CARL ASSURES ME THAT Danny is pushing the envelope as far as he dares, but the JetRanger slides over the tops of the cypress trees at a maddeningly slow pace. Ever since I learned that Caitlin left the service station with a young black man, I’ve tried to convince myself that she knew what she was doing and that she’s all right. But every neural fiber that drives my instinct tells me she’s not. In the heat of chasing a story, Caitlin sometimes loses the judgment that serves her so well the rest of the time.
“Can’t we go any faster?” I ask. “Just a couple of knots?”
“We can,” Danny says in my headset, “but we shouldn’t. Her phone will only be pinging for a tower every one to three minutes. If we pass over her too fast, we could miss it.”
“You realize we were doing this very thing only two months ago?” I say in a shaky voice. “Searching for Caitlin.”
“That was different,” Carl says in my headset. “Then we were flying at night, and we were using FLIR to look for her body heat. We were trying to pick her out of thousands of false positives created by animals, and we didn’t have any decent idea of where she was.”
“And now?”
“Now we’re scanning for a ping with a two-to four-mile range, line of sight. If we fly close enough, that phone will come up on this scope like a lighthouse in the night. We can fly straight to her.”
“If her phone’s on,” Danny says in a grim voice. “And if she still has it.”
“Fuck that noise,” Carl snaps in a rare display of temper. “The girl knows what she’s about. She’s a survivor. She’ll have it on.”
“If she’s such a survivor,” I mutter, “how does she keep winding up in these situations?”
“You know how,” Carl says. “She can’t stand to sit by and do nothing when she sees something messed up. Keep your eyes on the deck, Penn.”
What I can see from the window is far less valuable information than the electrons on the Raytheon screen Carl is studying on the scope behind my seat, yet I can’t take my eyes from the cypress trees passing steadily beneath the chopper.
“Watch for boat wakes,” Carl says. “Anything.”
“No wakes so far,” Danny says. “I’ve been watching.”
“Caitlin’s smart,” Carl insists, almost like a mantra. “If she hears this chopper, she’ll find a way to signal. She’s got a gun on her, too. I saw it.”
Thank God, I say silently. “How are you choosing your course, Major?”
“I’m riding the border between the federal preserve and the private hunting land. That’s our best shot, right?”
“Right,” says Carl.
Time passes with inexorable slowness. I feel more like I’m riding in a cable car than a helicopter.
“Carl?” I say into my headset mike. “Nothing?”
“Not a beep, bro. Just keep the faith. . . .”
A frantic pressure is building in my chest, so strong that I wonder if I’ve inherited my father’s propensity for heart attacks. “What are we missing?” I ask in desperation. “Are we making some stupid mistake? Maybe the problem is that she doesn’t know she’s in danger. Maybe she’s actually hiding from us. Or from someone else she thinks is out there.”
“That’s a good point,” McDavitt says.
“Bullshit,” Carl insists. “If she’s in trouble, she knows it. This is like fishing. We’ve just got to stick with it.”
“I hate fishing,” I mutter.
“Hold it!” Carl yells. “I got a ping! Decent strength . . . I think she’s trying to make a call.”
“Which way?” Danny asks.
“Sixty degrees. Strong, too. Eyes open, Penn! She’s down there. Watch for that pirogue!”
Danny banks to the right for what feels like a quarter mile, then goes into a hover. Carl studies his screen like a sonar operator tracking a torpedo that could kill him. Agonizing seconds pass.
“Carl?” I prompt.
“Hold it . . . I’ve lost the signal. Backtrack, Danny!”
“Oh, God,” I whisper.
“Hang tight, Penn. We’re close.”
CHAPTER 71
CAITLIN HUNCHED AGAINST the trunk of the cypress tree, gasping for breath, every atom of consciousness focused on the bloody tube protruding from her chest. Shock had set in—she knew from the uncontrollable shivering. Her visual field had darkened at the edges; the world was fading to a small circle, to the tube in her hand. Most alarming, her jugular vein had swollen again, so badly that it was hard to bend her neck. Every few seconds she looked skyward and twisted her neck; the motion seemed to help keep her conscious.
As her symptoms worsened, Caitlin had tried to drain more blood from her chest, but to her horror she’d discovered that the tube had clogged shut. The blood must have clotted inside the pen barrel. She figured she might be able to expel the blood from the tube if she pulled it out of her chest and blew as hard as she could, but she knew she’d never get the damned thing back into her pericardium.
Her panic over Tom passing out again had become anger, then rage at his weakness. But after screaming for half a minute, she’d realized two things: first, that Tom was never going to wake up again; and second, this situation was as much her fault as his, for lying to Penn last night when she could easily have told him that Tom was hiding at Quentin Avery’s house. If she’d only done that, everything that followed would have been different. . . .
Faced with the reality that she would die unless she could relieve the growing pressure on her heart, she tried to contort her neck sufficiently to suck on the barrel herself. This was akin to trying to suck her own nipple—which she’d once done at the request of a college boyfriend—only much more difficult. Because the pen was three inches lower than her nipple, and also because as the end of the pen barrel neared her lips, she felt its tip slip out of her pericardium. Dizzy with pain and terror, she drove the pen to its maximum depth again.
A dark rivulet of blood ran down her belly.
At first she thought the fresh pressure of built-up cardiac blood had driven the clot out of the tube. A surreal image of herself on television rose in her mind: she was making the talk-show rounds, like that kid who’d cut off his own arm to get free from a cliff. And I’m just as stupid as he was for running off to a blank space on the map, where no one knew where to look.