Joggers

JOGGERS

A Short Mystery
Story

by the author of

the Hunter Rayne highway
mystery series

R.E. Donald

Copyright 2012 by R.E. Donald

All rights reserved. This book or any portion
thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
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Cover © 2012 Hunter Johnsen

Proud Horse Publishing, British Columbia,
Canada

[email protected]

Smashwords edition, March 2013

PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
places and incidents either are the product of the author’s
imagination or used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual
persons, business establishments, events or locales is entirely
coincidental. This story is set in the year 1997.

JOGGERS

Five fifty-four a.m. Lying on her
stomach, feeling a weight in the hollow behind her knees, Elspeth
Watson pulled the sheet over her head and burrowed under the spongy
pillow. Her first vacation in six years and her goddamn internal
alarm clock wouldn’t let her sleep past six a.m. Against her will,
she began to count the dull booms of the surf.

Enough. If she had to lay still one
more minute she would scream. She scissored her legs, once, twice,
heard a snuffle and a yelp, and the weight behind her knees
thrashed a few seconds, then bounced up her back and thrust a
growling snout under her chin.

“
Pete! Get off me!” She
growled back. “Pete!”

The dog barked. A lightweight, elfin
sound.

“
Shhhhh!”

He barked again.

“
Goddamn it, Pete! Shut
up! You want to get us busted?”

El swung her feet to the floor, rested
her hands on her thighs, then hoisted herself off the bed and
padded to the window, the dog dancing around her feet. She lifted
back the curtain, raising a faint scent of stale smoke and mildew.
The breakers glowed in the wash of mist and pre-dawn light, the
beach yawning beneath their foam, colorless, except for a few dark
filaments of kelp. Barely visible, a green light winked where the
grays of the horizon met. Not bad. She might as well spend another
night here. That would leave only five more days to
kill.

Movement on the beach, a jogger. He
was scrawny and tall, joints like knots in rope. He wore thick
glasses, grimaced as if each step would be his last. “Nerd,” said
El, letting the curtain drop.

The shower was feeble, a tepid drizzle
that once again made her curse the decision to leave home. “I don’t
want to be here,” she muttered to Peterbilt as she tried to towel
the clammy feeling off her skin. “Why the hell do people pay good
money to be tormented and bored?” She grunted at the tiny coffee
maker on the bathroom counter. She’d used both coffee bags last
night. El pulled on her sweats, the dog prancing beside the
door.

“
Okay,” she said. “Let’s
hit the beach.”

El retrieved a can of Coke from her
truck first, held the can away from her to pop the top, let the
brown fizz drip on the fog damp asphalt. Caffeine and sugar, one
way or another. Until they’d cleared the motel, she kept Peterbilt
on the leash. He bobbed against the end of it like a horizontal
helium balloon, pitting his seventeen pounds against her two fifty
plus. You had to give him credit, he never stopped
trying.

So this is Monterey
Beach.
Off the leash now, Pete chased the
receding foam of the surf, leaped barking soprano at a low-flying
gull, dashed in mad circles around a tangle of kelp. He stopped and
sniffed, shot a quick glance up at El, then mashed something into
the sand with the side of his head, began screwing his whole body
into it. El jogged up and grabbed him by the collar, yanked him
away. “Goddamnit, Pete!”

A dead flounder, half rotted away. “So
this is Monterey Beach.” This time she said it aloud, wondering
where she could buy tomato juice, if she needed it.

The dog scooted off again and
disappeared behind a rock higher up the beach. El whistled, and his
black form appeared for a quick look, then darted back behind the
rock. El trudged toward it through the sand, her breath heavier.
Her stomach rumbled. Breakfast would be good.

The dog squealed and shot out from
behind the rock, followed by a grimy sneaker and a string of
curses. El whistled again, but the dog stood its ground, barking.
It spun out of the way of a rock, turned and barked again. “Pete!
Come here!” A figure rose up, a man, leaning heavily on the rock.
He wore a black toque with what used to be yellow trim. A gray
raincoat that looked almost new hung down past his knees, the rest
of his clothing stuck to him like scabs, brown and thick. Pete
charged back towards him and the man kicked, hard, his holey
sneaker sending the dog spinning with another yelp, another curse.
“Pete!”

“
Fuckin’ rat! Keep your
fuckin’ rat outa my face, or I’ll fuckin’ fry it up for
lunch!”

El could see now, the man had been
sleeping on the beach. A sheet of cardboard and a jumble of
newspaper lay beside the rock, held in place by two green garbage
bags, their contents bulging through ragged holes. “Sorry to wake
you,” said El. “Don’t mind Pete.” Juggling her Coke, she scooped up
the dog. It struggled against her hold, barking and
snarling.

“
Fuck you!” The man
pitched another rock.

El ducked left, and it hit her right
shoulder. She dropped the Coke. “Hey! You asshole! Cool it!” Pete
snarled and snapped in the man’s direction, fighting to get loose.
El winced at the smell of rotten fish.

“
Get the fuck outa here,
bitch! I see you here again, I”ll slit your fuckin’ throat.” The
man stood in a crouch, eyeballs popping out and yellow teeth bared
in a face dark from sun and dirt.

Is he talking to me or to
my dog?
El wondered. She rubbed her
shoulder, squeezing the struggling dog against her chest, rubbed to
stall for time, for a few seconds to decide whether to fight back.
She could feel her face burning, she wanted so bad to hurt him. He
wasn’t so big that she couldn’t have stomped him into the sand,
ground his face into the rock, but he might have the strength of a
crazy man. And this was California. You never knew when somebody
might have a knife, maybe a gun.

“
Okay, okay, asshole. Go
back to sleep.” She began to back away. “Better yet, go get a job.”
Peterbilt was trembling, growling deep in his throat. She scratched
his ears. “Easy, little guy.” The man had started to relax, gone
down on one knee, before she dared to turn her back to him, still
clutching Pete and his perfume of rotten flounder against her
chest. Her stomach rumbled again.

She found a restaurant where she could
watch the dog through the window while she ate. Pete and her
windbreaker were tied to a bicycle rack. She ordered bacon and eggs
and hash browns, with toast and a side of sausage. El fought the
urge to phone her office. The boys in the warehouse had bet she’d
call, and she wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of being right,
but damned if she’d ever let them goad her into taking another
goddamn vacation.

She saved a sausage for Pete, and
ordered an extra coffee to go. No reason to go back to the motel,
so she continued walking south, past Fisherman’s Wharf, up Cannery
Roy, until the fog lifted and the day turned warm. There were more
tourists out now, and she felt safe walking back along the beach,
letting the dog chase gulls again. The bag man was gone.

In the late afternoon, she left Pete
snoozing on the big bed after his bath and drove her pickup down to
Fisherman’s Wharf for an early dinner. She was seated outside on a
small deck, next to a couple from Minneapolis. She overheard them
tell the waiter it was their anniversary, and order a bottle of
champagne and a bucket of clams. Her meal was good, seafood pasta
with garlic. She nursed a second glass of wine, listening to the
sea lions bark and watching shifting congregations of pelicans and
gulls. She’d leave early tomorrow, she decided, drive down to Big
Sur, take some pictures she could show the boys in the
warehouse.

El caught the woman from Minneapolis
looking at her, a pity-the-poor-lonely-fat-woman look that she’d
seen many times before, and it always set her teeth on edge. She
drained her glass of wine and stood up, peering down over the rail
at a seagull commotion on the water below. “Jesus!” she cried.
“Look at that!”

The woman from Minneapolis
screamed.

A friendly cop with hairy forearms
told El to wait so they could get her statement. She watched them
haul the body from the water, a white middle-aged male, dressed in
an electric blue nylon outfit, jacket and pants. He might have been
a jogger, but his feet were bare. His pale dead toes seemed
indecent, as if he were naked all over. Even from the wharf, she
could see the obscene gash across his throat. El asked for a cup of
coffee.

“
You here on vacation?”
the friendly cop said as he handed her a takeout coffee from the
restaurant.

El snorted and turned away.

She couldn’t tell them much, only that
she’d been the first to see the dead man and that he’d floated out
from under the wharf, draped in a garland of kelp, with his nylon
windbreaker ballooning around his neck like a life vest.

“
Who is he?” she asked. “A
tourist?”

“
Doubt it,” said the cop.
“Tourists are safe here.” He handed her a business card before he
sent her back to the motel.

“
Let’s get out of here
quick before anything else happens,” she said to Pete the next
morning as she snapped her suitcase shut and yanked it off the bed,
but Pete needed to pee. “Okay,” she told him, “but let’s walk north
this time.”

The fog was thicker this morning,
rocks and tufts of beach grasses materializing out of the white
soup only yards away. Pete tugged against his leash, his paws
throwing up clumps of sand, until El relented and unclipped it from
his collar. “Stay close,” she told him. “No rolling in crap or
rousting out crazies.” But the dog’s black shape blurred and then
disappeared. She looked back, but the motel was gone, too, and her
only means of orientation was the dirge of the surf. She shuddered,
zipped up her jacket and hugged her elbows.

“
Pete!” she called.
“Come!” She strained her eyes against the fog and her ears against
the rhythmic thunder. Nothing. He should have done his business by
now. “Pete! COME!”

El heard the barking first, then a
man’s voice. El’s sweat turned cold and her heart began to pound, a
syncopation of the surf. “Pete!” She started walking in the
direction the sound had come from. “PETE!”

Suddenly a dark shape streaked past
her, ran a circle around her legs. She lunged for him, grabbed his
tail and pulled until he squealed. “Come here, you little shit.”
She hauled him up and held him against her chest, headed at a brisk
walk towards the motel. She hoped. She could see nothing but sand
and fog. Footfalls, already close by the time she heard them above
the surf, thudded against the sand behind her. She began to run.
Damn this sand! Damn this fog! A clump of beach grass materialized
in front of her and she swerved, lost her footing on the sand, and
went down. Pete fell clear, scampered back to stick his nose in her
face just as the footfalls thudded to a stop behind her
head.