“Her bathin’ suit was like pulled to the side, and you could see more than you were supposed to.”

Merrill felt another nasty bolt of adrenalin. He angled his foot better over the gas pedal. “Were they touching her?”

“No, man, I didn’t see nothing like that.”

Merrill pushed the pedal to the floor. Cars were pulling off the road. A twin-engine jet settled down onto the runway and rolled out. The Lincoln turned onto a side road and raised a cloud of dust. Merrill could see that one of the windows was down. Maybe this was the time to let the taxi driver out. The Lincoln cut a path between parked planes as one of the blond men stuck his head out of the window and looked back. Instinctively Merrill grabbed the wheel and steered the taxi after the Lincoln as he saw that it was headed for a big, white DH-125.

The same DH-125 Merrill had seen set down earlier? No other was in view. This gang couldn’t have traveled from here up to the hotel in the time available before he’d first seen them in the lobby. They must have been on the island waiting for Amy and him. The driver of the Lincoln leaned on the brakes and pulled the big car into a skid so the open window faced the taxi. The door on the other side opened and Merrill could see the backs of heads pushing quickly toward the plane. Someone appeared in the cabin door and waved them forward.

Merrill was so eager to locate Amy that he stopped watching the open window of the Lincoln even as someone appeared in it and the taxi driver struggled to get his foot out from under Merrill’s up off the gas pedal. The taxi driver was yelling and something was protruding through the window of the Lincoln as one of the blond men pushed Amy, her head covered by some kind of towel, up the stairs into the airplane. The thing protruding from the window of the Lincoln lit up like a welder’s torch and what was left of the taxi windshield leaped out of the frame, jerking like a run-over dog, and the driver’s cries suddenly stopped. Stopped – - Merrill looking up as the windshield cascaded back in on him and the front seat, the taxi driver coming down on top of him, too, as heavy a side of beef.

The car was rolling. Bullets ripped through the windows over Merrill’s head. The car bounced off another car and chewed into the fuselage of a small plane. The motion stopped and a horn blew. It kept sounding – - the taxi’s own horn. Merrill pushed against the driver, whose head twisted and flopped down toward Merrill. The left side of the driver’s skull was ripped down through the bone.