“Yes, immediately,” she said.
They stepped out cautiously.
The world seemed to be a sea of ripped-up palm fronds and foliage. Small trees were down all over.
“Close the door,” David told Alex.
Her beautiful, ever-changing, sea-colored blue-green eyes touched his one last time. She went back in, and he heard the bolt slide into place behind them.
“This way for the speargun,” he told John Seymore.
The other man nodded grimly and followed his lead.
Alex’s diving watch was ticking.
Five minutes, ten minutes. Fifteen minutes.
By then she was pacing. Every second seemed an agony. Listening to the world beyond the cottage, she could at first hear nothing.
Then, every now and then, a trill.
Already, the birds were returning.
Her stomach growled so loudly that it made her jump. She felt guilty for feeling hunger when David and John were out there, in danger, and Len Creighton still lay unconscious on the kitchen floor.
With that thought, she returned to his side. He hadn’t moved; his condition hadn’t changed. She secured the blankets around him more tightly.
That was when she heard the shots.
She jumped a mile as she heard the glass of the rear sliding doors shatter.
Alex didn’t wait. She tore through the place, closing doors so that whoever was out there would be forced to look for her. Then she raced into the front bedroom, opened the window and forced out the screen, grateful they hadn’t boarded up the place. As she crawled out the window, she wondered if the shooter was Jay Galway or Hank Adamson.
Then it occurred to her that maybe they didn’t know the truth about John Seymore.
And he was the only one of them who she knew had a gun.
In the stillness of the morning, the bullets hitting the glass, one after another with determined precision, sounded like cannon shots.
David had been waiting by the door of Alex’s cottage. He’d left it ajar, standing just inside with the speargun at the ready as he watched the trail. No one would becoming through the back without his knowledge—he’d dragged all the furniture against it.
But at the sound of the gunshots, he started swearing. What if John Seymore was the shooter?
No, couldn’t be. Gut instinct.
Someone was shooting, though, and David felt ill as he left the cottage and raced dexterously over the ground that was deeply carpeted in debris.
What if his gut instinct had been wrong?
He’d left Alex at the mercy of a killer.
Heedless of being quiet, he raced toward Ally’s cottage, heading for the back door.
Instinct forced him to halt, using a tree as cover, when he first saw the shattered glass. He scanned the area, saw no one, heard no one.
Racing across the open space, the speargun at the ready, he reached the rear of the cottage.
He listened but still didn’t hear a thing.
The broken glass crunched beneath his feet, and he went still. Once again he heard nothing. Slowly, his finger itchy on the trigger, he made his way in and moved toward the kitchen.
There, lying under a pile of blankets, just as they had left him, was Len Creighton. Then, before he could even ascertain whether Len was still alive, David heard a noise, just a rustling, from the front bedroom.
Silently, he moved in that direction.
The door to her cottage was open.
Alex had run like a Key deer from the other cottage and, without even thinking about it, had come here.
Because David would be here.
The front door was ajar.
She hesitated, found a piece of downed coconut and threw it toward the open doorway. Nothing happened.
Cautiously, she made her way to the door. She peered inside. No one. Logic told her that once he’d heard the bullets, David would have run to her assistance.
She entered her cottage, thinking desperately about what she might have that could serve as a weapon. The best she could come up with was a scuba knife.
She kept most of her equipment at the marina, but there were a few things here.
She raced into her bedroom, anxious to pull open the drawer where she kept odds and ends of extra equipment, reminding herself to keep quiet in case she had been followed. But she was in such a hurry that she jerked the entire dresser.
Perfumes and colognes jiggled, then started to topple over. She reached out to stop them from crashing to the floor and instead knocked them all to the floor with the sweep of her hand.
The sound seemed deafening.
She swore, returning attention to the drawer, but then something caught the corner of her eye.
She paused, looking at the pile of broken ceramics and glass.
The little dolphin had broken, and she could see that a piece of folded paper had been hidden inside the bottom of the ceramic creature.
Squatting down, she retrieved it.
Ordinary copy paper.