Beachcomber (20 page)

The dress, coupled with her new hair color, made her look like either a ray of sunshine or a bolt of lightning, Christy decided as she took a look at herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. Or a daffodil. Or a dandelion. What she did not look like was herself: a woman whose conservative style had been deliberately chosen to reflect both her profession and her seriousness about rising in it.

But being blond made her look—sexier. Yes, definitely sexier, and more fragile, and even a little ditzy, in a Reese Witherspoon–adorable sort of way. And it made her eyes look bigger and her cheekbones higher. Or maybe that was the cut.

She only hoped that blondes really did have more fun. Or, at least, better luck. As a brunette she’d been striking out big-time.

Removing the wedge from beneath the door, she lifted the alarm from the knob and then, gingerly, picked up the gun. The familiar tightening began in her
stomach as the bad memories crowded in. Determinedly, she pushed them back. Then she gripped the weapon properly, unlocked the door and headed for the living room, where she put the gun down on the coffee table, curled up on the couch and mentally worked through her options one by one. After doing that for about fifteen minutes and coming to the conclusion that all of them basically sucked, she gave it up. Doing her best to fight off incipient panic, she went to stand in front of the patio door and looked out through the glass.

Purple thunderheads were starting to pile up far out over the ocean, which probably presaged another late storm, but in the meantime it was a gorgeous evening. She could just see the beach beyond the dunes. Open for business despite having been the site of a grisly murder only two nights before, it was still packed with people at—she glanced at the kitchen clock—7:35. Another hour of daylight remained, and adults and children alike sun-bathed, frolicked in the surf, and just walked up and down the sand as if nothing bad had ever happened there, or ever could happen there. For a moment Christy watched them enviously. What she wouldn’t give to be one of them, here in this beautiful place, on vacation, happy and carefree. Or, at the very least, terror-free.

A movement in the shrubbery nearest the door caught her eye. Tensing, she eyed the swaying bushes with misgiving. The glossy greenery was so thick that it was impossible to see through, but it was only knee-high. Unless she was about to be attacked by a murder-minded
midget, she could hold off on the cardiac arrest. Still, she watched the branches warily, and when something leaped out without warning she jumped.

It was a black cat. A big black cat. Luke’s cat. Marvin, that was its name. She remembered in vivid detail the first time she had seen it.

In its mouth was a small gray bird struggling frantically to be free.

All thoughts of serial killers and hit men vanished in an instant. Christy shoved the brace aside, turned off the alarm, released the lock and pushed open the door. A salty sea breeze hit her in the face. Laughing voices and the rush of the ocean filled her ears.

“You! Drop that!” she yelled, clapping her hands sharply as she stepped out onto the patio.

The cat jumped just as she had done a moment earlier and cast a startled glance around at her. It was so surprised that it dropped the bird, which chirped in desperation as it tried to hop away.

“Scat!” Christy clapped her hands again, hoping to scare the cat away. Marvin gave her a contemptuous look and refocused on the fluttering bird. Crouching, its muscles rippling beneath its short coat, it clearly meant to reclaim its prey.

Christy pounced before it could.

“Bad cat,” she scolded, straightening with the clearly unhappy feline in her arms. It was a big cat, heavy and muscular, weighing probably a solid twenty pounds, and it was making no attempt to hide its displeasure about being cheated out of its dinner. It squirmed,
struggling to be free, but she, a cat lover from way back, already had it tucked securely under her arm with its front paws imprisoned in one hand. The bird, recovering from the shock that hopefully was all it had suffered, hopped a couple of times and then took wing. Watching it soar overhead, the cat lashed its tail and yowled.

“Oh, hush up.” Christy scratched behind its ears. The gesture did not appear to mollify it. It was tense, growling, clearly indignant at having been interrupted at such a crucial juncture in its life. She could feel its back paws digging into her side, and shifted to dislodge them.

“Christy, is that you?” Mrs. Castellano hobbled into view around the edge of the privacy fence and stopped to look Christy over with a frown. Today she was wearing a long flowered muumuu and leaning on a cane. Her bare feet were stuffed into blue plastic drugstore sandals. Her bare ankles were thick as sausages above them. Her white hair was styled close to her head in neat pin curls. Behind her was her nephew, still stocky, still scary, still in uniform complete with holstered gun. He, too, frowned as he looked at her.

“Yes, it’s me.” Christy had to fight the urge to scuttle back inside the cottage and lock the door.

“You done something different with your hair?” Squinting at her as though to get a better look, Mrs. Castellano sounded puzzled.

“I decided to go blond.”

“There you go. That’s it.” The old woman nodded with satisfaction, and stopped squinting. “Yeah, I can
see why. It adds a little something—gives you some pizzazz. Don’t you think so, Gordie?”

“The hair looks good.” His gaze met Christy’s.

“Thanks,” she said, doing her best to keep her expression from revealing the cold little frisson of distrust that ran down her spine as she looked at him.

“We were grilling out on Aunt Rosa’s patio and heard you yell,” Castellano explained. “With your track record, we thought you might need some help.”

“I was just saving a bird from my next-door neighbor’s cat,” Christy replied. He might be as innocent as a baby, but the bottom line was that he made her nervous. She didn’t like the way he looked at her, she didn’t like the way he looked, period, and she definitely felt uncomfortable in his presence. And at this point, that was good enough for her.

“You want to eat with us? We got steak,” Mrs. Castellano said.

“Uh, thanks, but I think I better take this bad boy here home before he gets loose again. I was just going to grab my keys and head on over next door. We can’t have him eating all the birds, now can we?”

Heart thudding, realizing that she was all but babbling, Christy stepped back inside her open door for just long enough to grab her purse off the couch, watching Castellano through the glass all the while. If he’d made a move toward her, she would have fled screaming out the front door. But he didn’t, so she didn’t. Stepping back out onto the patio, making sure she had a good grip on Marvin, who was still clearly determined to return to his earlier pursuits, she slid the
door shut behind her and heard the lock click into place.

“Well, I’ll just be running along.”

“You want to come over later, feel free.” Castellano met her gaze and smiled. He was attractive in a blunt-featured, prizefighter kind of way, but it was all Christy could do not to shiver at the thought that those smiling dark eyes might have been the ones that had looked at her through the gap in her bathroom door. “Aunt Rosa and me, we generally watch TV till around midnight.”

“Or later,” Mrs. Castellano chimed in.

“Thanks, I’ll keep it in mind.”

Edging around the pair of them with a smile and a nod, Christy barely managed not to break into a trot as she headed down the path that led to Luke’s cottage.

She was halfway there before it occurred to her that she was running to Luke because, since this nightmare had begun, the only times she had felt safe were when she was with him.

14

“S
HE’S ON THE MOVE.
She went out through her patio door,” Gary yelled from Command Central, where he’d been monitoring the action in the cottage next door. Luke, who had spent the better part of the day trailing Christy around Ocracoke, was just walking into the master bedroom after taking a shower.

“Shit.”
Cursing under his breath, Luke whipped his towel off and grabbed for the first clothes that came to hand. “Where the hell can she be going now?” Then, as an afterthought, “Did you say she went out the
patio
door?”

“That’s what I said,” Gary hollered back. “Wait, she came back in. She’s picking up her purse. She’s carrying something—No, she’s closing the door. She’s leaving again.”

“She still packing heat?” Luke pulled on a pair of ancient jeans and reached for an even more ancient gray T-shirt.

“No. She left it on the coffee table. I’m looking at it right now.”

“She look like she was headed down to the beach?
She have on a swimsuit or anything like that?” Luke jerked the T-shirt over his head and looked around for his shoes. Ah, there they were, over by the closet.

“Not that I could tell. Maybe under her clothes. You want me to go after her?”

“I got it covered. You keep on doing what you’re doing.”

What Gary was doing was taking every scrap of information that could be gleaned from the newspapers that had been in the briefcase Christy had put in the Maxima and running them through the computer. It was slow going, and so far had yielded exactly nothing except a recipe for gazpacho that Gary had tried and raved over, but Luke still had hopes of finding a destination, a code, a sentence, something that made sense of the delivery. Of course, it was possible that it had been no more than a test run, but …

He was hopping around on one foot putting on his second sneaker when he heard a knock at their own patio door.

For a split second Luke froze. It couldn’t be. It had to be. What were the chances that it was anyone else?

“I got it,” Gary called. As Luke heard footsteps heading through the living room, he was galvanized into action.

Knowing Gary, it was entirely possible that he’d forgotten to close the door to Command Central.

Gary had, indeed, forgotten. Luke reached the tiny third bedroom in the nick of time and closed the door to the sound of the patio door sliding open. A pair of quick strides took him into the living room. He arrived
just in time to see Christy smile at Gary as she stepped inside. Luke’s gaze slid over her—he’d already gone all goggle-eyed with the shock of her new hair color when she’d first emerged from the beauty salon as a blonde and was over it by now—to focus on the thing she held in her arms.

The
cat
she held in her arms.

“Your cat was on my patio again,” she said, while Gary, behind her, looked on aghast. “He’s a little upset because I made him lose the
bird
he’d just caught.”

There was obvious reproof in the way she said “bird.” Not that it bothered Luke. He didn’t care if the damned cat caught every bird in the universe. What was worrying him was that she was giving every indication that she expected him to take the animal from her.

Luke managed to summon up an apologetic grimace even as he eyeballed the cat. The cat eyeballed him back. Its eyes were narrowed into malevolent slits. They glowed a deep, angry yellow. The thing was growling, its tail lashing, its back feet pushing against Christy’s hip as it tried to get free. Clearly oblivious to her danger, Christy held on to it as she waited for him to relieve her of her burden.

Time seemed to stretch out endlessly, but in reality no more than a second or two could have passed before Luke faced up to the hideous reality of the situation. The thing was no more a pet than Christy was a linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys. It was a feral cat that had probably been a pet once but had been abandoned to fend for itself long since.

Now here it was, regarding him balefully, a huge,
muscular, battle-scarred tom with one chewed ear and a bad attitude. It looked like a feline Mike Tyson.

It also looked royally ticked off.

“Thanks for bringing him home.” Academy-Award-winning didn’t begin to describe the caliber of his acting as he smiled and reached for the cat.

“I couldn’t let him kill that bird.” Relieved of her burden, Christy brushed off her arms and the front of her dress. Oh, joy. Fine black hairs fluttered toward the carpet. Behind her, Gary took aghast to a whole new level.

“Of course not,” Luke said.

The cat was heavy. And mean. As soon as he took possession of it the thing hissed and tried to leap for the still-open patio door and freedom. He would gladly have let it go, except that releasing a supposedly loved pet back into the wild from whence it had just been so thoughtfully returned might seem, in her eyes, a trifle suspicious. Besides, Gary was closing the patio door.

“He gets like this when he’s hungry,” Luke said heartily, trying his best to sound normal, and turned away so that she could no longer see either the cat or his expression. “I’ll just go feed him.”

Bite me and you’re toast,
was his telepathic warning to the cat as he carried it off to his bedroom. It spat and tried to swarm up his chest by way of a reply.

“Shit.”
The curse escaped before he could stop it. Trying to cover up his reaction even as he tore the animal’s claws from his flesh and held it, struggling, away from his body, he added for the benefit of any listeners, “I just remembered we’re out of litter.”