Page 1 of One Cry Too Loud (Coastal Crime Unit #9)

M y heart was in my throat as I walked up to the front door.

That wasn’t unusual for me. In my line of work (in all the lines of work I’d had over the years, come to think of it), I lived with this sort of sensation.

A tight chest, a stomach on fire with nerves, and a pair of sweaty palms were just some of the symptoms of this lifelong truth.

The thing that made it different tonight, the thing that made it stand out from all the other nights when I felt like this, was that-right now, it wasn’t a bad thing.

In fact, it was absolutely the opposite.

Tonight, with the sun sinking into the ocean and a warm breeze blessing my face with its presence, I was happy to be this nervous.

I was happy because, as opposed to nights filled with car chases, drug dealers, and people pointing guns at me like I was a stationary target, tonight these nerves were the fault of a date.

Okay. So, I didn’t exactly call it a date when I asked her to come with me tonight.

I said, as I looked down at Kat’s bright eyes shining back up at me, that I wanted to take her for a drink.

She knew what that meant, though. It was there, in the smile that graced her lips as she accepted my offer.

It was in the kiss, light and soft, that she gave me a few seconds later, and it was in the crackling electricity that existed in every conversation we’d had from that moment to this one.

Something had changed between us, and we were finally putting action to that change.

I ran a hand through my hair as I reached Kat’s porch.

I shouldn’t have been this nervous. I shouldn’t have been worried about what she was going to think of me or if she was going to like me.

I knew Kat. I had known her since we were kids.

She was my first girlfriend, my first love.

She was my first everything. I knew she liked me.

I knew she was attracted to me. I knew all of this just as I knew the rest of her, like the back of my hand.

Still, my heart thumped hard against my ribcage, like someone was knocking at the door of my chest, begging to be let out.

So, why was that? I wasn’t some kid who needed to make a good first impression.

I didn’t need to charm some leggy girl in the hopes that she’d like me.

Kat was already charmed. I was already charmed right back.

Still, though, as I knocked lightly on the door and swallowed my nerves, I had to admit that something about this situation seemed to be bringing out the kid in me.

She opened the door almost immediately. She had a toothbrush in her mouth and a pair of slippers on, though other than that, she seemed to be completely dressed.

“You’re early,” she said through a mouthful of Colgate.

“I’m not,” I said, shaking my head.

“You’re definitely early,” she nodded. “Come inside. I’ll be ready in two minutes.”

“I’m not early. It’s seven thirty,” I said, walking into the house she inherited from her grandmother and closing the door behind me.

“Exactly. I told you eight o’clock,” she shot back. “Moving toward the bathroom.

“You did not. You told me seven thirty. You told me not to be late, and then you called me ‘Tiger’ for some reason,” I reminded her.

“I was trying something out. It didn’t work.” Kat shook her head. “But it doesn’t change the fact that I told you eight o’clock.”

“Check the texts,” I muttered.

“Oh, I will.” She grabbed her phone from the table and pulled the toothbrush out of her mouth. The gesture seemed to only so she could contort her lips into a cock ‘I told you so’ purse. She sighed as she reread the texts though, her purse falling away as she looked up at me.

“Read ‘em and weep,” I said, knowing what she’d just seen.

“You always have to be right don’t you?” She asked, huffing just a bit and only for dramatic effect.

“It’s a curse.” I shrugged. “You look great, by the way.”

“I look half finished, but thank you,” she said, turning away from me again and disappearing into the bathroom.

“If this is half finished, I can’t wait to see the completed product,” I replied, pacing around the living room.

“I told you, Two minutes,” she said.

I didn’t respond. I let her go back to the business of readying herself for our drink. Instead, I did what all detectives do when they enter a new room. I cased the joint.

I had been in this living room a lot. I had snuck into it and out of it more times than I cared to admit to when I was a teenager.

It wasn’t that Kat’s grandmother didn’t like me, but she had been a seventeen year old girl long enough to know seventeen year old boys had on their minds, and I guess she didn’t want one spending the night with her granddaughter.

Unfortunately for her, I was light on my feet when I wanted to be.

This place hadn’t changed much since those nights.

The furniture was still the same, the same wallpaper hung all around me, and the same shag carpet rose too high around my shoes.

There was something comforting about that, even if it told me that Kat either didn’t have the eye or urge to redecorate.

On the coffee table sat a number of envelopes. Instantly, my eye pulled away. This wasn’t an investigation. This was a date, more or less. I wasn’t about to go snooping around my date’s mail like I was trying to find clues for a murder victim.

Though I’d pulled my gaze away immediately, I still managed to see something. A name scribbled on the top part of an envelope. It was a name that struck me as familiar.

“You’ve been writing Danny?” I asked before I could stop myself. I stuffed my hands into my pockets quickly as though that action might cause the words to be pulled back out of the air. No such luck.

“Have you been reading my mail?” She asked playfully from the bathroom, instantly knowing how I got the information. She was a detective too, after all.

“Just the return address, and not on purpose,” I explained.

“It’s okay. I don’t mind. Do I detect a little jealousy in your voice?”

Danny was our old boss and Kat’s three time former fiance. To say they had a complicated past was to say the desert was hot. It vastly oversimplified the situation.

“I’m not the type who gets jealous,” I said honestly.

“Good, because I don’t like those types,” she said, emerging from the bathroom.

As I took her in, I saw that she looked roughly the same as she had when she vanished into the room.

The toothbrush was gone, of course, her slippers had been replaced with more appropriate shoes, and a light sheen shone on her face.

I assumed it was a touch of makeup, just enough to soften the edges and accentuate the vast physical blessings God had already bestowed upon her face.

I didn’t know too much about that stuff, though.

All I knew was that she looked amazing, and that was all I needed to know.

“You were wearing red the first night I picked you up from this house. I thought you were the prettiest thing I’d ever seen,” I said, looking her up and down. “Strange as it seems, I think you look even better in blue.”

“You remember that?” She asked, her hand instinctively touching her blue top.

“Hard to forget, not that I’d want to,” I said. “I was barely seventeen and shaking like a leaf, praying to God that you wouldn’t notice all the thin spots in the beard I was desperately trying to grow.”

“I did notice.” She smiled. “I still thought it suited you.”

“Would you have thought, back then, that we’d be here now?” I asked. “That’d we’d be about to-”

“About to what?” She asked, smiling a bit as she bit her lower lip. “What do you think we’re about to do here, Jackson? Why do you think I invited you in?”

“I think you invited me in because you wanted to come in,” I said. “And I think we’re about to go for a drink. Though, if you had another idea, I might be-”

My phone buzzed loudly, cutting into my words and putting a stop to them.

I wasn’t the texting type, not really. Everyone in my life knew that.

In fact, the only time my phone ever went off with a text was when I was needed for work.

And the vast majority of the time, that text came from the woman standing in front of my right now.

I narrowed my eyes and grabbed my phone.

“What is it?” Kat asked. “Is everything okay?”

“I’m not sure,” I answered, reading the words splayed across my screen. “It’s Vanpelt. He needs to see me.” I looked back up at Kat. “He says something has happened.”