Free Beachcomber by Karen Robards

a penlight in my pocket. Took Triple A, just like the transmitter. There was nobody in the car, the parking lot was dead, nothing happening anywhere. So I nipped into the men’s room by the pool because it was the only place nearby that had lights and privacy, and I changed the batteries. I was only in there for a minute, I swear, and I didn’t hear crap, but when I got back the car—was—gone.” His voice faltered at the end, probably in response to Luke’s expression.
    “Gone?” Luke was starting to feel like a frigging parrot, but the enormity of the screwup was such that there were no words to do it justice. He’d checked the briefcase on one of his trips inside Christy’s cottage. Catalogued and photographed its contents, from which he’d learned exactly nothing. The damned thing, which he’d expected to be full of money meant for Donnie Jr., was filled with old newspapers instead. Which meant, unless and until he was able to discern the significance of the newspapers, he still didn’t have a clue as to exactly what was going down here. The next step, of course, was to follow the briefcase, see who picked it up—he couldn’t get lucky enough to have it be Donnie Jr. himself—and where it went after that. Now they’d lost track of the briefcase.
    “Yeah, gone. Poof. Just like that. Empty parking space.”
    Luke searched for his center again, but came up empty. Tranquillity Central might be in there somewhere, but he wasn’t finding it. Or feeling it.
    “So what did you do?” he asked carefully.
    “First I thought— shit. Then I thought I better tell you. So I tried the transmitter again. Nada. The damned thing still didn’t work. Then I realized that our girlfriend was going to get home soon and you still didn’t know she was coming, so I started running down the beach—not the beach, exactly, but the path between the houses and the dunes—staying low because I didn’t want our girlfriend to see me. The whole time I kept trying to see if I couldn’t get the transmitter to work. Finally I smacked the damned thing and,boom, there it was, working. About that time our girlfriend started screaming and running up over the dunes. I sang out to you and hit the sand. She never even saw me.”
    Gary said that last part as if he expected congratulations. Luke fought off a vivid mental image of Ozzy Osbourne on stage biting off the head of a bat. Only Ozzy was wearing Luke’s face, and Gary was the bat.
    Abandoning the search for his center as a lost cause, Luke cast a cursory glance at the monitor—Christy was turning away from the counter, walking across the living room, switching on lamps—and let loose with a soft but heartfelt string of curses.
    “It wasn’t my fault!” Gary protested. “How did I know somebody was going to drive away in the car? The place was dead. There wasn’t a soul around. The ferries are closed for the night. Where could anybody go? What were the chances?”
    Luke swallowed several possible replies to focus on the big picture.
    “You get the license plate number?” Already heading out of the room, Luke threw the question back over his shoulder.
    “Yes, of course I got it.” Gary pressed a key on the computer and rattled off the number. “What do you think, I’m an idiot or something?”
    Clearly intended as a rhetorical question, that was probably best left unanswered, Luke decided.
    “So?”
    “The plate was reported stolen a month ago in Asheville.” Standing in the bedroom doorway now,Gary watched as Luke jerked open the door that led from the kitchen to the garage. “Where are you going?”
    “To look around, see if I can spot the car. Hell, this is an island. The ferries are closed for the night, like you said. Where could anybody go? You keep an eye on the monitor.”
    “Yeah, okay, but …”
    Whatever followed that “but,” Luke missed it. The door between the house and the garage was already closing behind him. He was driving a two-year-old Ford