Page 18 of No Safe Place

This damn New York investigator. What was he going to do about her? He looked up and then down, trying to think. He rubbed at the bridge of his nose.

Come on, come on, he urged himself. What is my play here?

Then he realized it.

He took out his phone and stepped outside onto the back deck.

It was his other phone, the SAT phone that reached out and touched someone through uplinks to satellites orbiting the Earth instead of regular cell sites. It was supposed to be more secure, but was it really? The satellites were so sophisticated they could orbit the Earth but couldn’t record conversations? He doubted it.

But that wasn’t his lookout, was it? Even he, the el presidente, as Ashley called him, had his own boss, his own orders.

He brought up the only number in the contacts. It was one he did not want to call. But he had no choice.

Some issues you could skirt. This was not one of them. Not anymore. This was getting out of hand.

“Time to call Frank,” he mumbled as he pressed the button.

17

Camp Hero Beach in Montauk Point State Park, one of the most easterly beaches on New York’s Long Island, was rarely crowded during the offseason.

In fact, it only had two cars in its parking lot when the 600-horsepower shiny black Cadillac CT5 grumbled into it at a little after 3 p.m.

Wheeling Cadillac’s answer to the muscle car into the lot’s farthest corner, Shaw put it in Park, buttoned off the ignition and pulled up the hood of his Carhartt sweatshirt as he got out of the car.

A lover of privacy, Shaw always liked to be where others weren’t, at the beach in the fall and winter, in the warmer months up in the hills.

Shaw’s level gaze pivoted left to right over the shiny black hood of his elegant muscle car. Then right to left.

He certainly had his reasons.

With his 6'6" height, short light brown neatly cut hair and a not unhandsome clean-shaven face, to a casual observer Shaw seemed like someone in charge of something, an airline pilot or a basketball coach or business executive perhaps.

But businessmen usually didn’t have badly reset broken noses. Or an almost avian, cold watchfulness in their restless eyes.

And although businessmen were sometimes lean, they weren’t as lean as Shaw. Nor did they have a jacked-up lift to their broadened out back and shoulders that spoke of the strength training and heavy bag smashing that had taken up multiple hours of Shaw’s every waking day since he’d been a fresh marine recruit more than twenty years before.

Now that he’d hit his forties, he worked out even harder than ever. He’d lost a step or two the last time he timed himself in the 100-yard dash. But he was definitely physically stronger and could hit harder than at any time in his life.

Not seeing anyone, Shaw finally walked across the gravel lot to the trail. By the ridge’s edge, down at the foot of the bluff toward the famous Montauk Point Lighthouse, the only other soul he spotted was a lady in a floppy hat walking on the beach with a small dog.

No wonder it was less crowded than usual, he thought as he headed east along the ridge. It was unseasonably cold today. Upper forties. Forecast even said there might be snow overnight.

Another two hundred feet up along the bluff, he came around a hedge and stopped before one of his favorite places in the world. In the slanted light, the secluded seaside pasture to his left was like a Renoir landscape, a pastel haze of blue and green with a slash of zinc white in the distance for the beach.

There really was something about the light out here in the Hamptons, he thought as he headed across the meadow. The light was so soft yet had a high-definition clearness brought about by all the water. It gave every vista an extra happy, extra vivid sense of mystery and promise. He’d read that it was the light that had attracted so many famous artists from New York City to stay here. Pollock, de Kooning, Warhol.

Shaw, too, had moved out here because of the light. Or was it the water? Because he was born and raised in flat landlocked Ohio or something? he wondered.

He wasn’t sure, but there was something about the endless Atlantic out there—all that water and sky and space—that flat out mesmerized him, pulled at something deep within him he couldn’t even begin to name.

He had a place several towns west, a cheap town house in Westhampton, a dump really. But one day he was going to pick up one of the twenty-million-dollar Montauk beach cottages nearby, one of the ones with private beach access and a heated pool where he’d just lie out all day, all week. Hell, he could stare out at all that incredible water forever.

Just a matter of time.

And money, of course.

He arrived at the end of the meadow. There was a stand of trees at the far edge and beyond it was a cleared section of tall grass where he stopped. He took a breath. Took it all in. Montauk in the fall. The smell of hay, the sound of birds, the soft rush of the surf. The Atlantic out there on the horizon like a dream of endless time.

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