“On your feet, you damn weasel,” Gannon said, grabbing him by his hair. “We’re going for a ride to find your boss.”

A ragged column of trailing dust rose behind the speeding truck as Gannon hauled it up the dirt drive. When they hit Sherman’s Highway, he was doing close to eighty, and the Sierra’s spinning back tires gave out a long, high scary bark off the asphalt as the rear end fishtailed.

He went flat-out south as fast as he could for another mile. Then he let off the throbbing engine and rolled all the windows down, listening.

When the ripping sound of the quad came ahead through the trees on his right, he quickly pictured the terrain in his head.

Reyland was along the water now on the Bahama Banks–side beach. South of him where he was headed was Lighthouse Point, where the island ended.

The truck’s V-8 throbbed to life again as Gannon buried the accelerator.

“I got you now, you son of a bitch,” he said.

A quarter mile to the south the road began to dogleg to the left. When he saw the palm trees on the far side of it, he realized they actually rimmed the beach Reyland was currently driving on.

Gannon reached over and grabbed his seat belt.

“Bump!” he called back to Emerson as the Sierra bucked up off the road and plowed through the brush.

The speeding pickup just fit between two palm trees and then there was a crunching sound as it bottomed out on some jutting rocks. Beyond the rocks there was a descending sand dune, and Gannon felt his stomach drop as the truck’s front end got sudden air.

He was rocketing down the curve of the dune, frantically pumping the brakes, when Reyland blew past at incredible speed from left to right across the beach right in front of him.

Gannon spun the wheel and locked his eyes on the quad’s cherry-red running light and gunned it down the beach. He was reaching over to grab the rifle a split second later when the quad suddenly zoomed out of his headlights to the left.

“No!” Gannon screamed as he watched the red light disappear from the beach up a dune of sand that sloped up toward the ridge on their left.

He was halfway up the slope after it a moment later when the truck’s tires began to slip.

“No!” he screamed again as the rear end swung back and forth in the loose sand as he revved it.

But it was no use.

Gannon slammed the stuck truck in Park and grabbed the rifle and bailed out the driver’s door. He sprinted up the dune between the quad’s tire tracks past the island’s abandoned old gray concrete lighthouse and then came running down the ridge’s other side.

He’d just made the flat sand of the Atlantic-side beach when he saw a spot of red to the north.

He halted and brought the infrared scope of the rifle up to his eye.