“Yes,” she said. The woman knew how to whisper a yes. I felt it go right through me. I tried to picture her face.
Bad idea, Alex. Exactly what you don’t need right now.
“I’ll see you at the house,” I said. “Be careful.”
I hung up the phone and sat there for a long moment with her voice buzzing in my head. Then I called the hospital.
“Dr. Havlin, please,” I said. “I’m calling to find out about Randy Wilkins.”
I was on hold for a few minutes. Then the doctor came on the line.
“Mr. McKnight,” he said. “Mr. Wilkins is in recovery.”
“How does it look?”
“I removed the fragment,” he said. “Now we just have to wait. If he’s going to regain consciousness, it should be in the next forty-eight hours.”
I thanked the doctor and hung up.
Forty-eight hours, Randy. If I didn’t have other things to do, I’d go there and wait. I want to be the first person you see when you wake up.
It was dark when I left the motel. You shouldn’t have let it get so late, I thought. You should be at her house now.
Relax. She’s not even there. She’s at the bar, having dinner.
The cell phone rang. I picked it up and hit the button.
“Alex,” she said. “Where are you?” Her voice was low again.
“I’m on my way.”
“He’s here.”
“He’s where?” I said. “Where are you?”
“I’m at home,” she said. “It was just too weird being at Rocky’s. The way he was looking at me when he found out about me hiring you.”
“Are you in the closet again?” I gunned the accelerator. I was still a good twelve miles from Orcus Beach.
“Yes,” she said. “I just went upstairs and looked out the window at him. I used the binoculars this time. He turned the light on in his car for a second. I could see he was wearing earphones.”
“Okay, just relax,” I said. “I’m on my way.”
“He looked kind of big, Alex. And ugly.”
“Just sit tight,” I said. “I’ll be there soon.”
“What if he comes to the house again? What if he breaks in here?”
“He won’t,” I said. “He knows you’re there.”
“Maybe he wants me to be here this time,” she said. “Alex, I’m scared.”
The signal wavered. Goddamned stupid piece of crap. “Maria, are you still there?”
“I’m here.”
“Do you want to call the police? If you do it from the closet, he won’t hear you. They’ll be able to catch him this time.”
“I thought they can’t do anything to him. You said that yourself.”
“They can put him through the wringer,” I said. “But ultimately, no, they probably can’t charge him. My partner thinks he probably has a lockbox in his car to hide everything.”
“Even if they could,” she said, “we still couldn’t find Harwood.”
“Probably not.”
“Unless you think there’s a way,” she said.
“There may be,” I said. “I could talk to him. I could ask him real nice.”
“I probably don’t want to know what ‘real nice’ means.”
The signal went out, came back, went out.
“Maria?”
“I’m still here.”
“Which way is his car facing?”
“It’s facing… south, I think. I’m terrible with directions, Alex. If you’re coming up the street to my house, he’s facing so that he’ll see you coming.”
“That figures,” I said. “All right, just make sure the doors are locked. I’m gonna try something here.” I had just left M-31 and was racing up B-15 along the shoreline. I caught up to a station wagon pulling a boat on a trailer. The driver was taking it nice and slow, so I blew by him.
“I’m gonna go back to the window and take a look,” she said. “I’ll keep talking like nothing is happening. In fact-”
“What? What is it?”
“I’m going to keep him occupied, Alex.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m gonna make sure he keeps listening.”
I heard a door open. Moments passed. “Is that you?” she said. Her voice was normal now.
“Maria, what are you doing?”
“I’ve been thinking about you,” she said. “I know we haven’t spent much time together yet. But I can’t help wondering.”
I didn’t say anything. I let her talk. The road curved suddenly. Two wheels slipped over into the sand. I touched the brakes, swerved hard to the right, and then snapped it back to the left.
“Can I make a confession?” she said. “I was thinking about you while I was taking a bath today. Which reminds me of a story. Do you want to hear it? It happened when I was a lot younger.”
I was pushing eighty miles an hour now. Two lanes running along the edge of the world, water on one side, pine trees racing by in a blur on the other side.
“When I was eighteen years old, my whole family came out here to the lake for the summer. The water was always so cold, even in the middle of July, but at night it didn’t seem so cold. It felt warmer than the air. So some nights when everybody else had gone to bed, I would sneak out onto the beach in just my bathrobe. If I was brave enough and I was sure nobody was around, I’d take my robe off and jump into the water.”
I kept driving.
“One night, after I had been swimming for a little while, I got out and ran back to where I had left my robe. But it wasn’t there.”
There was a long pause.
“Maria?”
Nothing.
I looked at the phone. The signal was gone.
“Oh no, you worthless piece of shit.” I picked it up and shook it, as if that would really make it start working again. “Come on, don’t do this now.”
I tried calling her number, but it wouldn’t send. The stupid little display kept saying the same thing: LOOKING FOR SERVICE.
“I’ll give you service,” I said. I was about to smash it against the dashboard, then stopped myself and tossed it onto the passenger’s seat.
I concentrated on driving the truck, on getting there as quickly as I could. I saw the sign welcoming me to Orcus Beach, passed Rocky’s place, turned left at the comer, gunned it down the access road, across the little bridge to Maria’s street.
I didn’t turn. I stopped the truck at the boat launch and got out. The sudden quiet was unnerving. Just the thin sound of the waves lapping and the lingering hum of the road in my whole body.
Okay, Alex. Let’s be smart. If you walk down the road, he’s gonna see you. It’s a dead end, so there’s no way to come from behind. Unless…
The beach.
I stepped down over the boat launch onto the sand and rocks. It was rough going, especially in the dark. The only light came from a half-moon hidden behind clouds and the even dimmer light from the houses along the shore.
I made my way north, behind the line of houses. I knew Maria’s was almost at the very end. The next to last, if I remembered right. I had to go all the way down, at least a half mile.
I thought of Maria on the beach. In her bathrobe.
I tripped over something and landed hard. I picked myself up and kept going.
I got to Maria’s house. The chief’s house. If he could only see me now, sneaking up on it from behind. I remembered the fence that ran all the way down the roadway. I needed to be even farther down the road, to be sure he couldn’t see me climbing over the damned thing. I passed her house and went to the very last house on the block. There was a cyclone fence around three sides of the property, stopping a few feet from the shoreline.
I grabbed the fence and caught my breath. What kind of paranoid bastard puts a fence like this around his property, totally open to the water? He obviously wasn’t considering the possibility of a sea invasion. The house was completely dark. Either nobody was home or they’d all gone to bed early.
I remembered the dead end, and the lower fence that ran along the guardrail. If I could make it all the way around the place…
I walked across the man’s beachfront, waiting for the motion detectors to trigger the spotlights and then the running guard dogs. Nothing happened. When I got to the other side, I saw a narrow strip of land running along the far fence line. It sloped down sharply to the little inlet I had seen from the road.