Steve Martini: Double Tap

Mist off the ocean was already beginning to drift over the pavement as he cruised along the beach in the rented Chevy. The house stood out like a gem, the last piece of private real estate before the public steps leading down to the beach. With chocolate-brown siding and white trim, the house sported rustic gables going in every direction beneath a river rock chimney.

He kept driving as he looked back in the mirror and caught a glimpse of the sandstone shelf behind the houses and the narrow beach now partially covered by the tide. White-frothed waves rolled up on the sand. In a few hours the incoming tide would devour what was left of the beach and waves would crash on the sandstone, sending spray onto the seawall that protected the estate’s rear patio.

The neighborhood was dominated by modern, upscale apartment buildings and small, stylish condos overlooking the Pacific. Oceanfront property was becoming far too valuable for private homes. The only single-family dwellings with ocean access appeared to be the two large homes at the end of the street just adjacent to the small public beach.

He was already familiar with the neighborhood, the daily routine, people walking their dogs, and surfers on the beach.

The house itself was larger than it looked. Set back from the street behind a set of double iron gates, the scale was made to appear diminutive by the use of small shingle siding and undersized dormered gables on the street façade. What looked like a story and a half in front became a full two stories on the ocean side. There, large windows on the second story maximized the ocean views. Beneath these, about thirty to forty feet back, was the stone-and-concrete seawall with two arched wooden doors leading up to an elevated patio overlooking the blue Pacific.

The house had a security system, but it was never used unless the occupant was leaving town for an extended period.

He rounded the block for the second time and checked for signs that might restrict parking. He saw none. The last thing he needed was a parking ticket that would document his presence in the neighborhood. Cops would check for this: an indication of any strange cars parked in the neighborhood. Once they had the license number, they would trace the vehicle to the rental agency and from there they would find his name. It was why he didn’t use his own car. The plates made it too recognizable.

He parked two blocks to the north, grabbed a light canvas jacket off the backseat, locked the car, and walked back toward the house on the beach. He stopped on the sidewalk near the steps as if to admire the ocean view while he slipped the jacket on and rolled the high collar up to cover his neck and the side of his face.

Below he could see the cove and the small public beach. From this angle he had a clear view to the south along the sandstone shelf behind the houses. It was deserted for as far as he could see. He had checked for security cameras. It was a risk. Some of the new models were the size of a thimble, hard to see unless you knew where to look, and wireless, so that there was little or no installation. A security company could show up and stuff one in a crevice between two boards in the side of the house and you’d never know it. There was one over the front porch, but nothing at the back of the house that he knew about. His eyes scanned for telephone poles one last time. The utilities along the waterfront appeared to be buried underground. There were occasional light standards every few hundred feet, but these contained only the ubiquitous vapor lamps for street lighting. If La Jolla had installed police security cameras, he was confident they had confined it to the downtown area and had skipped this neighborhood.

He walked partway down the stairs toward the beach, then stepped over the low concrete curb that separated them from the sandstone shelf. He strolled out onto the rocks. The breeze off the ocean buffeted his light jacket. But the collar wasn’t turned up for the wind. He used it to shield his profile from the wandering gaze of neighbors who might pass by a window at the wrong moment, or the prying eyes of some self-appointed general of the neighborhood watch, some old fart with nothing better to do than bend his venetian blinds every time a car door slammed in the street.

As he stood there surveying the back of the house, he heard the click of hard heels on concrete coming toward him. Out of the corner of one eye he glimpsed an old gent in white boating slacks and a blue blazer. He thought he saw a straw hat and a walking cane, but he couldn’t be sure. Whoever it was was ambling at a good clip along the sidewalk slightly above him.

The man in the canvas jacket didn’t turn or look up. Years of experience told him to avoid eye contact. Human sensory perception is less likely to register anything in the brain’s memory cells if what a person sees is inanimate. People who stay still become just another motionless object, like a rock or a bush out of bloom, something the untrained mind fails to record. He’d done enough recon and surveillance and walked into enough dangerous places to know this. Only another professional would notice anything about him, and remember it.

A lone motionless figure, he stood facing the ocean with his back to the sidewalk until the sound of the footsteps was well past. Then he took a quick glimpse to his left and watched as the old man continued on up the street and finally disappeared from view around a curve.

He took a deep breath, then let it out. If the man had stopped and asked for the time, or even if he had only come down the steps and stopped for a moment to glance at him on his way to the beach, it would have been over. He couldn’t take the chance. He would have had to leave, back to square one, two weeks of careful planning down the drain. He couldn’t be sure how much time he had before she would act. She was busy, a million projects at the office. She might get distracted. Then again, she might pull it from a pile on her desk tomorrow and go to work on it. He had set certain parameters of safety before he even started. It was why so many people got nailed. They were careless.

His heart pounded as he watched the ocean. A half dozen surfers sat astride their boards two hundred yards out, riding over the crests of approaching waves and into the trailing troughs. He was confident that they were too far away to make out human features or to identify a lone figure walking on the rocks behind the houses. The beach was not popular with swimmers. The water was too rough. The waves on an incoming tide would grind a swimmer against the solid sandstone that formed sharp ledges along the shore.

The late-afternoon light had reached that visual netherworld between shadows and vapor. Soon the streetlights would flicker on. He strolled over the rocks, at one point leaping across a craggy divide where foaming surf washed seaweed into a swale on the beach below. He strolled along the uneven surface, hands in his pants pockets, until he reached a point over the water where the rocks became slick with moisture from the fractured waves. Then slowly he turned until his back was to the ocean. He glanced up at the stone seawall topped by its white picket fence and the looming brown walls and large windows behind it.

The house looked deserted. There was no longer any live-in security-that he knew. It was made-to-order.