by GA McKevett
“I have to find out,” she told him, fixing him with her infamous, cobalt blue-eyed, steely, hundred-yard gaze. “I understand why you’d want nothing to do with it. I know you want our time here to be about loving and bonding and celebrating our nuptials, and I appreciate that. And I promise you we’ll get to that.”
She took a breath and looked down at the catwalk beneath their feet. “In fact, I promise you that later tonight, we’ll sneak up here in the dark and I’ll make such wild, passionate love to you that you won’t be able to see straight for a month.”
He grinned. “Wouldn’t mind trying that.”
“It’s a promise. But, boy, I’m telling you something else just as sincerely. If you don’t get outta my way, I’m gonna hurt you.”
He moved aside so that she could pass.
As she reached for the door, he got it first and opened it for her. As she moved past him, he put his hand on her back and gave her a little pat. “I’m gonna hold you to that promise. Ordinarily, with the way I feel about heights, I wouldn’t be lookin’ for an excuse to come back up here. But that was a pretty intriguing offer you made.”
“I never made love in a lighthouse,” she said as she stepped back inside the lantern room. “Have to make the most of life’s opportunities when they present themselves. Never know if they’ll come back around again.”
He followed her, giving a sheepish glance back toward the side of the light where he had been standing alone earlier. “Okay,” he said. “But when we come back up here—to get romantic and all . . .”
“Yes?”
“You don’t wanna go around to that other side, where I was when you called me.”
“Because? . . .”
“ ’Cause that’s where I threw up.”
“You threw up on the walkway? Dirk, that is so gross! Why did you do that? Why didn’t you lean over and do your business over the rail?”
He stared at her with haunted eyes for what seemed like forever. Finally he said, “Lean over? Look down? Look al-l-l the way down? Are you kidding me?”
“Oh. Right.” She sighed, rolled her eyes, and shook her head. “What was I thinking?”
Chapter 3
Savannah made it down the lighthouse staircase in less than half the time it had taken her to climb it. Funny how much easier it was when you had gravity and rabid curiosity on your side.
Dirk was directly behind her as she rushed out the front door and closed it behind them.
“I guess I should lock it,” she said, fumbling with the keys in her hand. “Betty Sue wouldn’t have given us keys if we weren’t supposed to use them.”
It took her a couple of tries to get the ancient lock to turn, but finally it slid home with a solid thunk. And when she tried the door, it was securely fastened.
“There,” she said. “No lighthouse burglars or nor’easter’s gonna push that sucker open.”
Dirk motioned toward the nearest cliff. “How do you propose we get down to the beach from here? I’ve climbed all the heights my delicate psyche can handle for a while.”
“I saw some stairs over there,” she said, “leading down from that dirt road to the water.”
He trudged along at her heels as she headed in that direction. “Just what I need. Another big, long, high, tall staircase.”
She stopped and turned so abruptly that he ran into her. “If you don’t want to go down there with me, you don’t have to. I’ll go by myself and you can stand there at the top of the steps and look down and . . . Oh, sorry. You wouldn’t want to do that either, huh?”
He didn’t miss her sarcasm. Judging from his scowl, he didn’t like it either.
“You know,” he said, “just because you don’t have any phobia junk yourself doesn’t mean you should make fun of people who do. It ain’t easy. In fact, it can make a person feel pretty damned stupid to be scared spitless of something that doesn’t bother most other people.”
For a moment, she flashed back on all the times she’d made chicken jokes at his expense, and she felt more than a little ashamed of herself.
She reached out and placed her hands on his chest. She could feel his heart pounding beneath her palms.
Wow! This really is hard for him, she thought. Rough, tough ol’ Dirk. Who would’ve imagined?
“I’m sorry, sugar,” she said, her voice soft with Georgia sweetness. “I really am. You don’t need to go down those stairs or anyplace else you’re not comfortable going. And I promise I won’t ask you again.”
He gave a snort and headed for the top of the stairs. “Oh, I’m going down to the beach with my wife,” he called over his shoulder. “I just want her to appreciate the sacrifice I’m making for her. I want major husband points.”
She laughed as she scrambled after him. “You got ’em, babycakes. And being how it’s our honeymoon, you should have plenty of opportunities to cash ’em in.”
As they hurried down the steep stairs, Dirk in the lead, she glanced to their left, to the stand of yellow-blossomed trees where she had first spotted the woman. Then she looked farther down to the rock outcropping where the blonde had disappeared. All seemed still and natural. No hint of anything amiss.
Except for the churned sand where the woman had left uneven, ragged footprints as she’d fled along the water’s edge.
Savannah directed Dirk toward the stand of trees. “The gal was dodging in and out of those big bushes,” she told him. “Like she was trying to hide from somebody who was after her.”
They walked into the thicket and picked their way among the scrub brush, looking for anything that Mother Nature herself might not have left there.
Savannah located the first find . . . and the second. “Here are her shoes,” she said, pointing to a designer peep-toed pump, which had been discarded beside a mallow bush. A few feet away lay its mate. Savannah wanted to reach down, pick it up, and examine the glossy, charcoal gray patent leather. But years of experience and expertise involving the handling of potential evidence kept her from doing so. Something told her these shoes and anything else they might find could wind up being evidence.
“She may have pulled them off so she could get around in the sand easier,” Savannah said. “I wouldn’t want to be running for my life in high heels on a beach.”
“Which brings you to the question, ‘Why would she wear high heels to the beach in the first place?’ ” he replied, poking among the bushes.
“Maybe when she dressed this morning, she didn’t know she’d wind up strolling on the sand,” Savannah suggested.
He leaned down, looking at something on the sand beneath a plant with delicate green leaves and flowers like small magenta stars. “Hey,” he said. “I got something else here.”
“What’s that?” Savannah walked over to him and squatted to see.
“Looks like a purse to me.”
Instantly Savannah recognized the luxury handbag as a Louis Vuitton. “I don’t think a lot of ladies grab their Louis on the way out the door to the beach.”
“Grab their Louis?”
Dirk didn’t spend a lot of time reading magazines that featured lifestyles and handbags of the rich and famous. His favorite boxing magazine, The Ring, didn’t include a lot of ads for Louis Vuitton handbags or luggage.
“That purse cost more than my car is worth,” she said with only the slightest twinge of green-eyed, gut-twisting envy.
“Something tells me,” Dirk replied, “that right now you wouldn’t want to trade places with the woman who dropped that purse and ran right out of her shoes, trying to get away from somebody.”
“So true. So true.”
Leaving the designer accessories untouched on the ground, Savannah started to follow the clear line of footprints in the sand. When she had the rare opportunity to stalk her prey in sand, mud, or snow, she felt like a Native American tracker—who was cheating. She didn’t even need the assistance of Granny Reid’s bloodhound, Beauregard. As a private detective, it was about as easy as her job ever
got.
“Wish everybody left tracks like these,” Dirk said as he caught up and walked beside her. “It’d make police work a lot simpler.”
“I was just thinking the same thing. How much you wanna bet that purse back there’ll tell us all we want to know about who she is?”
“I almost looked in it to see. But you seem so convinced there’s skullduggery afloat, I figured I’d better not disturb it till we see what we’re dealing with.”
“ ‘Skullduggery afloat’?” She snickered. “You’ve been hanging out with Tammy ‘Wannabe Nancy Drew’ Hart too long. In a minute, you’ll start talking about ‘sleuthing’ and ‘finding clues in old clocks under staircases.’ ”
“Harrumph. I’ll have you know that was a Sherlock Holmes reference. Nancy Drew, my ass.”
“If Tammy were here, she’d slap you upside the head, using ‘Nancy Drew’ and ‘ass’ in the same sentence like that. I’m pretty sure she’d consider that blasphemous.”
“The kid’s a pansy-bimbo, and she doesn’t hit that hard. Where you, on the other hand—”
Savannah was too absorbed to appreciate the compliment as they had reached the outcropping where she had last seen the woman. Holding up one hand, she motioned Dirk to stop.
She lowered her voice and said, “Shh. If she’s right around the corner, I don’t want to scare her.”
“What you mean is, you’re nosy and you don’t wanna interrupt anything that might be going on until you find out what it is.”
She gave him an annoyed look. She hated how he always knew exactly what she was up to. Even more upsetting was that after figuring it out, he would then tell her—usually in terms that made her intentions sound less noble than they were. Or, at least, less noble than she liked to portray them.
There was nothing more irritating than a friend who knew you better than you knew yourself.
Except maybe a husband.
What had she gotten herself into, putting that ring on her finger? Everything she had ever loved and hated about the man beside her was now magnified a hundredfold.
Yikes, she thought, before shoving the whole subject to the back of her mind. It didn’t bear thinking about. Not now anyway. Because she thought she could hear a female voice, and the sound was coming from the vicinity of the rocks ahead. Perhaps just on the other side.
The woman sounded upset and scared.
She glanced at Dirk and realized from the concerned look on his face that he could hear it, too. He nodded and stepped closer to her.
Together, they looked around the rocks and saw that the shoreline curved sharply, forming a small, rock-strewn cove. There, the beach was narrow, as thick brush and trees crowded close to the water.
In the midst of some of the thickest foliage, she saw patches of blue again, moving among the green.
“There she is,” she whispered to Dirk.
“Where? I don’t see anything.”
“Over there, on the other side of those rocks, in the trees. She’s wearing a blue suit.”
A second later, the blonde burst out of the foliage and headed straight toward them, running as fast as she could.
They heard her scream, “No! No!”
The sound went through Savannah—human fear, raw and primal. No one screamed like that unless they were horribly hurt or afraid they were about to die.
Savannah took one step toward the woman, intending to skirt the rocks and run to her aid.
But a loud, popping sound echoed around them. Dirk’s hand shot out and yanked her back behind the cover of the stones.
“Gun!” they yelled in unison.
There was another shot. And yet another.
Savannah had to look.
She took one quick peek and saw the blonde stumbling toward the water. Her hands reached out in front of her, as though trying to grasp some form of safety that wasn’t to be had.
One more shot, and she fell, face forward, into the foaming surf.
A horrible feeling of helplessness washed over Savannah as she watched the waves roll over the victim. She couldn’t see the shooter. Whoever had fired the shots was hidden among the trees.
Even if she could see the shooter, she didn’t have her weapon on her. And she didn’t need to ask Dirk if he had his.
Usually, both of them brought their guns with them, even on vacations. Old habits die hard for a cop and an ex-cop/private detective.
But they had decided that heavy weapons strapped against their ribs would not enhance the romance of the occasion. Surely, a newlywed couple wouldn’t need guns on their honeymoon, so both had left their weapons at home.
She turned to Dirk, saw the look of horror on his face, and knew he was feeling exactly what she was.
Well, maybe not exactly.
As she turned and looked back at the woman lying, dying in the water, a sense of dread flowed through her that only someone who had endured a similar, terrible circumstance could feel.
Only a few months before, Savannah, too, had been felled by gunshots and had lain on the ground, bleeding, knowing that her life was literally flowing out of her.
In that moment, standing on the beach, she could feel the other woman’s pain—that searing, fiery misery—in her own body. Savannah could feel her icy terror and the agony of thinking that no one was coming, no one could save her.
But someone had saved Savannah. Dirk had been there for her when she’d needed him most. Someone had to be there for the woman on the beach, too.
Savannah couldn’t stand there, in the safety the rocks afforded, and just let her die alone. Shooter in the woods, or not, she shook off Dirk’s restraining hand and darted out from behind the rocks.
It was crazy, she knew, to put herself in harm’s way, out there in the open with no cover. No weapon. No armed backup. It went against all her training and even her common sense.
She could hear Dirk yelling at her. She knew he was terrified and furious with her.
She’d deal with him later.
If she made it to the woman without getting shot herself.
As she ran, she braced herself for the feeling she knew all too well, the impact of bullets piercing her body, scorching and fierce as they ripped into soft, unresisting flesh.
But there were no more shots.
No one ran out of the bushes toward her—though she was dimly aware in her peripheral vision of Dirk racing across the sand toward the trees.
For a moment, a sharp bolt of fear crashed through her. What if Dirk was killed? What if his reaction to her impulsive move got him shot?
Fortunately, she didn’t have long to play that nightmare fully in her mind, because she had reached the woman and was standing, knee deep in the surf, grabbing for her.
The victim was still alive, but thrashing weakly; her face downward in the brine. Savannah slid one forearm under each of the woman’s armpits and dragged her back onto the sand.
She flipped her onto her back, and that was when she saw the wounds. Two dark areas blossoming into hideous red circles of blood—one on the woman’s chest, the other in her abdomen.
Exit wounds.
Sometimes they were smaller than entry wounds. Sometimes the same size. But more often, they were larger.
These were huge.
Savannah’s heart sank when she saw them. Not just the size, but the location.
She looked into the woman’s eyes and could see that she, too, knew what was about to happen. No matter what Savannah—or anyone else did for her—she was going to die.
Savannah glanced back toward the trees. She could see Dirk moving among them, quickly, but carefully. Ordinarily, she would have been rooting for him to catch the bad guy. But an armed bad guy? And Dirk without his weapon? No, this was one time she hoped the two wouldn’t meet.
She knelt beside the woman, leaned over, and checked her breathing. She could hear air rushing in and out, but it wasn’t a comforting sound. It had an awful, gargling quality that Savannah had heard before. It was a sound t
hat preceded death.
The woman’s eyes were open, wide open, registering her pain, fear, and shock. She seemed aware of Savannah’s presence.
“It’s okay,” Savannah lied as she pressed her palms over the dark wounds, an action that did absolutely nothing to stanch the flow. “You’re okay.”
“No,” the woman whispered. “Not okay.”
Savannah looked deep into the victim’s eyes and knew—this wasn’t the time for lies.
“I’m going to stay with you,” Savannah said. “I’ll be right here with you. Okay?”
The woman seemed to understand and nodded slightly.
“The worst has already happened,” Savannah told her. “I know you’re scared, and I know it hurts. But it’s going to get better.” She glanced down at the blood pouring through her fingers at an impossibly high rate, staining the sand and water around them.
“Soon,” Savannah told her. “It’s going to get better soon. All right?”
The woman on the sand nodded again. Some of the fear seemed to leave her face as she stared up into Savannah’s eyes.
For the briefest moment, it occurred to Savannah that she might know this woman. Something about her was familiar, but she couldn’t place her.
There would be time for that later. The trained police officer in Savannah came to the fore, pushing everything else to the background.
“Who shot you?” Savannah asked her. “Who did this?”
The victim moved her lips, though the sound she made was little more than a whisper. The dreadful gurgling sound was diminishing. Instinctively, Savannah knew she had only moments to live.
“Who were you running from?” Savannah asked again. “Who did this to you?”
Savannah leaned closer, her ear nearly against the woman’s mouth. She heard one word, feebly uttered, but clear all the same.
“William.”
“William? William shot you?” Savannah asked, feeling a rush of discovery, even in such sad circumstances.
But then the woman shook her head. “No. Not William. William . . .”
And that was all.
Savannah moved her hands away from the wounds and reached to grasp the woman’s hand. It was limp. As lifeless as the eyes that now stared blindly up at her.
