It was a short flight, fifty-two minutes. I took the window seat. We were forty miles from the coast when I saw dark clouds to the southeast, a squall line building. Over the intercom the pilot told us it was tropical storm Beryl, still a hundred forty miles from shore and about due east of Savannah, but headed toward the Carolina coast at twelve miles an hour with sustained winds of sixty-eight MPH. Second named storm of the season, and bigger than the first, Agnes, which had wimped out.
“Might get wet later tonight,” I said.
“Uh-huh.”
She’d lapsed back into moody silence, staring past me out the window. I left her to her thoughts. We started losing altitude, going into a low-power effortless glide, bleeding off air speed, flaps down a notch. We banked northward, easing down over cypress and tupelo swamps, tobacco fields, pine forests, salt marshes and tidal creeks, all of it so green it was enough to make a Nevadan’s eyes bleed. You get used to a world of grays and browns—low, tough vegetation that survives on seven inches of rainfall a year. If Beryl kept coming, this place might get seven inches an hour.
We passed right over Murrell’s Inlet, for many years the home of Mickey Spillane, a ragtag little backwater of homes and fishing boats. Then coastal forest, swampy inlets, more cypress, a few more fields, swampland, then we were racing over asphalt and concrete. The tires touched down at 7:25, local time.
Jeri checked reservations for our return flight while I located the car rental area, still wearing my wig. In spite of Beryl, the sun was bright, temperature in the low eighties, but a breeze was up, smelling of ocean. Jeri got a midnight-blue Mustang at Hertz, a poor man’s Porsche but with plenty of zip if you own a Tercel. Jeri drove. We exited the Jetport and circled around on a few loopy roads and finally ended up on Ocean Boulevard, headed north.
A wall of high-rise condos and hotels blocked much of the view of the Atlantic. Traffic was sluggish. We passed an amusement park with a wooden roller coaster, girls in bikinis on the sidewalks, kids on skateboards and rollerblades. You could smell the tropical greenery and salt in the air, catch whiffs of hot dogs, cotton candy, cocoa butter and coconut-scented suntan lotion.
We stopped at a light. Two teenage girls wearing maybe eight square inches of material between them crossed in front of our car, bobbling, showing off what nature had recently given them.
“Nice view?” Jeri asked me.
“Terrific, if you like bubble gum and low SAT scores.”
She smiled at that. “You ever been here before, Mort?”
I shook my head. “Nope. You?”
“Once. It’s been a while. I was sixteen. It’s bigger now than I remember, more built up.”
“Progress.”
“Like hell.”
The light changed. The Mustang shot ahead, then slowed at the tail end of a line of slow-moving cars, mostly driven by old folks in their eighties. We went about ten jerky blocks like that.
“This thing at…what’s it called? Furtado’s?” I said.
“Yeah. What about it?”
“I thought you said you do all the work yourself.”
“I do. But local access and resources are a big help. Keeps you from thumbing through phone books in hotel lobbies.”
I nodded. Fell silent again. Learning.
To the right, a gap opened up in the condos and I saw whitecaps on the ocean, a curved beach with lots of flesh still on it, lifeguard towers. To the west was an amusement park called the Pavilion, with a steel frame corkscrew roller coaster and several other wild rides. Farther north, a pier reached a thousand feet into the ocean. Overhead, a slow-moving single-engine plane trailed a banner that read: Crazy Zach’s - North Myrtle Beach.
“Where is this Furtado’s?” I asked.
“Thirty-sixth Avenue North.”
We were passing Tenth. This was going to take a while. I sat back and took in the town. Like Reno, it was experiencing growing pains. Another retirement Mecca, like West Palm Beach, Orlando, Tampa, Tucson. They crowd in until the place goes to hell and the murder rate doubles, then doubles again, then again. Those with the means to get out, do. They crowd in someplace else and repeat the cycle.
Furtado Investigations was in a squat cinder block building sandwiched between a locksmith on one side and a cut-rate appliance store on the other where everything in the place had to go! go! go!—at unbelievable, never-to-be-repeated prices.
Emilio Furtado was in his forties, dark-skinned, thirty pounds overweight, with shiny black brush-cut hair and ancient acne scars, green slacks, tassels on white shoes and half a dozen gold chains around his neck, half-hidden in a thick nest of chest hair. He smiled when he saw Jeri, still looking good in her pale silk shirt and plum pants. The smile faded when he got a second look at me.
“Rain’s comin’,” he said in unaccented English to her chest, where his eyes were glued at the time. He was evidently a breast man. “Got us a storm brewin’ out there. I hope you got somethin’ else to wear when it comes in.”
“We’ll manage,” Jeri said.
I took off the wig and rubbed my scalp. The thing was driving me nuts. Emilio stared at the wig, then at me, then he grinned. “Hey, you’re that guy from Reno, right? That heads guy—Angel.”
“Give that man a giant stuffed panda,” I said.
Jeri elbowed my ribs. Emilio looked at Jeri, back to me. “Hey, this about that? It is, ain’t it? Man, everybody’s talkin’ ’bout that.”
“Everybody but you,” Jeri said. “We weren’t here.”
Emilio’s grin widened. “Oh, yeah, sure. All I meant was, hey, this’s great.” His face changed subtly and
