Sunset Beach(123)

Sherri emptied her glass and poured herself another healthy tot.

Colleen crossed and recrossed her ankles, carefully working her feet loose in the cumbersome platform sandals.

“You know, it’s really kind of rude of you to drink in front of me and not offer me one. If you’re gonna kill me anyway, the least you could do is fix me a drink.”

Sherri laughed. “Ooh. Where are my manners?” She picked up the bottle and gestured toward the kitchen. “You go first.”

Colleen stood but didn’t move, waiting until the other woman, annoyed, moved closer to give her a push.

At that instant, Colleen swung her shackled hands and knocked the glass from the startled woman’s hands, and before Sherri could react, raised her arms and gave a mighty slicing backswing, bashing Sherri in the face with the full weight of the handcuffs, knocking her to the floor.

Colleen kicked off the shoes and ran, out the sliding-glass doors and onto the deck. She slipped and went sprawling on the rain-slicked boards. She scrabbled around, terrified, finally managing to get back on her feet.

She ran toward the beach, looking back only once, to see Sherri silhouetted in the doorway, the gun raised, clutched between both hands. She fired and Colleen screamed as the bullet ripped through her shoulder, knocking her down again.

The wounded woman lay still for a moment, hearing the panting of her own breath as blood oozed from the wound. But the adrenaline still pumped through her veins and she got back up again. This time she ran without looking back, blindly heading for the cover of the stand of Australian pines and what she knew was the beach, just beyond.

She was still running when she hit the shallow seawall of broken concrete riprap. Colleen could see the waves crashing ashore and heat lightning dancing on the gold-tinged horizon. A squadron of pelicans cruised past, their shapes silhouetted against the dark clouds. But she didn’t see the carpet of slimy moss and seaweed clinging to the rocks. When her foot slipped and she fell, the pelicans were the very last thing she saw.





58


“Sit,” Drue said, gesturing toward the sofa. She went into her bedroom and found an extra pillow and a lightweight blanket.

“Here,” she said, tossing them to her guest. “But you really don’t have to do this.”

“I want to,” Jonah said, stretching out on the sofa with the pillow beneath his head. “Get some sleep, okay? I’ll hang out here. I’m too wired to sleep.”

“The first thing I’m getting is a shower and my own clothes,” Drue said.

When she emerged from the shower fifteen minutes later, her hair hung damply on the shoulders of her clean cotton T-shirt, and she was dressed in drawstring pajama pants. Jonah’s head was tilted back and he was snoring, openmouthed.

She went to the sliding-glass doors and opened them, and he sat upright, giving her a sheepish grin. “Some bodyguard I turned out to be. I’m here fifteen minutes and I fall asleep on the job.”

“It’s okay,” she reassured him. “There is zero chance Ben is coming back here.”

Jonah thought about it for a moment. “I still don’t get it. Any of it. I know you say he probably got a payoff from the insurance people, but it’s not like Ben ever cared about money. I mean, did you ever see the place where he lives?”

“No,” Drue said. “I got the feeling he was a little embarrassed by it.”

“He lives like a damned hobo,” Jonah said. “I mean, the dude makes decent money. But he rents a room from this little old lady in Woodlawn. He doesn’t even have his own kitchen. And he buys most of his clothes at Goodwill and brown-bags his lunch most of the time.”

“Did he ever tell you about the video game he was working on?” she asked. “His side hustle?”

“Insect Assassin? Yeah. He actually had me play it a couple times. Like as a beta tester. I’m not that into gaming. I had an Xbox, and I played some in undergrad school, but I kind of outgrew it, I guess. Anyway, it was more than a side hustle. He really believed Insect Assassin would make him rich. And it was a pretty cool game, I’ll admit. But the graphics were lame. He had some famous artist chick in Korea he wanted to work with, to design the graphics, but he said she was crazy expensive.”

“And that’s why he did what he did. To get the money to take his game to market,” Drue said.

Jonah nodded in agreement. “Where do you think he is now?”

“In hell, I hope. It’s what? Nearly two-thirty?” She picked up her cell phone and frowned. “Hernandez hasn’t called yet. You’d think by now they would have picked him up.”

“You know what?” Jonah slapped his knee. “Ben told me he was playing in a gaming tournament this weekend.”

“You’re right. That’s where he was the first time I tried to call him Friday night, and where he called me from yesterday,” Drue said. “But that wouldn’t still be going on now, right?”

“Maybe. These tournaments? I went to one with him once, to watch him play Madden NFL. Which he sucked at, by the way. These guys, they play around the clock, they only stop for pee breaks.”

“Do you know where this tournament is?”

“Probably at the same place I went to. It was this grungy former multiplex over near Central Plaza.”