Beachcomber (43 page)
“Do you have this much trouble sleeping every night?”
“No, listen, this is important. If this guy is a hit man, and he can’t get to me, he might go after one of them, especially Angie, to teach me a lesson.” The thought made her heart pound. “Or if he should happen to be a serial killer, he might not be picky. He might take one of them just because they’re easier to get to than me.”
“This house has more security around it than the White House. After you got attacked that first night, I wired the place. The cameras are only the tip of the iceberg. There are motion detectors, perimeter alarms, the works. Nobody’s getting in, nobody’s going out, without us knowing about it. Now quit worrying and go to sleep.”
“Okay. Sorry. Good night.”
He grunted. It couldn’t have been more than a minute later until he was snoring again.
Christy lay there and listened. In, out. In, out. A strong, steady rhythm. She was counting noisy inhalations like sheep when she fell asleep.
It was approximately
eleven minutes till seven the following morning. The sky was robin’s egg blue, the sun was climbing the sky, and the tide was out. A few hardy joggers trotted over the sand; an old man with a bucket and a small rake waded in the surf, digging for
crabs; three kids played tag with the surging foam. Unlike these hardy folks, Luke was not yet in tune with the day. The night had passed as uneventfully as a night spent on a floor could pass. Which was to say, nobody screamed, the phone didn’t ring, the door didn’t get kicked in. He’d gotten just enough sleep to make him coherent but cranky. After a couple of hours in which he’d basically passed out, he’d tried every position under the sun in an attempt to get comfortable, and finally had given it up. His back hurt, his neck was stiff, and he needed a shower, a shave and coffee, not necessarily in that order. Christy was out like a rock, curled up in her bed with the covers pulled up around her ears, soft little snores fluttering past parted pink lips.
He considered crawling into bed with her, considered stretching his back out on her soft mattress, considered juicing himself awake by planting a good-morning kiss on her soft lips.
Then he considered how pissed she would be, and opted for a quick visit to his cottage instead.
“You’re not gonna believe this!”
Gary, still in his too-neat-to-be-believed pajamas, bounced out of Command Central like a rubber ball when Luke stepped through the patio door. Luke eyed him dourly. Nobody should have that much energy so early in the morning.
“What?”
“I figured out the numbers. Well, the computer did.”
“What?” Luke’s gaze focused on him.
“The numbers. On the newspaper pages. In the
briefcase Christy put in that Maxima the first night. It was right there in front of us the whole time. Nothing but the page numbers. It’s a post office box and the combination to it.”
Luke’s pulse leaped. He was suddenly wide awake. “You’re shitting me.”
“Nope. I even know where the post office is: right across the Sound in New Bern.”
“Let me see.”
Luke followed Gary into Command Central, took a quick glance at the monitors to make sure all was right with the cottage next door, and then looked down at the computer printout Gary tapped with a proud forefinger.
“Look, this is the number of the post office, this is the number of the post office box, and this is the combination.”
“Jeez Louise.” Now that Luke saw it in black and white in front of him, it looked simple. Way too simple for the amount of man and computer power it had taken to figure it out. He frowned down at the paper for a moment, drumming his fingers on the thick glass covering the vanity top. “They must be using the P.O. box as a drop box. It might have been just a one-time deal, something put in there for Donnie Jr. to pick up, but it may still be active. If it’s a public post office there’ll be hundreds of fingerprints, so that probably won’t tell us much. I’ll call Boyce and see if he can arrange to have a stakeout set up. We need to know who rented the box. Of course, whoever it was probably used a fake name.”
“Got it right here.” Gary tapped another piece of paper.
“You the man, Gary,” Luke said, looking at the paper. Anthony B. Newton, with an address in New Bern. No one he had ever heard of, but then he hadn’t expected it to be. He picked up the papers, then headed for the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee and call Boyce.
By the time he finished his call, he was on his second cup of coffee and his third muffin.
“How’re the ladies?” he asked Gary as he paused in the doorway of Command Central on the way to his bedroom.
“Nothing’s stirring. They’re all still asleep.”
“You get any sleep?”
“Yeah. I’ve got the system rigged so that if it’s breached this baby”—Gary tapped what looked to Luke like a plastic box—“goes off like a four-alarm fire. Rip Van Winkle couldn’t sleep through it. ’Course, during the day I turn the volume down.”
“Good plan.”
“Did you get things set up with Boyce?”
“Yeah. He’s gonna get somebody on it pronto. You know, we’ve got a problem.”
“What’s that?”
“If Donnie Jr.’s here and thinking about approaching Christy, he’s sure as hell not going to do it with that gaggle of girls around her.”
Gary leaned back against the vanity, crossed his arms over his chest, and looked at him suspiciously. “So?”
“So until we can figure out a way to get rid of them, I
want you to draw off the girls. Escort them to the beach. Show them around the island. That kind of thing.”
“Oh no. No way. You got the wrong guy for that. I’m an FBI agent, not a baby-sitter. Besides, who’s going to do the computer stuff? Log the phone calls? Man the monitors?”
“During the day, as long as I’m with Christy, there’s nothing that has to be watched in real time,” Luke said. “Anyway, I don’t think anything’s going to happen during the day, except maybe, if we get real lucky, Donnie Jr. or one of his flunkies coming up to Christy on the beach or somewhere. At night is when I need you here keeping on top of the monitors.”
“What about the checks I’m running on the owners of those white trucks? What about the criminal records check I’m running on just about everybody on the damned island? What about the hotel records checks, the RV lot checks, the campground checks?”
“Come on, Gary. I need you, man. We’ll work the other stuff in.”
Gary scowled at him. “You know what? Sometimes I hate my fricking job.”
Luke laughed, clapped him on the shoulder, and went to take a shower. When he opened the bathroom door, he was greeted by a god-awful stench and the sight of the damned cat crouched like the Sphinx’s evil twin on the closed toilet lid. Under the sink was a litter box, which, he determined after a single wincing glance at it, accounted for the smell. A bowl of dry cat food—Gary must have made it to the store last
night—and a bowl of water were pushed against the far wall.
Until that moment he’d forgotten all about the animal.
It lashed its tail and narrowed its eyes at him. From its reaction, Luke had a sneaking suspicion that it hadn’t forgotten him.
The thought of letting it escape into the wild was so tempting that he very nearly did it.
But then sanity returned. Christy was already plenty mad at him. Getting back in her good graces was going to be hard enough without losing the damned cat. Besides, he was pretty sure that even if he let it out, it wasn’t going far. It would just turn up again in the vicinity of her patio like a bad penny.
Shit. Eyeing it distrustfully, Luke moved inside the bathroom and closed the door. Then he did a fast shave and shower.
When he stepped out of the shower, the stench had been taken to a whole new level. A wary glance told him that the cat was no longer sitting on the toilet. Instead it was sitting in its litter box. Or maybe hunched was a better word.
It was taking a dump.
“You are
foul,
” he said to it, snatching up a towel and heading for the door. From the smug look in its eyes as it watched him, Luke had the feeling that he’d just been given the cat equivalent of the bird.
“T
HIS WAITING IS THE PITS.
”
Christy was on the beach, lying on a towel spread out on the firm white sand, having no fun at all as she watched dozens of giddy vacationers, who looked like they were having the time of their lives, play in the surf. She, personally, was not having the time of her life. It was late afternoon two days after Angie had arrived with the diamonds, and so far absolutely nothing worth talking about had happened.
Except that she had adopted poor, man-hating Marvin, and she had not had sex with Luke.
“You mean you’re not having fun?” Luke’s voice was a low, amused rumble in her ear, courtesy of the earpiece he had outfitted her with. He was sprawled on his own towel about thirty feet behind her, hopefully lost to the casual observer in the crowd that packed the beach. It was Thursday, which meant that the sand was more crowded than usual as locals who’d managed to wangle three-day weekends flocked to the ocean to let off steam. The serial killer who was supposedly stalking this and other area beaches was now national news,
but if his existence had caused anyone to stay home Christy, for one, couldn’t tell.
“You know, this doesn’t seem to be working,” she groused, looking straight ahead as per instructions. “And I’m tired of being the bait.”
She was lying on her side with her head propped on her hand, wearing a solid-black one-piece bathing suit that Luke had selected for her because it was best suited to conceal a wire. The wire was tucked down between her breasts, and picked up everything she said and everything that was said to her. Unfortunately, so far the only thing that had been said to her was
oops, sorry
by a little kid who’d kicked sand on her as he’d run past her toward the waves.
“Relax and enjoy the view,” Luke recommended.
“You know what? I’ve been lying here looking at this ocean for two hours. Waves come in, waves go out. People go in, people come out. That’s pretty much the view.”
“Okay, you’ve got a point. Lucky for me, though, the view’s a lot better from my location.”
“You’re right behind me.”
“Yeah, but I see hills and valleys. Curves. Lots of tanned skin. The most gorgeous legs I’ve ever seen in my life. A sexy ass that makes me want to—”
“Okay,” she said, rolling onto her stomach to intentionally send static through the mike. “Give it a rest or I’m out of here.”
“Hey, that hurt my ear.”
“Serves you right.”
“You gonna make me sleep on the floor again tonight?”
“Oh yeah. You can count on it.”
“You’re a hard, unforgiving woman, Christy Petrino.”
“And you’re a lying—”
“Excuse me, can you tell me which way the Crosswinds Hotel is?” a woman holding a little girl by the hand stopped in front of Christy to ask. In her modest bathing suit, Christy supposed she looked like the kind of mature, level-headed adult who might know.
“That way,” she said, and pointed. The woman thanked her and continued on, clutching her little girl’s hand as they picked their way among the sunbathers that lay thick as fallen leaves in autumn on the beach.
“I’m broiling here,” Christy complained. “My sunblock feels like it quit working about an hour back. Can’t I even go wade in the ocean?”
“One splash and you’ll fry the wire. Besides, I’d have to go with you and somebody might notice that we’re together.”
“I hate to be the one to break this to you, but I don’t think anybody’s watching.”
“You might be right. Then again, you might not be. I don’t know about you, but if it’s possible to catch DePalma because he sees you on the beach and comes over to talk rather than waiting to try until you’re making a middle-of-the-night delivery of the diamonds, I pick the beach.”
Since he put it that way, so did she. Just the thought of the had-to-be-coming-soon phone call was enough to make her forehead prickle with cold sweat, which, come to think of it, wasn’t all that unwelcome given the heat.
“So talk to me. Tell me why you think Marvin hates you.” Christy rolled back onto her side, adjusted her sunglasses, and resumed her former position, head propped on hand. In one of their nightly chats—her anxiety level hadn’t declined notably, which meant she still had trouble falling asleep—Luke had confessed the truth about Marvin’s origins. He’d also admitted to having the poor cat locked in his bathroom. Christy had rescued him first thing the next morning, and he was now readjusting to domesticated life in her cottage.
“I don’t know why the damn cat hates me. I just know that he does.”
“What, are you the pet psychic now? How do you know?”
“He takes a dump every time he sets eyes on me.”
Christy laughed.
“It’s the truth. I swear it on my grandmother’s life.”
Christy laughed again. “Do you even have a grandmother?”
“Sure I have a grandmother. I also have a mother and a younger brother.”
“No father?”
“He died right after I got out of the Marines. That would be ten years ago.”