Redheads (23 page)

“Sorry I—”

“Don’t apologize,” she said. “I wanted to be here. I’m sorry for Mike and his family. I’m sorry you lost your friend. When we stop and you can rest, you should mourn him. All of them. And then we’ll pick up and keep going, and we’ll get the son of a bitch. We’ve got more information now than ever.”

“Yeah.”

“However long it takes, Chris,” she said.

She met his eyes and didn’t look away. She saw he understood. Chris trimmed the sails closer to the centerline and steered the boat just south of the point at the end of Molokai. She could tell he was trying to keep himself under control. She could see the way his jaw was trembling, the grip he had on the wheel.

Half an hour later, Chris furled the genoa and then the main sail. Julissa steered for the mouth of the harbor, the engine vibrating gently beneath her bare feet. Chris was on the bow, sorting the anchor chain. She followed his hand signals when she got into the harbor. In its center, she put the transmission into neutral. The boat slowed to a drift, heading into the wind. At the moment they stopped, Chris released the anchor. Then he was walking along the side deck and stepping back into the cockpit.

“You ready?” Chris asked.

“Yeah.” She looked at her watch. It was six thirty in the evening. The day was still hot and there were at least two hours of light left.

“They’ll be here soon.”

He’d told her he wanted to leave the dinghy on its davits to make it seem they were still aboard. He had a yellow dry bag with their few things. Chris took off his shirt and shorts and stuffed them into the dry bag. He stood in his boxers and handed the bag to Julissa. She took it, turned her back on him, and stripped down to her bra and panties. She stuffed clothes and sandals into the bag, sealed it, and handed it back to Chris. Then she stepped onto the teak deck and dove over the rail into the water. She went down deep, eyes open. When she came up, she turned to the boat, hands over her breasts to be sure her bra had not come off in the dive. Chris was locking the companionway. She treaded water and watched him. She could hear the sound of the surf on the breakwater, birds singing in the mesquite trees that overran the land between the harbor and the cliffs, and then, quietly at first but finally asserting itself as the dominant noise, the sound of a helicopter approaching.

Chris heard it and stepped out onto the deck, looking up. He pointed and she nodded. He tossed the dry bag into the water, and jumped off the side of the boat, feet first. He came up near her, swept his hair back with his hands, and then swam over to the bag. They swam around the front of the boat and towards the flat strip of land between the harbor and the ocean. Chris climbed the rocky slope and pulled the dry bag up after him. Julissa followed, and when she got to the thorn-covered ground beneath a mesquite tree, Chris handed her the towel and then her pair of sandals. She covered herself with the towel, put on her sandals, then turned away to dry herself and dress. She handed the towel back to Chris and then stepped out of the cover of the mesquite tree and stood in the clearing, zipping and buttoning her shorts. The helicopter was close enough to see its blue paint. She pulled a thick mesquite thorn from the sole of her sandal and turned to see Chris, dressed now. He raised his hand to the helicopter and she did the same.

“Your boat’ll be okay?” she asked.

Chris shrugged. “I’d call some guys to take her back, but that’d put them in too much danger. Like asking someone to house sit for me right now.”

He turned from the helicopter and looked at
Sailfish
. Then he turned back to the helicopter, which was coming straight at them. The pilot must have seen them. As the helicopter approached, they backed into the trees again and waited for it to land in the clearing. The dust hadn’t settled and the blades hadn’t stopped turning when the door opened and the pilot stepped out and jogged toward them. He was wearing a mechanic’s one-piece jumpsuit and a baseball cap.

“You Jarrett?”

“That’s me.” Chris held out his hand and shook the pilot’s. “This is Cheryl. Thanks for coming on short notice.”

“Not a problem. That’s your baggage?” The pilot was looking at the dry bag and glancing behind them at the boat.

“Just this.”

“Plane’s in the hangar in Kahului and they’re fueling it up right now. She’ll be ready to go the minute we land.”

“Then let’s go,” Julissa said.

They followed the pilot back to the helicopter. Chris took a seat in the back and Julissa took the copilot’s seat. The pilot handed them headsets after they buckled their seat belts. When he spoke into the microphone on his headset, Julissa could hear him clearly over the rising whine of the rotors.

“Thirty minutes flying time to Maui. Forty-five minutes, you wanna go the scenic route past Kalaupapa and the north shore of Molokai.”

“Let’s just go the fastest way,” Julissa said.

“No problem. Here we go.”

The helicopter rose above the level of the mesquite trees and then above the top of the
Sailfish
’s mast. The pilot executed an about-face turn so they looked along the wind-swept coast of Molokai. He lowered the nose and they sped above the beach. Julissa saw the bleached skeleton of a whale that had been tossed from the ocean onto an inaccessible and rocky shore.

Chris had been afraid if they went to the airport in Molokai and waited for a regular flight, the killer’s men would find them. There was too much risk. If their goal was to stay alive, then money wasn’t an object. So he’d called a jet charter service and arranged for a helicopter to meet them at the harbor. He’d asked if there were empty-leg charters available, and agreed immediately when the company offered a Gulf Stream V bound for Bangkok with a fuel stop in Manila. The plane could leave any time in the next three days; Chris instructed them to have it fueled and ready to fly no later than eight that evening. Julissa had winced inwardly when she heard him arrange the payment. He hadn’t dickered over the terms, but had simply recited his credit card number.

Though he didn’t tell her what it cost, Julissa dealt with enough Silicon Valley executives to know they would be burning at least seven thousand dollars an hour between now and when they got to Manila. She did the math in her head. Even if the charter jet averaged five hundred miles an hour, Chris was looking at sixty-three thousand dollars just to get out of Hawaii. But either of them would have spent every dollar they owned or could borrow to find the killer and finish him. She turned and looked at Chris in the backseat of the helicopter. His hands were folded in his lap and he was looking out the window at the passing sea.

They passed between Lanai and Molokai, then flew low past the tiny, crescent-moon sliver of Molokini. Then they were roaring over the pineapple fields of Maui, hurtling across the central plain at a hundred and ten knots. At the Kahului Airport, on the north side of Maui, the pilot approached a white hangar and touched down gently just to the left of its gaping doors. Julissa saw their jet inside.

“They radioed ahead, told me she’s ready. Pilots are waiting.”

“Thanks,” Chris said. He was unbuckling his seat belt. A ground crewman ran from the hangar and approached the helicopter, bending low to the earth as he came beneath the still-spinning rotors. He opened the door for Julissa, who stepped out into the grass and trotted away from the helicopter, towards the plane. Chris was behind her. Once they were on the tarmac and away from the wind and roar, they slowed to a walk.

“Been to the Philippines?” Julissa asked.

“Just Manila. He killed a girl there, four years ago. So I went. Didn’t find much. You?”

“No. Other places in Asia, sure. Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong. Just business.”

The Gulf Stream V was upholstered in tan leather, richly carpeted, paneled in nautical teak, and lit by windows four times the size of a commercial airliner’s. Julissa waited for the copilot to comment on their lack of luggage or the fact that her wet bra had soaked through the front of her tank top. But after touring them through the plane, he went forward to the cockpit, where the pilot was already starting the engines. Julissa went to the galley and had a look inside the miniature refrigerator.

“You want a beer, a glass of wine or something?”

“Sure. Whatever you’re having.”

She took two bottles of beer and looked for a bottle opener. Then she joined Chris near the back of the plane, sitting on a leather settee that faced him. She handed him the beer. The plane had taxied out of the hangar; out the window, the sun was turning orange as it sank to the horizon. She tried to picture where she’d be in a month and couldn’t. She wasn’t even sure about the next twenty-four hours. Instead of asking Chris questions he wouldn’t be able to answer, she took a long drink from her beer. It had been hot on the boat, and the beer felt good. She thought of Allison. When they were teenagers they would stay up late at night in the downstairs of their parents’ house, wearing their pajamas and sneaking beers out of the back of the refrigerator, just talking. Teenaged sisters were supposed to hate each other, but Allison had always been her closest friend. Even in college, they’d talked on the phone almost every night. Never once, in all her life, had she considered she could lose Allison.

“When we get there, I’ll pick up where I left off,” Julissa said. “I should be inside the FBI’s computer in a couple of days.”

“Okay. We’ll make our next move based on what you find.”

The plane accelerated down the runway and was in the air much faster than a commercial plane. Julissa supposed it was a matter of weight; they were on the run with nothing but a single bag that was on the seat next to Chris. The pilots banked to the southwest until the sunset was visible out the windows on the right. She could see the channel between Oahu and Molokai, lit orange now in the fading light. The sky overhead was fading to a translucent purple. The two men left on Oahu might be waiting by the elevator of her hotel with their silenced pistols and their manila envelopes. But that would only last so long. Sooner or later they would smash into Chris’s house. And inside, it would only take one mistake to bring everything down. They were going to be airborne for the next nine hours—how far ahead would they still be when they stepped off the plane?

“What’s in your house that could connect you to the ID you’re using?”

“Nothing.”

“The credit card statements—where do they go?”

“They’re electronic statements, emailed to a Hotmail account. Which I only checked from my phone.”

“The one you threw over the side?”

“Yeah.”

“No photocopies of the ID or anything with that name in your house?”

“No.”

“Nothing on the boat?”

“No.”

“And that includes emails? I don’t know where you got the ID, but were there any emails with whoever made it for you?”

“Nothing like that.”

“When they can’t find us, they’re going to tear your house to pieces.”

“They’ll probably burn it to the ground, too.”

“Any friends they could go after?”

“They already did. Mike was the only person who knew anything. And he didn’t know my other name. So he couldn’t have given it up. Not that he would’ve anyway. It looked like he held out.” Chris finished his beer and put it on the table beside him. Then he looked up at her. “Anything in your hotel room that ties you to the FBI thing?”

“No. Everything’s on the laptop I have here.”

“Then we’re still a step ahead of him. It. Whatever he is. I’m still having a hard time getting my mind around that.”

“Me too.”

Chris took his empty bottle and rolled it back and forth between his palms. “I imagined getting close to him, tracking him down. I spent so much time thinking about it, imagining my hands around his throat. Strangling him. But I couldn’t picture his face, so it was always just a blank in my dreams. Like a man who wasn’t really there. Just a shadow. Now I guess it isn’t even a man.”

“You’d strangle him if you could?”

“That, or a knife. I’d like it to be slow. I’d like him to look me in the eyes, so I could tell him who I am. Why I’m killing him. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In the end, I just want him dead.”

After dark, when they’d eaten, Chris carried their tray back to the galley, and returned a moment later with two blankets he’d found. Julissa wrapped herself and sat with her legs crossed on the leather seat. Chris poured the last of the wine and they drank together, looking out the windows at the dark sea spread out forty thousand feet beneath them. The horizon was lit by the moon and Julissa could see the curve of the earth. Traced to its completion, it was a curve that defined their hunting ground. He could be anywhere in the world.

She fell asleep against Chris’s shoulder, wondering where they would eventually find him. Up a deep river that cut into the pulsing heat of a New Guinea jungle, buried in a lair under the stone-encircled heart of a medieval city. Fifty stories up a glass office tower, overlooking an industrial port. She dreamt of Allison screaming as she was eaten alive, her telephone dangling off the hook in a pool of blood on the floor. In her sleep, she wrapped her arms around Chris and held him tightly. He held her back.

Chapter Twenty-Four