Terror Stash Read Free Page A

common opinion among such an odd assortment of easy-going surfers was unusual, but Greg attracted disgust like bait drew seagulls. That he was the only other person out here today didn’t reassure her at all.
    She saw him push off, paddling hard to pick up the big seventh wave and her adrenaline spiked. She kept her board pointing upwind, cutting across the back of the waves well beyond the break, watching him.
    He popped up on his board easily enough, riding down the wall with his feet planted safely about a third the way up his board and a solid shoulder-width apart. It was the scale that made her hold her breath. Greg was a big guy, over six feet and with heavy surfer’s muscles across the chest and shoulders. The wave building behind him dwarfed him. It peaked higher than his head and he wasn’t anywhere near the bottom of it.
    That was all she saw before the back of the wave hid him. She kept watching, anyway, tracking the wave into the beach. Sooner or later the wave would subside, or Greg’s head would emerge where he’d dived beneath it and he’d start over-arming his way to where she was cruising back and forth, psyching herself into the run back to the beach.
    But instead of Greg re-emerging on the back side of the wave, what she saw was much worse. She gripped the boom of her sail hard as she watched Greg’s board fly up into the air, trailing streams of water. Its back was broken and she saw a flicker of pure white as it flipped up. The polystyrene core of the board was exposed where the tough fiberglass shell had been cracked open. The stringer thrust out from the insides, an exposed, splintered spine.
    The board went up a long, long way before it started back down to the water, trailing not just water, but the leg rope, too.
    The unattached leg rope. Something had broken the board and ripped the rope from Greg’s leg.
    Montana barely processed the thought. She turned her board into the beach and leaned away from the sail, bringing it fully into the crosswind. She angled across the waves, her mind working with crystal clarity.
    Where Greg’s board had turned its spectacular somersault was where most of the beginners met with disaster—where the reef turned the clean swells into a churning soup of surf and roiling sand.
    Had Greg made a rookie mistake and wiped himself out on the reef? With the swell, the peculiar back surges and the cross wind, even the most experienced surfer could find themselves in trouble.
    She kept a lookout in the troughs between waves, scanned the swells for his head. Then she saw him about fifty yards ahead, on the other side of the wave rolling ahead of her.
    He was face down.
    Fighting the strength of the cross wind, she edged the windsurfer closer. She glanced over her shoulder. The next big seventh was powering up behind her. Shit! She dug her back heel into the board, flipped the nose around to face the wave, turning the boom in her hands with barely a conscious thought about the balletic movement that had taken her weeks to perfect.
    The move bought her very close to Greg. Close enough that she just had to lean down and snag the back of his spring suit. Like most habitual surfers, he’d hung a thick, waist-length cord from the zipper so that when he wanted to get out of the suit, he didn’t need a second person to pull the zipper down. Although it was more than warm enough to surf without a suit, a spring suit saved the surfers from some of the scrapes and cuts they could get if they wiped out over the reef and got worked over by the wave, deep down in the guts of it.
    She shifted her grip on the boom, reached out with her left hand, snagged the cord and braced herself. Greg’s body weight was a sudden anchor. The back of her board bit deep into the water. She used the leverage to turn the nose the few extra degrees she needed to bring it facing squarely into the oncoming wave. She wound Greg’s suit cord around her fist with a quick rotation of her hand and looked up