Solitude Creek (Kathryn Dance 4)

Now he was eyeing the cluster of people nearby, surrounded by spray flying over the rocks from the impact of the roiling water. The sun was low. That special time, he'd heard it called by photographers. When light became your friend, something to help out with the pictures, not fight against. March had studied photography, in addition to more esoteric, intellectual topics, and he was good. Many of the pictures on the Hand to Heart website were his.

They're dead, he reflected again.

The family he was watching was Asian. Chinese or Korean, probably. He knew the difference in facial structure--he'd been to both of those countries (Korea had been far more productive for his work). But here he was too far away to tell. And he certainly wasn't going to get much closer.

A wife and husband, two preteen children, and a mother-in-law: a bundled-up matriarch. Armed with a point-and-shoot, the husband was directing the kids as they posed on dark brown and red and dun rocks.

Spanish Bay, a tourist twofer with beach and rugged shoreline, is a beautiful coastal preserve featuring everything one would want in scenic California. A mile of sand, surfers immune to the icy water, dolphins, pelicans, dunes, deer, rocks on which seals perched, busy tidal pools.

And sea otters, of course. Cute little fuzzy-faced critters that floated easily on the turbulent surface, smashing shellfish open on rocks perched on their chests

The area was idyllic.

And deadly.

In researching his plans for the Monterey Bay area, March had learned that every few months tourists wandered too far out onto these craggy rocks and, crash, a muscular arm of the Pacific Ocean lapped them indifferently out to sea. Those who didn't break their heads open on the rocks and drown died of hypothermia before the Coast Guard found them, or breathed their last while tangled in the pernicious kelp. It was near here that the singer John Denver had died, his experimental plane falling from the sky.

The Asian family was now prowling the rocks, getting closer and closer to the end of the bulwark that stretched forty feet into the ocean, two yards above the agitated water. The rosy light from the low sun hit them full.

Beautiful.

He slipped the Galaxy S5 mobile phone from his pocket and began shooting video of the scene around him. Just another tourist. Nothing odd about him, catching the beautiful, rugged scenery in high-def pixels.

A huge crash of water and the spray must have tickled the children. They seemed to giggle. The father gestured them to go some feet closer to the end. He aimed his Nikon and shot.

Grandmother remained on the trail, some distance. Mother was about twenty feet behind her husband and children. March noticed she was calling. But the roar of the ocean on this windy evening was loud. The man probably couldn't hear.

Another huge wave, exploding on the gray-and-brown rocks. For a moment the children weren't visible. He glanced at the screen and saw a rainbow in the angled sunlight.

Then there were the children once more, oblivious, looking down at the water as their father directed them closer yet to the terminus point of the rocks.

March now noted that out to sea a large wave was gaining strength.

The lens of his camera app was pointed their way but his concentration wasn't on the video he was taking. He was looking at the swelling wave.

Fifty yards, forty.

Water travels fast even though it is, of course, the largest moving thing on earth. And this behemoth began to race.

Closer, closer, come on...

March's palms sweated. His gut thudded as he thought: Please, I want this...

Thirty yards.

The wave beginning to sharpen into a peak at the crest, God's palm to slap the family to their deaths.

Twenty-five yards.

Twenty...

It was then that the mother had had enough. She charged forward, unsteady on the slippery rocks, and stepped in front of her husband, who gestured angrily with his hands.

Would her husband ignore her? Stand up to the bitch, March thought. Please.

Fifteen yards away, that huge swell of water.

His breathing was coming fast. Just thirty more seconds. That's all I need.