He crouched down. Somewhere, far off to his right, he heard the noise of a rifle being fired, and a long splinter of white wood peeled itself off the rail of the vessel a couple of feet behind him.
He wanted to ask if everybody was all right, but the words seized up in his throat.
Then he spotted Pamela lying on her back, her head in Jeanne’s lap, Paul holding her hands in his. Nanci was sitting cross-legged on the deck, looking down at the teenage girl with an expressionless face. To the right, Jeff Thomas had flattened himself behind one of the raised hatch covers. Mac was conscious of a lot of blood, all over his daughter’s chest, running onto the deck, puddling there.
“She’s done for, Mac,” said Nanci.
“Can’t be.”
Jeanne was saying something, but he couldn’t hear it. He knelt down and looked into his daughter’s eyes. She was still alive, but the blood was pumping from the gaping wound. Her lips moved as though she was trying to speak.
“What? What is it, honey?”
“Sorry, Dad…”
Mac watched her die. Saw the spark of life extinguished from the eyes. Saw them turn into dull mirrors, his own anxious, distraught face distorted and reflected in them. For a moment Pamela’s body seemed to tense, then it relaxed into the unmistakable finality of death.
“Oh, Jesus, Pam,” he whispered. “No, not you, too. Jesus, but I love you. I love you.”
There was another rifle shot, but no clue to where the bullet had gone.
“Stay here,” said Nanci Simms.
Mac hardly heard her. One arm had gone around Jeanne, and the other was brushing a wet tendril of bloodied hair from his daughter’s forehead.
“What?” He swallowed, realizing that no sound had come from his dry lips. He half turned and saw that Nanci had vanished from his side. “Where did…?”
“Over the side, Dad,” said Paul, his white hands still holding his dead sister’s fingers.
SHE LANDED EASILY, despite the drop from the rail. The snow had thickened, though it was melting wherever it touched the wet, muddy earth. The gunman was up on the bridge. She was sure of that. It was the best vantage point, and that’s where she’d have placed herself if she’d been given the take-out mission.
The Port Royale machine pistol was slung across her shoulders, the survivor of the matched pair of Heckler & Koch P-111s holstered at her hip. Nanci knew she’d move faster with both hands free.
She kept close to the water’s edge, certain that the snow was thick enough to make her invisible. Before it had started, she’d already noted the lie of the land, seeing a steep-sided ravine running to the left of the creek that would bring her up and under the highway.
Three more shots were fired, the sounds louder each time, as she neared the bridge. Despite the gradient and the slippery dirt, the sixty-year-old woman was hardly panting as she reached the looming shadow of the metal-and-concrete structure.
Now, beneath it, she could see that the bridge had been badly damaged by the recent quakes.
Iron had buckled and great chunks of the stone had cracked and fallen away into the stream below. Water was trickling through a gaping split in the actual bed of the blacktop, leaving a rusty stain on the fissured concrete.
Nanci carried on, slower, more cautious, until she had worked her way up to a level even with the ribboned road. Here she was able to look directly across to the ocean side. There was a figure lying there, using one of the rectangular drainage holes as a shooting point. As Nanci watched, she saw the rifle at the shoulder and heard the crack of the shot. Much louder.
The killer wore a dark blue rain poncho and had a rucksack at the elbow. Spare ammo was laid neatly out in clips on a square of oilcloth.
Nanci drew the 9 mm automatic and picked her way off the slick hillside onto the highway, moving through the drifting snow like a cat, silent as eternity.
Normally she would have simply put a bullet through the back of the shooter’s skull. Quick and totally safe.