When she pushed the door open, she caught a whiff of something spoiled. Meat, maybe? Or fruit or vegetables that had turned?

But the stronger smell was alcohol. She was used to that. Mr. Barkman liked his bourbon and his beer. She’d had to put enough of the bottles in the recycle bin.

The room was dark, the blinds drawn.

But even before her eyes adjusted, she knew something was wrong.

It took a moment for Irene to make sense of the scene. Her first thought was that someone had shoved a massive tree stump through the living room coffee table.

Only, tree stumps didn’t bleed.

CHAPTER 16

Alec Sheppard pitched headfirst out of the Twin Otter, the wash of the propeller blasting him in the direction of the plane’s tail—free-falling in a perfect no-lift dive, spinning away and down like a drill bit. Pure joy in what he could do.

He threw out the pilot chute to deploy the main canopy and started counting down. One thousand one, two thousand one, three thousand one—three seconds to deployment. Kept his eyes forward as he counted. Alec had been trained to look straight ahead, and in all his jumps—he was coming up on a 125—he’d never broken faith with this most important tenet.

There was a reason for this.

Looking at the ground could stop the thinking process cold. It could lock up your brain function and bring home the very real prospect of mortality at the exact moment when you needed all your wits. You never wanted to be mesmerized by ground rush.

When he reached “three thousand one,” he looked up.

He already knew what he would see—his main canopy hadn’t deployed.

But he had options.

Plan A: Because his legs and arms were spread out, he might have created a “burble,” a vacuum pocket flat on his back, which would keep the main canopy from deploying.

So he dipped his right shoulder.

Nothing changed.

He dipped his left shoulder. The canopy still didn’t deploy.

Okay: Plan B. Pull the reserve.

He pulled the ripcord on his reserve canopy.

There was no response. He reached back again and felt along the brake cable—he’d have to manually find the pin that would release his reserve chute. He started stripping the cable with both hands, pulling, pulling, pulling—

Something sharp sliced into his index finger.

A thrill went through him. The pain—but also, the first ripple of fear.

He was now at twelve hundred feet.

He had time…maybe five seconds.

Alec went back to pulling on the cable, rooting around inside the reserve rig, going deep—and sliced his finger again. Adrenaline shot through him a second time, leaving his extremities momentarily weak.

The cable had been sheared in half.

That was when the image floated before him: the man in the SkyView Café Starbucks.

Pointing the finger gun at him.

Pointing the finger gun.

Don’t panic.

No time for troubleshooting. He’d tried Plan A and Plan B. All he could do now was keep on with Plan B.

Once again he reached around with both hands and tried to get to the reserve pin inside the rig. He clawed and dug around in the pouch, stretching his arms to the breaking point, squeezed and pinched and pounded and scrabbled, slicing his fingers on the shorn cable strands, trying like hell to find the damn pin and pull it out. Any minute he’d get to it. Any minute, but all the while he was counting down the seconds, like a news crawl running through his head. One thousand feet, nine hundred feet, eight hundred—

His back was arched. His arms were straining. His neck was tired. His fingers and hands were slippery with blood—cut to ribbons.

He looked down.

The ground rushed up, faster and faster. Ants became people, and then people became people-with-horrified-faces. He was going in undeployed—again.

Six hundred feet.

He forced his eyes back up to level. He wasn’t done yet. Pulling, shoving, hitting, grabbing, shaking the reserve rig—he’d go down fighting. But at the same time as he fought to save himself, Alec could feel his mind shift into pure acceptance mode.

I’m going to die.

No way he’d survive something like this twice.

The twenty-third psalm flitted through his mind—“Yea though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I will fear no evil—”

Because I’m the Craziest SOB on God’s Green Earth. That was the saying.

But this time it was different.

Evil was the exact thing he feared.

Alec awoke to the ringing of the phone. It took him a moment to swim out of his dream and realize where he was: Tucson, Arizona.

The last thing he’d seen before waking was something dark hurtling from above slamming into him—hard.

But the image that stuck with him when his parachute didn’t open wasn’t the shattering memory of the disastrous free fall into the slough in Florida, which left him with a fractured pelvis, splintered ribs, a broken collarbone, and a stopped heart.

No. This time when his canopy didn’t deploy, Alec Sheppard saw the face of a stranger.

The stranger was a good-looking man, about Alec’s age, mid-to-late thirties. He wore a jumpsuit. He was about to jump, or he’d already jumped. He sat at one of the café tables at the SkyView Jump Center, a cup of Starbucks coffee on the round table in front of him. The man appeared to recognize him; his eyes lit up and a smile played on his lips. Alec had never seen him before—at least he didn’t think so, but he’d jumped a lot of places and interacted with a host of people he’d never meet again.

What puzzled him was the thing the man did next. He pointed his finger at Alec, like he was shooting a gun.

Sun streamed through the sheer outer drapes of the hotel’s window.

Alec had beaten the Reaper twice. The second time he’d literally landed on his feet—no injuries at all.

As he reached across the hotel bed for the phone, he thought about the man at the SkyView Café in Houston. The man who shot the finger gun at him right before he jumped three weeks ago in Houston might have been the same guy as the jogger on the roof in Atlanta last September.

Both of them were strangers. Both of them had targeted him. The jogger with the red tag had smacked him on the chest. The other guy had sabotaged his rig or found someone to do it for him. The cables to both the main canopy and the reserve canopy had been cut.

The phone stopped ringing. It was probably Steve, calling to remind him about their breakfast downstairs in the hotel restaurant.

Alec turned on the TV, still thinking about the guy who had plastered the red tape with the number five to his chest. He hadn’t been hurt, but it did qualify as an assault.

And the other guy. The Starbucks Guy, as Alec had come to think of him. Sitting there with that strange smile on his face, shooting the finger gun at Alec approximately thirty minutes before he almost fell to his death. If the jump master hadn’t been able to pull the ripcord on Alec’s reserve canopy at the last possible moment, he would have cratered again. As it was, he’d landed unscathed.

Alec took a shower, dressed, and called Steve, but got his voice mail. Looked at his watch.

A half hour later, he left the room and took the elevator down to the restaurant.

Steve was a no-show.

Alec called Steve again, and once again, got his voice mail. He left another message and ordered breakfast.