Page 92 of The Other Lady Vanishes

“Where are you?” Massey shouted. “Show yourself, you son of a bitch.”

Jake put his back to the wall of the boathouse and took a quick look around the corner. Massey was a dark silhouette against the glare of the headlights that now illuminated the pier. The object he gripped with both hands was not a flashlight. It was a gun.

So much for the faint possibility that Massey really had come to make a deal.

Massey might have been drunk, but he wasn’t so far gone that he couldn’t see Jake briefly revealed in the headlights.

“Damn you, you’re not going to stand in my way,” he yelled.

He lunged forward, firing wildly. The thunder of the pistol shattered the unnatural stillness of the night. Again and again he pulled the trigger. Most of the shots went wild but Jake heard a couple plow into the wooden boathouse.

“Adelaide is mine,” Massey shrieked. “You stole her from me. Everything will be all right again if I get her back.”

“Who told you that, Massey?” Jake said.

“Gill explained everything. He needs her, too. It’s a matter ofnational security.Top secret. Very hush-hush. There’s a war coming. Gill says the government will need the drug. It will pay a fortune for a truth serum that works.”

Massey advanced another couple of paces and pulled the trigger again. Jake heard wood splinter in the dock.

“Gill already has the drug,” Jake said. “He can sell it to the government. He doesn’t need Adelaide.”

“The drug isn’t right yet. Gill needs to run some more experiments. Adelaide has to go back to Rushbrook. Don’t you understand? It’s a matter ofnational security.”

“If you want me to get out of the way,” Jake said, “you’ve got to answer a few more questions.”

“No more questions. You’re trying to trick me. You have to die.”

“That’s going to be a problem,” Jake said.

Massey responded by pulling the trigger again.

There was a faint but distinctiveclick. The gun was empty.

Massey screamed.

“No,” he shrieked. “Stay away from me. Stay back.”

He sounded like a man who was fighting a waking nightmare. Jake heard a car door open. There was another volley of gunshots. Someone had accompanied Massey to the pier.

Massey screamed again, this time in pain as well as fear. But he was still on his feet. He fled down the pier. When he went past the boathouse Jake was using for cover, he did not pause. He was a man fleeing demons.

He reached the end of the pier. Jake saw him silhouetted in the moonlight. He teetered for a moment at the edge, as if trying to stop himself from going over, but he had too much momentum.

Panic-stricken, he yelled one last time and then he was gone.

The screaming didn’t stop until he sank beneath the surface of the black waters of the cove.

Jake leaned around the edge of the boathouse again just in time tohear the door of the Ford slam. The vehicle made a tight turn and rocketed off into the night, heading back to the main road. It disappeared in the direction of Burning Cove.

There was a short silence before Luther emerged from the shadows of the shed. He slipped his gun into the holster he wore beneath his jacket.

“Well, that didn’t go according to plan,” he said.

Jake holstered his own gun and took his flashlight out of the pocket of his jacket. “I’m starting to think that the plan wasn’t a good one. I don’t suppose you got a look at the driver of the Ford?”

“Sorry, no. Too busy trying to dodge stray bullets. You’d be amazed how many people get killed by stray bullets.”

Jake switched on the flashlight. “It’s a damn shame we lost Massey. He could have answered at least a few questions.”

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