The Medusa Amulet (43 page)

“Get in the boat!” David said. “The one at the end!”

Without missing a step, Olivia ran down the wooden pier and jumped into the boat. As David hastily untied the rope, she straightened out the oars. He thought about untying the other boats and setting them adrift, but before he could do it he saw the man in the peacoat skittering down the hill, with something that looked suspiciously like a gun glinting in his hand.

“Row!” David said, and she had no sooner dipped the oars in the water than David leapt off the pier, landing with a thud and knocking
her backwards off the thwart. The boat careened away from the dock with the two of them tangled on its floor.

David heard one of the men shout to the other.

Slinging the valise off his shoulder, he scrambled over Olivia, and grabbed for the oars.

He could hear the thumping of feet racing down the pier.

Bending low, he put his back into it, and pulled hard. The boat skimmed forward into the dark, the oars creaking in their locks. As soon as he’d managed to raise them from the water, he pulled again, starting to get the rhythm of it. The two men were shouting at each other, in a language he didn’t understand, and although it was too dark to see what they were doing, he could hear the splash of a rope being flung into the water and the hollow clunk of a prow banging against the pier.

He dipped the paddles again, wishing he could somehow do it more quietly, and saw an orange spark ignite from the direction of the dock. A bullet plowed into the water near the stern. Olivia, crouching low, said, “David, keep your head down!”

Another spark ignited, with only the slightest
phht
, and this time a splinter of wood exploded off the rim of the boat.

David knew they were just shooting at the sound of the oars—out here on the lake, it was almost pitch-black—but if he didn’t keep moving, they might catch up.

“David, what can I do?” Olivia said. “How can I help?” In her voice, he heard more anger than fear.

He didn’t know what to tell her. He pulled again, but it was hard to row without sitting up and exposing himself to another wild shot. And no matter how carefully he dipped the oars, they squeaked in their locks and came up dripping.

There was another flash in the night, that one closer, and the bullet cracked into the back of the boat, flinging a powdery dust into the air. David wondered when they might lower their sights enough to put a bullet into the boat below the waterline.

“David, let me row for a while!” Olivia whispered. “I can do it.”

But David shook his head and asked her if she could swim.

“Of course I can swim.”

“Then take off your coat—it will weigh you down—and get ready to.”

He let go of the oars—already his hands were starting to ache—fumbled in his pocket for his cell phone, and turned it on.

“You see the boathouse?” he said. From the lake, they were the only lights visible. “Swim back there.”

But she paused. “Only if you will, too.”

“I’ll be right behind you. Get going!”

Dropping her coat and kicking off her sneakers, she rolled over the edge of the boat and into the water. Once he was sure she was well away, he bent double and quickly pulled the oars through the water three or four times, putting some distance between them and their pursuers.

The gun blazed again, and the bullet clanged off the oarlock with a shower of white sparks before ricocheting into the darkness.

He heard a laugh of exultation—the shooter must have guessed how close he’d come—and he prayed that Olivia would be able to slip past them unnoticed.

The white lights of the boathouse were still visible, but that was all. Thick clouds covered the moon and stars.

David dropped the oars, pulled off his shoes, and shrugged his coat from his shoulders. And then he groped for his valise under the thwart. He couldn’t leave it behind, but he thanked God the original papers were still hidden away in Chicago.

The gunman shouted something that was plainly a taunt, and fired again. The bullet sizzled into the water by the bow.

David slung the valise over his shoulder, then bunched his coat on the seat and tucked his open cell phone on top of it, with just a hint of its light shining clear.
Let them follow that, like a beacon, farther into the lake
, he thought.

And then he slipped overboard.

The water was so frigid it took his breath away, but he put both hands on the stern of the rowboat and shoved it off as hard as he could. In seconds, it was invisible even to him.

Then, using the breast stroke to minimize any splashing, he started back toward the dock. His clothes, plastered to his body, were heavier and more cumbersome than he’d imagined, and the valise acted like a drag.

But when he heard the other boat come near, he stopped swimming altogether and let himself drift on the water. All he could make out was the shape of the boat, a black hulk moving through the black water, and the silhouette of a man hunched in the bow, who was talking—and no doubt issuing directions—to the rower whose back was turned. David was no more than five or six feet away, so near that the blade of one paddle almost smacked him as he ducked his head below the water. He felt the ripple of the boat’s wake lapping the surface above him.

But once it had gone by, he raised his head, clenching his teeth to keep them from chattering, and started swimming in earnest, eager to get his blood pumping again.

But where was Olivia? He didn’t dare call out to her, and he heard nothing at all.

He swam on, the lights of the boathouse glimmering fuzzy and white behind the lenses of his soaking glasses. What he wouldn’t give right now for just a sliver of moonlight on the water, enough to give him a glimpse of Olivia moving safely toward the shore.

In the distance, he heard the
phht
of the silencer again, followed by the pop of something exploding—the end of his cell phone—and then a cry of joy. The shot must have caught the thing dead center and blown it to smithereens. They probably thought at least one of them, whoever had been holding it, was injured or dead.

He kept swimming, though it was increasingly hard to tell if his feet and legs were cooperating. His whole body was starting to go numb, and the valise felt like a millstone.

He took deeper breaths, cutting through the water as fast as he could, trying to keep himself in line with the lights of the boathouse while searching desperately for some sign of Olivia.

The bulky outlines of the tethered boats eventually loomed into sight, and he moved toward them, his arms as heavy as lead weights. But when he finally threw an arm over the side of one of them, he felt an icy hand clasp his own and pull him up.

“Come on, David! Come on!”

He looked up and saw Olivia’s face, her dark eyes shining in what looked like a frame of frozen hair. Gasping, he hauled himself into the boat, banging his shins and elbows on the thwarts, but his limbs, blissfully, were too cold to feel the pain.

He hugged Olivia’s shivering body to his own, but neither one of them had any heat to share.

“They’ll be back,” David said. “We have to get going.”

He stood up shakily, then clambered after Olivia onto the dock. There was only one place he could think of going before they froze to death. Clasping hands, they ran back up the hill, down the path, and out of the park.

A car rolled by, with a couple of kids who saw them emerge onto the street, drenched and shoeless, and they shouted something derisory as they drove past.

But down the block, David saw that the lights were on in the house of the Marquis di Sant’Angelo.

“It’s just a little farther,” David said, and Olivia immediately understood.

On the doorstep, clutching each other against the cold, David felt the security camera taking them in, and he shouted, “You have to help us!” into the intercom.

The door flew open this time, and the servant stood back to let them in. They stumbled, still dripping and nearly frozen, into the marble foyer, where a man in elegant dinner clothes, his black tie hanging loose at his throat, was standing at the top of the stairs.

“Ascanio,” he barked, “get some blankets!”

David nodded his thanks, his head quivering from the cold, his arms thrown around Olivia.

“I’m Sant’Angelo,” the man said, leaning hard on an ebony walking stick as he descended the stairs. “You’re safe here.”

But David didn’t know what safe felt like anymore.

Chapter 31

Gary had seen David’s last call come in, but for the first time he hadn’t picked up.

Because for the first time, he hadn’t known what he would say.

Sarah had collapsed the day before, keeling over in the laundry room, and now she was back in intensive care. Dr. Ross had been called, a whole host of new tests had been done, her condition had eventually been stabilized; but Gary had the impression that they had turned a terrible, and possibly final, corner. Until he was sure it was true, he didn’t want to burden David with that news (even though David had always insisted on being told the truth, whatever it was).

Dr. Ross came into the waiting area, with a sheaf of papers and lab reports stuffed in a folder, and hard as Gary searched his face for any glimmer of hope, he saw none.

The doctor sat beside him, and for several telltale seconds, continued to burrow into the paperwork … as if even he was trying to postpone the inevitable.

“How’s she doing?” Gary asked. “Can I go in and see her now?”

“I would wait a bit,” Dr. Ross replied. “The nurse is still with her.”

Gary nodded, watching the TV mounted from a ceiling bracket. In barely audible tones, a weatherman was announcing yet another storm on its way. Little white icicles on the map pointed down at Chicago like daggers.

“I wish I had better news for you,” the doctor finally said.

It didn’t matter that Gary had seen it coming; he still felt like he’d been punched in the gut.

“The new regimen isn’t working. In fact, it’s made the situation worse.”

“But I thought she was rallying.”

The doctor shrugged, and said, “That can happen, initially. But then the systems can’t sustain it—her blood counts have been so bad for so long, her lymph nodes are all gone or lethally compromised—and one thing after another starts crashing. It becomes a cascade, and even when we’re able to stop one organ failure, it’s usually at the expense of another. At this point, the cancer has simply spread too far, too wide, and too deeply. The disease, I’m afraid, is in control, and all we can do is try our best to ameliorate its more painful effects.”

Gary took some time to digest what the doctor had just said. In the background, he could hear someone on the TV offering advice about avoiding heart attacks while shoveling snow.

“At this point in time,” the doctor said—and Gary, his mind battening on anything but what was about to come, thought,
Can time have a point?—
“it would probably be best to think about moving her to our Hospice and Palliative Care Center. We could make her a lot more comfortable there, for as long as necessary.”

Gary certainly knew what this meant; it meant Sarah had reached the end of the line. But he still found it nearly impossible to make his mind go there. “I can’t just take her home?”

Lowering his head and pursing his lips, the doctor said, “I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s going to be very hard at this stage, and right now, the hospice unit has room available. It’s very tranquil, very quiet, and I can arrange to have her transferred there in a couple of hours.”

“Does Sarah know about this?”

“She does. She’s the one who first brought it up. No one ever wants to be in the ICU five minutes more than they have to, and I don’t blame them.”

Neither did Gary. It depressed the hell out of him just to visit
there, and when he had brought Emme the day before, the old lady in the next cubicle had suddenly expired, and much as he had tried to disguise what was going on from his daughter, Emme knew. Gary and his mom, who had flown up from Florida the day before, had ushered her out into the waiting area, but Emme had broken down in terrified sobs. All that night, Gary had slept in the bed with his daughter cradled in his arms, and Gary’s mom was back at the house right now, just trying to hold things together.