CHAPTER 18
Harrison tried counting to twenty but stopped at
nine. It was all he could stand before he moved in the same
direction. West. Where a watery sun could be barely discerned
through the layers of smoky gray.
He sensed he was making a lot of
mistakes. A lot of mistakes. He sensed there was something going on
here with Lorelei that was more than just pumping a source for
information. Something even more than roping in an accomplice,
something he almost never did, yet here he was, doing
it.
What the hell are you
doing? he asked himself.
Getting a story.
He made a sound of disgust directed
solely at himself. Oh, sure. That was all this was. Immediately, he
sought to interview himself. A trick he used to make certain he
wasn’t fooling himself about anything.
She’s pretty,
his mind pointed out.
Yes.
She’s serious but has a
sense of humor.
Yes, again.
She’s adventurous, even
though she believes she isn’t.
Right-tee-o.
You like her way more
than you should. You have bad luck in relationships. You should
keep this on a professional level, or else someone gets hurt. I’m
not telling you anything you don’t already
know.
“Bingo,” he said quietly.
And she can kiss with a
passion that sets your mind reeling and your damned cock to start
rising to attention.
Oh, hell. He pushed the unexpected,
runaway thoughts aside.
For now.
He couldn’t see more than six feet in
front of him, though he could hear the surf, a buzzing roar with
the occasional crash of a wave breaking on the rocks. People’s
voices sounded like dull mews in the soft, fuzzy light. The whole
world was surreal.
Be careful, he
thought with a strange twist of his heart.
Laura stopped to grab a black garbage
bag from a table where two middle-aged women in CLEAN UP THE BEACH!! baseball caps and oversized
sweatshirts collected donations and passed out information. She
nodded to the women, then followed a safe distance behind the
girls, who walked ever closer to each other as they neared the
sand. Harrison had been right; they went straight to the
beach.
She found her thoughts divided between
the task at hand and the kiss that still lingered on her lips.
Justice was locked into another room in her mind entirely, and she
was happy to leave him there for now. More than happy. She wanted
to live in the moment.
The kiss had been knee-weak
spectacular, and Harrison Frost hadn’t been affected in the least.
This would have sent her into paroxysms of self-flagellation if she
hadn’t been able to keep her own cool, at least in front of him. As
it was, she found herself in a kind of mild shock, wondering at
herself.
The girls reached the beach and slogged
through the softer sand near the road, turning right rather than
toward the packed beach and dull, roaring surf. They were trudging
purposely northward, avoiding the crowd closer to the water. Laura
drifted along behind them, sometimes closing the gap when the fog
swallowed them up, sometimes shifting to the right or left to give
the illusion that though they were traveling in the same direction,
they weren’t going to the same place. They met other beachcombers,
parents with toddlers, dog walkers, and cleanup people along the
way, but no one stopped to talk.
The girls were in their own world. They
never looked at Laura. About a half mile from the turnaround they
started slowing down and looking around. They were arguing with
each other, and Laura had to pull closer, bending down to pick up
an imaginary something in the sand, to hear them.
“We went too far!” Lana
complained.
Jenny snapped, “No, we didn’t. They’re
around here. Noah!” she called. “Noah!”
“Shut up,” Lana responded. “Jesus. You
want to just call the cops while you’re at it?”
Jenny stomped forward, and a figure
materialized from the fog. A male. He grabbed Jenny’s arm and
pulled her down toward the sand and farther away from Laura. Lana
followed with a snort of disgust. “Well, geez, leave me out, why
don’t you?”
“Shut the fuck up.” The disembodied
male voice filtered toward Laura, who had stopped short and stood
still and quiet in a cocoon of gray. She couldn’t see anything, but
she was close enough to hear. She bent down again, this time
actually finding an old soda bottle, which she tossed into the
garbage bag, but her ears were trained on the ongoing
conversation.
“Noah,” a female voice
said.
“It’s Envy,” he hissed
back.
Another male voice hacked out a short
laugh, which caused Noah/Envy to snarl, “Stupid fucks. Pay
attention. We’re going back for seconds.”
“What do you mean?” the unidentified
female voice asked.
“I’m gonna change your name from Pride
to Dumbass,” he barked. “Anybody else got a stupid
question?”
“We’re going to hit one of the places
we already did?” Jenny guessed.
“Yeah, baby. Lana’s
favorite.”
“Lust!” Lana hissed. “My name is Lust.
You called Ellie Pride, so call me Lust!”
“Give it a rest,” Ellie/Pride said.
“Ian doesn’t even like his name,” she added
tauntingly.
“Who gives a shit?” Noah demanded. “Did
you hear what I said? Don’t you want to know who?”
“I’m losing weight!” another male voice
protested. “Jesus! I don’t want any stupid name!”
“Ummm . . . ? My favorite?” Lana
questioned. “I don’t know what you mean, Noah . . .
Envy.”
He snapped back, “Both names start with
a B, moron. Know who now?”
“Oh . . . you mean . . . Britt . . .
Berman?” she asked, unsure, and there was a flurry of scuffling as
Noah/Envy must have clapped his hand over her mouth and gotten them
all to go quiet. Laura was afraid to move yet worried maybe
Noah/Envy might materialize in front of her. Time to
leave.
Carefully she took a step backward,
heart pounding, then a second step, then a third toward the surf.
She wanted to run but she forced herself to move slowly, though her
ears were practically buzzing with fear.
“Hey!” Noah/Envy’s voice was suddenly
right in front of her. “You. What are you doing?”
Laura couldn’t see through the fog, and
then an angular boy of about seventeen materialized. He wore a dark
scowl and his mouth was a snarl. He looked dangerous and determined
and deadly, and she couldn’t help the zip of a chill that ran
through her. “What?” she asked. “Are you talking to me?” She looked
around.
“Yeah, bitch. I’m talking to you. What
are you doing here?”
“Cleaning up the beach!” she said,
holding up her bag and ignoring a tiny niggle of fear in her brain.
“And my name isn’t bitch. You got that?”
He stepped closer, menacingly. “You
listening in on something you shouldn’t?” he demanded.
She forced herself not to back up. “I
said I was cleaning up the beach, the public
beach, with my family,” she lied, hoping he’d think she was with a
group. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”
“Don’t be stupid!”
“Don’t be insulting.” She wasn’t going
to let this teenaged punk push her around.
“Shit!” He grabbed her arm and shook it
once, hard. She saw the group of them then, moving toward her, a
dense wall of youth that was definitely frightening in that mob
way. There were seven of them, all right. Three girls and four
boys, all scowling at her.
She stared hard at the leader. “Let go
of me,” she said with the same calm, determined voice she used on
unruly patients and tried to yank her arm back. His fingers only
tightened.
One of the guys glanced around,
uncomfortable. “Oh, come on. We don’t need to scare people,” he
said.
“There are a ton of people around,”
Ellie, the third girl, reminded.
Noah/Envy was having none of it. He
moved closer, glaring into Laura’s eyes with pure fury. His hand
held her arm fast.
She caught a whiff of something minty
and earthy. “Chewing tobacco causes mouth, tongue, and throat
cancer,” she said rotely. “You should be careful.”
“What the fuck do you
care?”
“Hey, man,” the worried guy said as
voices approached from behind her. A child’s laughter and a man’s
deeper baritone.
Noah/Envy dropped her arm
reluctantly.
She heard, “Lorelei? You there?” in a
disguised, almost unrecognizable voice that she nevertheless knew
to be Harrison’s. She turned toward the sound and melted into the
fog, blindly moving in his direction. Relief washed over her as he
materialized, and she slid easily into his arms, as if he were,
indeed, her disgruntled husband. The kids were swallowed up behind
drifting wisps of gray smoke. She half turned, expecting Noah/Envy
to keep coming for her, but they were gone in an instant, invisible
behind the shifting curtain of fog.
Silently, Harrison pulled her away from
them. She was half lost, aware only of the sound of the surf, which
kept her oriented enough to know they were walking south, quickly,
back toward the turnaround. They reached it in silence and then
were among the other beachgoers and cleanup volunteers, walking up
the street in the direction of his car. She dropped off her small,
nearly forgotten bag of garbage at a collection site, where a woman
offered her a starfish sticker that said I CLEANED
UP THE BEACH.
Not really. But she wasn’t going to
quibble.
Harrison shepherded her along the
promenade that ran the length of the beach in Seaside, then opened
the door of a small deli, where he guided her to a two-person table
toward the back of the room, away from the door. He seated them
both with their backs to the windows before he said a
word.
“I heard him,” Harrison told her
grimly, his lips flattened over his teeth, his jaw clenched. “I was
going to jump out and kill him if he threatened you
further.”
“That’s a little over the
top.”
“They’re dangerous.”
“So am I,” she said, then flashed a bit
of a smile. “I deal with belligerent patients all the time, and
then there’s that communicating with a killer thing.”
“Yeah, that,” he said but seemed to
lighten up a bit.
“They’re kids.”
“JDs.”
“Even so, a few punk kids don’t scare
me . . . well, not much.”
“They should.”
“Maybe.” She leaned closer to him but
had to wait until a bored-looking girl popping her gum walked
through the tables to take their order.
“What can I getcha?” she
asked.
Laura glanced at the menu, a huge
blackboard that hung over a counter. “Turkey sandwich, with the
cream cheese and cranberry sauce,” she said, spying the first thing
that looked good.
“Clam chowder and a hot tuna melt,”
Harrison said.
“Anything to drink?” the girl asked on
a sigh.
“Coke,” Harrison said and glanced at
Laura.
“Water’s fine.”
The girl turned and wandered to another
table, where a young mother was struggling to keep her
three-year-old in a booster chair. Once the waitress was out of
earshot, Laura kept her voice low and said, “So, from what I could
tell, there were seven of them. His name’s Noah and he calls
himself Envy. They didn’t say his last name. Lana is Lust. Ellie is
Pride. There was another guy, who was obviously Gluttony, though he
didn’t like it much. Ian. I don’t know Jenny’s ‘sin’ name, but
they’ve got Greed, Wrath, and Sloth left. They’re planning to
re-hit the Bermans’ house.”
His brows shot skyward. “You heard that
for sure?”
“He said they were going for seconds at
Lana’s friend’s house. He gave her one guess and said it was two
Bs. She came up with Britt Berman before he
stopped her from saying more.”
Harrison made a sound of disbelief, or
wonder, or something; Laura couldn’t be sure. “Sometimes, things
just happen,” was all he eventually said. Grabbing his cell from
his pocket, he looked at it for a moment, his mind calculating.
Then he stuffed it away and said, “C’mon,” and he grabbed her hand.
“I’m gonna write a story,” he said. “Then we’re going to see the
Bermans and give them a little heads-up.” He paused at the counter.
“Our order,” he said to the girl, “we’ll take it to
go.”
Hours later, sunk low in the passenger
seat of Harrison’s Impala, her butt numb from inaction, Laura
watched as the Deadly Sinners appeared like a dark horde and spread
out around the Bermans’ house like a plague. Harrison, seated
behind the wheel, slid the binoculars to his eyes and smiled. “Just
like clockwork. If only Envy realized how
predictable he was, he might be dangerous.”
Thirty seconds later an alarm sounded.
Not the Bermans’ house, whose alarm had been smashed in the
previous burglary and hadn’t yet been replaced. The next door
neighbors’ alarm was the one blaring through the melting fog, the
same neighbors where the Berman family had since taken refuge after
Harrison had alerted the Seaside police about the pending
target.
Harrison loved it. He waited, observing
for a while, then stepped out of the car to confer with one of the
officers. Laura found herself feeling detached and oddly content.
Spending all day with him had given her insight to the man.
Observing him in action, whether interviewing her, chasing down the
Seven Deadly Sinners, writing his story, or sitting with her on the
stakeout, she’d learned far more about the man than she’d
expected.
Trouble was, she was starting to feel
like she’d known him for years, which was ludicrous. Studying him
now, as he stood under the lamplight, his shoulders broad, his
waist and hips slim, his hair dark in the fog, she felt it strange
to think a few days ago they hadn’t met.
He turned, as if he felt her gaze on
him, and started jogging through the wisps of fog to the car.
Moments later he slammed back into the Chevy. “His name’s John
Mills,” he said, referring to the young officer. “I’ve talked with
him before. Some of the cops are hard-asses, but Mills talks to me,
so he’s the one I called about this.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m writing up the story so far, and
then I’m gonna talk to him tomorrow, see if I can learn anything
else.”
“Where are we going now?” she asked,
intrigued with how animated he was just talking about his
work.
“My apartment. I’ve got the notes and
most of the story on my laptop. Just need to write it down and send
it off. It’ll be front page of the Breeze
tomorrow.”
“Let’s go,” she said, still intrigued
as he jammed the car into gear and did a three-point
turn.
They drove to his bare second-story
apartment, where she found a single director’s chair and sat.
“Still working out the details of the interior design,” he joked as
she took in the lack of furnishings.
“Easier to keep clean.”
“Hmmm.” He barely noticed as he was so
into his story. He snapped open his laptop, pulled up the file,
then added a few final words about the capture of the Seven Deadly
Sinners. “No names,” he said. “They’re all underage.” Then he
e-mailed the changes to his editor and said, “Good copy,” as he
closed the lid on his laptop. “Wanna get a dinner? We can drive
back and get some chicken strips and fries at Davy Jones’s. Then
I’ll tuck you in.”
“I’ll take the drive back, but I’ll
skip the bar food,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Davy Jones’s
twice in one day might be more than I can handle.”
“You don’t like fried
food?”
“I like fried food as much as the next
woman.”
“No woman likes fried food. Or admits
to it. It’s all about salads and nutrition and weight loss. There’s
no fun to it. The fun level is directly related to oil/fat
consumption, and you’re not going there,” he teased.
“I had huevos rancheros this morning,”
she reminded. “With you.”
“That’s baked, I think. Minimal fat
content.”
“Maybe.” She smiled. “But I’ll take a
rain check on dinner, thanks.” She’d spent way too many hours with
him already, she determined, and yet she wanted to be with him
longer, and though she could tell herself it was because she was
nervous about Justice, that Harrison Frost made her more
comfortable, less anxious, it was something more.
Something she couldn’t even consider
right now.
“You have to eat, don’t you?” he
pressed.
“I’ve got stuff in the
fridge.”
“How much stuff?”
“You wangling for an
invitation?”
“Maybe. What have you got in the
fridge?” When she didn’t immediately respond, he added,
“Salad?”
“And other things.”
“Other healthy things.”
“Don’t you eat healthy
things?”
He half smiled. “If you invite me to, I
will.”
He was blasting her with a kind of
irrepressible charm that she sensed could be a real pain in the
ass. “Okay,” she said, relenting not only to him but to her own
secret desires as well. “Take me home and I’ll dig up something for
us to eat. But you’re not tucking me in.”
He offered her a lazy, self-deprecating
smile. “What if I just stay at your house, say, on the living room
couch?”
“What if I say no?”
“Might not work,” and he was serious
again. She knew that their time ignoring the real threat that
menaced her was over. The exhilaration of being instrumental in
catching the Deadly Sinners was fading. She couldn’t escape her own
problems forever, though she’d done an admirable job of it
today.
“The couch has saggy
cushions.”
“You’re a nurse, right? Maybe you can
fix me if I . . . need help.”
“Maybe.” She ignored the tiny voice
inside her head that nagged at her. What do you
think you’re doing, Lorelei? This is crazy. Nuts! But it was
a little thrilling to think of him spending the night.
He locked the front door, and they
headed down the outside stairs to his car. The scent of the sea
reached her nostrils, and the night was cold. Raw. Deep. As they
climbed inside the Impala, Harrison said, “Hey, I heard you
diagnose Noah with future mouth cancer. That one of your woo-woo
predictions?”
“No.” Laura almost laughed. “I was just
trying to distract him. I could tell he’d been chewing. And it
doesn’t really work that way, anyway.”
“Can you tell if there’s something
wrong with me?” He turned toward her, eyeing her with amusement,
his hand on the keys in the ignition, the gloom outside the car
thick.
“No.”
“How does it work? Do you see my aura,
or something?” God, his eyes were dark, sexy in the
night.
“There you go, making fun of me again.”
She tried to be annoyed. She wanted to be annoyed. Instead, she was
amused and managed to break his gaze. Instead, she stared out the
front windshield, willing herself not to look at him, her fingers
curling over the armrest.
“Well, how does it work?” he
insisted.
“I don’t really know.”
“You must have some idea.”
“Well,” she said reluctantly. “It’s
better if I touch you. Maybe I could see something,
then.”
“Bullshit.”
“Total truth.” She turned back toward
him, smiling.
“Okay.” He left the keys dangling in
the ignition and held out his hand, clasping her fingers. He gazed
at her penetratingly, and she found herself mesmerized by the
warmth of his skin.
After a moment she frowned and ripped
her hand away.
“What?”
“I don’t really want to
say.”
“Oh, come on!”
“All right.” She shook her head.
“You’re on the way to serious digestive problems. The kind with . .
. unpleasant surgeries.”
“Is there a pleasant
surgery?”
“But this problem is just a small
possibility. Not a reality, yet. I think you might be able to avoid
it, given some changes.” She rubbed her hand where he’d touched
her. He stared at her hard, and she could tell he was wondering if,
just maybe, she was really, just possibly, for real. “I’m sorry to
say, Mr. Frost, but you need to give up fried food.”
“Oh, hell!” His fingers twisted the
keys, and the Impala’s engine roared to life. “Like I said.
Bullshit.”
“Total truth,” she rejoined; then they
both started laughing.
Forty minutes later they’d pulled into
her driveway, their jovial mood disappearing with each mile that
passed beneath the tires of Harrison’s car. She thought of the
maniac who was related to her and his thirst for blood. Her blood.
Her sisters’ blood. Her unborn child’s blood.
Could she do it?
Call to the maniac?
Dance with the devil?
She stared out the window into the inky
night, over the cliffs to where she knew the ocean rolled in
restless waves. She closed her eyes and remembered him as a child.
Small. Blond. Blue-eyed. And filled with hate. He was pale and
lean, and the few times she’d seen him, there had been a weirdness
evident. Even then his intense gaze curdled her blood, but now . .
. with his vicious hissing voice, she couldn’t imagine facing
him.
But she would . . . if she had
to.
She didn’t even realize they’d reached
her home until she heard the crunch of the Chevy’s tires on gravel,
saw the arc of its headlights wash up against the siding of her
little house.
It was now or never.
Harrison, alone with his own thoughts,
switched off the ignition and turned to her, ready to ask her what
was next. Before he could open his mouth, she said, “Let’s do it.
I’m ready.”
“Call Justice . . . in your way?” he
asked, a bit surprised by her sudden capitulation after the
seesawing indecision that had plagued her throughout the
day.
She swallowed hard, then pushed open
the passenger door and felt the cold, damp night press against her
face. She slid out, slammed the door behind her, and said over her
shoulder, “That’s right, Frost. And you’d better damn well be ready
to take this investigation to the next level, because I guarantee
you, he’s going to be pissed.”