Her neighbors were home, but she was too restless to spend another evening watching others. She decided to go for a walk. The pleasant evening, along with the easy breeze carrying the sounds of the tossing surf might just blow away her sense that something unseen was on tilt. She had not jogged on the beach this morning, so all this second sense could be nothing more than her body craving some activity. If so, the four-mile-roundtrip walk into town might be just what she needed to trim the crust off her mood.

  She would stop in at Millie’s Sea Grog. Millie’s was mostly about drinking, but the place had the town’s best clam chowder, not to mention a nightly crowd of area hunks wallowing in the town’s bawdiest bar talk. Millie’s also meant getting hit on, but, by now, the message on the boys’ boner network said: Oh, sure, Linda Darby puts out, puts out rejections. She had heard the rumors: Linda is a lesbian. Linda has a secret lover. Linda is an old-fashioned girl with a steady guy overseas. Whatever. She could deal with those guys, and she’d enjoy the laughs.

  After drawing her hair back into a ponytail and strapping on her fanny pack, she paused at the mirror. She didn’t like the plumpish look that came with the pack, and neither would the fellas in Millie’s. She unhooked the pack and dropped it on the chair in her bedroom. When she glanced at the ocean through the back slider, she saw low clouds on the far horizon moving horizontally, a mist more than a fog. She’d seen this pattern many times. There were no white caps out beyond the breakers which meant mild wind off the ocean. Her prognosis, she would be home before the dampness reached the shore. She grabbed her purse and headed out the door.

  *

  “Linda Darby’s on the move,” the voice said into Tag’s earphone. “She walked up Ocean Road and angled onto Main Street, on the inland side. It looks like she’s heading into town. I’ll let you know if she changes direction. If you don’t hear from me, you know where to take her.”

  *

  Linda brushed back the strands of hair the breeze had swept across her forehead and eyes, and angled onto Main Street. In the next block, a local couple came toward Linda, rollerblading their way home as they did each night after closing their glass blowing shop in town. They coasted across Main and began laboring up the only street cut into the hilly inland side. They lived on that side street, their property cut out of the tangled wild berries that crowded in wherever man had left the local land to its own devices. About one mile up, that side road deteriorated into a gravel trail fit more for deer and four wheelers than passenger cars. After another two miles that road crested over Pot Ridge, the local spine that separated the coastal dwellers from the enterprising growers who had emigrated from California’s thriving marijuana fields.

  The lady rollerblader wore a lightweight sweatshirt about the color of a blouse Linda had tried on last week. The top had a cowl neckline. She had liked the fabric, just not the price. Over the years she had tried on a lot of clothes that she liked at the moment, but had forgotten about within a week. This top she had remembered, that proved something. And it had fit her just right. What the hell, you only live once. She’d stop in the House of You. Besides, she thought, the new top might just be the ticket to shake off her funk—therapy. She smiled, thinking that maybe her doctor would give her a prescription for the top. The young doc liked to look at her, and he had a tight body that made going to see him more pleasant than any doctor she’d used in the past. But she dated no local men, no exceptions, not even for doctors.

  Downtown Sea Crest was like a morgue after dark, shrouded by a billion living stars. Linda had never understood why this one clothing store stayed open until nine. She stepped off the curb into the intersection that began her favorite stretch of downtown. The air here tasted of donuts from the nearby shop, and there had been no scientific studies claiming you could get love handles just smelling them. On Sundays, she often walked down to get one glazed and one cream-filled bismark. Nothing beat donuts, hot coffee, and the Sunday newspaper on her deck overlooking the ocean.

  The House of You was just past the hardware store on the other side of the alley. She quickened her pace toward the store, its light reaching out across the sidewalk.

  Then, just as the pungent odors from the alley pushed the heavenly donuts from her nostrils, Linda stopped smelling everything.

  Chapter 2

  A strong hand clamped over Linda’s mouth and nose, a wide hand, a man’s hand, a suffocating hand. His strength coiled around her shoulders pinning her right arm. He wore a short-sleeve shirt, his arm carpeted with tattoos of snakes coiled around a busty topless woman. His other hand gripping her left elbow, allowed him to steer her deeper into the alley.

  Oh, God.

  She staggered, twisting her head in a desperate attempt to free either her mouth or nose. She fell back against his head and shoulders. He was clean shaven. His height nearly matched hers, five-eight, but he was powerful. She needed to remember all she could so she could tell the police. But for now her attention was riveted not on staying alive, nothing that long term, but on her desperate hunger for one more taste of air.

  This is only a robbery. Only a robbery, she kept telling herself as each erratic step pulled her deeper into the darkness between the rows of two-story brick buildings.

  Linda’s attacker abruptly jerked her arm, navigating her around a filthy puddle in the trough gutter that centered the alley, the action momentarily easing his grip.

  She sucked a mouthful of air through his smelly, tobacco-stained fingers.

  He smokes. All right, that’s something else I know about him.

  Just as quickly, his hand tightened again and the two of them went back to stumbling as if their clothes were sewn together. An idea had come with that quick breath. Her right arm was pinned against her side, but she controlled her hand. She opened it, letting her purse drop to the pavement.

  There’s my purse. Take it. Leave me alone.

  The tattooed man ignored the purse.

  Desperately she searched for another idea. Something. Anything. Nothing more came.

  Take my purse. Let me go. Please. Please.

  Linda could no longer see the brightness from Main Street. The meager light finding its way back this far had been frayed by the century of grime coating the twists and turns of the buildings lining the alley.

  Her holder suddenly jerked her to a stop. The foul-smelling trough water penetrated the canvas uppers of her walking shoes. His breath slithered down the back of her t-shirt. “I’m going to let you breathe. If you scream, I’ll hurt you.”

  *

  Tag knew the assignment was not a straight hit. First they needed to talk with Linda Darby to learn what she knew. If the woman resisted, the dentist would start with his gum pick and battery-operated drill. No one resisted for long, but someone would hear the screams. Tag had worked under the field leader for this mission before. The man was competent, one of the best, but Tag did not agree with his decision to use the alley for this interrogation. The woman would have been home in an hour or so. They should have waited.

  *

  Linda breathed, heaving breaths, again, and again. The damp, salt-rich air raced through her body. She considered screaming. But she had been warned. Instead, her voice scratched out from her dry throat. “What do you want?”

  His hand moved from her arm to the top of her shoulder, his fingertips burrowing into her collarbone like a carving fork piercing a roast turkey. She buckled some, hoping to alleviate the pain, but he increased the pressure.

  A second man stepped out from the shadows, his belly waging war against the lower buttons of his dress shirt. His tie loose at his neck, the collar unfastened. His head in constant motion, a turret mounted on lumpy shoulders. Her holder was clearly the brawn, could this one be the brains? Not that brutalizing a woman took great brainpower.

  The near electrical punch of her adrenal gland stunned Linda. Her legs buckled. Her head felt light. She didn’t recognize this as a panic attack. But labels didn’t matter. Escape mattered.

  I’m a jogger. If I can get free, I’ll have a chance.

  The second man started to move toward her. No. He had only bent his knee, putting the flat of his foot up behind himself, against the wall of the building on his side.

  Suddenly, the man holding her from the back jerked upward onto his toes, exhaling a loud painful grunt. From the corner of her eye Linda saw the outline of a third man fully in the shadows.

  My god, he kicked the man in the balls.

  Her holder released her, his hands instinctively cupping his groin as if he were holding a fledgling fallen from a bird’s nest.

  Kick him again. She screamed inside her head. No, hold him and let me kick ‘im. I’ll drive his dick up behind his eyes.

  In a flash, her helper slammed a brick down onto the man’s spine. Then he kneed her assailant in the face, and his head slammed back against the brick wall. His tattooed arms flopped like a gate with a broken hinge. He went down. Flat. His face in the gutter trough where Linda’s had stood only a moment earlier.

  Linda staggered back until her shoulders thumped that same brick wall.

  As the shock of surprise wore off, the taller one on the other side of the alley brought his foot down from the wall. He reached inside his jacket. In that same moment, the third man hurled the brick he still held, striking the taller man in the shoulder. His hand inside his coat paused. In that split second, the third man drove his fist into the other man’s gluttony, followed by two quick blows to his face. The taller man collapsed, a circus tent dropping to the dust of a deserted fairground.

  Her helper wore a full-head stocking mask. In the shadows, she hadn’t noticed. He stepped toward her. He grasped her arm and pulled her close, then touched the bottom of her chin.

  Her head came up, fear occupied her face.

  His warm whisper touched her ear. “You’re okay.” The scent of his light cologne found her nose. “Go home,” he said. “Do not call the police. They cannot be trusted.”

  He got her walking toward the street, out of the alley. On the way she scooped up her purse, the strap seeming to reach up for the hand it knew. Ten yards from the sidewalk, he let go of her arm, turned and, betrayed only by the fading sound of his footfalls, retreated into the swallow of the darkness.

  Linda spoke into that darkness. “But—”

  “No buts,” his voice returned from seemingly nowhere, “go straight home.”

  When Linda reached the sidewalk, she began walking briskly, nearly jogging, her gaze often backward. The police station was on Main Street at the corner of Oak. Three blocks. She could make three blocks. She had to make three blocks.

  At the station she grasped the door handle, pulling it part way open, and then stopped. She stood there. Then let go.

  He did save me. He must have had a reason for telling me not to go to the police.

  After walking to the next corner, feeling unsafe in the town where she had always felt safe, she got into a taxi, giving the driver her home address.

  The hack spoke without turning his head. “Are you all right, Miss?”

  The voice was louder, less of a whisper, but it sounded much like the man who saved her in the alley. She decided to find out. “If not for you,” she said, “I would likely have died tonight.”

  “If you had, in that last moment, what’s the one thing you would have missed having in your life?”

  “The right relationship with a man, maybe even a family of my own.”

  “But you have been married.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Not important.”

  After a minute or two of silence, she spoke again. “I thought my husband was the right man. … My hormones keep telling me he was. … Then, eventually, I just knew …”

  “Then what?”

  “I blamed the man. All my girlfriends told me I was right to leave him. I was sure at the time.”

  Sudden squeals and pops from the taxi’s tires fighting for footing startled Linda as the cab drove off the blacktop onto the graveled roadside. “You’re home,” the hack said without turning his head.

  “Who are you?” Linda asked.

  “I teach high school social studies. I’m on vacation.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “I also teach P.E.”

  “I’m not going to get an honest answer, am I?”

  “You were smart not to go into the police station. The authorities cannot be trusted.”

  “But I have to do something?”

  “Yes, you do. Go inside. Take a warm shower and go to bed. You will sleep. Don’t worry. I got your back.”

  Chapter 3

  Linda awoke to the patter of windblown rain striking the window, and the crescendo of the breaking surf a hundred yards from her deck. God, she loved these raw natural sounds. They allowed her to live alone without feeling isolated. She lingered, her head nested in her pillow. After a while, the rain stopped and she could hear the calls of the gulls taking flight, soaring and swooping down to skim the surface of the sea.

  As always, she had left the Venetian blinds open on a slant, the morning sun and the waves acting as a gentle alarm. She parted the blinds and peered outside. Everything had that fresh look, the sky brightening wherever the sun reached through seams in the billowy clouds. A hummingbird furiously worked the airspace above her deck, thrusting its rapier-like beak in and out of the orange blossoms of a honeysuckle flourishing in one of her patio pots.

  The shards of last night’s terror began worming back into her mind. She poked the power button on her bedside radio, turned the volume up to cover the bathroom noises, turned on the light over the sink and opened the faucet to let the water heat. Her morning routine, everyone had one.

  She had not as yet decided what, if anything, she would tell Cynthia about last night. She didn’t want to worry her older friend, but she just had to tell someone, and there was no one else close enough for such a sharing. She also needed to find out why last night, on the phone, her normally upbeat friend Cynthia had sounded so melancholy.

  The local radio station she habitually played each morning told of the theft of one of Sea Crest’s two taxis. Then, the announcer said the thief had abandoned the cab on a side street.

  Linda went still. She had ridden in that cab. As she reasoned the events, the taxi had been stolen, at least borrowed, by the man who helped her and then drove her home. He had certainly not been a cabbie for he had not asked for a fare.

  I hadn’t realized that until right now. And why did I tell him all that stuff about myself. Things I’ve never told anyone but Cynthia. Why did I do that?

  Her body went rigid, the hair dryer poised above her head, warming only the air. The radio had gone on to report that two men had been found dead—murdered, the announcer said, two strangers. Police Chief Benjamin McIlhenny reported having found no identification on their bodies. They had been found in the alley behind Sea Crest Donuts. Both shot in the head.

  Linda’s windowless bathroom shrank, cramped. The sensation of a belt tightened around her chest made her fight for the next breath, just as she had in the alley. The dead men had to be the two who attacked her. There were two men. Found in the same alley. They had been killed that same night. They had to be. Who else could they be?

  She recalled the touch of the repulsive man who’d held her close. He had rough hands. And sour breath. She shuddered. Then her mind saw the cruel face of the second man, his sagging stomach.

  The radio station described these killings as the first local murders ever, according to the Sea Crest Gazette, the town’s twice-a-week newspaper: Wednesday and Saturday mornings. The station went on to inform its listeners that no one knew exactly which year the Gazette had issued its first edition. Old man Jory, now retired, whose family had once run the ice house just outside of town, called in to say his pa had once said the Gazette began publishing in October 1881. The paper’s first lead story had been the shootout between the Earps and the Clantons at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. Since then, the Gazette had reported many murders, but none in their own quiet hamlet. That had changed this morning. The tone of the announcement almost seemed proud. Like Sea Crest had finally made the big time, had qualified to be on the map.

  Such nonsense.

  Her next thought struck like a claw hammer.

  My mysterious helper must have killed them. … Who else? I have to tell Chief McIlhenny. No. First I want to talk with Cynthia.

  Linda left her condo at eleven-fifteen so she could arrive at O’Malley’s Bistro in time to get their regular table by the front window. The establishment had a side wall of stainless steel equipment that kept things cold and a back wall behind the bar crowded with more stainless equipment that kept other stuff hot. Other than the ubiquitous well-known fast food mainstays, O’Malley’s Bistro along with Millie’s Sea Grog comprised everything about food and drink for those who called Sea Crest home.

  From the table at the front window, Linda always saw Cynthia come out of her job across the street at SMITH & CO. At sixty-two, Cynthia was twenty-five years older than Linda, at least seventy-five pounds heavier, and had weak ankles. Linda always opened the door to O’Malley’s from the inside and helped Cynthia to their usual table.

  SMITH & CO. occupied a plain brick, standalone building with no windows and only a small sign: SMITH & CO., CONSULTING. No glass door. No sign welcoming visitors. In fact, the building, framed by alleys on its north and south sides, projected an image that said: not welcome. Cynthia had never invited Linda to stop at the office, and had always deflected inquiries about her place of employment.

  As usual, Clark Ryerson came to Linda’s table. He always waited on her, trading tables with other staff when necessary. Rumor was that Clark had come to town after being hired to provide security for the marijuana growers. Then one day Clark rode his Harley into town with a horrible cut on his side, blood steadily dripping from the bottom of one pant leg of his Levi’s. He told Dr. Mulvihill he’d foolishly backed into a cutting machine. The story seemed suspicious, but nothing else suggested trouble in the growers’ nearly autonomous region a few miles to the east. Mulvihill stitched Clark’s wound, but the man had lost a great deal of blood and needed a transfusion. Clark told the doctor to forget it. His blood was Bombay Phenotype. The state’s blood banks had none. The U.S. Army had trouble getting Bombay. Only one person in every quarter-million was Bombay, and their bodies rejected blood of any other type. To Clark’s surprise, the doc had one other patient with that type. Linda Darby.