J. Daniel Sawyer - Clarke Lantham 01 (20 page)

I mounted the bank between the field and the beach, and didn’t see the drop off in the dark. I tripped, and plunged headlong eight feet down into the sand, just managing to tumble forward enough to land on my back.

All the wind rushed out of me. I gasped for air, certain I was dead.

Out the corner of my eye, I saw a fire off in the distance, what looked like a mile down the beach. I held onto the image as hard as I could while my diaphragm struggled to reinflate my lungs.

I rocked. Flailed against the paralysis.

Managed to get a few degrees over onto my side, and the glorious, salty, hacking cold air rushed in again.

I lay there on the ground heaving for what felt like a whole lifetime, trying like hell to keep my lungs from collapsing again.

How long it took, I don’t know. I don’t even care to guess. What I do know is that when I finally struggled to my feet, I found that my left arm worked. After that shot I expected it to be useless, but a little careful probing satisfied me that it was just a graze. Hurt like the devil, but it went in a stripe diagonally up and to the back.

I hoped to hell I’d put my man down for good. The thought of meeting him again didn’t exactly wax my carrot.

Then again, maybe it didn’t matter if I’d killed him.

I fumbled for my phone—or the prepaid piece of crap I was currently using for a phone. Time to call in the cavalry.

Back pocket. That’s right. I’d stowed it in the back pocket.

Pulling it out didn’t do me much good. Nothing more than a bundle of cracked, smashed plastic spiderwebs with a stupidly-optimistic keypad.

Fine. No cops. If fate wanted me to play it this way, fate could pay my damned insurance.

My legs worked fine after I tested them a couple times. How the hell I was gonna find Nya was anybody’s guess. Facing the ocean, north was to the right and south to the left. I’d turned right to shake my tail, so I was north of the beach road by maybe a hundred yards.

Left it was: south toward the fire. Good thing sand was soft enough that an eight foot fall wouldn’t do more than knock the wind out of me and make my ribs a little crackly.

And give me a hell of a bruise where the .45 had slammed into my coccyx.

The breakers washing in on my right were low, maybe two or three feet high judging by the foam that glinted in the scant moonlight. I did my best to keep my eyes off the fire ahead so I could see as well as possible in the dark.

There was a party of some kind up there. I could hear the faint plucking of guitar strings and voices.

Something about the voices cut through the cold. I could even pick out laughter. There hadn’t been enough of that in the last couple days.

The cliffs on my left opened up to a wide sand path—this had to be the beach road end of Poplar. If I went up, I might expose myself to my tail, assuming he was still conscious after I conked him. If I continued on, and Nya was at the fire, chance was good Gravity or Phil were there too, and both of them knew me by sight now.

Up it was. I stayed low, give as little chance as possible to spot me for anyone who might be watching. Low jog up to the top of the grade, then right into the parking lot. Down to the end of the parking lot, over the low-slung wire barrier, and still crouching along the trail.

About another hundred yards along I saw the glow reflecting on the plants at the cliff’s edge. I crept up to it and peered over.

A bunch of college kids out, enjoying the night, far enough past beach curfew that probably nobody would find them down here. Ten to one they’d all parked somewhere in that neighborhood and hiked in, to keep their cars from attracting attention.

Just like Nya.

She was there with them, about a hundred feet away from me, thirty feet below on the sand, singing along with the guitar and playing pass-the-tequila.

No way I wanted to be falling off this cliff.

I picked along it for a little ways till I found a spot with good cover—the bottom of a little gully beneath a pair of cypress, silently grateful that I was wearing dark clothes today instead of the more heat-wave-appropriate white and khaki. There was just enough moonlight that I’d stick out like a sore thumb otherwise.

First time I’d been without a cell phone since longer than I could remember, and I was already kicking myself for how dependent I was on it. I had no camera with me—not that the prepaid’s camera would have been much good in this light, but it would have been something. I had no watch—no way to judge the passage of time except watching the moon’s progress across the sky, an activity I indulged in so seldom that I didn’t trust my ability to guesstimate how fast it meant the earth was spinning.

An indeterminate amount of time later, headlights painted the tree trunks above me, then swung off. I scrambled three feet up the roots to peer over the edge of the gully. On the far side of a green which, judging by the low signage I could barely make out by the trail, was a local park gone to seed, a long driveway stretched all the way up to the stand of trees that lined the highway. I could tell this was the case because a car was currently advancing down it. I checked right—the driveway looked like it ended at an expensive two-story affair with a lot of glass and big rooms. A beach vacation rental, most likely, with the occupants getting in from an evening in town doing the boutique shopping. It was probably about the time the coffee shops closed up.

Nothing else seemed to happen over there, and that wasn’t my focus anyway. My focus was the fire party below, keeping my eyes on Nya and scanning the crowd for other familiar faces, rather than watching the impromptu skinny-dipping endurance contests when ten or twelve at a time would barrel into the fifty-degree-or-less surf.

My view north was obscured from my huddle-spot in the gully, so when Gravity popped into view twenty yards up the beach from the fire, dangling his shoes from their laces in his left hand and Bridget’s hand from his right, I kicked myself.

I should have been watching the parking lot and neighborhood to the north to spot anyone else approaching, but I hadn’t.

Then again, the chances that I’d have been able to see who it was before he hit the edge of the firelight were somewhere between fat, slim, and none anyway, so I chalked it up to a wash.

The two of them walked in the surf together, swinging their hands up and back like kids on a first date. Nya didn’t notice them until they were inside ten yards.

He raised his hand and pumped his fingers in and out in that way that really relaxed hippie kids do. Nya squealed and ran up to meet him, gave him a huge kiss and Bridget a similar treatment then dangled between their shoulders while the three of them marched arm-in-arm-in-arm to join the circle around the fire.

She made introductions—I could hear her voice from here when she spoke loudly, but I couldn’t make out any of the words. They settled back into the rhythm of the party, and I settled back against the trunk of the tree and deliberately failed to doze off.

I hate waiting. You think I’d have been smart at career counseling day and gone into something like garbage collecting or speedboat racing instead of a career that is all asswork—whether at a desk doing research, or in cars and blinds doing stakeouts.

Tonight was different though. I wasn’t doing surveillance. I was playing guardian angel. Nya wasn’t going to be another Stephanie. Neither was Bridget. I was convinced that Gravity was going to try and make her into one.

We can put ‘em down like monkeys
.

I shivered in the cold sea breeze and pulled my shredded jacket closer around my torso. Where the hell was Gina? I had a terrible feeling someone would trip over her body hiking up the fire trail on the back of Diablo.

If I had a phone, I could call in backup.

But I didn’t. I didn’t have any cuffs either, and no way to control Gravity if I got him back to my car.

And I couldn’t control a crowd that large. I went down there and pulled a gun to make a citizen’s arrest, there were only two ways it ended. Either the crowd took me down, or Gravity ran for it. If I was very lucky, nobody would get shot.

No, that wasn’t possible. I had to wait until they were isolated—and until I actually saw Gravity do something felonious. To date, the closest I’d seen was reckless driving, and nobody would take that one seriously.

If I was still a cop, this would all be a lot easier.

When Bridget lost her clothes and ran for the water with a new wave of skinny-dippers, it put the kibosh on blaze-of-glory hero fantasies anyway.

And again, the night seemed to pass on its own. Gravity wasn’t doing anything weirder than any of the other kids. It must’ve been another fifteen minutes before I heard the blast of an air horn from somewhere south of me.

The cliffs blocked my view, but turns out I didn’t need to climb out of the gully and slink out to the point to get a look at who was making the ruckus. Gravity threw both his arms into the air and yelled “Phil!” like he was welcoming a long lost friend home from the war.

I heard Phil’s voice yell something, but the consonants were all swallowed up by the incessant noise of the sea.

“
Say what?” Gravity yelled.

Phil repeated his load of gobbledegook goulash.

“
Sure!” Gravity said something to Nya, and Nya ran to the ocean to collect Bridget. Bridget, naked and shivering, ran into the warm sphere of the fire and pulled on her clothes. Then she, Nya, and Gravity all linked arms and stumble-ran down the beach like they were off to see the wizard.

Time for me to move.

I climbed up the roots and into the tree, then swung out onto the overgrown grassland of the old park. About a hundred yards south, the rental job stood, lit up from the inside. Its only two outside lights were shining onto a wooden walking path that disappeared through the sand bank and presumably wound down the cliff to the beach.

I jogged a little ways down, then dropped to my belly and crawled to the edge of the cliff.

Phil was standing at the bottom of those stairs. Gravity and the girls were heading right for him.

Someone paid a pretty penny for this place. Someone with money. Phil? Maybe. This thing had to go for something like two or three K a weekend. Almost certainly this is where Gravity had been headed on Sunday, which meant they’d let it out for at least a week—and for reasons I hoped to God I was wrong about.

It was a good location for a murder or two. Remote. You could fire a gun out here in this wind and there was an even chance nobody would hear you. Given how rural it was, if someone did hear you, there was a good chance nobody would care.

Infinite soft earth that nobody walked regularly, good for a burial that no one would find for weeks.

Perfect isolation.

No witnesses.

Except tonight, there would be a witness, and one armed to the teeth and perfectly happy to see either of these fuckers hit the floorboards with blood in his lungs.

The wind was getting stiffer, whistling as it swept past the top of the bluff. Much harder and it might break the back of the Santa Annas that were keeping the Bay stifled these last few days. It made for good cover as I played prowler, circling the perimeter of the house after they’d gone in.

As I passed under the living room window, I heard something that sent my heart straight down through my feet.

“
That’s it!” Over the wind’s buffeting, I could barely make out Phil Thales’s voice, and at least two people moaning, “Squeeze it. Squeeze her hard. Yeah! See what happens? Fuck yes.”

It almost sounded like an orgy, except I remembered what Stephanie looked like.

Strangled—probably strangled during sex.

The window was too high off the ground for me to be able to peak in. I hurried the rest of the way around and found the back door.

Through the window in the door, I could see it was an airlock job—a mud room closed off from the house by a second door. I could slip in and they’d never hear the wind outside. Then it would just be a matter of not stepping on any creaky floorboards.

I drew my .45, held it straight down next to my leg. I thumbed the safety off.

With my left hand, even though it made me wince, I reached for the knob and turned it. The latch clicked and I froze, but no lights came on in the back of the house. No one seemed to have noticed the noise.

I pushed the door open, rolled in, and closed it silently behind me.

10:30 PM, Monday

The latch clicked as the door closed—barely audible to me standing next to it. No trouble.

I could hear thumping—sounds that could either be screwing or struggling or a big subwoofer—through the far door of the mud room.

Three steps to the door. One twist of the handle—this one clicked louder, but the blaring of music and voices that hit me from the other side gave me another smidgeon of security.

The mud room opened to the kitchen. The kitchen had two doors—one going rightways into a hallway. All dark there. Bedrooms, probably, and a stairway to the second floor.

The one leading left had light spilling into it.

I cocked my gun arm up to forty-five degrees, so I could bring it to bear faster.

One foot past the other. One breath each step. Soft and easy.

I could hear the rubber treads on my shoes kissing, gripping, and tearing loose from the kitchen’s tile work, then from the hardwood as I crossed though the doorway into the anteroom. There was a kind-of-hallway here—a wide, straight passage along which were staggered narrow rooms, and a beaded curtain at the end of it.

Each doorway meant something else to clear. That meant another few seconds before I could get to the main room.

Goddammit
.

I had no choice. I couldn’t have someone coming up from behind, mistaking me for the prowler I was, and shooting me.

Or worse, recognizing me and shooting me. Personal quirk: I’d far rather be killed by ineptitude than malice. Most of the time, the odds seemed to be on that side of things anyway.