Confidence Girl: The Letty Dobesh Chronicles - Crouch Blake. Страница 18

Something niggled her.

A seemingly small fact she was overlooking.

A rodent scurried through some leaves nearby.

A mosquito whined in her ear.

What was it?

No flashlight.

That was it.

Fitch hadn’t brought a flashlight outside with him. When she’d glimpsed him walking down the steps, she’d expected to see a light wink on. But it never did. And then he’d just strolled up that path in the dark like—

Her breath caught in her chest.

—like he could see.

She sat up.

That wasn’t a strange-looking hat he’d been wearing. Those were night-vision goggles.

Thirty, forty yards way—impossible to know for sure—Letty heard branches rustling.

It was the sound of something big coming her way through the underbrush.

Get out of here now.

Letty started pushing her way through the labyrinth of mangroves. By the time she broke free onto higher ground, her little black dress dangled by a thread.

An oak branch beside her face snapped off.

The gunshot followed a microsecond later.

A boom like a clap of thunder.

And she was running.

Arms pumping.

Gasping.

Driven by pure instinct.

She ducked to miss an overhanging branch, but another one caught her across the forehead.

Blood poured down into her face.

She didn’t stop.

There were lights in the distance.

The house.

She veered toward it. At least inside, Fitch wouldn’t have the sight advantage he held right now.

Letty came out of the scrub oak and onto the dirt path that cut down the middle of the island. For three seconds, she paused. Hadn’t had this much physical exertion in months. Her lungs screamed. She could hear Fitch closing in.

Letty opened up into a full sprint as she approached the house.

She reached the stairs, grabbed the railing.

Three steps up, she stopped. Maybe it was a premonition. Maybe it was just a feeling. Something whispered in her ear: you go in that house, you won’t ever come out alive.

She backed down the steps and stared into the darkness under the stairs. Thinking, Where is the last place in the world he would expect someone to hide who can’t swim?

Her eyes fell upon the snorkel set hanging from a nail driven into the concrete.

She grabbed the snorkel and mask and took off running toward the east end of the island—the only side of it she hadn’t seen.

She shot back into the scrub oak. Glancing over her shoulder, she spotted Fitch coming into the illumination of the floodlights mounted to the deck. He pulled off the goggles to pass through the light. Held them in one hand, that giant revolver in the other. A big, sloppy grin spreading across his face like a kid playing cowboys and Indians.

Another fifty yards through the oaks, and then Letty was standing on the shore in her strapless bra and panties. Her Chanel had been ripped off completely.

The water looked oil-black.

She could hear Fitch coming.

Wondering how much time she had.

Wanting to do anything but wade out into the sea.

13

Letty pulled on the mask and stepped into the water. It was cool, just south of seventy-five degrees, and shallow. She took invisible steps, no idea if the next would plunge her in over her head or shred her feet on coral.

By the time she’d gone thirty feet out from the shore, the water came to her knees. At fifty feet, it reached her waist. She stopped, couldn’t force herself to take another step. Hated the feel of it all around her, enclosing her. Reminded her in so many ways of death.

Fitch stumbled out of the oaks onto the beach. He stood profiled in the moonlight. He was looking all around as Letty jammed the snorkel into her mouth and slowly lowered herself into the sea. Struggling not to make a splash or a ripple.

The water rose above her chest.

Then her neck.

Up the sides of her face.

Daddy please.

She could breathe, but still she felt as though she were drowning. No sound underwater but her own hyperventilation as she sucked oxygen down the tube at a frantic pace.

Her knees touched the sandy bottom of the ocean floor.

The claustrophobia was unbearable.

Even with her eyes wide open, she couldn’t see a thing.

Lifting her right arm, she fingered the top of the snorkel. It stuck two inches out of the water. She pushed with her knees, rose up slowly until the top half of the mask peeked above the surface.

Fitch still stood on the shore, staring in her direction.

She dipped back under.

It was unbearable.

Nine years old.

The cool and the dark of it.

By herself at night in the singlewide trailer she shares with her father. He comes home from the bars. Drunk and angry and alone. He loves to take hot baths when he’s drunk, but Letty has beaten him to it. He finds her soaking. With their water heater on its last leg, it will take two hours to heat enough for another bath. In a rage, he shatters the fluorescent bulb over the sink and locks her inside. Tells her through the door if she gets out of that bath before he says she can he’ll drown her in it.

It’s wintertime. Four hours later the water is cold and the air temperature in the bathroom even colder. Letty sits with her knees drawn into her chest, shivering uncontrollably. She’s crying, calling for her father to let her out. Pleading with him for forgiveness.

Toward dawn, he kicks the door in. From the smell of him, he’s somehow drunker than before.

She says, “Daddy please.”

It happens so fast. She doesn’t even see him move. One minute she’s shivering and staring up at him. The next he’s holding her head under the frigid bathwater, telling her what a bad girl she is to make him so angry. He’s beaten her before. He’s come after her with a broken beer bottle. With his belt. With his fists. With other things. But she has never believed she was going to die.

Because there was no warning, she didn’t have a chance to take in a full breath of air. Already bright spots are blooming behind her eyes, and she’s struggling, kicking. Wasting precious oxygen. But his boot heel presses down hard against her back. Pinning her to the fiberglass. He holds her head down with two hands. Even drunk, he has the strength of an ox. The build of a diesel mechanic. She is no match. Every second passing so slowly. Panic setting in. Thinking, He’s going to kill me. He’s really going to kill me this time.

The fear and the horror meet in a single, desperate need. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. She can’t help it. Can’t resist the pure, burning desire. She takes a desperate breath just as her father jerks her head out of the water by her hair. “Think you learned a lesson?” he growls.

She nods, apologizing as she bawls hysterically out of the only emotion her father has ever caused in her—fear.

There are other nights like this. A handful of them are worse. She will never learn to swim. Will always fear the cold, dark water. Will never understand despite a thousand sleepless nights why her own father hated her.

And like that nine-year-old girl, a part of her still believes it was her fault. Some flaw in her emotional chemistry. And nothing she can do, no amount of logic, no quantity of love from anyone, will ever make her stop believing it.

Letty came up suddenly out of the ocean.

If Fitch saw her and shot her, so be it. But she couldn’t stand another second underwater.

He was gone.

She spit out the snorkel’s mouthpiece. Took several careful steps toward the shore until the water level had dropped to her thighs. She stared down the north and south beaches—too dark to see much of anything.