Читать книгу Midnight Fantasy - Ann Major - Страница 7

Five years later…

Stay with me, Frenchy. I need you.

That’s as close as Tag had come to telling the best friend he’d ever had, he loved him.

But maybe Frenchy had known.

Tag had clasped him in his arms long after Frenchy’s eyes had gone as glassy as the still bay, long after his skin had grown as cool as his dead mother’s that awful morning when the alarm clock had kept ringing.

Stay with me, Frenchy.

He’d lashed the wheel of the shrimp boat to starboard with a nylon sheet…his makeshift autopilot…and headed home, cradling Frenchy’s limp, grizzled head in his lap.

Stay with me, Frenchy.

But Frenchy’s eyes had remained closed.

The deck had rolled under them.

It was midnight. The full moon shone through the twisted live oaks and tall grasses, casting eerie shadows across Frenchy’s tombstone. Tag was all alone in that small, picturesque, historical cemetery located on a mound of higher earth that overlooked Rockport’s moonwashed bay. Come morning, this time of year, the graves would be ablaze with wildflowers. Funny, how death could make you see the truth you didn’t want to see. Tag had been living so hard and fast for so long, he hadn’t admitted he’d loved the old bastard, till he’d held his friend’s limp body and begun to weep.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen! Damn your hide, Frenchy, for leaving me like everybody else…. But most of all I damn you for making me give a damn. It should be me who’s dead.”

They’d buried Frenchy beside his son, the son he’d lost right before Frenchy had saved Tag’s life.

Tag was glad the cemetery was deserted. He didn’t want anybody to see how profoundly Frenchy’s death had upset him.

Sunken black circles ringed Tag’s bloodshot eyes; his jaw was shadowed with several days of dark stubble. His stomach rumbled painfully from too much liquor and too little food.

The moon shone high in a cloudless, bright sky. The salt-laden sea air smelled of dry earth and newly mown grass. Frenchy’s favorite kind of night. The shrimp would be running. Not that Tag could bear the thought of shrimping under a full moon without Frenchy.

Tag’s big black bike was parked a little way from Frenchy’s tombstone under a live oak tree that had been sculpted by the southeasterly prevailing winds that blew off the gulf, cooling its protected bays and low-lying coastal prairies.

Tag was kneeling before the pink tombstone. Soft as a prayer, his deep voice whispered. “Haunt me, Frenchy. Damn you, haunt me. Stay with me.”

“You don’t need an old man past his prime. You need a woman, kids,” Frenchy had pointed out, in that maddening know-it-all way of his, a few nights ago.

“Strange advice coming from a man who’s failed at marriage four times.”

“Nothing like a pretty woman to make a man old enough to know better hope for the best. Life’s a circle, constantly repeating itself.”

God, I hope not.

“You’re young. But you’ll get old. You’ll die. Life’s short. You gotta fall in love, get married, spawn kids, repeat the circle.”

“There’s places in my circle I don’t want to revisit.”

“You’re not the tough guy you pretend. You’re the marrying kind.”

“Where’d you get a damn fool notion like that?”

“You’re either sulkin’ or ragin’ mad.”

“Which is why you think I’d make a delightful husband.”

“You don’t fit in here. Your heart’s not in bars or fights or gambling…or even in fishing. Or even in getting laid by those rich, wild girls who come to Shorty’s looking for a fast tumble in the back seat of their car with a tough guy like you.”

“What if I said I like what they do to me? And what if I said I can do without a heart, old man?”

“You’re a liar. You got a heart, a big one, whether you want it or not. It’s just busted all to pieces same as your pretty, sissy-boy face. Only the right woman can fix what ails you.”

“You’re getting mighty mushy, old man.”

“You think you can stay dead forever?”

The wind drifting through moss and honeysuckle brought the scent of the sea, reminding him of the long hours of brutal work on a shrimp boat. The work numbed him. The beauty of the sea and its wildlife comforted him, made this hellish exile in an alien world somehow more endurable. Just as those women and what they did to him in their cars gave him a taste of what he’d once had, so that he could endure this life. But always after the women left, he felt darker, as if everything that was good in him had been used up. Which was what he wanted. Maybe if they used him long enough, he wouldn’t feel anything.

Tag knelt in the soft earth and studied the snapshot of a younger Frenchy framed in cracked plastic in the center of the pink stone.

“You’re a coward to run from who you are and what you want, Tag Campbell—a coward, pure and simple.”

Tag had sprung out of his chair so fast, he’d knocked it over. “You lowdown, ignorant cuss! Every time you drink, your jaw pops like that loose shutter.”

Frenchy laughed. “What’s the point of wisdom, if I can’t pass it on to a blockhead like you? Life’s a circle….”

“Don’t start that circle garbage.”

Tag had slammed out of the beach house, taken the boat out, stayed gone the rest of the night on that glassy, moonlit sea. He hadn’t apologized when he saw Frenchy waiting for him on the dock.

Then Frenchy had collapsed on the boat a few hours later when they were setting their nets.

Guilt swamped Tag. He’d never thanked the old man for anything he’d done.

The wind roared up from the bay, murmuring in the oak trees, mocking Tag as his empty silver eyes studied the grave. It was difficult to imagine the hard-living, advice-giving meddler lying still and quiet, to imagine him inside that box, dead. Emotions built inside Tag—guilt, grief—but he bottled them, the way he always did when he wasn’t driving fast, fighting, chasing women, or drinking.

The dangerous-looking man who knelt at his friend’s grave bore little resemblance to the younger man whose life Frenchy had saved in a Louisiana swamp. That man had been elegantly handsome before the beating, his smooth features classically designed, the aquiline nose straight, his trusting silver eyes warm and friendly.

That man was dead. As dead as Frenchy.

The powerfully-built man beside the grave was burned dark from the sun. On the inside his heart had charred an even blacker shade. Fists had smashed and rearranged his once handsome features into a ruggedly-brutal composition. The broken nose had been flattened. There was a narrow, white ridge above one brow. Despite these changes, or perhaps because of them, an aura of violence clung to him. Maybe it was this reckless, outlaw attitude that made him so lethally attractive, at least to women of a certain class. Such women cared little about his inner wounds. They came on strong, wanting nothing from him except to use his body for quick, uncomplicated sex.

His guarded silver eyes beneath black arcing brows missed nothing, trusted no one. Especially not such women—women who made him burn, but left him feeling even colder and lonelier when they were done with him and drove off in their fancy cars to their big houses and safe men.

His muscles were heavy from hard, manual labor. He wore scuffed black cowboy boots, tight jeans, a worn white T-shirt, and a black leather jacket.

Frenchy.

Death triggered deep, primal needs.

Death. Violence. Sex. Somehow they went together.

Alone with his demons, without Frenchy to irritate and distract him, Tag needed a bar fight or a woman—bad. So bad, he almost wished he’d gone to the funeral and wrestled some shrimper for a topless waitress. So bad, he almost wished he was in jail nursing a hellish hangover with the rest of Frenchy’s wild bunch.

Instead he’d driven his motorcycle—too fast and over such rough roads, he’d almost rolled. He’d scared himself. Which was a sign that cold as he was in his lonely life, he wasn’t ready to end it. When he’d calmed down, he’d come to the cemetery to pay his last respects.

The silvery night was warm and lovely.

Perfect kind of weather to hang out in a cemetery perfumed by wild flowers and glistening with moonlight.

If you could stand cemeteries.

Which Tag couldn’t. Any more than he could stand funerals. Especially the funeral of his best friend. Not when his own mood was as brittle and hopeless as the morning his mother had died, as the afternoon his father had slammed the door in his face.

Frenchy’s funeral had been a blowout brawl at Shorty’s. The cocktail waitresses, even Mabel, had danced topless on the pool tables. Some of the shrimpers had found their dance inspiring, and since there weren’t ever enough women to go around in Shorty’s, the “funeral” had gotten so wild, two of Frenchy’s ex-wives had called the cops who hauled the shrimpers and barmaids to jail.

It had been just the sort of uproar that gave shrimpers and the industry a bad name.

Then Frenchy’s will had been read. Everybody really got mad when they found out that, fool that he was, Frenchy had left that black dog, Tag Campbell, everything.

Everything. Boats. Restaurant. Fishhouses. Wharves. Even the beach house which was practically an historic landmark. Everything.

Campbell.

That snobby bastard! He didn’t even like to fish! Still, he was the best fisherman any of them had ever seen. Just as he was way too popular with their women even though he secretly despised them. The bastard preferred books to beer even though he could drink any one of them under the table. Tag Campbell was too proud and high-and-mighty to hang out with the likes of them at Shorty’s. How in the hell had he outsmarted them all—even Frenchy?

Everything was his.

There was lots of angry muttering.

“It isn’t right! Frenchy dead on that boat with just that lying Tag Campbell to tell the tale.”

“If you ask me, the bastard killed him.”

“You heard the coroner. Autopsy report says massive coronary. Says Frenchy smoked and drank too much. Says it’s a miracle Frenchy lived as long as he did.”

“I say it was murder. Frenchy was fit as a fiddle. Why just two nights ago he was drunker than a skunk dancing on that table with Mabel.”

Rusty and Hank, two of the rougher prisoners, deckhands Tag had fired for laziness and pure meanness, vowed that as soon as they got loose, they’d see their friend, Frenchy, avenged.

Frenchy had a lot more money than the shrimpers suspected. The sheriff paid Tag a visit just to tell him he’d be smart to leave town, at least till Rusty and Hank cooled off.

At the sight of the sheriff’s car in his drive and Trousers, his Border collie, slinking off to the woods, Tag grimaced. No wonder Trousers was scared. The big man cut an impressive figure in his uniform and silvered sunglasses. He had heavy features, squared-off shoulders, and a big black gun hanging from his thick belt.

Tag had dealt with more than his share of armed bullies in uniforms. The law, they called themselves.

Self-righteous bullies, strutting around in their shiny boots like they owned the world. They’d boarded his boats, slashed his nets, kicked his ice chests over and swept his catch overboard, fined his captains. No sooner had Sheriff Jeffries slammed his meaty fist against his screen door and bellowed Tag’s name, than sweat started trickling under his collar. A lot of his cats scurried under the house or after the cowardly Trousers. Others hunkered low behind pot plants to watch the suspicious character stomping down their breezeway.

“I just let Rusty and Hank out. They’re calling you a murderer.”

You half-wild, no-good bastard.

His own father had wrongly accused him of embezzlement and grand larceny. Anger burned in Tag’s throat, but he smiled as if he didn’t give a damn and saluted the man with a whiskey bottle. “You got a warrant—”

“Sometimes, Campbell, the smart thing is to walk away.”

Tag stared at his own reflection in the silver glasses and then pushed the door wider. “I ain’t runnin’.”

The sheriff planted himself on his thick legs and then leaned against the doorway.

“Jeffries, those guys talk big when they’re safe in jail, but they’re like dogs barking from inside a fence. You let ’em out, and they’ll lick my hand like puppies.”

“Just a friendly warning, Campbell.”

“Thanks, amigo.”

Still, Tag had opened a drawer, loaded his automatic and stuffed it in the waistband of his jeans before setting out on his bike alone.

Numbly Tag studied his friend’s tombstone. Frenchy had been mighty proud of the pink stone. He’d chosen it himself on a lark five years earlier right after he’d brought Tag home. Frenchy was known for cheating at cards, and had won the plot off one of Rockport’s most respectable citizens in a drunken poker game at Shorty’s.

“You cheated him,” the man’s indignant wife had ranted, and the whole town, at least the women, had believed her. “You got him drunk, so you could cheat him.”

Now Frenchy was as ashamed of his lack of talent at cards which made cheating a necessity as he was proud of his drinking skills. He might have gallantly returned the plot had she not accused him of cheating.

“We wuz drinking his whiskey, I’ll have you know, and I was even drunker than he was, lady,” Frenchy had declared almost proudly. “Could be he cheated me.”

The lady sued, but the judge, a poker player, had sided with Frenchy.

Tag studied Frenchy’s name and the date of his birth and the single line etched in caps on the bottom of the stone—IT WAS FUN WHILE IT LASTED.

Slowly Tag lowered his gaze. Instead of flowers, a mountain of beer cans and baseball caps were piled high on the mound of clods. Indeed, every baseball cap that had been nailed to the ceiling of Shorty’s had been enthusiastically ripped off and reverently placed on his grave.

Tag’s eyes stung. Frenchy would’ve been mighty proud.

Grief tore a hole in Tag’s wide chest as he slowly rose and stalked over to his bike. He pulled on his black leather jacket, zipped it. Next came his gloves, his black helmet. Straddling the big black monster, jumping down hard, revving the engine, he made enough noise to wake the dead.

But then maybe that was his intention.

Not that it did any good.

Frenchy wasn’t coming back.

Tag roared to the gate, skidding to a stop in a pool of brilliant gold that spilled over him from the streetlight.

He turned and looked back at the cemetery.

Stay with me, Frenchy.

Suddenly, time as Tag knew it did a tailspin. Or maybe the world just turned topsy-turvy. Whatever. The moon got bigger. Then it flattened itself into the shape of a huge pink egg in that inky sky. Stars popped like fireworks. For a second or two Tag felt there really might be a mastermind up there.

Tag got all warm and tingly inside. The wind sped up and the silvery night pulsed bluish-pink. A couple of beer cans came loose from the grave and started to roll straight toward Tag.

He shut his eyes, but the same pulsating, vivid rosy-blue fog swirled behind his eyelids, too. He blinked. Open or shut, the otherworldly, blue-pink radiance pulsed.

After a while, somebody, maybe Frenchy, switched off the pink light, and the moon settled down. The streetlamp came back on, gold and bright as ever. The night beyond was silvery dark. The can didn’t stop rolling till it hit the toe of Tag’s boot. He picked it up, noticed it was Frenchy’s favorite brand. Tag flattened the can, stuffed it in his back pocket.

What the hell had that been about? Had the streetlight malfunctioned? Or was it just him?

As he stared at the moon he felt different somehow, not so tight and morose. The hole in his chest seemed to have closed. And the night, like his future, beckoned with amazing possibilities.

Had Frenchy done this? Had he actually haunted him? Had he given him this strange sensation of peace? Of new opportunities?

Hell no. The grief and the booze he’d drunk earlier, coupled with not eating, was getting to him. He was hallucinating.

He’d better make it a short night, grab a burger and go to bed. Warily, he looked both ways before pulling out.

Two cars zoomed recklessly toward him from his right. Kids, playing chase. Where the hell was Jeffries when there was real work for a big bully with a gun to do?

Impatiently, Tag waited for the juvenile delinquents to pass.

When he caught that first glimpse of long blond hair, the back of his neck began to tingle. She was a rich tart on the prowl for a cheap thrill.

Happy to oblige, pretty lady.

Then she came into clearer focus the way a terrified deer does in your headlight.

He didn’t notice the make of her late-model, flashy red sports car. He was too busy noticing her. She looked nervous and scared.

He felt her—deep inside. She touched a raw place he hadn’t known was still alive. She made him ache and hurt and crave things he’d thought he’d given up for good. What would it be like to have a woman like her waiting at the door with a smile every night when he came home?

In the space of a microsecond he memorized that pale pampered face; those classy, even features she’d painted with way too much makeup, probably to make herself look older and more sophisticated. Pert, shapely breasts spilled above a low-cut white bodice. The style was overly sophisticated for her, too.

He caught a glimpse of something sparkly around her throat. Diamonds? Rich, too?

He knew her type. She was the kind of woman who wanted her real man to be a money machine but found “nice” men too tame in bed. So, she came looking for a guy like him at Shorty’s. He’d gone with plenty to motels. Some preferred backseats of cars, but once they got their kicks, they rearranged their skirts and drove off. They never asked his name, and he always felt depressed and cheapened, less than nothing when they were done with him.

Other men envied him his popularity. What the hell was the matter with him? What did he want really?

He couldn’t tear his gaze from this one. With her long blond hair streaming behind her, she looked like an angel riding the wind.

He willed her to look at him, to really see him.

Suddenly she tossed her head toward him. Her eyes grew huge the instant she saw him—as if she were equally fascinated and yet scared, too. Again, he thought her different than the others. He had the strangest feeling that if he stared into her eyes long enough, he would rediscover his own soul—which was a crazy feeling, if ever there was one.

Something dangerous and fatal connected them. Unwanted longings and painful needs bubbled too near the surface. His pulse raced out of control.

How could he feel so much in the space of a few heartbeats? She was a baby, younger than her voluptuous body, while he was far older than his years.

“Do you hold yourself as cheap underneath as all the others, baby?” he growled.

The minx flirtily tooted her horn and sped up. As if she wasn’t already driving fast, way too fast.

Her little car careened onto the shoulder, pinging his bike and long, denim-clad legs with gravel, but she regained control. The beat-up sedan behind her raced past Tag in hot pursuit. Gravel sprayed his boots and his bike like bullets. Only he didn’t get any hormonal bang from these punks.

Damn. He knew that junk heap. Rusty and Hank. Not kids. Two mean guys who were mad at the world in general and out for vengeance against him tonight. What if they took it out on her?

He’d lied to Jeffries. Those guys were bad news. As bad as the thugs who’d almost killed him in the swamp. After he’d fired them, they’d sprayed paint all over the cars in the parking lot out back of Frenchy’s restaurant. Painted the outer walls of the kitchen in purple graffiti.

Correction. His restaurant now.

He had a score to settle. A damsel as a trophy only upped the stakes.

Tag whipped his big bike onto the asphalt road, gunned it.

The cars raced north at double the speed limit, flying over the lighted bridge, veering left on screaming tires, onto Fulton Beach Road. The moonlit bay glittered to the east of them. The mansions on pilings that lined the canals loomed tall and dark to the west.

The quaint road along the beach, with its cottages, historic Fulton Mansion and motels, narrowed, roughened, but the girl and her pursuers kept driving like maniacs. Just as she got to the wharves and warehouses that lined the waterfront near his own restaurant, a black shadow raced from the water side into the road.

Her brake lights flashed.

Adrenaline pumped through Tag’s veins.

Had she hit whatever it was…killed it—

Animals touched a soft spot, especially strays. He had a collection of mongrel dogs and cats that lived out back in the woods behind his house.

Her car spun off to the right, bounced over something on the shoulder, and rolled to a crooked stop in front of the alley that ran between two abandoned fish houses. A long shadowy tail disappeared into the tall reedy grasses of the marshy wetlands on the other side of the road.

The junk heap came to a stop right behind her car, ramming her.

The woman in skintight white stumbled out of her sports car.

Rusty and Hank fell on top of her.

Party time.

Tag ripped his bike off road, stopping so fast, he nearly rolled. His right boot hit white shell, and he skidded in a geyser of white dust.

Party time.

Not their party.

His.

He’d been spoiling for a fight…and a woman.

Looks like he had his own personal wish fairy looking out for him up there in heaven.

Frenchy?

Stay with me, Frenchy.

A girl’s terrified scream went through Tag like a knife. He was off his bike—running.