The first thing I learned in a military field hospital is that visible brain matter means the casualty won’t make it.
“Get down!” John shouts. “Find cover!”
I kiss Wendy’s hair, then get slowly to my feet and walk to the crest of the wooden steps and look down. The man in the Polo is doubled over near the bottom step, gasping for breath and trying to hang on to a wooden chain post. As I watch, my heart empty of pity, his hand slips off the post and he tumbles headfirst into the river.
After a moment he bobs to the surface, floating in place, his mouth opening and closing like that of a landed fish. Then he slowly turns away as the current takes hold of him. I feel no urge to save him, but as the current pulls him along the bank, I realize that if the river takes him, we may never know who he was, never find Thalia, or Jane, or any of the others – or even learn what happened to them.
Hopping over the chain, I try to keep pace with him by running along the treacherous riprap. Navigating the gray rocks without breaking an ankle is difficult, and the high water carries him rapidly along, not only downriver but into the main channel. He’s twenty feet from the bank and slipping farther away.
“Help!” he shouts, panic filling his dull eyes. “I can’t breathe!”
His lungs are probably filling with blood. He could drown internally before the river gets him. I can’t go in after him; he could drown me even without meaning to.
“Please!” he shouts. “I can’t stay up!”
“Go to hell!” I yell, though I need to save him.
He’s twenty-five feet into the channel now, turning in slow circles in the wake of a distant tug. Spinning away from me, he shouts something I can’t hear. Then, as his face comes around, again he repeats it.
“Your sister’s alive!”
A bolus of adrenaline flushes through my veins, and I have to fight every muscle to keep from leaping in after him. That’s just what he wants, of course. He has to be lying.
“Where is she?” I cry.
“Save me!” he yells again. “I can save her! Please!”
“Tell me first!”
His head slips under the water, then bobs up again. I struggle down to the river’s edge, where a big piece of driftwood lies wedged in the rock. It’s a long branch, worn smooth by the water on its journey south.
“Jordan!” shouts a voice from miles away. It’s John, back at the steps. “Bring him in with the branch!”
I pull at the limb with all my strength, but I can’t free it from the rocks. Every second he slips farther downstream, my sister’s fate going with him. I can’t save the bastard without jumping in myself, and that would be insanity. Good swimmers drown in the Mississippi, even without someone trying to kill them.