Wicked Break Read Online Free Page B

not.
    We sat there staring for a few minutes at the bouquet of purples and yellows in the sky at the far edge of the water. The crowd on the boardwalk was slowly dissipating as the evening trudged in.
    â€œYou wanna go out?” Carter asked, gesturing at the water. “Decent swells should be here soon.”
    I closed my eyes. “Nah.”
    We sat there again quietly for a few moments.
    â€œYou saw her, didn’t you?” he said finally.
    â€œSaw who?”
    â€œThe Virgin Mary. Who the hell do you think I mean? Liz.”
    I didn’t say anything. Of all the annoying things about Carter, perhaps the one that bugged me the most was his ability to read me like an eye chart.
    â€œDid you talk to her?” he asked.
    â€œNope.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œDidn’t feel like it.”
    â€œRight.”
    The truth was I didn’t know why I hadn’t just gone over to talk to Liz. Maybe it was because I was afraid of what she’d say to me. Not talking to her had become weirdly comfortable and I wasn’t sure I was ready to give that up.
    Carter stood, yanked off his tank top, and grabbed the eight-foot G&S surfboard next to the sliding door. He tucked it under his arm and stepped over the small stone wall onto the boardwalk.
    He turned around. “You know I can’t stand her, dude. I really can’t. It would be fine with me if I never saw her again, never had to hear her name again.” He shook his head. “But if you’re in love with her, or whatever, you’re just being chickenshit. Flat out. So she’s pissed at you. Big deal. Liz is pissed at everyone, as far as I can tell. Deal with it and quit sulking. I’ve watched it for too long now and I’m tired of it.” He shook his head. “I’ve never thought of you as a coward, Noah, and I don’t really wanna start.”
    He turned and walked down the sand toward the water and the exploding hues of the horizon and left me to think about that.

Six
    After a night of restless sleep, Rachel’s eyes, Liz’s face, and Carter’s words rattling around in my brain, I decided I needed a few more details from Peter Pluto. I needed to see what specifically he’d meant by maybe Linc getting hooked up with a bad crowd. Did he know about the gang or was there another crowd I needed to be aware of?
    And as much as I wanted to avoid the subject, I wanted to know more about their father. Nothing he’d told me about his brother had added up and I ended up watching a girl I’d just met take a bullet. I didn’t know whether the shooting was tied directly to Linc Pluto’s disappearance, but it sure seemed like an awfully big coincidence.
    I walked up Mission to the Enterprise rental office, and after fifteen minutes drove away in a rented Ford Taurus. My car was still impounded and I didn’t mind sticking a few more dollars on Peter Pluto’s tab.
    His home was in Clairemont, a nondescript suburb north of the downtown area and twenty minutes from my house. The community rests on the hills just above Mission Bay and stretches two dozen miles to the east. Middle-class housing, strip malls, and neighborhoods that had deteriorated marked what had once been a desired address. Most of the original residents had vacated to the sprawling suburbs of the east and north, seeking newer homes and newer schools, leaving most of Clairemont in search of an identity.
    His address was just off Balboa, in the Mount streets, so named because the streets were named after the mountains of the world. I turned right on Mt. Arafat and then right again on Mt. Everest.
    Not something you do every day.
    I found Pluto’s house near the end of a cul-de-sac on Mt. Everest. The ranch home was a faded gray, with a giant plum tree in the front yard. A beat-up basketball hoop rested above the garage and the grass in the yard was a mix of green and brown. A bright blue Ford pickup was parked in the