Beachcomber (37 page)

She nodded.

He kissed her again, quick and hard, then left. Getting dressed, Christy heard the burst of loud greetings that, she assumed, met him as he stepped through the patio door, and smiled. Knowing Angie, she and her friends were giving him a hard time. Luke would be lucky to escape with his life—to say nothing of her pants.

Gary grinned at
him from his post in Command Central as Luke walked into the cottage. Already smarting from the gauntlet of knowing looks, smirks, giggles, and ribald comments that he’d had to navigate to
escape Christy’s cottage, Luke returned that grin with a level stare.

“You got something to say to me?” he asked challengingly.

“Nope.” Gary shook his head, then chuckled. “Except, nice ass.”

Since that was a repeat of a comment one of Angie’s friends had called after him as he’d headed down the beach path, Luke shot Gary a quelling look and continued on toward his bedroom without comment. He opened the door a little cautiously. No foul smell greeted him. A glance at his bed reassured him. Fresh blankets. No cat crap.

How was he going to persuade Christy to leave him out of the report she made to the cops?

Honey, you know, it just makes me look like a total wimp if I admit some bozo was able to knock me over the head and stuff me in your trunk. So why don’t we just leave that part out?

Oh, yeah, like that didn’t sound suspicious. Casting around for another angle, Luke shed Christy’s too-tight sweats in favor of a pair of jeans and an ancient Seventy-sixers jersey, and padded barefoot back down the hall to raid the refrigerator and make some decent coffee. The instant crap he’d cadged from Christy’s larder before showering had basically tasted like mud, and its caffeine content wouldn’t have kept a fly awake. On his way past Command Central, he paused, his attention caught by an image on the central monitor. Two of the girls were still out on the patio, he saw at a glance, but Christy’s sister stood in the open doorway with her back to
the camera. The view was, to say the least, distracting.

“Somebody ought to tell her that thongs aren’t allowed on this beach,” Gary muttered.

“Yeah,” Luke said, perusing the close-up with lazy attention. “You go for it. Thanks for cleaning up the cat crap, by the way.”

“I didn’t have much choice. It was stinking up the whole house.”

Christy walked into the frame. She was wearing faded jeans and a kind of frilly white top, and her feet were bare. She looked cool and slim and so lovely that she took his breath away. It bothered him to realize that he would rather look at her when she was covered from her neck to her ankles than at her hot and nearly naked sister.

There was something fundamentally wrong with that.

“Oh my God, what happened to your eye?” Angie shrieked, sounding like she was right in the room with them as she turned and, thanks to the light pouring through the open patio door, apparently saw Christy’s shiner for the first time.

“I was in a car accident. Last night. Angie—”

“That’s a relief. I was afraid you were going to say the hunk did it,” one of the girls on the patio said, as they craned their necks to look back at Christy. Both were late teens, early twenties, bottle blondes in teeny bikinis with big hair cascading around slim shoulders and enough makeup to paint the cottage twice over. Their boobs were bigger even than Angie’s, nice brown cantaloup-sized hooters that, under other conditions, would have caught Luke’s eye for longer than the couple of seconds he accorded them. They’d managed to
scrounge up two lounge chairs from somewhere and were draped across them soaking up the sun.

“Yeah,” said the other. “Wouldn’t you know it? It’s always the good-looking guys.”

“It was the air bag,” Christy said.

“Oh, by the way, this is Amber. This is Maxine.” Angie made the introductions while Christy moved up to stand beside her in the doorway. Luke found himself assessing two mighty fine asses: one all but buck naked, the other doing its bit to fill out a pair of faded jeans.

The jeans won again. Shit.

“Hey, Christy,” Amber and Maxine chorused in unison. “Thanks for letting us come.”

“Hey,” Christy said, sounding faintly uncomfortable. “Uh, look—”

“Your boyfriend is the bomb,” one of them—Luke had no idea whether it was Amber or Maxine—told her with a grin. “You get tired of him, you let me know.”

“Or me,” the other said.

Gary smirked and cast a razzing glance up at Luke.

“He said he’s renting the cottage next door,” the first one added. “What I want to know is, are there any more at home like him?”

Amber and Maxine both burst into laughter.

“There’s your cue, buddy,” Luke said. “They’re here, they’re hot, and they’re horny. Go for it.”

Gary grimaced. “Yeah, right. Anyway, Christy’s more my type. Maybe I should go after her instead.”

Luke almost said something on the order of
do it and die
when he realized he was being teased.

“Whatever floats your boat,” he said, feigning indifference,
and straightened away from the doorjamb to pad toward the kitchen.

“We got anything to eat?” he called over his shoulder.

“Leftover lasagna. Pasta salad. We would have some nice cold slices of steak teriyaki, but, oh, wait, the cat you brought home ate the steak.” Gary abandoned Command Central to follow him into the kitchen.

“Christy brought the cat, not me.” Luke opened a cabinet and slid his fingers around the blue Maxwell House can. Just the sight of it made his brain cells perk up.

“It was your fault.”

“Could you give the cat obsession a rest, please?” Luke dumped coffee and water into the coffeemaker and turned it on.

“Sure. Fine.” Settling himself on a barstool, Gary didn’t say anything for a minute or so while Luke opened the refrigerator and rummaged around. Then, in a carefully neutral tone, he asked, “Dirt bike work out?”

“Yeah. You did good.” Luke wasn’t in the mood for leftover lasagna or pasta salad. He settled on plain old bologna, set it on the counter, and reached for the bread. “You get anything on the white truck?”

“Twelve registered here in Ocracoke. Over three hundred in the Outer Banks. More if you go inland.”

“Great. Ah well, I guess we start checking each and every one out.”

“Already doing it,” Gary said, watching as Luke slathered mustard on bread. “I don’t see how you can eat that stuff.”

“I’m hungry.” Luke slapped the sandwich together.

Gary made a sound under his breath that basically condemned bologna sandwiches to an outer circle of hell and abandoned the subject.

“Christy wasn’t suspicious when you two just happened to stumble across a dirt bike way out there in the middle of nowhere?”

“Nah.” Luke bit into his sandwich. The smell of coffee was beginning to permeate the air. His eyes half-closed in anticipation, Luke realized that, like many a seeker of truth in the past, he had accidentally stumbled upon the way: the on-ramp to the nirvana highway was reached via bologna sandwiches and coffee. “Anyway, I think by that time she was too tired to be suspicious.”

“You get anything good out of her?” As Luke paused in the act of devouring his sandwich to fix Gary with a look, Gary apparently realized how that sounded. “Information, I mean,” he clarified hurriedly.

“Some.” Luke took another bite, and turned his attention to the coffee. It was almost ready. “Franky Hill’s dead. They killed him, and showed her the body. She’s been scared out of her mind ever since.”

“I knew it,” Gary said with satisfaction. “You gonna bring her in now?”

Luke chewed and pondered. He’d been asking himself the same question for the last few hours, and not coming up with any answers that didn’t involve major helpings of shit hitting the fan. “Yeah, well, I’m thinking about it.”

“It seems to me—” Gary began, only to be interrupted by a quick knock on the patio door. Luke’s head
swiveled toward the sound. Gary’s head swiveled toward the sound.

Christy, with the feline Mike Tyson glowering in her arms, gave a little wave through the glass and slid the patio door open.

Luke almost choked on his bologna. Swallowing, he put the remainder of the sandwich down fast.

“Marvin had a bird trapped on the other side of my fence,” Christy said, stepping inside and closing the door behind her, presumably so that the poor misunderstood kitty couldn’t get out. That done, she let the cat jump to the carpet. After one hunted glance around, it bounded for the hall and disappeared. “When Amber heard it chirping and tried to save it, he scratched her. So I caught him and brought him over. I really don’t think you ought to be letting him outside. It seems to make him nervous.”

If Luke hadn’t been so horrified himself, he would have laughed at the look on Gary’s face. Coming face-to-face with the Antichrist couldn’t have provoked a more appalled expression.

“Thanks for bringing him home,” Luke said, walking toward her. The key was to get Christy out of the house fast, before the cat had time to vent its frustration on his bed.

“Yeah,” Gary said.

“No problem.” Christy slid her hands into the back pockets of her jeans and glanced past Luke toward the kitchen counter. “Do I smell coffee?”

“You know, I’ve been thinking,” Luke said, sliding a hand around her elbow as a prelude to turning her
around and escorting her out the door and back across the sand. “Maybe I should help you tell your sister and her friends about the serial killer.”

“I already tried.” Christy’s expression turned glum as she looked up at him. “Know what they said? Amber said
‘Whoa’
and Maxine said
‘Ooo, that gives me chills.’
Then Angie said
‘What are the chances?’
And then they all three decided that a free week at the beach was worth the risk.”

She sounded so disgusted that Luke had to smile.

“Let’s see if I—” he began, only to break off as shrieks of laughter filled the air. Shrieks of female laughter. Realizing that it was coming from the third bedroom with a thrill of pure horror, Luke reached for the handle of the patio door.

“Hey, forget it. He belongs to my sister.” Angie’s voice rose above the laughter, clear as a bell.

Christy froze as she heard it. Her head spun almost as fast as Linda Blair’s in
The Exorcist.
Luckily, a full 360-degree turn was not required. For an instant, a hideous instant, she stared at the open door of the third bedroom. Then, with a single awful look that encompassed both Luke and Gary, she jerked her arm from Luke’s hold and, to the accompaniment of more raucous female laughter, rushed toward the door of Command Central.

27

F
OR A LONG MOMENT
Christy stood there with her mouth open, absolutely unable to believe her eyes. Among a whole plethora of other electronic equipment, there were three computer monitors set up in the room. One showed a view of the outside front of her house as seen from, say, the woods across the street, complete with a couple on bicycles who were apparently just at that moment riding past. The second pictured her house from the rear, panning from one side to the other from a distance of about a hundred feet, with the pinkie-sized figures of her sister and her sister’s friends sunbathing on the patio as the centerpiece. The third view obviously originated from inside the house. It was framed by an image of her open patio door. Beyond it, she could clearly see—and hear—Angie and her two friends in screen-filling close-up.

For a moment all she could do was stare while her mind went through an entire theme park’s worth of spins and loops. Then she turned her head to find Luke right behind her, grimacing. Beyond him stood Gary,
who couldn’t have looked any more horrified if he’d just swallowed a live grenade.

There was no doubt about their guilt. It was written all over their faces.

“What are you two, a couple of perverts?” she gasped as memories of certain articles she had read about men who get their kicks bugging the homes of neighborhood women filled her head. Then she turned on her heel and pushed the flat of both hands against Luke’s chest to move him out of her path. “Get out of my way. I’m calling the sheriff.”

“Christy, no.” Luke staggered back a step, but managed to grab her around the waist when she would have stomped past. “Wait. Stop. I can’t let you do that.”

“What do you mean, you can’t let me do that? You can’t stop me from doing that, you sick, disgusting …
pervert.
”

“Christy …”

“Don’t you
Christy
me.”

But despite her struggles he wasn’t letting go, and all of a sudden it occurred to her that she might have inadvertently stumbled across a secret that he and Gary really, truly didn’t want anyone to know. That might, in fact, put her in danger. Voyeurs went to prison, didn’t they? Heart leaping, juiced by a jolt of pure adrenaline, she reverted to the scrappy little girl who’d had to fend for herself and her sisters in Pleasantville and elbowed Luke hard in the stomach.

“Oomph.”
Caught by surprise, Luke groaned and doubled over.

“Sicko!” Christy flung at him as she tore herself out
of his slackened hold and fled toward the patio door and safety. Once outside, she planned to scream like a siren all the way home as she ran to lock herself in her house and call the sheriff.