Page 28 of The Perfect People

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The guy was fast.

Maybe it was the head start. Or maybe it was that he was barefoot, which was an advantage when running on sand. But for whatever reason, by the time Jessie left the cement walking path of the Strand and started chasing the scraggly guy onto the beach, he had a good fifty yards on her. Susannah, who wasn’t as long-legged as her and didn’t run five miles every morning like she did, was well behind.

It didn’t help that with so many people spread out on the Friday evening of Labor Day weekend, the beach was an obstacle course of humanity. She dodged rows of folks lying out, hoping to catch the last rays of the fading sun, as well as multiple umbrellas, along with picnic tables and chairs, and even a few sand castles.

The crowds didn’t thin out until they reached the wet, packed-in sand close to the water. With fewer people to worry about stepping on and a better grip on the firmer sand, she began to close the gap on the guy, who kept looking back, sensing he was in trouble.

After what she guessed was nearly half a mile of non-stop sprinting, pumping her legs relentlessly in the stultifying early evening heat, she could almost reach out and grab him. She was about to do just that, to try to tug at his shirttails and knock him off balance, when she saw him reach for something in the pocket of his board shorts. Realizing that she didn’t have time to go for a weapon of her own, she leapt at him, tackling him right as a wave crashed in to shore.

They landed just as the water came rushing in over them. Despite the heat in the air, the water was bracingly cold as it swallowed her up. She tried to hold her breath, but after running for several minutes without a break, she couldn’t help gasping for air and some water got in. She began to cough and gag. The wave briefly pushed them toward the beach before sucking them out into the deeper water.

Jessie did her best to scramble to her feet while attempting to regain her breath. Just as she felt the ocean’s surface below her toes and took her first uncluttered breath, another wave slammed into her, shooting her back toward the beach face first. This time the force was so strong that she landed on the sand, too far to be sucked back into the water. She pushed herself up onto all fours just as Susannah arrived.

“You good?” the detective asked.

Jessie nodded breathlessly.

“Good, because he’s not. I’m going in after him.”

Jessie turned her head and saw the scraggly guy flailing about desperately in water that looked to be about five feet deep.

“Be careful,” she wheezed. “He has something in his pocket.”

She pushed herself upright and stumbled over to the water, where Susannah was dragging the guy out. He looked panicked.

“I can’t swim!” he shouted.

“You don’t have to,” Susannah shouted at him, annoyed, “this water’s two feet deep. You already nailed me in the face once with all your thrashing about. If you do it again, I’m going to punch you back, got it?”

The guy stopped fighting her and she dropped him in the sand on his back.

“Roll over,” she ordered.

“Why?” he asked.

“So I can cuff you.”

“Why?”

“Just do what I tell you, man,” Susannah said. “You are not in a position to be asking me questions right now.”

The man rolled over and she cuffed him.

“You want to check his pocket, Jessie?” she asked.

Jessie kneeled down and carefully felt around, pulling out a piece of hard plastic. It was his driver’s license.

“Is this what you were going for when I was chasing you?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Why didn’t you stop running?” she demanded. “I thought it might be a weapon.”

“I was scared,” he said in a thick southern accent that she hadn’t picked up on before. “You were chasing me.”

“I was chasing you because you were running away after staring at us while we were conducting an investigation,” she said, looking at his license. “Do you care to explain yourself…Trey Killian of Nashville, Tennessee?”

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