Beachcomber (13 page)

“What exactly did he say?”

Oh, roiling nausea. “When he first spoke to me through the door he called me by name, in this weird kind of singsong voice. Then, later, he got the door opened enough to see me and he said, ‘Hi, Christy.’ ”

“How do you think he knew your name?”

Actually, several possibilities came to mind, none of which she cared to share.

“I don’t know.”

Luke frowned thoughtfully, and Christy wondered with a little spurt of panic if in the course of their conversation she had somehow revealed too much. Uncle Vince had made it clear that if the organization thought she might spill the beans on what she knew, she was basically toast. On the other hand, she wasn’t sure she wasn’t a prime candidate to be toast anyway. The fact that her attacker had known her name was freaking her out, now that she thought about it. A hideous possibility had been niggling around in her mind ever since she’d stumbled across that poor woman earlier, and as
she added the killer knowing her name to the mix it took on monstrous shape and form: what if the woman’s murder had been a mistake? What if the killer had attacked the wrong person, down there on the beach? What if he’d been following her, Christy, meaning to kill her, and somehow gotten his wires crossed? What if the horror that had taken place on the beach had been a bungled hit directed at herself? And then this break-in had been an attempt to rectify the error? Among other things, that would certainly explain how her attacker had known her name.

Her blood ran cold at the thought.

“There’s no one you can think of who might want to harm you?” Luke asked. His question was so in tune with what she was thinking that Christy started. It took a couple of seconds before she felt in control enough to reply.

“No,” she lied. “There’s no one like that.”

“Maybe the guy’s connected to something you have going on at work?”

Christy tried not to be too obvious about taking a deep breath. He was so on the money with his speculations that it was scary. “How could he be? To begin with, I work a long way from here—in Philadelphia. And I don’t do the kind of work that gets people killed. I’m a corporate lawyer, not a defense attorney or a prosecutor.”

Yes, but a corporate lawyer working for a firm that she’d just learned was basically a front for the mob. If Franky, the slimy little weasel, hadn’t clued her in, she never would have gone hunting the truth, and she
wouldn’t be in this mess now. Damn Franky, anyway. She’d
told
Nicole that marrying him was a mistake. Her sister hadn’t listened. Her sisters never listened. They screwed up, she cleaned up the mess. It was the story of her life.

“So what’s your theory about what happened tonight?”

Christy hesitated. It was hard to sort out what she could say from what she was better off not revealing when she felt like her brain had gone on vacation and left the rest of her behind. She closed her eyes and concentrated on remembering the image she had to convey if she had any hope of getting out of this with a whole skin: that she was the innocent victim of a crime and nothing more.

“I don’t have a theory. How would I? All I know for sure is that a woman was murdered on the beach tonight, I found her, and then some crazy broke into my house and tried to kill me. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the two events must be connected.”

She closed her eyes in an effort to end the conversation. He was obligingly quiet for a bit, apparently occupied with his own thoughts.

“Hell of a first day on vacation.”

There was the faintest note of wry humor to that. Christy’s eyes popped open and she glanced at him. His mouth turned up at the corners in the smallest of smiles.

“For you, too.”

“Yeah.”

The car slowed then, and Christy realized that they had reached the clinic. Good thing, because the towel was almost soaked through, and her shoulder was throbbing. A small, rectangular sign advertised Urgent Care Center, Open 24 Hours. Beside it, a convenience store was also still open. At nearly five
A.M.
on a rainy Sunday morning, neither appeared to be doing gangbuster business. There were a total of three cars in both parking lots.

“You are
not
carrying me in,” Christy said as he parked in front of the clinic.

“Your call.”

But she was still sitting in her seat, albeit with the door open and one leg out, by the time he came around the car. Her legs had the approximate tensile strength of limp spaghetti, she’d discovered. With the best will in the world, she was not going to make it inside the clinic under her own steam.

“No shoes,” she said in sullen response to his inquiring look as he opened the door wider and ducked his head inside. It was still raining, though only lightly now, and raindrops glistened on his face and in his hair. His shirt was spattered around the shoulders. Beyond the car, she saw that the pavement was a torrent of muddy water that shone brown under the lights.

The corners of his mouth quirked up. “Definitely a problem,” he agreed, sliding his arms around her.

Christy turned her face into his shoulder as he carried her into the clinic through the gentle rain.

8

I
T
WAS ALMOST DAWN.
He was back in his castle, his safe house, his hidey-hole. Back in the lair of the beast. And the beast was raging. Everything,
everything
tonight had gone wrong. Christy Petrino was still alive. He’d had to run for his life, not once but twice. And Liz had escaped.

How the hell had Liz escaped?

He would figure that out, but not now. For now, he had to concentrate on calming himself down. He was twitchy all over. His skin felt like it was splitting open. The beast felt almost too huge, too powerful, to be contained in his human body any longer. Its blood lust had been roused again, but this time it had been left unsatisfied. He had to slake it, and soon. If he went to work like this—and he had to go to work soon—someone might notice. Someone might see. Someone might guess.

What he was.

He was going to have to make do with Terri. She was still in her cell; after punishing Liz, he’d rushed back here to make sure she hadn’t gotten out as well. That
would have created huge problems for him: he would have had to find her. Fast.

But that hadn’t happened. Terri was still precisely where he needed her to be. Until now he hadn’t had much use for her. With her butch haircut and flat chest and big ass, she wasn’t up to his usual standards. He’d played with her a little, testing things out, but mostly he’d made her watch what he did to Liz. At first Terri had screamed and cried and begged him not to hurt her friend, but he’d broken her of that. He was good at breaking girls of bad habits. Three days after he’d taken her, he’d had Liz responding to the snap of his fingers. He’d do that for Terri, too.

And for Christy, when he brought her here, to play with her before he killed her. Now
she
was more his type. The fact that he’d made her acquaintance before supplied just that little extra fillip. That she’d squirted him with Mace and escaped him tonight would only add to the fun.

He was going to enjoy Christy Petrino.

On his way downstairs he turned on the overhead light. It was his way of letting the girls—oh, the
girl,
singular, now—know that he was coming. Usually as soon as he did that he could hear their chains rattle as they scrambled up from the floor, hear their frightened breathing, hear them licking their lips and shuffling their feet nervously as they waited for him to appear. They’d learned not to cry out or scream. They’d learned that he was the master, and would be loved and obeyed—and feared.

He reached the bottom of the stairs and lifted his bag
of toys from the hook on the wall. This level was specially outfitted with, among other things, four cells—not that he’d ever had four girls at the same time, but he believed in being prepared for all contingencies. There were two on each side, with the enclosed staircase and a utility closet serving as a partition in the middle. He’d kept Liz and Terri on separate sides so that they couldn’t see each other unless he allowed it. It was one of those reward and punishment things that made his little hobby so much fun. He knew they called to each other when they were sure he was out, but he didn’t mind that. The walls were thoroughly soundproofed.

Liz’s cell was on the left, but he refused to look at it for the moment. It would make him too angry, and he wasn’t ready to kill Terri yet, not until he had her replacement in hand. But he already knew that the barred door of Liz’s cell was locked, and the chain that he’d kept fastened around her ankle lay limply on the floor. It was still securely attached to the wall, and the shackle itself was locked as tight as the door.

How had she managed it? How? How? It occurred to him that in all likelihood Terri would know.

“Terri?” He felt his voice pitching higher as it tended to do when he got excited. “Terr-
eee,
are you ready to play?”

9

T
HE SHERIFF
’
S OFFICE
was housed in an incongruously charming frame bungalow crouched close to Front Road right across from Howard’s Pub. On either side of it were a busy Shell Oil station and the Curl-o-Rama, a hair salon. Christy parked along the live-oak–shaded street, which, like all of Ocracoke’s roads, originally had been built for horses and buggies and didn’t look like it had been widened since the horses left. Finding a spot was tricky, because the island, which had a winter population of approximately 900, was full to capacity with something in the nature of five thousand summer visitors. Christy knew, because she’d tried to book herself into a hotel for the remainder of her stay, which she hoped would be extremely short. Unfortunately, she had struck out. Everything from historic Blackbeard’s Lodge to the new Hyatt was booked solid.

She would sleep in her car before she’d sleep in that cottage again. Even going back inside to gather up a change of clothes had been beyond her. Just thinking about it now made her break out in a cold sweat. She felt
as if she were trapped in a house of mirrors, and every time she tried to escape she ran into a dead end. She was beginning to be afraid that there was no way out.

The scariest part of the whole thing was knowing that she was completely on her own. There was no one she could confide in, no one she could trust. To turn to her family was unthinkable: doing so would put them in mortal danger, too. Running to the authorities hovered at the back of her mind, but if she did, if she turned on the mob, she would have to hide out for the rest of her life. That went for her mother and sisters and Nicole’s children as well. In a word, the situation was impossible. Better to sweat it out, to do as she was told until they were reassured that she wasn’t a threat, and could be trusted to keep her mouth shut. The key was staying alive until that message got through.

Even her cat-loving neighbor had deserted her. Citing an impossible-to-reschedule appointment, Luke had disappeared soon after Sheriff Meyer “Bud” Schultz and one of his deputies had shown up at the clinic. His departure had left her feeling oddly bereft; it was embarrassing to realize that as long as he was around she’d felt safe. For all his surfer-boy looks, he’d taken charge last night with an effortlessness that, in retrospect, impressed her. He’d saved her life, calmed her fears and gotten her to the clinic with a cool efficiency that had resulted in a totally unfounded feeling that he was someone on whom she could depend. Then he’d taken off to, presumably, resume his interrupted vacation. She, on the other hand, was left to stew in the nightmare that was her life.

Not that she really regretted his leaving, of course. He was a chance-met stranger, a vacationing lawyer who had just happened to rent the cottage next door. There was no real help he could offer her. Feeling forsaken when he poked his head into the treatment room to say a quick good-bye was stupid. The sheriff had been with her when he’d left, asking her questions even while the doctor had been putting three stitches in her shoulder. In other words, she’d been in good hands. Afterward, the sheriff had made a phone call that had accomplished what she could not: he’d secured her a room at the Silver Lake Inn. A deputy had driven her to the hotel, where she had tried without much success to sleep for a few hours.