The Tender Shore: A Matt Ransom Mystery

by Bobby Underwood

  Praise for author Bobby Underwood

  LOVERS’ TIDE

  “Each of the stories is very well written — each one a portrait of a mysterious love that transcends all boundaries. This is a very good anthology — a good read late at night, or on the airplane, or anytime!” — Kurt Johnson, Amazon Reviewer

  GROVER’S CREEK

  “Grover’s Creek is like comfort food for the soul. It leaves the reader longing for the simple pleasures of a bygone era. I highly recommend it for those who enjoy nostalgia and the romance of the past.” — Wanda L. Pyle, Author of Windborne, and The Stone House Legacy

  THE TURQUOISE SHROUD

  “The Turquoise Shroud launches the reader at high velocity down a twisting, turning road of adventure, intrigue, murder and romance that will keep you breathlessly on the edge of your seat until the explosive conclusion. Move over Travis McGee, Seth Halliday is in the driver's seat now!” — Doug Little, Goodreads Reviewer

  “This may be the breakout series for this prolific writer. Seth Halliday is a sympathetic but likable character with just the right amount of flaw. The descriptions are masterfully crafted to place the reader in the heart of the action.” — Wanda L. Pyle, Author of Windborne, and The Stone House Legacy

  “I won this book in the Goodreads FirstReads competition. It is very hard to put down and when you do it’s not long before you are back to the book. I would definitely recommend this book to readers who are fans of crime books.” — Sophie Narey, Goodreads Reviewer

  “The Turquoise Shroud grabs your attention in the first paragraph of chapter one and doesn’t let go until the end. I enjoyed reading this intriguing mystery as it unfolded.” — Sandra Jackson, Author of Promised Soul

  THE TRAIL TO SANTA ROSA

  “It was a wonderful story and the genre/setting was almost secondary to me as the story arc is character driven. It was exceptionally well written and wonderfully descriptive at times with the author Bobby Underwood really getting to the soul of his characters.” — Danni, Goodreads Reviewer

  THE SAPPHIRE SEA

  “Though I really liked the first (The Velvet Sea) and third (The Gentle Tide) books of the series, I did find this to be the most powerful book to date!…Matt is in a race against time to save those he loves, and the entire bio-organic population of the Earth. But this fight will cost him more than he could possibly imagine, and take him down roads he never knew existed!” — Kurt Johnson, Amazon Reviewer

  WHERE FLAMINGOS FLY

  “Primarily set in post World War II Miami, the story is rich with atmosphere and geographic detail of the era. For all those who are lover’s of the noir genre of 1940's & 50's movies, 'Where Flamingo's Fly' is an exciting tale of murder and romance that also reads like a great screenplay.” — Doug Little, Amazon Reviewer

  “It’s a fun book, both a stroll down memory lane to an earlier time, and a salute to the gang busters of yesteryear…if you like noir fiction, then give this book a chance, you’ll be richly rewarded for doing so.” — Kurt Johnson, Amazon Reviewer

  AFTER CLOSING TIME

  “It's a nice book to read on a quiet night, when everyone else in the house is asleep and workaday world is so far away. I liked Night Run the best, but all three stories were great.” — Kurt Johnson, Amazon Reviewer

  As with all works of fiction, the characters in this story live only in the author's imagination. Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Some real locations were used for atmosphere only, and while they exist, the people do not. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author. I assert the moral rights to be identified as the author of this work.

  The Tender Shore

  by

  Bobby Underwood

  Chapter One

  For beckoned by her lush island of dreams, he sails toward the heaven of her tender shore, and drowns happily within her velvet sea

  We were in Los Cabos, staying at a wonderful centuries-old vacation spot called Las Ventanas al Paraiso. We had just made love on a bed with white sheets and white covers, the breeze from the tropical paradise wafting through the open terrace doors and blowing across LeAnn's beautiful naked body. She was smiling at me, her long black hair stark and lovely on the white pillow, her arms bent back and lying next to her head. I was sitting just below her waist, her leg draped across my lap. I began adoring it with wet, loving kisses. She made no effort to move, enjoying the warm Mexican air and the feel of my lips against her soft flesh. She sighed happily, satisfied and in love, the same way I was in love. As I got closer to her tender shore she reached down with a delicate feminine hand and brought my fingers to her pretty smile, kissing each one affectionately.

  "I'm crazy about you," she whispered.

  "I love you too." And I did.

  We had been through so much together. I had loved and sheltered her when I believed her to be a Cherry 6; a pleasure drone outlawed in 2163 who believed itself to be human. I was Matt Ransom, a Civil Regulator, and after the murder of one of her kind in New Chicago which hadn't felt right, we had travelled to Paris where, with substantial help from Edna Bascomb, a conspiracy that rocked all mankind had been uncovered. The crux of it was that LeAnn was human, after all, but it was I who was not. Perhaps only thousands of humans remained on Earth now, in fact, the rest having colonized on Mars. The remaining portion of Earth’s population was bio-organics who believed themselves to be human. They were in most ways, but they had no soul. They could work, marry, have affairs, go about their lives believing they were human. But the capacity for real love and empathy, passion and compassion was limited in all the earlier versions. I was one of the few who had been given a soul — or whatever it could be called when a machine shared the same feelings as a human — and was able to love, and believe in something more than random chance in the universe if I chose to do so.

  When Aerodyne, the company responsible for the deception on mankind had destroyed much of the evidence, it was uncertain who was human and who was machine. Since each person believed themselves to be human, of course, it meant someone else was the robot. After months of chaos, with the entire planet in turmoil as the role of governments of the world in the conspiracy was speculated on and denied, life had eventually returned to normal. Normal in the late twenty-second century, however, meant a gray and sienna sky, the blues and greens of the planet sporadic around the globe now. Teutonic shifts and toxic pollutants had created a new landscape. Oceans created new shores and some countries surrounded by the sea had all but disappeared under great tsunamis and earthquakes. Beaches had to be filtered regularly for toxins so that people would not get sick. The remaining sea life, which was sparse, benefitted from the regular detox procedures also. Very few people knew that the cleansing was necessary because micro-organisms in the ocean sometimes seeped through synthetic skin, causing brief interruptions in pathways of non-humans.

  It had happened to me once, on Shell Beach in New Chicago. It was when LeAnn discovered I was not human; a secret she kept from me because by then she already loved me, and that was all that mattered to her. She was branded with the symbol of a Cherry 6, so I had protected and adored her, believing she was non-human. It did not matter to me because I loved her. Irony.

  LeAnn had no idea anyone else was like me at that time. She only knew that she was human, and marked in some unknown manner which forced her to live her life less freely than others did. It had nearly destroyed me when I discovered the real truth. Nothing had prepared me for th
e shock of finding out I wasn't human. Before leaving Paris we stopped in a church to light candles for those who had suffered and died without knowing why. Edna Bascomb had said we were both God's children, and He had loved us both enough to let us find each other in a world where love was in short supply. Faith had been all but lost by 2165, but Edna had enough for all of us. I believed her words in the quiet sanctity of Saint Augustin those few years back, and I believed them still. So did my wife. My shame was washed away there, beneath those images of heaven, and reminders of faith. We had walked out restored to who we were before we had arrived in Paris.

  I moved over LeAnn in a push-up position. She wrapped her white arms around my neck, letting her hands hang loosely and girlishly between my shoulder blades. Her legs remained open and inviting, a sexy harbor beckoning me towards her velvet sea. I kissed and adored her milky white breasts. They were warm and soft and sweet. She couldn't wait any longer and neither could I, and for a second time I dove into her waters. She gave voice to her pleasure and wrapped her pretty legs around my waist while I plunged repeatedly into her velvet ocean of love. I needed her love and hammered her sea like a pounding rain. Finally, the storm became a violent hurricane and she screamed in release, when in a sudden rush of joy, the rain dispersed into her ocean and was no more. We kissed gently, our passion satisfied for a moment but the love that had caused it still remaining.

  The potted sago palms on the terrace moved gently as a light wind traveled across the blue water and white sand. We lay cradled against each other on top of the sheets, facing the open terrace. It was a lovely view. I had my arms around the best girl on Earth or Mars. She was beautiful and I always wanted her. The soft graceful curves of her shoulders, back and velvety hips were warm as they pressed against me and we lay looking out onto the sunny paradise. I wrapped my arms around the only paradise I’d ever need.

  Chapter Two

  For there is a stillness about the sea that man must not allow himself to believe, less he be deceived, and drown in its stormy undercurrent

  Stacy would be joining us in San Jose del Cabo by evening so we made good use of the terrace deck, stretching out on big padded lounge chairs in the afternoon. LeAnn wore a pair of bright orange shorts and a white Miami Dolphins jersey with contrasting aqua and orange trim and an aqua dolphin logo on each shoulder. A pair of cheap pink shades she'd had since Paris finished the look. The football jersey was from the late twentieth century and she looked wildly hot and sexy wearing it. I wasn't particularly fond of the team from Earth's recent history, but I had spent more than a few bucks on the New Chicago black market to get it for her. She had fallen in love with it after seeing it in an old photograph.

  There were only about twenty-thousand real dolphins left in the world's oceans according to the latest figures. Whales were even closer to extinction, their food supply depleted by plate shifts, undersea volcanic eruptions, and a bit of oceanic weapons testing gone horribly wrong. Those crying about whaling during the twentieth century seemed in retrospect like children crying over spilt milk while the farmer took an axe to the cow. Such was hindsight.

  Edna had insisted we keep the wine-colored bank card she'd given me before all the ugliness in Paris transpired. So we used it for holidays. I had saved her granddaughter's life twice, if you lumped together the mess I'd extracted her from in her youth with the bomb blast in Paris that almost killed LeAnn, Stacy, and Emily Bascomb. It had taken the life of an elderly French gentleman, so my efforts had not been completely successful. It seemed long ago and far away now, at least the bad parts. The wonderful romantic parts, however, seemed like yesterday. That day in Saint Augustin seemed like yesterday as well. LeAnn and I were more in love than ever. Emily had stayed in touch and was happy raising her girls and running San Francisco's museum, which was one of the few left on the planet. San Francisco had ironically survived the massive quake in 2159 which dumped some of California into the Pacific and rearranged the West Coast of the United States considerably. Edna had come out of retirement, and with Doc Martin's help, whom she had married, she had taken of Aerodyne again. In only a few years it was back on top technologically, and its reputation restored.

  LeAnn and I had gotten officially married when we'd gotten back to Chicago. We'd had our own ceremony in the past, when the nature of her mark as a Cherry 6 had made it impossible for us to do so properly. But this one made it a matter of record. It was a small ceremony in the cathedral Edna had almost singlehandedly kept going during those lean years when faith was a dirty word to some. Edna, Emily, Doc, and Stacy, who was LeAnn's bridesmaid, were the only attendees. We spent our honeymoon in New Chicago, on Shell Beach. Some of our happiest moments had been spent there and we added more memories to them that weekend. Edna had the beach cleaned and cordoned off so that it was our own private playground for the weekend.

  The only one of our group who hadn't fared well, was Stacy. Blonde, crazy-pretty and just as nice, her husband-to-be just couldn't handle the news that he wasn't human. Edna had given Stacy the proof to show him, having discovered it before we'd confronted Aerodyne, and the world had gone crazy for a time. He was an earlier model, however, and unlike me, he could say and do the right things, believe in fact that he was feeling love, and giving it, but in truth he could not; it was only the motions he was going through, not the emotions. They couldn't make it as a couple and Stacy had returned from Mars alone, crushed.

  She still worked for Edna, who had given her time off to join us on vacation. Stacy was just as nice, just as gorgeous, and still enjoyed her job. She was LeAnn's best friend. She hung out with us when she could make it to New Chicago and the two talked on the telecom a lot. But something had been taken from her that hadn't returned. It wasn't that Stacy still loved him, LeAnn explained to me, but that she was sort of in some netherworld of having a life planned and then having no place to go when everything you thought was going to happen hadn't. She had been out socially since then, but I gathered from things LeAnn inferred without saying so directly, that her few romantic encounters had turned out less than stellar. LeAnn said she needed love, not sex, and until she felt that shared magic with someone that made sex more than sex, that made it a part of love itself, she would never move on. I was married to a smart girl and I knew she was right.

  She was reading Harry Potter and I was reading Summer of '49, a book about a baseball season over two-hundred years ago, when the Yankees and Red Sox had battled down to the final day of the season. It had been the greatest rivalry in sports. Both books were real ones, made of paper that was yellowing now, but perfect for vacation. A world more technologically savvy but far less substantive had embraced the EPD, or electronic print device, long ago, writing the death certificate for printed books. Ours were old but in good shape, and we both preferred them to the coldness of electronic text. It was fun scavenging together through old secondhand book stores in Chicago for the antiques. And when we went out of town, the book shops were the first place we scouted out. There was more to a book than just the words. LeAnn put down Azkaban and asked, "You want a soda?"

  "Yeah, thanks."

  "Okay, get me one too, then," she giggled. "Lots of ice in mine. I'm not a snooty European."

  "You know, if you weren't sex on a stick and I wasn't so crazy about you, I'm sure I wouldn't let you by with this kind of behavior."

  "I have been bad, Daddy. You may have to spank me later." She smiled. Then in an exaggerated aristocratic voice she said, "Now do be an absolute darling and run fetch me that Coke before I pass out from this monstrous weather. It must be seventy-two degrees out here."

  I bent down to kiss her. "Anything for you, Love," I mimicked her.

  I drank some Coke and tried to read, but the warm breeze and the sexy girl next to me brought on a serenity that made me want to do absolutely nothing. Life was wonderful for us, so wonderful that I sometimes marveled at how I'd ever gotten along before her.

  I still had my work but there were few serious crimes requi
ring an investigation by a Civil Regulator. Civil Enforcers, lower on the food chain in status and salary, envied me. They took care of the more mundane tasks, such as petty theft and traffic control. The latter had gotten easier as the new glider craft had cut ground traffic by half. As people got more accustomed to using them, they realized it was just as easy to get cited up in the air as it was on the ground. Things had leveled out to a normal quota of tickets per week after a while.

  LeAnn had opened a small coffee shop and book nook not far from our home in New Chicago. Edna had fronted the money to get it started and LeAnn had done such a great job that the loan had already been paid back. She'd really put her heart and soul into the place, creating a warm and pleasant atmosphere irresistible to those beleaguered by the hustle and bustle of the Windy City. She had scoured places for items from history that gave Summer Dream a nostalgic feel, because she wanted it to be a quaint sanctuary from the real world.

  People could enjoy a sandwich and a coke, or just a coffee and pastry beneath reproductions of vintage travel posters from the 1930s through the 1950s. It gave the place a classy art deco feel. Unable to find the tables and chairs she desired, she'd had them made. Each table had a famous logo from Earth's past painted in the center against a soft yellow background. You could sit with the Morton Salt girl, have a sandwich with a lovely 1940s Coca-Cola girl on the beach, or share a coffee with your coworker as a pretty girl on your table tilted back a Hires Root Beer. One table was an advertisement for the new 1949 Buick Roadmaster.