Fantasy Life Read Free Page B

his radio and pressed the talk button. “Athena, where’s Hamilton?”
    Athena Buckingham had been the North County dispatcher for the Seavy County sheriff’s office ever since Gabriel was a boy. She was efficient and tough, and someone who still put the fear of God into Gabriel, even though he was, technically, her boss.
    “He left the moment I contacted him.” Athena’s voice, operatic in person, seemed tailored for the radio. “He should be there at any moment.”
    Depending on traffic and accidents along the way. Getting from one part of Seavy County to another in the summer was a nightmare, which was why the sheriff’s office had finally split into three districts.
    Only one road, Highway 101, ran all the way down the Oregon Coast. In Seavy County, particularly in the northern part, the highway was often the only north-south road for miles. The Coastal Mountain Range was wider here, placing tall mountains on the east side of the highway. With the ocean on the left, there wasn’t a lot of room for roads, houses, or anything else.
    And the traffic in the summer got worse every year. July was peak tourist season and roads that were built for hundredsof cars had to cope with thousands. Usually if Gabriel saw a body, it was on the highway, inside a demolished car that had tried to pass in a no-passing zone. If he had a dollar for every one of those accidents he had seen in the seven years he had served as North Seavy County’s sheriff, he would be able to retire already.
    Gabriel said, “Tell him to get his butt here as fast as he can. He’s going to like this one.”
    “He’s going to like this one?” Athena repeated. “What does that mean?”
    Gabriel let go of the radio and reattached it to his belt. He knew better than to answer that question on the public bands. But he also knew that Athena would repeat his words to the coroner, Hamilton Denne.
    And Denne, who had a great scientific and historical interest in what he had once dubbed the fantasylife of Seavy County, would love this one. He would find out everything he possibly could about this creature, and then some.
    Gabriel thought he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He looked over at the tourists. At least two families waited by the black rocks, as well as a single man standing off to the side. Two women wearing wet suits and holding their surfboards watched as if they were waiting for the right wave.
    Gabriel studied the tourists out of reflex. If this were a dead human body before him, he would be thinking about suspects. Seavy County had at most two or three murders a year, but there were a lot of accidental deaths. And in accidental deaths, especially ones around the ocean, murder always had to be ruled out.
    The family on the left had the same avid look on their faces as the surfers did. The children, a boy and a girl both nearing puberty, were beginning to lose interest. They were casting longing gazes at the ocean.
    But the parents seemed riveted. Gabriel would guess thatthey were Southern Californians just by their clothing. The shirts were tasteful, although short-sleeved, and their shorts were khaki, but completely inappropriate. Even though the sun was out, making the sky a brilliant blue, the temperature down here hadn’t gone higher than sixty-five. In areas the wind could reach, the temperature went down at least ten degrees.
    No wonder the children wanted to move. They were probably cold.
    The wind didn’t get to this part of the beach because of the cliff that the tourists were leaning against. The cliff, which extended for at least two miles, curved against the beach, forming a natural barrier to anything that came from the south.
    The cliff was black and large. On the tip, the cliff rose even farther up, forming a shape that people had once compared to a goblet, giving the entire southern tip of Anchor Bay its name—the Devil’s Goblet.
    A friend of Gabriel’s often joked that the Devil used to live on the Oregon Coast,