“Get out of the way,” she demanded.
“Where’s Nina?”
“Joe, for God’s sake—”
This was the first time that Rose Tucker had seemed vulnerable, and Joe was going to take advantage of the moment to get what he most wanted. “Where’s Nina?”
“Later. I promise.”
“Now.”
From upstairs came a loud clatter.
Rose gasped, turned from the door, and pressed her gaze upon the ceiling again as if it might crash down on them.
Joe heard voices raised in argument, filtered through the elevator shaft—Mahalia’s and those of at least two or three men. He was sure that the clatter was the sound of empty packing crates and pallets being dragged and tossed away from the cab door.
When the men in the leather jackets discovered the elevator and knew there was a lower floor to the building, they might realize that they had left an escape gate open by not covering the beach. Indeed, others might even now be looking for a way down the sheer forty-foot bluff, with the hope of cutting off that route.
Nevertheless, face to face with Rose, recklessly determined to have an answer at any cost, fiercely insistent, Joe pressed his question: “Where’s Nina?”
“Dead,” she said, seeming to wrench the word from herself.
“Like hell she is.”
“Please, Joe—”
He was furious with her for lying to him, as so many others had lied to him during the past year. “Like hell she is. No way. No damn way. I’ve talked to Mercy Ealing. Nina was alive that night and she’s alive now, somewhere.”
“If they know we’re in this building,” Rose repeated in a voice that now shook with urgency, “they can remote us. Like the Delmanns. Like Lisa. Like Captain Blane!”
“Where is Nina?”
The elevator motor rumbled to life, and the cab began to hum upward through the shaft.
“Where is Nina?”
Overhead the banquet-room lights dimmed, probably because the elevator drew power from their circuit.
At the dimming of the lights, Rose cried out in terror, threw her body against Joe, trying to knock him off his feet, and clawed frenziedly at the hand that he had clamped over the lower deadbolt.
Her nails gouged his flesh, and he hissed in pain and let go of the lock, and she pulled open the door. In came a breeze that smelled of the ocean, and out went Rose into the night.
Joe rushed after her, onto a twenty-foot-wide, eighty-foot-long, elevated wood deck overhung by the restaurant. It reverberated like a kettle drum with each footfall.
The scarlet sun had bled into a grave on the far side of Japan. The sky and the sea to the west were raven meeting crow, as feathery smooth and sensuous and inviting as death.
Rose was already at the head of the stairs.
Following her, Joe found two flights that led down fourteen or sixteen feet to the beach.
As dark as Rose was, and darkly dressed, she all but vanished in the black geometry of the steps below him. When she reached the pale sand, however, she regained some definition.
The strand was more than a hundred feet across at this point, and the phosphorescent tumble of surf churned out a low white noise that washed like a ghost sea around him. This was not a swimming or surfing beach, and there were no bonfires or even Coleman lanterns in sight in either direction.
To the east, the sky was a postulant yellow overlaid on black, full of the glow of the city, as insistent as it was meaningless. Cast from high above, the pale yellow rectangles of light from the restaurant windows quilted part of the beach.
Joe did not try to stop Rose or to slow her. Instead, when he caught up with her, he ran at her side, shortening his stride to avoid pulling ahead of her.
She was his only link to Nina. He was confused by her apparent mysticism, by her sudden transit from beatific calm to superstitious terror, and he was furious that she would lie to him about Nina now, after she had led him to believe, at the cemetery, that she would ultimately tell him the full truth. Yet his fate and hers were inextricably linked, because only she could ever lead him to his younger daughter.