Mistress Read online

  Chapter 21

  I land hard on the ground and feel sure that I’ve damaged myself in various ways, but now is not the time for assessment. I pop up and sprint for the boathouse and the dock. The men are shouting behind me, but it’s white noise to me, drowned out by the furious adrenaline rush.

  They can’t see you.

  But surely they know the direction I’m headed. The bullets blasting into the beech and pine trees all around me confirm it. I don’t have a choice. I don’t know what I’m up against on land. Lake Anna at least evens the playing field. But the water’s still half a football field away.

  My legs burn. The undergrowth tears my ankles and calves. My bare feet take a beating over the terrain. And I’m making too much noise. I’ve always been a noisy runner. In high school, I would come home from a thirteen-mile tempo run, and our housekeeper, Dominga, would say, Lord above, Mr. Ben, you breathe like a cow.

  Glass shatters in front of me, by the water. The boathouse windows. They must be running and shooting at the same time.

  Well, Dominga, you should hear me now. I’m gasping for air, filling my lungs down to the bottom, and clearing them out with a giant wheesh before breathing in again, intentionally hyperventilating to maximize the oxygen in my bloodstream. I’ve never tried it while running, but I’ll need all the air I can get for what’s coming.

  I tear off my T-shirt just before I hit the dock and pound out the last one, two, three, four, five steps, just as I did when I was a kid, count out the five steps and leap, arcing up first to look across the water at the lights of Anna Cabana, and then down to the water, tucking my head between my arms in a tight streamline to get as much distance from the dock as possible.

  I slice into the water and keep it deep and flutter-kick like mad. I’ve got to make it to the neighbor’s dock without coming up for air.

  I wait until I just start to slow down, then I start the pull-kick-glide of the underwater breaststroke, just as Matt Damon did at the end of The Bourne Ultimatum, when it looked like he was dead in the water, like he’d been hit by a bullet before he jumped off the building, but then he started swimming and the music kicked in and we were all relieved that he’d survived.

  When Nicholas Cage jumped off that building into the ocean while escaping from prison in Face/Off, they just presumed he was dead and didn’t search for him. That seemed like a stretch to me, but I guess when you’re watching a movie premised on the idea that someone could have surgery done overnight to transplant another person’s face onto his without any scarring or recovery time, then you’re already on board with the suspension-of-disbelief thing.

  Pull. Kick. Glide. I need oxygen. Johnnie Shaw from the tri training club could make it fifty meters in one breath. That’s just crazy, though. Thank God the dock isn’t that far. I hope.

  My lungs are already begging for air. I let small puffs of air out through my nose with each stroke to help stop the spasms of panic from my lungs.

  Was your mother breathing when you found her, Ben?

  My son won’t be answering any questions, Detective.

  My son won’t be answering any questions.

  I open my eyes underwater, but it makes no difference. I can’t see a thing. Utter blackness. There’s no horizon to reference, no way to know if I’m swimming in a straight line. All I know is that I was pointed toward the dock when I jumped. Every part of my body is on fire. My legs, arms, back—everything screams for air. All that time training for triathlons, training to get away from my father, I never did a workout with sprints first and swimming after. Hundreds and hundreds of brick workouts over the years, jumping off the bike after a fast ride and then running, to get used to the transition. But why would I need to transition from sprinting to swimming? So I never did. Until now.

  Pull. Kick. Glide.

  Pull. Kick. Glide. I don’t think I can make it much farther. My fingers and toes are buzzing and my chest is throbbing, struggling for a great racking sob of inhalation. I must be getting close. I hope I’m getting close.

  The police are going to try to blame you, Ben.

  Don’t ever talk to them, son. They can’t make you.

  Pull. Kick. Glide. I can feel my feet brush the surface of the water. Oh, I’ve never wanted anything so much as the sweet night air just inches above. But bullets travel remarkably well through water, no matter what the movies say.

  I fight every instinct to breach the surface. I pull back down, away from precious oxygen, and I want to die.

  Did your mother ever talk about wanting to die, Ben?

  My son won’t be answering any questions.

  Pull. Kick. Glide.

  My arm brushes something solid. I reach out and feel it. All the mermaids in the sea never sang a song as beautiful as my heart sings to the solid wooden pylon of the dock. I scramble up the post and my head breaks the surface of the water. The air sears into my lungs and I gasp delicious, choking breaths of oxygen while trying to avoid too much rainfall in my mouth. I’m alive. I’m still alive.

  But whoever was chasing me can’t be far behind.

  Chapter 22

  After a minute or two of panting like a desperate animal while I regain full consciousness, I pull myself onto the dock and lie flat. The rain’s lightened up a little, but it’s still coming down strong. I listen and hear nothing, but then again, the rain might be drowning it out.

  I slither along the dock toward the boathouse and silently thank Steve for not having the light on. Maybe he’s not even at the lake right now.

  Steve Sykes used to let me escape to his house whenever I could get away. I would assure Father I was training again, on a nice century ride somewhere—a hundred miles can take hours—and I’d sneak over and watch old movies for the afternoon. Steve would always leave the side door unlocked. But it’s been years. With any luck, old habits die hard.

  I try the handle. It’s locked. It’s a glass-panel door, so I grab the canoe oar engraved with SYKES from over the top of the door and break out the windowpane by the door handle.

  Sorry, Steve. Getcha back for that one.

  I carefully reach in through the broken pane, unlock the door, and sneak into the quiet house. The side door opens onto the laundry room. I rummage quickly through the basket by the dryer and find dry clothes and slip on the flip-flops by the door. I peer around in the kitchen. The fridge is still right there by the door, and it looks like his old off-roading Jeep keys are still hanging there. At least that habit stuck around. I take the keys and creep back out the side door.

  I don’t hear anything from outside except the rush of the wind and the beat of the rain, so I dash quickly over to the old Jeep, a 1986 CJ-7 with THIS END UP in big yellow block letters across the top of the windshield. Steve liked extreme sports before they were called extreme sports.

  It’s been a long time since I drove a stick shift, but she roars to life, along with Brian Johnson of AC/DC singing “Back in Black,” and I have no trouble remembering how to crank up a manual transmission and let her rip. I floor it out of the driveway, kicking up gravel behind me. Thank God for the hardtop in this rain.

  What are those guys with automatic weapons thinking right now? They don’t know, that’s what they’re thinking. Maybe they hit me and I died in the water. Maybe I’m still in the water, swimming somewhere, could be anywhere, they have no idea. Lake Anna’s an enormous lake. Probably they’ve given up on me.

  I take Halls Drive up to a fork. The soft left will take me west. I slow down only slightly and follow the fork west, just as I see headlights to my right, the east—the direction of my cabin.

  It’s them.

  (This is when Mel Gibson, in some action flick, would say, We’ve got company. I always wanted to say something cool like that.)

  I floor the gas and kick the old Jeep as hard as it can go, but now the headlights behind me have negotiated the fork and are bearing down on me. The beams are high. It’s probably an SUV. I can’t outrun it. I hear a staccato burst fro
m behind me and see the flash of light from the automatic weapon, but the first round misses completely. I weave along the road, trying to be as unstable a target as possible while drilling the gas pedal to the floor.

  The SUV closes ground on me and then my back window shatters and bullets rip into the passenger seat, thump-thump-thump, and the radio blows out just as Angus Young was starting into his guitar solo and the windshield takes two or three pops as well. I’m ducked as low as I can go and the wind is whistling in through the holes in the windshield and another staccato burst, rat-a-tat-tat, drums into the body of the vehicle and I know it’s any second now, any second, and the SUV is getting so close that they probably think they’re going to ram me and force me off the road and I veer left, to the far left of the road, and they’re staying along the right side, probably because the shooter needs a steady ride so he can aim and they probably like the angle, with them all the way on the right side of the road and me on the left, it makes it easier to shoot at me but guess what? it’s about to create a serious problem for them because—

  This road is about to veer sharply to the right.

  Bullets rip across my windshield and tear through the dashboard and I cut the steering wheel hard right and navigate the turn and pray that this Jeep doesn’t topple over, especially on a slick road, praying that the angle I’ve given myself will make up for the centrifugal force and the SUV behind me is completely out of position and I make the turn but the SUV slams on the brakes and it’s too little too late and I look in my rearview mirror but I don’t have one anymore so I crane my neck around while I keep driving forward and the SUV has…

  Yes, it’s gone off the road, missing the curve and sending it into underbrush and, if there’s any justice, an unforgiving tree.

  I let out a breath. You narrowly escaped again, Benjamin.

  But the bell tolls for thee.

  Chapter 23

  I double back to my cabin, taking a different route to avoid the bad guys. I hate to say that I hope they died in a collision with a tree, because I hate to wish death on anybody, but let’s just say it wouldn’t ruin my day.

  I stay for a grand total of two minutes, long enough to pack a bag full of possessions. I try not to linger too long on the hundreds of bullets lodged in the walls, furniture, and floor, or on the fact that most of the glass wall on the lake-facing side of my cabin is in tiny shards now. I’ll never feel safe in this place again. And I owe Steve Sykes a new Jeep (or at least an old one).

  I decide to stay close by and find a hotel for the night, or what remains of the night. There’s no real reason why those guys shooting at me, even if they are in one piece, would stick around Lake Anna, and if they were still on the hunt for me tonight, they’d likely be watching the highways. Plus I don’t trust myself driving long distances in the rain and dark on my Triumph.

  I get a single room with a queen bed and a tiny bathroom at a chain hotel. There’s no couch in here, but there’s one of those cheap little love seats. I push it up against the door. Then I take my car keys and balance them on the manual latch on the door so that if any weight pushes on the door from the outside, the keys will drop to the floor and land on a strategically placed tiny hand mirror that I found in Steve’s Jeep. The sound of keys falling onto glass will, I hope, alert me if anyone’s trying to join me tonight. Clever, right? I saw that in Conspiracy Theory. Mel Gibson, Julia Roberts. I might have been the only one who saw it.

  I probably won’t need that warning, because I doubt I’ll be able to sleep. I know this much: I need to. I still have a hangover from that little thing with my plane crashing to the earth, and tonight hasn’t exactly been a picnic, either. My heart is racing and my head is pounding and my limbs are jangling, but I know that underneath the nerves, I desperately need rest.

  I pace the cheap carpet while my mind scatters in twenty directions like cockroaches fleeing light. Was President James Buchanan gay? Did John Wilkes Booth’s fiancée have an affair with President Lincoln’s son Robert? Isn’t it odd that Robert Todd Lincoln was present at two presidential assassinations but not his own father’s? I mean, what kind of odds are those—

  Stop. Focus, Ben. Concentrate on another set of odds: your odds of survival. Whoever’s trying to kill me only has to succeed once, after all. I have to succeed every time in avoiding them.

  I turn the shower dial as hot as it goes and let the water punish me. I put my forehead against the wall and try to think about that lobbyist Jonathan Liu and what Diana might have known that got her killed and might get me killed, and then I’m thinking of Janet Leigh in the shower in Psycho and then that remake with Vince Vaughn, and that probably wasn’t his best career move, but then again he got to have sex with Anne Heche—or wait, that wasn’t Psycho, that was Return to Paradise—anyway, I’m vulnerable, because how well can you defend yourself when you’re wet and naked?

  Not very. I mean, I’m not much of a threat to anyone when I’m clothed. Naked, about the only thing I could do is scare somebody for a few seconds.

  I dry off and put on some clothes that I brought from the cabin, stuff I haven’t worn for ten years, and try to relax, to think of something that won’t freak me out, to take a small break from all this so I can get some rest.

  By 2:00 a.m., I’m convinced that Buchanan was gay.

  By 3:00 a.m., it’s clear that, while Julia Roberts can obviously hold her own in a lead role, I prefer her in ensemble casts like the ones in Mona Lisa Smile and Mystic Pizza and Steel Magnolias, which makes me briefly consider whether I’m gay, too.

  By 4:00 a.m., I’ve put the presidents in alphabetical order.

  And then I’m back to wondering about the odds of my surviving whatever is happening to me, and there’s literally an equation on a blackboard, and then Matt Damon puts down his janitor’s mop and picks up a piece of chalk and navigates through this complicated algorithm with confident strokes and then Ben Affleck shows up, first to apologize for Gigli and then to tell Damon that he should be doing more with his life than scrubbing floors, then Robin Williams walks in and tells me to seize the day, and I try to tell him he’s got the wrong movie but then Damon has completed the foot-long equation on the blackboard and just as he turns to me there’s a loud, tinny sound that startles all of us, and Damon says to me, Hate to say it, Ben, but you’re toast—

  My eyes pop open and I lurch forward on the bed. I scramble to get a view of the door.

  The keys aren’t teetering on the latch anymore.

  They’ve fallen onto the mirror on the floor.

  Someone just tried to open my door.

  Chapter 24

  I quietly slide off the bed and slither along the carpet. I can’t see below the door frame. I have no way of knowing if someone is standing outside my door.

  But those keys didn’t just fall off by themselves. Someone must have pushed against the door.

  I hold my breath, count down the first twenty presidents, and wait for any further movement. I stare at that door until my eyes are playing tricks on me, until that door is breathing in and out, expanding and contracting.

  I lie there perfectly still for at least ten minutes, my face pressed against carpet fibers of cheap quality and questionable hygiene. Maybe the sound of the keys landing on the glass mirror, meant to alert me, had the additional effect of spooking them. But it’s kind of hard to believe that men armed with automatic weapons would be scared off by a set of car keys and a hand mirror.

  I push off the carpet to a crouch, then tiptoe toward the door, careful to stay out of the line of the door frame. If these guys are inclined to unload their weapons through the door, I don’t want to be on the receiving end.

  I approach the door and hold my breath again and listen. Nothing that I can hear but the quiet hum of the cheap air conditioner in my room.

  Okay, it could have been gravity, not an intruder. But I have to be sure.

  From my position outside the door frame, I leap into the line of fire, so to speak, and peek
through the peephole. Nothing. Nobody out there.

  Okay. Maybe it was just gravity. Maybe I need to get a grip.

  “It’s time to end this,” I announce to no one but myself. I’m not even sure what that means, because I’m not exactly in control of events, but it sounded cool and I’ll take any relief right now. Something Eastwood or Stallone would say before engaging the villain in a climactic scene. Load the chamber, cock the weapon, and say, This ends here. No—This ends now.

  “This ends now,” I say to the mirror.

  I have one card left to play. I’m going back to Diana’s apartment to grab the surveillance tapes. They’ll tell me who pushed her off the terrace.

  Then I jump as I hear a short, loud buzz, then the same sound a second time. Terror fills me and disintegrates in the time it takes my brain to register that my smartphone, resting on the nightstand, has just received a text message.

  I reach for my phone as though it were a hot burner on a stove. The sender has been blocked. The message is a photograph. It takes me a moment to get it in full view.

  “Oh, no,” I mumble.

  It’s a photograph of Diana’s brother, Randy Hotchkiss, lying facedown in a pool of blood.

  And underneath it, these words:

  Randy couldn’t stop asking questions.

  Can you?

  Chapter 25

  Riding the Triumph in the misty morning air, I take a different route to Diana’s place this time. I’m not going to turn up 33rd Street and just walk right into a police detective—not to mention catch the attention of any mysterious guys in a Lexus. No, this time I’m entering Diana’s building from the rear, up the fire escape.