Beachcomber (35 page)

Simple pride laced his voice: the hometown team had done good.

“You don’t say?” Managing a smile, turning away from the counter while the kid said
sorry y’all had to wait
to the next customer, he transferred the doughnut bag to the hand holding the coffee cup, and fished in his pocket for two quarters.

Sliding them into the slot, he opened the door and removed a paper. At first he saw nothing. Then he turned the paper over.

Liz’s face smiled up at him from the lower right corner. Looking at it and the accompanying story, he felt his heart begin to pound.

25

“T
HIS WAY
.”

By the time they’d said good-bye and thanks to the turtle people and started heading back through the forest, it was full morning. Luke was still feeling out of sorts, but he did his best to lose his unexpected attack of angst as he caught Christy’s hand and headed west. Having been told by Gary exactly where they were and how to get where he wanted to go, Luke was able to take a pass on doing things like following water back away from the sea and looking for moss growing on whatever side of the tree it supposedly grew on to find the way out.

“How do you know?”

True to her untrusting nature, Christy hung back, glancing all around. The sun didn’t penetrate the canopy very easily, which meant that there was just enough light to enable them to see each other and their immediate surroundings. The gray trunks and low-hanging branches of loblolly pines surrounded them like an army of silent sentinels. A fine mist hung in the air.

“You mean besides my unerring sense of direction? The turtle guy told me to head this way.” Luke jerked his thumb to the east.

That did it. With their hands linked, she trudged behind him as he broke a path through the undergrowth. He was bone-tired and so, he judged from her silence, was she. Everywhere he looked, steam rose from the ground in misty columns, glistening like spider silk as sun rays slanted through the canopy to find it. The morning chatter of birds and the whirr of the stirring insect population formed an exotic background chorus. The whole world smelled like his jeans: musty and damp.

“Do you think he’s still out here looking for us?” Christy’s voice was hushed.

“No. It’s after eight, and there are too many people up and about. Even if he is, he’s not going to find us. The forest is way too big.”

“Unless we have really bad luck. Oh, wait, isn’t that what we’ve been having?”

Glancing back at her, Luke saw that she was looking slightly wilted and way too pale. Her white T-shirt was smudged and grass-stained, and it was still damp enough to give him a decent view of her nipples. Her shorts ended at mid-thigh, and below them her truly phenomenal legs were scratched and dirty. Beneath that fringe of choppy blond hair that he wasn’t sure he was ever going to get used to, her big brown eyes flickered over their surroundings nervously. And, sure enough, the left one had a purple semicircle at its outer corner.

His gut tightened just from looking at it.

“You’ve got a black eye,” he said.

She frowned and lifted a hand to the eye in question. He gritted his teeth against the urge to turn around and press his lips to that damaged eye, and forged on.

“So tell me about your former boyfriend,” he said over his shoulder. The question was intended to remind himself of his true reason for being in her life as much as it was to milk her for more information. The way he felt at the moment, information could pretty much go hang. “Michael, wasn’t it?”

“There’s not much to tell.” He could hear the glimmer of a smile enter her voice as she continued: “By the way, just so you know, you’re heaps better in bed.”

That stopped him.

“Oh, yeah?” He turned around, tilted her chin up, and looked down at her. Choppy blond hair, black eye, dirty face and all, she was the most gorgeous woman he had ever seen in his life. That, he realized, was not good. In fact, it was shaping up to be a problem of major proportions—but recognizing it for what it was didn’t stop him from dropping a quick hard kiss on her mouth.

“Yeah,” she said, smiling up at him when he lifted his head.

He kissed her again, just for good measure, this time lingering a little over the softness of her lips. As they resumed their trek, he couldn’t help but notice that his spirits were at least fractionally lighter than before.

Whatever else might be wrong with their relationship, the chemistry was definitely right.

“You think he’s behind this? Michael?” He threw over his shoulder, doing his best to keep his eye on the ball.

A beat passed.

“Maybe,” Christy said, her fingers tightening on his. Then, “Probably.”

“Maybe you should ask him. Can you get in touch with him some way?”

“I tried calling him at his private number. He didn’t answer, and he hasn’t called me back.”

“He could be out of town. He could even have followed you here to Ocracoke.”

Luke felt the sudden tremor in Christy’s fingers and wanted to kick himself for putting the idea in her head. It frightened her, that much was clear. Hell, in her shoes he’d be frightened, too.

“You don’t have to be afraid anymore, you know,” he said, his tone a little rough around the edges as his hand tightened protectively around hers. “I’ll keep you safe.”

The derisive sound she made was a classic male self-esteem deflator.

“You can’t. How can you? You’re a lawyer. They’re the mob. I appreciate the sentiment, but if we’re going to get out of this alive you need to get real.”

It was getting harder and harder to remember that as far as she was concerned he wasn’t his usual tough-guy-in-charge. “Okay, right.”

“I shouldn’t have told you,” she said, clearly filled with remorse.

“You did the right thing to tell me.” His voice was firm.

“If they kill you because of me, I’ll never forgive myself.”

“I’m actually pretty hard to kill.”

“They kill people all the time, you know. It doesn’t mean anything to them.”

She was trying her best to warn him, and she sounded so earnest and so sweet and so genuinely worried about him that he couldn’t help himself: he turned around and kissed her again. She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back a little desperately. It was some few minutes before he summoned the strength of will to set her back on her own two feet and lead the way to the road.

It was a gravel track just about wide enough for a single car to squeeze through. As Gary had said, the last few nights of rain had basically reduced it to mud. The ruts on either side were a running series of mud puddles. The middle was squishy rock, but it was high ground and undergrowth free.

“Oh my God. A road,” Christy gasped when she emerged behind him through the vegetation and saw it.

“Can you believe it,” Luke said, towing her down the middle. Okay, so his acting powers were wearing thin. He was hungry, he needed coffee like a mosquito needs blood, and he was practically out on his feet. And what was happening between him and Christy was nothing he wanted to think about until he had the benefit of at least one solid night’s sleep.

“Shouldn’t we keep to the side, you know, over in the trees?” A glance back told him that Christy was
glancing apprehensively behind her. “What if he’s somewhere on the road?”

“We’ll hear him coming.” Since the truth was that they hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the guy since about fifteen minutes after bailing out of Christy’s trunk, Luke calculated that the chances were way slim that he’d be coming along that particular mud track at that particular moment. There was always bad luck, of course, but unlike Christy’s his world view tended toward the optimistic.

“How far do you think we have to go?”

“A ways.” Actually, not that far at all, although of course he couldn’t tell Christy that. Gary would have left their transportation somewhere fairly close by.

After about ten minutes of walking, he spotted it: a nubby tire sticking unobtrusively—although not so unobtrusively that he’d walk right past it—out from beneath a bush that crowded the side of the road.

Luckily for his Academy Award aspirations, Christy spotted it about the same time he did.

“Luke, look!” Tugging on his hand, she pointed.

“I see.”

Even before he pulled it out from beneath the bush, Luke knew what it was: a dirt bike, a small, all-terrain motorcycle, as per request. As transportation went, it wasn’t fancy, but it would do the job. And it wasn’t elaborate enough that its discovery would rouse Christy’s suspicions.

“Do you think it works?” Christy stared raptly at it.

“Let’s see.” Swinging a leg over it, he kick-started it. After three pumps, the engine roared to life.

“Thank you, God,” Christy said devoutly, casting her eyes heavenward. Luke nearly smiled:
thank you, Gary
was more like it. Then she fixed those big brown eyes on him and frowned a little. “Do you think anyone would mind if we borrowed it?”

He couldn’t help it. He had to tease her a little.

“I don’t know,” he said gravely. “Some people might consider that stealing.”

“We’ll bring it back.”

“Yeah,” he said, capitulating because she was chewing her lower lip and that did bad things to his peace of mind. “We will. Hop on.”

She did, locking her arms around his waist. With her snuggled up tight behind him, they headed off down the track.

The seat was small, the road was bumpy, and the ride was of necessity stop and go. As the sun continued its climb across the sky, mosquitoes and flies and biting gnats came out in swarms. In theory, their forward motion should have kept the worst of the predators away from them. In practice, it didn’t. Since keeping the bike on the uneven surface required both hands, Luke had to forgo all but the occasional swat. And since keeping her butt from bouncing off the back end of the seat required both hands, Christy was in pretty much the same boat.

By the time they jolted out onto I-12, the two-lane highway that traversed the island, a good hour had passed and, among other things, Luke basically itched all over. The specter of poison ivy was rearing its ugly head, and the only thing that appealed to him more
than the prospect of a hot shower was the thought of coffee and a hot shower.

“Hang on,” he yelled. As Christy’s arms tightened around him he goosed the throttle. The results were less than spectacular. The bike’s top speed was probably sixty miles an hour, and with Christy perched precariously behind him he was able to do about a third of that. The traffic was sporadic as the Hatteras ferry, which connected with I-12 at its northern tip, disgorged its load of tourists and their vehicles in waves. Cars overtook them, occasionally honked and went on by, with everyone pretty much headed in the same direction: south, toward Ocracoke Village.

“You want to stop by the sheriff’s office on our way through and tell them what happened?” Luke yelled over the roar of the engine when they paused at a light at the edge of the village.

“No! I want to take a shower before I even think about talking to anyone!”

That was so in line with Luke’s own thinking that he didn’t say anything else. Calling more attention to himself with the local fuzz was not something he wanted to do. Number one, if the sheriff’s department decided to do a really thorough check on him, they just might discover that Luke Randolph, Atlanta lawyer, didn’t exist. And number two, whoever was trying to kill Christy had no idea that he’d been in that trunk with her, and it would be better for all concerned if it stayed that way.

The problem was, unless he could think of some way to persuade her otherwise, Christy was going to
tell the sheriff’s department the entire story as she knew it.

Luke pondered the dilemma as they putt-putted down Front Road and around the harbor toward the beach. This part of the island was clogged with traffic of various descriptions. It said something about the motley nature of the vehicles that they blended right in. No one appeared to pay the least attention to a Honda 250cc trail bike with two very dirty people on deck as it roared through the picturesque town.

Christy’s arms tightened around his waist as they turned a corner and her cottage came into view. It was nearly noon, the sky was blue, the sun was bright, and last night’s torrential rain was forgotten. They passed his cottage, then pulled into Christy’s driveway. Mrs. Castellano, her attention apparently attracted by the noise of the engine, looked up from her front yard, where she was, as usual, tending her flowers as well as the goings-on in the neighborhood. Luke gave her a wave. She waved back, and turned her attention to her garden again.

“The garage door opener is in my car,” Christy yelled as he stopped in front of her garage. Luke nodded, and cut the engine.

The sudden silence was deafening.

“But I have a spare key to the cottage tucked inside that flowerpot,” Christy whispered as she climbed off the back.

“You’re coming in with me, right?” she asked warily as he swung off behind her and put the kickstand down. Luke swept her with a glance: she basically
looked like she’d been through a wind tunnel. Her hair stood out around her head like dandelion fluff, bits of leaves and other debris clung to her clothes, and one of the straps that secured her sandals flapped loose. Her eye was indeed black, her face was brown with grime, and to add insult to injury her nose was sunburned to a rosy pink.