Life Guards in the Hamptons (20 page)

Poor Matt must have been up all night checking the pups, and now he had to hold office hours, with this gorgon of a geek. I volunteered again. “I can come back in a while if you need help with them.”

Melissa sneered, but Matt said he’d call me if he ran into problems. Moses trotted right by his side, while he carried Mollie, whose tongue lolled out of her mouth as
if she were too exhausted to keep it in. But none of the dogs shivered, and their temperatures were normal, he said. I thought about setting Maggie down before my out-of-shape arms and thighs gave out and I dropped her, but a kennel man hurried out the clinic’s back door to help, and one of the vet techs took Mollie from Matt. Another young man went to the house to get the garbage bag into the hospital’s dumpster.

He wouldn’t need me. Which didn’t make me as happy as it ought to.

Before he got busy in the clinic, I said I’d call our news in to the firehouse in Montauk. The volunteers deserved to hear that the dogs were recovering.

Melissa almost slammed the clinic’s back door in my face. “Great, then we’ll have reporters on the doorstep, as if we don’t have a full waiting room already.”

Matt shrugged. “She’s right. Try to keep the dogs’ whereabouts a secret for now, if you can.”

“In Paumanok Harbor? You’ve got to be kidding.”

He turned serious. He reached a hand to brush my cheek and looked at me with those soft brown eyes. “You folks keep a lot of secrets, Willy.”

Yes, and mine were eating at my soul right now. I needed to talk to Oey. Or, sigh, my grandmother.

T
HE FIRST THING I DID WHEN I GOT HOME was strip off my revolting clothes, right by the front door on the porch. No one could see, and the foul rags were not coming inside. Little Red took one sniff and lifted his leg on them.

“Nice,” Susan said when I came all the way in, nearly naked, nearly frightened to death. The old truck wasn’t in the driveway, and last I’d heard she was staying at the restaurant to keep cooking for the volunteers and the survivors. She tossed me the afghan from the couch and went back to filing her nails and watching the television, like just about everyone else in the region, I’d guess. She wore my old terry cloth robe, so maybe she just came home to shower and change. “It’s a good thing that guy didn’t come over.”

I was too tired and too angst-ridden for another lecture about not bringing strange men home with her. I hated finding some bare-chested surfer dude raiding my refrigerator before I had a cup of coffee. “Yeah, real good. Thanks.”

“He said he’d call first, but you never know.”

I rested my head on the top of the couch. “Men are like that.”

“He seemed serious about talking to you, though.”

“If it’s another reporter, tell him I’ve gone back to the city.”

“No, this guy saw the poster about your mother’s
rescued greyhounds. He bought the old Mahoney place and wants a dog. He asked about you at the restaurant last night before all the chaos.”

“Tell him she’ll be home by Halloween.” Wearing the afghan and nothing else, I watched another station, this one with breaking local news.

“The rejoicing in the Hamptons is short-lived,” went the lead. I turned the volume louder to hear a bald man in a bow tie.

“In the midst of a miraculous rescue mission, unknown felons have taken advantage of the situation to escalate the recent crime spree.”

Susan put down the nail file. “Damn, I guess I should have looked at my cell for messages.” We both leaned forward, as if that made the story any more comprehensible. According to informed sources, which meant someone didn’t want to give his or her name, almost every police officer in the Hamptons had been out directing traffic last night when they weren’t helping pull people from the water. The main roads had to be kept clear for fast-moving emergency vehicles, so cops manned all the busy intersections to prevent more casualties. Some of them drove police cars to the hospital or the walk-in clinics when the ambulances were full.

So no one was watching Main Street. Except the wily robbers.

Tiffany’s got hit in East Hampton. London Jewelers, too. Rose Jewelers in Southampton. That little place in Sag Harbor that fixed watches. A coin shop in Westhampton that advertised, “We buy gold.”

Someone stole it. All of it. No one knew until morning that the alarms had been electronically bypassed, cameras disabled, automatic calls to the security companies interrupted, the storage vaults and safes silently detonated.

The FBI took over the investigation, now that large corporations like Tiffany and Company had been hit.

As if the thefts weren’t scary enough, more money went missing from the government coffers. This time a million dollars of Southampton’s bank account
disappeared into cyberspace. Worse, nearly every employee of all the departments of that township had a hundred dollars deducted from their paychecks. A hundred dollars meant a lot to a part-time street sweeper or the divorced school crossing guard with four kids and no child support.

The town could repay the money … if the million dollars had been where it belonged. Now everyone would have to wait. Near riots started breaking out. Homeland Security had investigators in place. The new Federal cybercrime unit had investigators confiscating computers. The whole town was shut down.

“They call them black hat gangs,” Susan told me. “Groups of topnotch hackers with no consciences who work together to steal as much money as they can. It’s a game with them, at first, to see if they can break the codes. Then they get greedy. I heard they suspected Russ, because word is he’s so good at programming. They found some kind of routing device from his computer at Town Hall to an unknown network. But he stayed at the command center all night with his laptop from home, which had no such gizmo.”

“I bet he’s mad as hell someone messed with his machinery.”

“Outraged, more like. He thought he had the most firewalls and safeguards on the planet. Now he swears he’ll find the crooks.”

“They’re going to let him help?” Like setting the fox to guard the henhouse.

“He swears to Chief Haversmith he had nothing to do with any crimes.”

Which mightn’t work for the FBI, the CIA, or Homeland Security, but if Russ passed the chief’s test, he told the truth. If anyone could unravel the web back to whoever spun it, I’d put money on Russ, especially when his own honor was at stake.

“Do they think the street crimes are connected to the electronic ones?”

“They’re not saying, but someone had to be good at shutting down the security systems.”

“And no one saw anything?”

“They never do.”

“Yeah, but enough people were coming and going for the rescue to notice people leaving jewelry stores with suitcases or sacks.”

“You’d think so.”

The next story on the news got weirder when some science expert got on to talk about a new species of dolphin discovered aiding in the disaster off Montauk. These larger, more intelligent animals seem to have been directing the more common species, identified by markings shown in photos from each instance, as the same pod that earlier tried to keep people out of the waters. Now the new ones had disappeared. Called back to secret laboratories? Retrieved by government covert ops? NOAA was sending marine biologists; PETA was sending protestors.

I was sending mental messages to whoever listened.
Go home!

The camera went back to the newscaster in the bow tie. “And they say this is the off-season in the Hamptons. Well, folks, there’s not a room to be had past the Shinnecock Canal.”

I found the remote and turned the TV off. “At least the restaurant should do well.”

Susan said she was too tired to cook. “I never want to look at a soup pot again.”

“How about a peanut butter sandwich? I had scrambled eggs in another lifetime.”

My brilliant chef cousin who could make flavors burst in your mouth until you smiled from the inside, laughed. “On Ritz crackers.”

“Sounds good.”

While we ate, I listened to phone messages. Uncle Henry at the police station wanted to see me. Oh, yeah, I’d be in a hurry to get there. Did the turkey answer the farmer’s whistle the week before Thanksgiving? Ditto Grandma Eve, who already had the metaphorical hatchet in hand.

Friends from the city wanted to know if I saw anything.
My editor wanted to make sure the new book would be done on time. My father sounded worried. My mother sounded pissed. That was about right, for them.

I couldn’t face any of it. Maybe if I’d had enough sleep, or enough time. Or more information, not the kind that came from the TV either. I wanted to take the dogs for a walk on the beach, or take a nap. I wanted to go back and help Matt. I wanted to find Oey and figure out what was going on. As usual, no one gave a rat’s ass over what I wanted.

First I put word of the Newfoundlands’ recovery on the town’s Facebook page. That would reach everyone in the Harbor and Montauk, too. I made sure to add that the pups were still too traumatized for public viewing, but they were out of danger, in a secure environment.

Then I called the hospital and got connected to Peg Winters’ room.

She cried.

Shit. “Are you all right?”

She kept crying. “My babies.”

“Listen, they’re fine. I just saw them.” I had no reason to tell her about the wobbles or the runs, nor could I lie. “They’re not perfect yet, but Matt says they are good. They all ate breakfast.”

Peg cried some more.

A nurse got on the line. “It’s the painkillers. Some people react like that, especially after a trauma. Mrs. Winters will be fine in a couple of hours when the last of the heavy stuff wears off. You can pick her up then.”

Me? Well, better driving to Southampton than into the abattoir of the council meeting Uncle Henry said they’d call this morning. I showered, twice, walked the dogs, and still had time to check in with my father. A worried parent had to be easier than an angry one.

“Stu, skunk, and a broken nose, right?”

“I never said your nose got broken. I never even said that he’d hit you, just that he wanted to. Now that you know, you can be more careful.”

Okay, I’d stay out of bars and Paumanok Harbor
where everyone saw me as Calamity Jane. “Nothing about fish? Dolphins?”

“No, baby girl, they won’t harm you. A cat might.”

“A cat?” They kept a couple at the farm, half-feral rescues, to keep the rodent population under control. “One of Grandma Eve’s mousers?”

“A mouser! That’s it! With green eyes. It can give a nasty scratch and carry all kinds of germs and diseases. Don’t get hurt, Willy. I love you.”

“You, too, Dad. Don’t play tennis in the sun.”

Traffic hit a dead stop at the light on Montauk Highway near Wainscott, so I called my mother. I got her voice mail, hallelujah.

“Hi, Mom. Everything is getting back to normal out here, even the traffic jams. Not that I’m calling from the car or anything. I might have someone interested in a greyhound. I’ll get his number, so you can check him out when you get back. We’re really busy here, as you can imagine. Those Newfies are adorable and Matt says they should be okay. The rest of us, too. Talk to you soon.”

Another long delay at Watermill. Another duty call.

“Hi, Grandma. I am fine, yes, Susan is too. Listen, I don’t think the oiaca will be around today.”

“Because it had a long night?”

“We all did.”

“Well, the tourists are flocking east to Montauk, looking for dolphins and taking pictures of the boat on its side. We should have a quiet time of it. Quiet enough to hear your story.”

She didn’t mean the one I was writing, either.

“Sorry, I’m losing the connection.”

M
RS. PEG WINTERS, MY NEW BEST FRIEND, cried when I picked her up. She was so grateful the dogs were safe, she was alive, she had a place to stay and someone to drive her while her arm was in a cast and a sling, that she gave me a hug. In one swoop I had the breath knocked out of me with the heavy cast and my turquoise silk shirt spotted with her tears. I hadn’t brought all that many clothes with me out to the Harbor this trip because I was counting on being back in the city in days. And half of what I had brought was in the garbage. So I wore my favorite blouse, the one that made my eyes look bluer. The fact that I would see Matt when I dropped Peg off at his house did not have anything to do with my decision. He’d be too busy to notice me, anyway.