Shockwave Read Online Free PDF Page B

softly. “I could hurt you right now. Very badly. Much worse than death, if I wanted. Two quick little pokes with this”—tapping the point of the Tanto lightly on his cheek—“and you’d never use your eyes again. But I’d never hurt a friend. I’d never
let
anyone hurt a friend, either.”
    He wasn’t my friend, but I wasn’t lying to him. Torture is stupid. All it achieves is pain and terror. If you want someone to talk, you have to put more incentive in front of him than just making the pain stop. The thought of a hidden protector somewhere out in the darkness he prowled was stronger than any fear I could have induced.
    He went silent again, but I could feel the calmness settle over his spirit.
    “Just tell me about that photo. All I want to know is what was happening just
before
you took it. You were there, so you know. You tell me and I’m gone. Just like last time. I kept that promise, didn’t I? And remember what I told you then: someday, you may be thankful you have a friend like me.”
    T he body had washed up way north of where we live. Not far from where a huge chunk of concrete pier torn loose by a monstrous tsunami in Japan had floated all the way across the Pacific.
    For a while, that pier had been a tourist attraction. Some just wanted to see it, so they could e-mail the sight to their friends, or post it on Facebook if they didn’t have any actual friends. Some brought metal detectors, “prospecting” for whatever valuables might also have made the journey. “Salvaging,” that’s how they’d describe their hobby. As if they were deep-sea divers taking risks, not scavengers looting a corpse.
    Finally, the government managed to chop the whole thing up and turn it into concrete granules that could be used for road fill. “Recycling”—that’s a magic word around here. I knewmore about recycling than any of them ever would, but it wasn’t knowledge I’d share.
    Oregon doesn’t have private beaches. You can pay millions of dollars for oceanfront property to sit out on your deck and watch the beautiful sunsets with nothing blocking your view, night after night. If you stayed there until after dark, you could listen to the sounds of eardrum-destroying “music” … and the accompaniment those lying on the sand a long way below you create when the meth kicks in. The next morning, you walk down your “private” staircase and self-righteously clean up the mess those disgusting people always leave behind. After all, you didn’t pay a fortune for a landscape of garbage.
    All along the beach, skull-and-crossbones signs were posted, warnings of what people call “sneaker waves.” You can’t see them coming—they reach out like the tentacles of a giant octopus and pull you under. You just vanish, as if you’d never really been there at all.
    That didn’t stop some drugged-out fools from sleeping under those signs. Or stop perfectly sober people from letting their dogs “run free.” Or not watching their kids close enough.
    Every time one of those waves took a child, the sand would be dotted with heartfelt “memorials,” artistically arrayed by anguished locals. It wouldn’t do to plant a row of tombstones blaming the grieving parents—the self-proclaimed liberals who populate the coast would tolerate just about any lifestyle, but “anti-tourist” conduct was strictly prohibited.
    Those same sneaker-wave tentacles are as capricious as they are deadly—they don’t just whip out and drag people under, they sometimes fling things back up on the beach, too.
    Like that body.
    As soon as I saw that photo, I knew the strange man I always thought of as a video ninja had been there, doing his work. The original ninjas were trained as spies, working in darkness centuries before artificial light existed. And that was him—partof the night—incessantly spying in service to the overlord who lived inside him.
    So I knew that the ninja had already been in place for hours when the ocean