Beachcomber (4 page)

The sand was warm and gritty underfoot, dotted with puddles and strewn here and there with webs of stringy seaweed. Moonlight glinted on the clear blob of a jellyfish as it came tumbling toward her, rolling along on the outer edges of the inrushing tide. Fighting bubbling
panic, gasping for breath, her heart beating a hundred miles a minute, her straining legs only wishing they could pump as fast, she pushed everything from her mind but the urgent need to
get off that beach.
The sound of the surf effectively deafened her; blowing strands of her hair whipping in front of her face all but blinded her. She couldn’t hear so much as the slap of her own feet hitting the beach; she could barely see where she was going. But she could
feel
—and what she was feeling terrified her.

Her five senses be damned: at the moment only the sixth one mattered. And it was telling her that she was in imminent danger. There was someone behind her, giving chase—hunting her.

In the very act of casting what must have been the dozenth in a series of frightened glances over her shoulder, Christy tripped over something and went down.

She hit hard. Her knees gouged twin pits in the sand. Her palms thudded and sank. Her teeth clinked together with a force that sent pain shooting through the joint that connected her jaws. Salt spray hit her in the face as a large wave broke with particular enthusiasm just yards away.

Stunned to have been so abruptly catapulted onto all fours, she registered all that in an instant. She’d tripped. What had she tripped over? A piece of driftwood? What?

He’s coming. Move.

Heart leaping as her own personal early warning system went off in spades, Christy obeyed, scrambling
to her feet and at the same time instinctively glancing back to see what had felled her. Not that it mattered. Whoever was out there was closing in fast. She could sense him behind her, almost feel him… .

A slender arm, inert and pale as the sand itself, lay inches behind her feet. Realizing just what had tripped her, Christy was momentarily shocked into immobility. Then her widening gaze followed the limb down to the back of a head covered with a tangle of long, wet-looking dark hair, narrow shoulders and waist and hips, rounded buttocks, long legs. A woman lay there, sprawled facedown in the sand. She was wet, naked as far as Christy could tell, with one arm stretched out across the beach as if she had been trying to crawl toward the safety of the houses. She didn’t move, didn’t make a sound, didn’t appear to so much as breathe.

She looked dead.

Then her hand moved, slender fingers closing convulsively on sand, and her body tensed as if she were trying without success to propel herself forward.

“Help … please …”

Had Christy really heard the muttered words? Or had she just imagined them? The pounding surf coupled with the frantic beating of her own pulse in her ears was surely enough to block out even much louder sounds. But …

“I’m here,” Christy said as she crouched, touching the back of the woman’s hand with equal parts caution and concern. As her fingertips made contact with cold, sand-encrusted skin, a swift rush of pity tightened her throat.
Poor thing, poor thing…

The woman’s fingers twitched as if in acknowledgment of her touch.

“La … law …”

There was no mistake: she really heard the broken syllables, although this time they made no sense. The woman was not dead, but she seemed not far from it. Something terrible must have happened. Some kind of terrible accident.

“It’s all ri—” Christy began, only to break off as her peripheral vision picked up on something moving. She glanced up, beyond the woman, to see a man perhaps three hundred yards away, slogging past the dunes that had concealed him up until that point, headed inexorably toward her, head down as he followed the footprints—
her footprints
—that even she could plainly see in the sand. Her pursuer! For vital seconds she had forgotten all about him. Terror stabbed through her now, swift and sharp as an arrow. Her heart leaped into her throat. He was little more than a bulky shape in the uncertain moonlight, but this was no ghost, no figment of her imagination. He was unmistakably there. Unmistakably real. The Mother of All Rabbits in a dark jogging suit with the moonlight glinting off something shiny in one hand.

A gun?

Even as she gaped at him, he lifted his head. It was impossible to see his face, his features, anything more than the sheer bulk of him. But she could feel his gaze on her, feel the menace rushing toward her as he looked at her and realized that she was looking back. For an instant, a dreadful, blood-freezing instant, they
connected, hunter and prey zeroing in on each other through the imperfectly concealing darkness.

All thoughts of trying to help the woman were instantly forgotten as that sixth sense of hers went haywire, signaling bad news and screaming at her to
move!
Propelled by an acute attack of self-preservation, Christy leaped to her feet. Letting loose with a scream that could have been heard clear back in Atlantic City, she ran for her life.

2

“S
HIT.
I
NCOMING.”

That terse heads-up from Gary, boomed into the earpiece nestled way too close to Luke Rand’s surprisingly tender eardrum, was all the warning he got as he slipped out through the patio door. Wincing, he was further auditorily assaulted by female shrieks coming from no very great distance away. Sliding the door shut, he looked around and saw Donnie Jr.’s hot little chickie scrambling across the dunes toward her house—and him—with the approximate grace of a hog on ice. Christina Marie Petrino—Christy to her family and friends, of which he was neither—was letting loose with fire-alarm caliber cries for help between pauses in which she appeared to be glancing over her shoulder. He hadn’t noticed the shrill sounds before now, probably because before now he’d been busy inside her house. He barely had time to rip the earpiece from his ear and stuff it inside the pocket of his shorts before she slid down the last dune and came bounding right at him.

Time to think fast. Stand and bullshit, try to hide or
run? Since he was caught on her tiny concrete patio, with her house behind him and a rickety privacy fence rising six feet high to his left and right, both running and hiding were pretty much out. To get out of there he’d have to head straight toward her. Considering the moonlight, there wasn’t much hope that he could just blend in with the night and escape notice. As soon as she got a little bit closer, she was going to see him. Likewise, if he chose to move, the instant he stepped out of the narrow shadow cast by the overhanging eaves he would be visible. Since the name of the game here was
covert
operation, doing anything that might make her suspect that her house had been invaded while she’d been out was obviously not a good idea. The alternative was to hold his ground … no, advance … no, rush forward as if he were hurrying to her assistance, having used his keen powers of perception to discern from her cries for help that she was a damsel in distress.

And turn his bullshit generator on high.

As a plan it was cobbled together but it would have to do. He was out of time. Because she’d seen him. There was no mistaking that. Her eyes found him as he stood motionless as a statue there amid her knee-high shrubbery. They widened with horror. Her mouth dropped open. Letting go of her long skirt so that it fell like a curtain over truly admirable legs, she skidded to a stop just feet away from the patio’s edge and raised her hands defensively as though to ward him off.

“Hey there, what’s the problem?” he asked in hearty good-guy mode, and, operating on the theory that the
best defense was a good offense, strode out into the moonlight toward her.

Bad move. Backpedaling, she shrieked like she’d just come face-to-face with Son of Sam. Luke blinked, recoiling at the blast, then watched in bemused surprise as her foot caught on something and she abruptly sat in the sand, just missing planting her sexy little tush in a well-established fire ant hill. A small flashlight, a large cigarette lighter, something shiny and cylindrical that she’d been holding, flew out of her hand to land in the sea oats at the base of the nearest dune. She glanced behind her as if to see where the object had gone. Then her head snapped back around. Wide-eyed and clearly terrified, she looked up at him.

“Get away from me! Help!
Help!”

“Hang on now …” He moved toward her with the clear intention of assisting her to her feet.

“Keep away!”

She frantically crab-walked backward, getting a little hung up in her loose dress but still managing to propel herself away from him at a pretty good clip. He couldn’t help it: he succumbed to a flicker of purely male appreciation even as he watched her retreat. Her legs, long and slim and tanned, were phenomenal, as he remembered from his previous observations of her. They were also bared clear up past No Man’s Land, which unfortunately for his continued appreciation of the view was covered by either shiny black panties or a shiny black bathing suit bottom. Her breasts—nice breasts, not too big but round and perky, constrained by either a flimsy bra or bathing suit top beneath the
dress—jiggled like the real things. Her dark hair flowed down her back, her big dark eyes were wide as Frisbees, and her pointy-chinned, high-cheekboned face was turned up so that her delicate features caught the moonlight. Mob honey or not, she was a babe, and right at that particular moment she looked pretty darn cute scooting away from him on her backside. DePalma had good taste in women, he had to give the bastard that.

It was a damned shame she was going to end up in jail when this was all over.

“Look, it’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Holding up both hands palms out to demonstrate just how harmless he was, he smiled at her, going all out to exude good-neighbor helpfulness from every pore. She did not appear persuaded. Reaching the dune, she tried without success to move backward up the sandy slope that kept crumbling beneath her.

“Stay away!”

Disregarding that, he kept moving, stopping when his feet were just inches from her toes. He was confident that he looked innocuous enough, an average Joe on a beach vacation, nothing to alarm her at all in a smiling blond guy wearing ratty swim shorts and a partly buttoned madras shirt. Anyway, she’d been screaming before she’d come up over that dune, so whatever was freaking her out wasn’t him. He smiled wider and was leaning over to help her to her feet when she let loose with another of those ear-splitting shrieks and threw a handful of sand in his face.

The stuff stung. Jerking upright, he shook his head,
thanking his lucky stars he’d managed to close his eyes in time.

“Jesus,” he said. “Chill, would you? It’s okay. Everything’s cool.”

“Help!
Fire!”

“Fire?”

That made no sense, but then it didn’t really matter: the object was not to understand her, but to convince her of his harmlessness and get the hell out of Dodge. He tried smiling again and reextended his hand to her. She rewarded that gentlemanly gesture by kicking out at him like a pissed-off mule.

“Ow, shit!” She’d stiff-legged him! Pain shot through his leg as her heel connected with his kneecap. He grabbed his knee and hopped backward only to trip over the plastic chaise longue that he’d deftly managed to avoid during his two previous, infinitely more successful forays onto her patio.

This time it took him down. He hopped right into it, lost his balance, and crashed down on the footrest part. The cheap plastic collapsed beneath him with a resounding
crack!
His tailbone hit the ground with bruising force. Unable to stop the fall’s momentum, he kept on going over, and the back of his head smacked concrete. To add insult to injury, the surviving part of the chair jackknifed over his head. Lying flat on his back on unforgiving concrete with sharp plastic shards digging into his butt and a plastic tent over his head, he quickly realized that seeing stars and looking ridiculous weren’t his only problems.

“Don’t move! Don’t move!”

In the very act of pushing the chair off his head, he looked up to find one more sure sign that the situation was quickly deteriorating: an agitated woman dancing above him armed with a can of self-defense spray.

It was pointed right at him.

Shit. A faceful of Mace he did not need.

“Lady, I’m on your side,” he yelped, both hands reaching for the sky in imitation of all the cornered bad guys in all the spaghetti westerns he had ever seen. “I’m just trying to help you. You don’t want any help, that’s fine by me. I’ll just go away.”

She still held the spray on him, arms extended, clutching the can with both hands like Dirty Harry with his .44, her finger clearly itchy on the trigger. But his words seemed to give her pause. At least she didn’t immediately make like a skunk and spray.

“What are you doing on my patio?”

Good one.

“Looking for my cat.” The excuse just popped into his head, probably because he’d seen a cat prowling out near the edge of her privacy fence when he’d come in.