Terror Stash (2 page)

There were just a few people sitting on the beach. Those not in the water weren’t lying around sun baking, though. At this time of the year the hole in the ozone layer was right overhead. Acquiring a tan was a natural by-product of surviving a torrid summer that seemed to last all year, interrupted by a short rainy season in the middle.
Most of them were watching other swimmers and surfers, or just passing the time. It was a great day for it.

As he watched the waves roll in, Caden realized that he was happy, with a mellow contentedness he hadn’t felt in far too long. The inexplicable restlessness that had been driving him crazy had momentarily lifted.

He filled his lungs and breathed out, feeling life tingle in every extremity.

“Howya goin’, mate?”

The tall, gangly teenager standing between the nose of Caden’s car and the next was vaguely familiar to him. The teen was watching Caden, his eyes wide and his feet poised for flight.

Caden hadn’t heard his approach at all. It was a measure of how relaxed he was here. It was also a good warning. He let the tension flow from the muscles that had bunched in preparation and gave the teen a friendly grin. “Hello, yourself.”

The pimply kid was easily over six feet, possibly even taller than Caden, but the only way he’d get the scales to hit more than one hundred and forty pounds would be to rig them and fill his pockets with lead. He had a chin than fell away to nothing and sported feathery first whiskers. His black, long-sleeved Zero tee-shirt said he was a skateboarder. The jeans with the holes at the knees showed he wasn’t a good one. There was a region of lily-white flesh between the hem of the tee-shirt and the elastic of his boxers; the loose band of the jeans started another two inches lower.

He was wearing flat-soled sneakers.

“Where’s the skateboard?” Caden asked.

The guy’s eyes widened even more. “Err...” He looked around. “Well...” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “It’s back in the car.” He shrugged and gave an all-mighty sniff. “No bitumen around here.”

True. Caden took in the teen’s bloodshot eyes and the painfully protruding hipbones and kept his mouth shut. He’d let him lead the conversation to where he wanted it, although he already knew where that would be.

“I’m Joel,” the kid offered.

“Yeah.” Caden considered him again. “Do I know you?”

“I didn’t think you’d remember me.” Joel blushed. “About three years ago. Outside the Yallingup liquor store.”

“Got it.” He’d placed the kid at last. He’d been heading into the store to pick up some of the local wine that Ria liked and had almost tripped over three high-school kids. Two of them were in jeans and Hawaiian shirts, their hair slicked back and cigarettes on conspicuous display in their pockets. The third had been a petite blonde with big blue eyes, in a sundress. The boys had pulled him to one side and seriously, man-to-man, proposed he buy them a carton of Swan stubbies for their party that evening. He could keep the change.

As they’d made their proposals, one of them kept looking over his shoulder at the blonde, who watched the action go down with her arms crossed and a pout on her lips. Caden recognized the type instantly. In twenty years’ time she’d be the woman in high fashion clothes and the latest accessories, with no visible means of support but a handful of adoring, deep-pocketed men who would do anything to keep her happy.

His heart had hardened. He’d eyed the two colorful twenty-dollar bills the boys held out to him, took the average price of a carton away from it and laughed. “Not enough profit in it for me,” he told them and walked away.

He looked at Joel now. “You’ve got a lot taller,” he remarked.

Again, the self-conscious blush. “Yeah, well. It happens.”

Caden shut up again and just watched.

The kid’s blush deepened the longer the silence stretched. “You were just sitting on your car,” he said at last. “Looking.”

“Yep.”

“Looking for someone?”

This wasn’t quite what Caden had expected. So he played along. “Maybe.” It was a safe enough answer.

“Maybe...looking for a way to have a good time?” Joel’s expression wasn’t just hopeful, it was desperate.

Ah...
The mental sigh mimicked the deflation he felt, but Caden kept his face neutral. “Are you offering a date, kid? Or something else?”

“What?” Joel’s face flushed hard this time. “No, no, not that!”

Bingo
. Caden hid his grimace. “What can you offer?”

The kid nodded, eager. “Whatever you want, man. Whatever, you know? I’ll get it for you.”

Caden shook his head. “Too quick, Joel.”

“Huh?”

“You were too quick to offer the anything. No one’s that stocked.”

He grabbed the kid’s wrist. It was easy. Joel wasn’t expecting it and his reaction was slower than a turtle’s. Caden pushed the long sleeve up past the skinny elbow. Inflamed tracks were revealed. Caden hid the sick feeling it gave him. “How long?” he asked.

“Hey, man, what the hell—!”

Caden slid off the hood, still holding his wrist. With his other hand, he grabbed a good bunch of the kid’s shirt and pushed him up against the side of the car. He smiled to take the sting out of it. “I said, how long have you been mainlining?”

Joel’s face crumbled and his shoulders bowed. “A year. About. I think.”

“You’re into it pretty heavy, or you wouldn’t be trying to do an end run around your dealer.”

“Huh?” Joel blinked.

Caden rephrased the American football analogy for him. “You’re trying to pull one over your dealer. Cut yourself some profit without telling him you’re going into business for yourself. Anyone tell you that’s a quick way to get yourself dead?”

Joel’s eyes were wide, full of hurt and bewilderment. “But I just...I just...”

“You just don’t have any money for your next stash.”

Joel bowed his head. Muttered something.

“What?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Joel whispered.

Caden sighed. Aloud this time. “What’s a hit worth around here now?”

Joel’s head came up. Hope shone in his eyes. He quoted the price and Caden was startled. “Jesus Christ, they’re practically giving it away!” He shook the shirt he still had a grip on. “And you can’t afford even that much?”

Joel dropped his head again. “It’s not just me...”

Tiredness washed through Caden. The fatigue was an echo of the restlessness he’d thought he’d got rid of. It was the flip side, the bone-weary energy-sapping sensation that had been robbing him of sleep and peace of mind for far too long.

Dull anger touched him. “Why here? Why now?” he growled.

“Huh?” Joel looked up again, a wrinkle between his brows.

Caden let his head roll back. “
Goddamn it
!”

He let Joel’s shirt go and stepped back, massaging his fingers. Joel stared at Caden’s hands as he worked them, fear blossoming on his face and Caden realized the kid was bracing himself for a beating. Tiredly, Caden lifted his hands palm up and let them drop.

Time to climb back into the trenches again.

He studied Joel. “You’re not going to have the quantities I need, not if you’re working under the table. Tell me who you get your stuff from and I’ll give you some of my buy.”

“Free?” The flare of hope and excitement in his face was almost painful to watch.

“
Gratis
,” Caden agreed.

Wariness touched him. “How much of it?” he asked.

Caden grimaced. “It’s the blonde, right? I bet this was her idea.”

Again, the flush touched Joel’s cheeks. “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, man.”

“Yes, you do, but I’ll leave that one alone. Tell me your supplier, instead.”

Joel hesitated. Caden watched greed and Joel’s wounded ego battle it out on his face. Desperation won. “His name is Stewart.”

Caden was genuinely startled. “Stewart
Connie
?”

“I don’t know his surname. He hangs out at—”

“I know where to find him,” Caden growled. He grabbed his towel, walked around to the right side of the car and climbed in behind the wheel. The seat, even though it was fabric, was almost too hot to sit on.

Joel followed him around and ducked down to look at him as he rolled down the windows. “Where do I find you again? To get the stuff?”

Fury licked at him but Caden pushed it away. “I’ll find you.”

Joel gripped the window. “How do I know that, man? How do I know that you won’t snake me?”

It was a surfer’s term, but Caden understood it well enough. “You’ll just have to trust me.”

He peeled out of the parking lot, spitting gravel everywhere, careless of the paintwork it would chip. All his good feelings about the day and good old laid-back Yallingup and Margaret River had evaporated.

So much for the sign the dolphin had given him. Gut instinct. Shit. “Next time you want to follow your nose, Rawn, stay at home,” he muttered.

Well, at least he knew exactly where to find Stewart Connie. The man wasn’t bright enough to stay out of the business despite near-death encouragement, so he certainly wouldn’t be smart enough to change the way he did business.

Until
the moment when Greg hit the water from ten feet up, doing better than fifteen miles an hour, Montana had been gripped with alternating waves of silvery adrenaline-spiked pleasure and fear that loosened her gut and flooded her mouth with copper-tasting spit.

The moment she’d stood up on the board and turned the sail to pick up the breeze, she’d recognized that both the wind and the hidden strength of the surges creating these monster waves were greater than she had anticipated. By then it was too late. The only way to get out of it was to pick up a wave and sail back to the beach. Arriving in one piece was going to be optional.

She’d seen Greg crest a wave as he paddled out to the surfers’ customary line-up area and tried to be comforted that she wasn’t the only one out here today. Greg, though, was a hotheaded jerk that few people liked. A common opinion among such an odd assortment of easy-going surfers was unusual, but Greg attracted disgust like bait drew seagulls. That he was the only other person out here today didn’t reassure her at all.

She saw him push off, paddling hard to pick up the big seventh wave and her adrenaline spiked. She kept her board pointing upwind, cutting across the back of the waves well beyond the break, watching him.

He popped up on his board easily enough, riding down the wall with his feet planted safely about a third the way up his board and a solid shoulder-width apart. It was the scale that made her hold her breath. Greg was a big guy, over six feet and with heavy surfer’s muscles across the chest and shoulders. The wave building behind him dwarfed him. It peaked higher than his head and he wasn’t anywhere near the bottom of it.

That was all she saw before the back of the wave hid him. She kept watching, anyway, tracking the wave into the beach. Sooner or later the wave would subside, or Greg’s head would emerge where he’d dived beneath it and he’d start over-arming his way to where she was cruising back and forth, psyching herself into the run back to the beach.

But instead of Greg re-emerging on the back side of the wave, what she saw was much worse. She gripped the boom of her sail hard as she watched Greg’s board fly up into the air, trailing streams of water. Its back was broken and she saw a flicker of pure white as it flipped up. The polystyrene core of the board was exposed where the tough fiberglass shell had been cracked open. The
stringer thrust out from the insides, an exposed, splintered spine.

The board went up a long, long way before it started back down to the water, trailing not just water, but the leg rope, too.

The
unattached
leg rope. Something had broken the board and ripped the rope from Greg’s leg.

Montana barely processed the thought. She turned her board into the beach and leaned away from the sail, bringing it fully into the crosswind. She angled across the waves, her mind working with crystal clarity.

Where Greg’s board had turned its spectacular somersault was where most of the beginners met with disaster—where the reef turned the clean swells into a churning soup of surf and roiling sand.

Had Greg made a rookie mistake and wiped himself out on the reef? With the swell, the peculiar back surges and the cross wind, even the most experienced surfer could find themselves in trouble.

She kept a lookout in the troughs between waves, scanned the swells for his head. Then she saw him about fifty yards ahead, on the other side of the wave rolling ahead of her.

He was face down.

Fighting the strength of the cross wind, she edged the windsurfer closer. She glanced over her shoulder. The next big seventh was powering up behind her. Shit! She dug her back heel into the board, flipped the nose around to face the wave, turning the boom in her hands with barely a conscious thought about the balletic movement that had taken her weeks to perfect.

The move bought her very close to Greg. Close enough that she just had to lean down and snag the back of his spring suit. Like most habitual surfers, he’d hung a thick, waist-length cord from the zipper so that when he wanted to get out of the suit, he didn’t need a second person to pull the zipper down. Although it was more than warm enough to surf without a suit, a spring suit saved the surfers from some of the scrapes and cuts they could get if they wiped out over the reef and got worked over by the wave, deep down in the guts of it.

She shifted her grip on the boom, reached out with her left hand, snagged the cord and braced herself. Greg’s body weight was a sudden anchor. The back of her board bit deep into the water. She used the leverage to turn the nose the few extra degrees she needed to bring it facing squarely into the oncoming wave. She wound Greg’s suit cord around her fist with a quick rotation of her hand and looked up at the mass of water rushing at her. Five seconds left. Maybe.

She slid her right hand down the boom, bringing the sail back fully into the wind. The sail ballooned out with a snap of wet fabric and instantly the board surged beneath her feet. It moved sluggishly with Greg’s weight dragging it, but all she needed was power enough to push through the peak of the wave. The strength of the wind would help her now.