Lance stood at the corner and looked down Sand Dollar Road. Lit up bright as it was, the diner stood on the corner like the welcome sign to Sugar Beach. The starting gate to the rest the town had to offer. Beyond it was a long stretch of other businesses: restaurants, motels, surf shops, and a large empty parking lot with a sign so large and so well lit, Lance could read it all the way from the corner—BEACH ACCESS - $10 ALL DAY PARKING.
There was music playing from somewhere down the street, loud and with a strong country twang. A sports bar, maybe. If Sugar Beach had a main strip, Lance was pretty sure he’d just found it.
The diner was perfectly named Sugar Beach Diner and advertised this in bright pink neon atop the roofline. The exterior was all big windows and dull aluminum, which reflected the pink from the sign and the glow from inside in a slightly disorienting sparkling effect. The parking lot was fuller than Lance had been expecting, given how empty the bus station had been, and as he stepped over the curb, he saw the car that’d honked at him parked crookedly along the front of the building. Through one of the big windows, Lance saw a group of four young women, no more than twenty, surely, huddled together in a booth on the right, laughing and flipping through the oversized menus.
He made a note to ask for a table on the left of the restaurant. He wasn’t in the mood to try and drown out highly energized high-pitched voices.
He just wanted coffee. The biggest they could legally give him.
Lance was almost to the door when something stopped him. A noise, somewhere to his left. Somebody had coughed. The sound was from deep down, one of those rattling coughs that brought to mind images of little pebbles shaking around in a burlap bag.
A shape took form in the darkness, lit only by the glow that reached it from the diner, and the ever-changing red, green and yellow of the stoplight above. On the opposite corner, across the street from the diner, somebody was huddled inside a sweatshirt, the hood pulled up and cinched around their face. They sat on the corner of the sidewalk atop what looked like a rolling suitcase, holding what could only be a sheet of cardboard or poster board with some words scrawled on it.
Another cough started and was drowned out in the sound of an approaching stream of cars as the light changed. Lance watched as the hooded figure stood from where they’d sat and held the sign up as cars began to stop at the opposite light that had just turned red.
Lance stood, rooted in place, watching as the figure walked tentatively toward the first car in line and held the sign out, then slowly walked past it and toward the rest of the waiting cars.
The light changed, and the cars moved on. Nobody had offered anything to the hooded figure, who walked back to the suitcase and sat once again, setting the cardboard sign at their feet and pulling their hands inside the sleeves of the sweatshirt.
Lance wore cargo shorts and his hoodie, and while the breeze had a little bite to it, he wasn’t cold. Rarely was, actually. But as he watched the figure on the corner attempt to pull themselves further inside their sweatshirt, he had to wonder just how long they’d been sitting there.
The diner’s door opened, and a man came out, talking loudly on a cell phone. Something about making sure the buyer had the money in escrow no later than Thursday. Lance caught a whiff of food from the open door and went inside, casting another glance over his shoulder toward the figure on the corner as he did.
* * *
Since the diner was moderately busy, and the staff was likely used to catering to a never-ending revolution of tourists, nobody really seemed to pay much attention to Lance, for which he was thankful. Since the night his mother had died, he felt as though he carried around a weight of paranoia and an ever-present need to look over his shoulder, check his blind spots, consider strangers suspect. Something about the steady hum of energy in the diner coupled with the aroma of food and, thank goodness, coffee allowed him a moment of reprieve. His concerns melted a bit, and when the waitress brought him the coffee he’d ordered, he took the first sip, bathed in the rush of pleasure it brought him, and leaned his head against the upholstered seatback and actually sighed.
He took another sip, swallowed, and smiled. Barb had been correct. The coffee kicked you in the teeth. In the best of ways.
He ordered chicken pot pie with a side salad and devoured the food as though it were a contest. His coffee was refilled twice, and when the waitress asked if he’d like dessert, he asked if they had pie.
They did. Five different kinds. Lance chose a slice of apple and a slice of chocolate mousse.
“One to go?” the waitress had asked.
“No, ma’am. Both for here, please,” Lance answered. And with the question came a thought. Lance looked out the window to his right, turned half around in his seat to look toward the stoplight. Through the glare on the window, he could just make out the hooded figure, still seated on the rolling suitcase. “But I’ll take two to-go cups of coffee, if you have them, please.”
The waitress nodded and headed off, returning with his order in record time.
Lance enjoyed the pie, though the chocolate mousse was a little too artificial-tasting for his liking, downed the rest of his coffee, and then scooped up his check and the two Styrofoam to-go cups and walked to the checkout counter near the entrance.
There was a short line of people waiting to pay, and Lance stood patiently, double-fisting coffee cups like he was about to pull an all-nighter cramming for exams. As he inched his way forward, one successful transaction at a time, he eyed a bulletin board on the wall behind the cash register. Various flyers were hung skewed and haphazardly, multicolored pushpins peppering the board and keeping them in place. There were flyers for timeshare rentals, boat rentals, charter fishing trips, beach yoga, and a coed volleyball team. Most of the flyers looked tired and out-of-date. Probably put up during the busy spring and summer months and now forgotten.
One in particular drew Lance’s attention. It was a solid white sheet of paper with a red heart that looked like it had been painted in watercolor. The advertising text below the image left no room for interpretation. It simply gave the phone number for a suicide prevention hotline.
It seemed incredibly out of place among all the other flyers advertising fun and adventurous activities. But, Lance thought, maybe that was the point. A statement being made.
He paid cash, left a nice tip for the waitress, and then used his shoulder to push through the door and back into the cool evening air.
The temperature seemed to have dropped almost ten degrees from earlier, and ordinarily Lance might have decided to pull his hood up to help keep his ears warm. But right now, two things kept that from happening. First, both his hands were full as he carried the two Styrofoam cups of coffee across the parking lot. Second, when he approached the figure huddled beneath the stoplight, he didn’t want to appear to be a threat. He wanted his face visible and his hands out in the open, coffee or not.
There was no crosswalk here, but there was also no traffic. The steady stream of cars that had crisscrossed the road earlier was all but gone. As Lance jogged across the black seam of road, he saw a single pair of headlights glowing in the distance, growing from the blackness that was the opposite end of Sand Dollar Road, away from all the motels and business and country music. There was nothing there that Lance could see. Nothing except the two glowing eyes of the car getting closer and closer as he walked the last twenty-five feet or so up the sidewalk and stopped beside the hooded figure.
The first thing Lance noticed was that the person wasn’t sitting on a rolling suitcase. It was actually a rolling cooler, something you might load up with a bag of ice and a few sodas for a family road trip, or a day at the ballfield … or a day at the beach.
The second thing Lance noticed was the wisps of long blond hair escaping the hoodie the figure had pulled up on their head, the red stoplight above highlighting them a deep shade of crimson.
At the sound of Lance’s approaching footsteps, the figure turned atop the cooler, took in his
presence and stood quickly, taking a fast step backward and dropping the cardboard sign at her feet.
The quickness of her movement had caused the hood of the sweatshirt to fall slightly, exposing one half of her head and face. She reached up and jerked the other half down, shook her hair free and eyed Lance like somebody who was used to a fight. Ready to react.
Her eyes were so blue they pierced the night. Burned straight through the red glow of the stoplight.
She might have been eighteen, or maybe twenty-five. It was impossible to tell. She looked youthful, but also aged, as if life had been unkind. Stolen some precious years. Her blond hair fell past her shoulders, naturally curling at the bottom.
She was beautiful. Strikingly so.
But there was something else.
Lance stood still, tried his best to smile despite the strong sense of sadness he felt pulsing off this girl. It struck him deep in the gut like a dull knife, and he had to work hard to clear his throat and say, “I brought you a coffee.”
No response from the girl.
Lance shrugged. “I just figured it was cold out here and you might like something warm. I, uh, well, I can just leave it here on your cooler, if you’d like.”
He took one half-step forward, never breaking eye contact as he bent at the knees and gently set one of the to-go cups atop the hard plastic lid of the cooler. When he stood, the headlights of the car that had been approaching from the dead side of Sand Dollar Road splashed across his face and then homed in on the girl in front of him as the vehicle braked and came to a slow stop.
The girl turned and saw the car, a solid black Ford Excursion that looked like somebody could live inside it and probably took a gallon of gas just to start up and back down the driveway.
The girl looked back to Lance, her gaze accompanied by a stab of fear—only not of him. It was almost as if the fear was for him.
“Thank you,” she said, with some sort of accent, heavy and thick, that took Lance by surprise. Something European, maybe? Her words were short and clipped and meant to dismiss, as if she were trying to move Lance along.
Something else about the situation had changed, and it took Lance a moment to recognize what was wrong. The red glow of the stoplight was no more, having shifted to a bright green that cast a limelike hue across the scene.
The light was green.
Lance didn’t drive often, but he’d retained enough knowledge from driver’s education to know that a green light meant go. The black Ford Excursion was not going. It continued to sit, dark-tinted windows making it impossible to tell if the driver was looking down at their phone, had suffered a heart attack, or was sitting and staring out the window, watching, waiting.
Everything suddenly felt very bad, and Lance decided he had seen enough. Or rather, it was as though Lance was being told he’d seen enough.
“You’re welcome,” he said to the girl.
He gave the driver’s-side window of the Ford one more glance, hoping to catch a glimpse of something, anything, and saw nothing but darkness.
Lance Brody jogged back across the street toward the diner’s parking lot, leaving the beautiful girl in the green glow of the traffic light and the heavy shadow of the SUV.
4
There was a small sidewalk that lined the front of the diner, and Lance stopped on the corner of it, kneeling down and pretending to search for something inside his backpack while keeping his eyes in the direction of the girl beneath the stoplight. The light had turned red again, and three cars drove past on the Highway 19, temporarily obscuring Lance’s view. When they’d passed, the girl had made her way back to the rolling cooler. She removed the to-go cup of coffee and set it on the sidewalk, then grabbed one of the cooler’s handles with one hand and scooped the cardboard sign from the sidewalk with the other.
As she started toward the Excursion, cooler in tow, the back hatch of the vehicle opened automatically, slowing rising up like a mouth about to swallow her. She bent and lifted the cooler from the ground, struggling against the weight of whatever was inside, balance wobbling briefly as she straightened and just managed to rest the cooler on the lip of the rear opening, sliding it inside and tossing the sign in after it. Then she reached up and pressed a button on the hatch and it began to close again, just as lazily as it had opened.
She walked around to the passenger side of the vehicle, out of sight. When the light turned green, the black Excursion drove through the intersection at a speed which felt very slow to Lance. Yep. They’re definitely checking me out.
Not one to shy away from a moment, Lance smiled and waved a farewell to the SUV as if it were driven by a longtime friend.
He had to assume the driver did not wave back. He didn’t even get a friendly toot of the horn.
Lance’s eyes followed the Excursion down Sand Dollar Road until it eventually turned off onto another street, the image of the girl’s face, those piercing eyes, refusing to leave his mind.
“She’s hot, right?”
Lance spun around at the sound of the voice, not realizing anybody had been nearby. Down the side of the diner, a utility door, presumably leading into the kitchen, was propped open with a plastic milk crate. Easy access to the dumpster and grease disposal bin that sat huddled in the corner of the rear lot. A young man leaned against the wall, one leg bent, foot against the aluminum siding. His head was resting back, looking up to the sky as he exhaled a puff of smoke while flicking the ash from the cigarette he pinched in his left hand. He wore jeans with black rubber nonslip shoes and a white t-shirt, with a black apron draped around his neck and cinched around the waist.
“What’s that?” Lance said, taking a step closer.
The man took another drag from his cigarette and then extinguished it on a small plastic ashtray atop the upturned milk crate. Exhaled the smoke and said, “The girl on the corner. She’s a hottie, right? Those eyes are something else.”
The man turned to look at Lance, and in the moonlight, Lance figured the guy was midtwenties at the most. Close to Lance’s own age.
“Who is she?” Lance asked, walking closer and leaning his shoulder against the side of the building, trying to look relaxed, trying to keep his words full of just the right amount of curiosity. Just a young guy asking about an attractive girl. Not a telepathic soldier of the Universe’s army who talked to the dead in his free time. Because there was no denying the sadness he’d felt when the girl had looked at him, or the fear that had permeated the air when the Excursion had pulled to a stop and waited.
The man shrugged. “No idea. I walked over and said hi once. Back when they first started popping up here and there. Manager wanted me to go ask if she wanted a free meal. But it was mostly just to see what they were up to. Anyway, she hardly said a word. She declined the meal and offered to sell me a cold beverage.”
Lance suddenly had many more questions. He started with the easiest: The mixing of pronouns the man had used. “You said ‘they’ just now. Who do you mean?”
“The girls.”
“Girls?”
“Yeah.”
“So there’s more than one?”
“Oh, right. Yeah, I don’t know how many exactly, but one day about … damn, I guess it’s been almost two years now, they were just here. Started showing up on intersections and camping out near some of the semi-busy touristy spots. All with their coolers, selling drinks and hardly saying a word to anyone.”
Lance thought about this for a moment. Then, though he hated saying it this way, having to sound like a sexually excited teenager, asked, “Do they all look like her? You know … hot?”
The man let out a rush of air, as though he were trying to calm himself down. Nodded. “Yeah, man. They’re all smoke shows. At least for around here. Especially in the off-season, like now, when the beaches and bars aren’t full of out-of-towners from the colleges that are close by.”
“And nobody knows where they came from or why they’re here?” Lance asked, feeling repetitive but finding th
e fact hard to believe.
The man shrugged, picked up the tiny ashtray and kicked the milk crate out of the way to head back inside. The sound of dishes clattering and grills sizzling intensified as he opened the door wider.
“I can’t say nobody knows,” he said. “And there’s certainly rumors. The most recent being that they’re actually Russian spies. But come on, man, this ain’t Hollywood. We just know they’re hot, and they’re all over the place with their coolers. Look, my break’s over.”
Lance nodded. “Yeah, sure.”
The man took a half-step inside, then stopped. Looked back to Lance and said, “Hey, none of my business really, but you look like you’re…” He trailed off, trying to find the right words. “I mean, if you’re looking for a job, I think we’re hiring part-time. Cook and dishwasher.”
Lance was about to ask what about his looks made it seem like he was in need of employment, but then remembered the sight of himself in the mirror at the bus station. He might as well have had DRIFTER written on his forehead. He needed a shower, and he needed to wash his clothes. He didn’t think he smelled bad, but deodorant and toothpaste could only get you so far.
Lance nodded again. “Thanks. I’ll think about it.”
The man shrugged, as if it made no difference to him at all. “Pay’s not great, and you go home smelling like you’re deep-fried, but hey, it’s better than killing yourself.”
He waved a goodbye at Lance and was all but through the door before Lance shot a hand out and grabbed the utility door before it could slam closed. In his mind, he replayed the scene in the bus station men’s room, with the janitor asking him if he was there to die. He remembered the hug from Barb and her reassurance that somebody loved him. He saw the watercolor heart on the flyer behind the diner’s cash register. And now this: It’s better than killing yourself.
“What do you mean by that?” Lance asked, and it must have been something in his eyes, something about his tone that suddenly set the man on the defensive.
The Lance Brody Series: Books 3 and 4 Page 3