Brother, was J. D. Salinger ever full of shit.
Angel frowned as a mob of shouting eight-year-old boys rocketed past. Defiant, she refused to even wince when their churning bare feet pecked her with sand. She watched them tear along the crowded beach and yowl and smile goofy breathless grins when they trampled the sand castles that two quiet, serious-looking seven-year-old girls were constructing at the water’s edge.
See, it’s all right there. The rampant Y chromosome and testosterone.
Give me a break. No way boys could concentrate long enough to save anybody from running off a cliff. Much less find them in a field of rye. Look at them, tearing around. Probably, they’ll go off somewhere and light farts. Little fuckers.
Holden Caulfield, no, thank you.
Angel carefully picked grains of boy sand from her well-oiled arms, dusted off her towel, and then continued to rub SPF 40 sunscreen on her legs. She wore a broad sun hat, which left her face in shadow, and wide sunglasses. The tight wig was a bother in all this heat.
But necessary.
It was a sweltering late afternoon, the beach at Square Lake was packed with people, and Angel was far from invisible. No, today she had slipped free from her constraining sports bra and let out a little cleavage. Usually, she would wear a one-piece suit, but today was an exception. Today she was showing some skin.
Aubrey Jackson Scott spent his afternoons on this beach, and since the heat spell fell on them like hot dishwater she’d observed him here several times. Now she thought she had a plan that might work. So she’d bought the new suit.
He appeared to be omnivorous and might like a gal who was hanging out here and there. Angel got the impression that his appetites strayed all over the pasture and couldn’t be fenced in. He did kind of remind her of a goat.
And he was a borderline exhibitionist. Which was sad, purely on the basis of evaluating his body type. He’d clearly been in shape once and let himself go. About thirty pounds over the line. Aubrey wore the briefest of swimsuits, a European job a bit skimpier than a Speedo, which sometimes nearly disappeared in the dross of his belly, or skinnied up between the cheeks of his butt. Once in the last hour Angel had watched two teenage lifeguards put their heads together and consult in his direction, presumably about his appearance.
Angel could imagine their discourse: Well, he hasn’t done anything wrong yet. Right. That epitaph had graced a lot of tombstones.
So they let Aubrey jiggle his overweight gut and rear end around the beach. With a heavy gold chain around his neck, he had to be the greasiest man Angel had ever seen. His body hair was matted in streaks. The man actually oozed. He looked as if he’d acquired his deep-fried tan from a full immersion dip in a vat of boiling fat at McDonald’s.
Maybe he’d been discreet once, but he’d passed the point of control. Aubrey was definitely surplus population. Somebody had to come along with a pooper-scooper and remove him from the scene.
Letting it all hang out wasn’t his only problem. From a distance of twenty feet, Angel watched Aubrey remove tobacco from the tip of a non-filter cigarette, then tamp something in the cavity. He lit up, took a deep drag, and held it in. She could distinctly smell the thick oily marijuana in the heavy air. She shook her head. The guy looked as if he lived in a cannabis haze of sensation. Men, women, boys, girls. You name it. He’d probably tried it with his vacuum cleaner.
But she wasn’t capricious. She needed some proof that he belonged on the list. Angel took her work seriously; she was prepared to go pretty deep undercover to get her confirmation.
Aubrey kept a blocky digital Nikon camera in his gym bag. He’d whip it out and grab snaps when the opportunity presented itself. She watched his camera follow a six-year-old girl in a blue bikini as she walked into the lake.
He was close enough for Angel to hear the precise snap of the shutter.
Angel had been moving in on him for more than an hour. Unaware that she was getting closer, he trolled his watery brown eyes up and down the crowded beach. Looking for strays, maybe. Except he had not approached any children. Occasionally, he just took some pictures. Once he walked down the beach, past the roped-off swim area, and snapped a group of scuba divers when they came ashore for a break; then he talked to them and wrote something down.
Hmmm.