Dead Ringer by Ken Douglas Page B

words the instant the thought came to his head. “Think you can get to that store and get the van back before she does?”
    “ Really?”
    He handed Virgil the keys. “Go.”
    “ I’m gone.” Virgil took off at a dead run.
     
    * * *
    Maggie took quick breaths. The sand, starting to cool now, sluiced between her toes as she found her rhythm. She was a runner. Throughout the course of the afternoon she’d had five or six drinks. Not that much considering she’d eaten, but too much for her. She’d always been a lightweight, a cheap date.
    The water lapping against the beach seemed to be calling her name and she turned toward it. She ran at the very edge of the surf, feet splashing through the water as it rolled up onto the beach. Cold water, cool breeze, gentle waves, almost paradise.
    She passed the enclosed Olympic pool on her right and was closing on the Belmont Pier when she stopped to catch her breath and do a few stretching exercises. Here, with the pool complex blocking off the cars on Ocean Avenue on one side and the Pacific on the other, she could imagine she was alone on a Caribbean island, but a horn honk in the distance reminded her she was pretending. She sighed. She couldn’t escape the city any more than she could escape her own depression.
    “ Damn him,” she muttered. “He’s with that redhead.” She bent down, legs straight, grabbed onto her toes. She held the position, the back of her legs burning. “How could he?” She bent lower, feeling the burn. She straightened up, sucked in a deep breath. All of a sudden, she was angry. Mad at Nick. And he hadn’t done anything. Not really. She was the one who’d strayed. The one who got pregnant. No good blaming him. But where was he? Where had he been tonight?
    She bent to the ground again, finished her stretches. She saw two lights far out at sea, green and white, a sailboat on a starboard tack. It had been four years since she’d been on a sailboat, the last time she’d seen her father alive. They’d let her mother’s ashes fly in the wind. Two days later he was dead by his own hand. He just couldn’t live without her.
    “ Oh, Dad, we could’ve worked through it.”
    She’d been too depressed to spread his ashes. Instead she left the job to his brothers. She was depressed now, like she’d been then and it was taking her down. She raised her eyes to the stars. “Oh, God, I want to keep this baby.”
    But she knew she couldn’t and it made her heart ache.
    She sighed.
    Metal against metal clanged up ahead. A city truck was parked at the end of the pier. They were locking the gate, keeping the Belmont Pier safe from the homeless who might spend the night out there. She used to fish the pier with her dad till all hours of the night when she was in high school. Now no children fished with their fathers at night. The pier was locked off. The fish, like the pier, safe till morning.
    She sucked in a lungful of air, one more deep bend, knees straight. She dug her palms into the sand. Her legs screamed. She exhaled and eased out of the bend. A chill rippled through her, she felt herself being watched, she stood still, an elk exposed, looking for the wolf. Slowly, she moved her eyes around the night, then bit back a gasp as something moved under the pier. There was someone there. She’d been right, somebody was watching her.
    She grabbed another quick breath, then sprinted back the way she’d come, legs pumping, determined to run till exhaustion pushed all thought from her mind.
     
    * * *
    Ripples curdled up Horace’s spine as he stood on the beach and watched the woman run toward the pier. Something sinister churned his stomach. To do a woman whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time, it seemed a sin, evil.
    But she’d seen his face and maybe Striker’s too, certainly his car. That’s what really worried the man and there was nothing Horace could do about that. Striker called the tune, paid the bills. Horace held a