Maybe they would have to lop off his leg.

He blinked tiredly up at the sky, letting the cold rain pelt onto his face. “Maybe they won’t get a chance to lop it off,” he said aloud, talking to the frigging birds who did nothing all day but eat and crap. “Maybe I’ll just die out here and the birds’ll pick my bones clean, and one of these days some jerk-off ornithologist’ll find my skeleton and...shit! Get hold of yourself.” And he began again to count: “One thousand one, one thousand two...”

His teeth were chattering and his hands had turned shades of purple, blue and orange, clashing, he observed idly, with the bright reds of the young maple a couple of yards off. He’d never known a body could hurt so constantly. The pain never let up. He ached and ached and it just wouldn’t stop.

“I’m going to die out here with nobody to come to my funeral but the birds.”

One thousand three, one thousand four...

“I’ll get hypothermia and freeze to death like one of Ashley’s stranded dolphins. Maybe they’ll do an autopsy on me right here, like they do the dolphins. Oh, Ash…where the hell are you?”

One thousand five, one thousand six...

“Don’t be such a simp.” He tried to straighten up. “Sarah’ll figure things out—unless she’s in cahoots with her old man, the bastard.” He yelled into the sky. “The hell with you, Balaton! Bastard! Son of a bitch!”

One thousand seven, one thousand eight...

Lillian cried out, tripping, when she heard the shots. “Please God, don’t let me be too late.”

The shots had been fired near her...just ahead, near the dock. She had to get there. She had to stop them from killing each other.

Then abruptly her pace slowed, and sucking in deep lungfuls of the cold air and feeling her legs wobble, she appraised the situation with the clear eye of an experienced reporter. What could a small, unarmed terrified middle-aged woman do? They had guns. Perhaps someone already lay dead.

Who?

She had to know.

In her breakneck run, the hood of her poncho had dropped back off her head, and now her hair was soaked and rain ran in streams down her back. Good God, I’m cold.

“And you’re a coward, too,” she said aloud.

She kicked a rock loose and grabbed it, brushing off some little slimy creature that clung to its bottom, and she pressed on.

The path opened up into a small clearing, and there was the dock with Crockett’s Chris-Craft racer tied up to it. Looking around, alert, Lillian edged into the clearing. Just beyond the dock was a picturesque point where she and Judith, as happy-go-lucky teenagers, used to sit and talk about boys and careers and children and death. A tall hemlock stood above a bank of jagged rocks, where the surf crashed wildly. On the opposite side of the point, she knew, was a cliff with a dramatic panoramic view and a sheer, treacherous drop.