The Sisterhood - Michael Palmer [120]
Joey’s hands and feet were bound. He had been stabbed dozens of times before he died. Arranged neatly on his chest were one of his ears and parts of three fingers. The morning papers would dismiss his grisly death as “a probable gangland slaying.”
Twenty miles north of the city, the real reason, a crudely sketched blood-smeared map, extracted after an hour of torture, rested on the passenger seat of Leonard Vincent’s sedan.
CHAPTER XXI
Moving soundlessly, Christine set her suitcase by the front door and returned to the bedroom. Through eyes reddened by nearly an hour of crying, she peered across the pale early morning light at David. He was sleeping peacefully, his bushy hair partly buried in the pillow clutched to his face. With a painful glance at the letter wedged alongside the dresser mirror, she tiptoed out of the house.
The morning was chilly and still. Her breath, faintly visible, hung in the air. Far below, a thick mantle of silver covered the ocean as far as she could see. With movements as dreamlike as the world around her she took the key from the jeep, dropped it in an envelope, and walked slowly to her own car. Any moment she expected to hear his voice calling to her from the deck. The sight of him, she knew, would snap her resolve like a dry twig.
Without a backward look, she slid onto the driver’s seat of the Mustang and rolled it down the drive before starting the engine. At the end of the turnoff to Rocky Point, a quarter of a mile from the house, she stopped and set the envelope with the key in a small pile of rocks. A final check to be certain David would have no trouble spotting it, then she turned left onto the winding ocean road, heading south to Boston.
The thoughts and feelings whirling inside her made it impossible to concentrate. She took no notice of the dark sedan that cruised past her in the other direction, nor of the huge, featureless man behind the wheel. No notice, that is, until the car suddenly appeared in her rearview mirror only a few yards behind.
Leonard Vincent maneuvered his car close to the smaller Mustang. Christine’s momentary anger at being tailgated changed to terror as their bumpers made contact. At first, it was just a scrape, then a crunch. Suddenly Vincent sped inside her on the right and began forcing her across the road. Christine’s knuckles whitened on the wheel as she strained to keep from spinning out of control. She searched to her left for an escape route and instantly broke into a terrified, icy sweat.
Not ten feet away was the edge of a drop-off—the high slope of rocks and trees where a thirty-six-hour lifetime ago she had stood and gazed for the first time at Rocky Point. Several hundred feet below stretched the Atlantic.
Another crunch, louder than before. Christine’s head spun to the right. The front of Vincent’s car was even with her passenger door. Beyond him, a shallow gully, then a sheer wall of sandstone. The Mustang vibrated mercilessly as its tires bounced sideways. Christine slammed on the brake. The acrid smell of burning rubber filled the car.
Leonard Vincent’s expression looked bland, almost peaceful as he forced her closer and closer to the dropoff. Less than five feet remained between the Mustang and the edge of the road when Christine released the brake and floored the accelerator. Her car shot forward. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the sedan slip away. Then the bumpers of the two cars locked.
In an instant they were both out of control, spinning in a wild death dance across the road. Christine fought the wheel with all her strength, but it ripped from her hands. Her right arm slammed down against the gear shift and shattered just above the wrist. At the moment the white-hot pain registered, Christine’s car hit the sandstone wall. Her head shot forward, smashing into the windshield just above her left ear. The glass exploded and instantly her world went black.
She did not hear the scream of tearing metal as the two cars separated. She did not see the wide-eyed terror in Leonard