But a few hours later Oliver got a nasty shock when the pilot crackled on the overhead speaker and announced they were approaching Los Angeles and would be on the ground in thirty minutes. He flagged down his little Asian stewardess and asked kind of casually, "Isn't this flight direct to Tokyo?"
She explained, in heavily-accented English, that the flight was direct, not non-stop. The airplane would stop briefly in Los Angeles to let on and off some passengers, but those continuing through to Tokyo were welcome to stay on board.
Oliver felt a chill down his spine, wondering if the cops had somehow figured out he was on board this flight and would storm the plane in L.A.? How long would it take for them to figure out his disappearing act?
Oliver hated to feel like the prey.
The plane landed and some passengers got off and others got on. But law enforcement hadn't been waiting and after a routine forty minute stop, the plane was airborne again and headed toward Tokyo.
Eleven and a half hours later, it landed gently at Narita Airport.
But then the flight attendant made an announcement requesting all passengers remain in their seats to keep the aisles clear for a brief delay. When the plane door opened, six small but serious-looking uniformed police boarded, followed by a salt-and-pepper-haired supervisor with his hands folded across his protruding belly. They turned left, into first class and stopped at Oliver's seat.
Which was empty.
"Where is your passenger from 4A, Mr….Dwayne Hurd?" the police supervisor asked the flight attendant, polite but hard.
She gave him a nervous little bow. "Mr. Hurd left the plane in Los Angeles. He told us he had a stomach problem. Then he did not board again when it was time."
The supervisor shrugged and gave the signal for his men to leave. Whoever Mr. Hurd was and whatever bad things he may have done, it seemed he was still America's problem.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
A couple of days later, Pepper Ryan was sitting on a big towel on the beach below the Ryan property. His hands were sweeping little fans in the sand, feeling the light scratch of warmth. His finger snagged against a small seashell and he plucked it, wiped it free from sand. It was a perfect spiral, and golden in color. Score! He'd keep it to show Zula and if she liked it, he'd give it to her.
Pepper was soaking in the warm Cape Cod sun. Trying to heal. Wearing Jake's old hat and listening to the Red Sox on a little portable radio turned down low. The Sox were winning but Baltimore had loaded the bases with only one out in the seventh. And Baltimore was riding a five-game win streak.
Pepper saw his buddy Angel walking down the beach toward him.
Pepper stood. But gingerly. Every joint in his body protested even normal movement. The stitches on Pepper's temple felt like he had a toothache on the side of his head.
"Hey Mano!" said Angel. His broad smile was infectious. "I heard you were still alive!" Then the big laugh--an eruption of mirth. And relief.
He gave Pepper a gentle hug. Then he held Pepper at full length, inspecting him. "FBI?" asked Angel, with a quizzical head tilt. "Tell me that means you're a Female Body Inspector! Which reminds me—what happened to Maddie Smith?"
The thought of Maddie still bugged Pepper. She would always be an impossible mix for him. The bitchy, manipulative jet-setter who'd tried to use him, but still showing glimpses of the seventeen-year-old girl he'd maybe loved once, before the adult world had turned them each into very different people. He wondered if she'd meant her offer for him to run away with her, that night—a fantasy that had momentarily seemed better than his messy reality.
Pepper just shook his head and told Angel about Maddie's voice message. She'd said in case he didn't already know, he'd blown his chance. His loss! She needed to clear her head so she was taking her Gulfstream to Cancun with Justin to see his new reality show in production. Lawyers would clean up the mess at Eagle's Nest, arrange her daddy's funeral, and she'd be back for that. But she never wanted to see Pepper again.
"Tough one Mano!" frowned Angel, but he couldn't hold it—his frown quickly slipped to a smile and his booming laugh. "But if there's one thing I know about you Pep, you were never meant for the easy life!"
Pepper could only laugh too. "Hey, you feel like hanging a while on the beach?"
"Long as you don't suggest a clambake!"
Too soon, Angel...
Pepper could see an elderly couple meandering along the tide line, coming their way. Was it the same couple who'd found the clambake pit with Keser's body? The Tuckers? The old woman picked up something and showed it to the man. Then she shook her head with a grimace, flipped whatever it was into the water. Clearly not up to their standards…
Angel plopped down in the sand, kicked off one flip-flop to the left, the other far to the right. Lay flat and gave a loud, contented sigh. "You see the Globe today? They still had four pages about the assassination attempt. The feds are still trying to hunt down that Brian-Edward Westin from New River Front and that crazy homeless guy, Oliver—I can't believe they haven't caught 'em yet! And hey, they said Lizzie Concepcion had a red starfish tattoo way down by her cha cha, did you know? Pretty hot, right? Maybe I should get a tattoo…"
Angel kept babbling but Pepper didn't respond, he was still focused on the shoreline. That elderly couple could have been Pepper's dad and mom someday not too many years from now, if his mom hadn't died so young. Growing old together, the fairy tale. The old man could even be Pepper someday, far, far in the distant future, if he could avoid getting shot or blown up first… He squinted at the elderly couple and tried to guess—if that were actually him someday, who'd be that woman at his side? Impossible to tell.
So for now Pepper surrendered, lay back on his towel. Tuned out Angel's chatter and the Sox play-by-play guy. Listened to the soft percussion of waves stroking the shore like drum brushes. An island song floated to his mind and he sang along softly to the Atlantic's lazy tempo. He tilted his face to the sun—he soaked in its perfect, Cape-Cod-in-July heat—and buried his feet in the sand until he hit a depth still wet and cool from high tide.
And the world finally let Pepper be, for longer than he would have guessed.
Thank You
Thank you for buying this book. Pepper Ryan and his friends (and some enemies) will be back for new adventures soon.
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Keep reading for an exciting preview of Timothy Fagan’s next Pepper Ryan novel
KILL TIDE
Chapter One
.
It was on a wet July afternoon that Pepper Ryan became a hero to pretty much everyone on Cape Cod, except himself.
Pepper was driving through warm rain to the apartment of a woman he thought maybe he loved. He was going there to answer an epic question she’d asked him two days earlier. His hands were shaking, just thinking about it.
His hands were also shaky because he was driving a police SUV which he’d basically stolen a few minutes earlier from the New Albion police station, where he was working that summer as a police cadet.
Pepper was beyond pissed off at his dad, the chief of police, and it had felt like rough justice when he’d swiped the keys. So he hadn’t cared that a marked police vehicle was completely off-limits to a lowly cadet. Especially the department’s only brand-new Ford Explorer SUV Police Inter
ceptor, with all its bells and whistles.
Including one hell of a sound system.
To drown out the mess of thoughts filling his mind, Pepper cranked up a Kings of Leon song, “Use Somebody,” on the SUV’s radio. Pepper was only twenty years old back then. He hadn’t yet heard that song ten billion times. He sang along, really getting into it. As he neared the woman’s apartment, his heart was banging louder than the song’s crazy drumbeat. And faster.
So Pepper was cruising a bit too hot-headed and singing a bit too loud as he came down the hill on Rogers Folly Road late on Thursday afternoon. Especially since it had been lightly raining for the past couple of hours—the windshield wipers were squeaking back and forth and the road was shiny black.
He was about a hundred yards short of the intersection with Lower County Road when he saw a brown Chevy cargo van pull onto the road from the grassy strip to the sidewalk. It approached the four-way stop, to Pepper’s right, at almost exactly the same time as Pepper.
The cargo van was a dull brown that the rain had darkened to exactly the color of dog poop. Pepper also saw what looked like a white garbage bag in the high grass near where it’d been parked. Had the van driver dumped that trash? But the object was smaller than a kitchen garbage bag. A grocery bag?
The van’s right-turn signal was flashing as it approached the stop sign. Pepper saw the driver—a white guy in a green trucker’s cap—look left and their eyes crossed for half a moment. The brown van rolled into the intersection and stopped about five feet beyond the little white stop line.
Pepper stopped at his sign a split second later. No turn signal because he was continuing on Rogers Folly Road.
The man looked at Pepper again, spat out his open window, then grinned and drove away straight, despite still having his turn signal on. What an idiot!
And that was the moment Pepper got his inspiration. A crazy solution to all his problems that summer. A perfect way out.
Again, Pepper was not a cop. A cadet was half a level up from a boy scout, minus the merit badges and knot-making skills. He had absolutely no authority to do what he was contemplating. He mentally flipped a coin.
Go straight? Or turn left?
The coin came up tails and Pepper didn’t think he’d cheated. He turned left to follow the brown van. But as he turned, he thought, Pepper, you’re nuts. He was about a hundred yards behind the van, which was moving at a slowish pace, probably five miles under the thirty miles per hour speed limit.
Pepper caught up to the van and settled in twenty yards back. Brown paper covered the inside of the van’s twin small rear windows. It looked the same as thousands of other work vans all over the Cape. And not really at all like the white van that Pepper’s dad and law enforcement had been hunting on Cape Cod that week, in connection with the most notorious crimes on the Cape in many years.
Kings of Leon reached the bitter end of their song and a decent Black Keys tune started up, but Pepper killed the music. Then he turned on the police radio and lifted the mic. First time ever, but he’d seen his dad and others do it for most of his life. Still, he fumbled around, too jacked up with energy.
Then he hit the talk button. “Hello, ah, Dispatch?” he asked.
Pepper’s stomach was suddenly in his throat. It was one thing to get a crazy idea. The way people standing near a ledge getting a momentary impulse to jump, which they quickly dismiss, leaving their toes tingling while staying alive. That self-preservation instinct…
The voice of Barbara Buckley, one of New Albion’s police dispatchers, crackled over the radio, acknowledging.
Shit. What should he do? It wasn’t too late yet to bail out on his idea.
And then it was. “Ah, Dispatch, this is Car Two-Two,” said Pepper. “Please send units for, ah, backup. Lower County Road, east of Rogers Folly.”
Long silence, then: “Is that you, Pepper? Repeat that—”
Instead, Pepper hung up the mic. He fumbled around the dashboard and eventually found the switch to activate the roof lights and siren. His heart jumped as he flipped it. Pepper, now you’re fucked. Congrats, you’re fired for sure. His right foot didn’t belong to him…he barely could feel it, heavy and strange, as it floored the gas. His siren screamed in his ears.
Thirteen minutes later…
Pepper felt a strong hand reach down and shake his shoulder.
It belonged to Lieutenant Donald Eisenhower—his dad’s second-in-command on the New Albion police force. And his dad’s longtime best friend from way back in their army days. Pepper had never seen Eisenhower’s African-American face so pale. Or so close. It was ridiculous.
It registered with Pepper that he was lying on a wet road, looking up at Eisenhower, and his left side from his shoulder down to his hip felt like it was on fire. His hand too. He tried to sit up but couldn’t.
“Hey man, what’s up?” Pepper asked. He didn’t recognize his own voice. Thick. Slurred. Pepper gingerly raised his hand in greeting and saw it was stained blood red.
Thump, thump, thump.
“Hey…you hear that?” asked Pepper.
Lieutenant Eisenhower was bent over at his side and answered him. But Pepper couldn’t follow his words very well, because the lieutenant’s head was lazily splitting into a mosaic of Eisenhowers. Like Pepper was looking through one of those kaleido-thingamabobs he’d played with as a kid… What was Eisenhower saying?
Pepper tried to wipe the blood off his hand on the wet road. But the blood only smeared. He was in a ton of pain and his hand looked wrong now. Why wasn’t the rain washing it clean?
He saw a small group of fuzzy people behind Eisenhower, gawking down at him. The evening sky behind them was a broken shade of gray. Were they civilians? Like what, this was all a goddamn show?
Pepper tried to push himself to a seated position, but his hand landed on someone else. He saw it was a man who was covered in blood too. This man was deathly still. A wet green baseball cap lay in the street at his side.
Eisenhower slapped his cheek, as if to make him focus. But the slaps felt way too feeble. What was wrong with the lieutenant? Was he hurt too?
“What happened, Pepper? What the holy hell did you do?” Lieutenant Eisenhower asked.
Pepper could barely hear him over the thump, thump, thump. He tried to clear his head and answer. I can explain…just give me a second. Please!
Pepper really tried. But no words came out. And now the many faces above him looked wicked scared. And way too close.
Then Pepper had a thought that gripped him like an icy hand on his neck.
If I die, I’ll never get to explain…
Then his world slid to darkness.
To keep reading Kill Tide, please use this link to Amazon.com:
Kill Tide page on Amazon.com
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my first and best early reader, Karen Fagan. To Jim Fagan, Paul Donahue, Rob Lendrum, Sheridan Leinen, Kate Fagan, Mike Fay and the original (Bill) Smith for their early reads and valuable feedback.
And to all my other beta readers and project supporters: Erin Fagan, Matt Fagan and Anna Fagan. Mary Martinez, Anney Ardiel and Patrick Fagan. Anne Fagan. Bill McCall. Linda Parkins and Dave McCall. Liz Coker. Cindy and Paul Bohne. Joe Reck, Kevin Jordan and Geoff Wadsworth. Sean O'Keefe and Greg Fruno. Tom Museth and Craig Hutcheson. Dan Keser. To Brian Leary for his logistical guidance. To John Raffier for the shoes joke. To Paula Moon and Bruno Massat for the inside scoop on veterinary anesthetics. To everyone else who read, encouraged or pushed me along the way to get this book completed.
To independent editor John Paine, for his developmental editing wisdom. To Damon, Alisha and the rest of the team at damonza.com, for their striking cover design.
To Matt Kurlansky, author of Salt, A World History and Ronald Kessler, author of The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents, for their fascinating books that caught my imagination.
And thank you to MFS, a terrific inve
stment management company with even better employees, for your kindness when I quit my day job to write novels. Both times.
About the Author
Timothy Fagan has always loved to read suspenseful books that make you laugh out loud in public. Now he loves to write them.
Timothy previously spent twenty years as an attorney and executive in the financial services industry, focusing on securities regulatory matters across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. He grew up in British Columbia, Canada and currently lives near Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
Killing Shore, the first book in the Pepper Ryan Thriller Series, won the 2019 Best Thriller Award by TopShelf Magazine. The next book in the series is a prequel, Kill Tide.
For more information about Timothy Fagan, his upcoming books and other projects, please visit his website: www.timothyfagan.com.
Or visit his social media pages:
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