Yacht Girl Read online

  Yacht Girl

  Murder On the Redneck Riviera Book One

  Alison Claire Grey

  Copyright © 2019 by Alison Claire Grey

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  To The Fiesta Motel. I miss you.

  Women can keep only one secret— their own.

  Yiddish Proverb

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  BEFORE

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  PRESENT DAY

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Also by Alison Claire Grey

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  A good hit meant careful planning. Every hitman worth a damn knew that much.

  In Lockwood’s previous life, he’d been meticulous about the details. That was what made the difference, in the end. Being sloppy was always the tell of an amateur, and he’d never been that.

  Lockwood was a professional. He’d never killed anyone for free— and he hadn’t killed anyone at all in almost fifteen years.

  That would change tonight.

  He’d been following his target for two days.

  His mark was a pretty big deal in certain circles. There was no way this would go down and not bring a lot of heat and attention to the incident. It would happen fast too, something Lockwood would have to consider in his exit strategy.

  That’s what made this more complicated than anything he’d done in the past. He’d never killed anyone with any sort of fame or notoriety. Most of the people he’d killed would never be missed. They were rotten people who had done terrible things.

  He’d never killed someone who was tethered to as much power as this asshole was.

  The guy was the son of one of the most powerful men in one of the most powerful families in Hollywood— the McCoy dynasty, a family considered the Kennedys of the West Coast.

  Back in Lockwood’s assassin days it had just been paramilitary, clandestine operative stuff, nothing like this. The people who died by his hand had all been killed in the name of protecting something larger than any of them— including himself. It had never been personal at all. He’d never enjoyed the kill like some men did. He’d done it because it’s what he was trained to do.

  It was what he was paid to do.

  That’s why he was so great at what he did. There was no emotion involved. He could separate his own morality from his actions. And then one day he couldn’t do that anymore, so he’d retired.

  So to speak.

  This hit would be different from everything he’d ever done before.

  But he was ready.

  The McCoy kid had checked into a crummy little beach motel in Panama City Beach, Florida called The Siesta. Lockwood watched the guy be a dick to the sweet lady working the front desk, pushing her to hurry up with his keys, bitched about how he didn’t have all day.

  He’d camped out across the street from the place, biding his time as the McCoy guy checked in. It was important to have patience when it came to these things.

  Things had to be done fast, but never in a state of panic.

  The motel’s rooms all had doors facing the street, something that came very much in handy for him tonight. He could see exactly where the McCoy douchebag was heading.

  Lockwood watched him amble like an oaf toward his room. It was on the third floor, fifth from the left. Lockwood made note of it. After all, he’d be paying it a visit soon enough.

  The guy had only been in there twenty seconds, brief enough that his door hadn’t even shut behind him yet, when he was already outside again, stomping his way back down to the front office.

  He wasn’t happy with his room, it looked like. He rushed the poor lady into handing him keys to another room. There were plenty of empty ones, after all. Then he stomped back up the stairs, like a petulant child, this time to the second floor. The room was the very last one on the right.

  Lockwood counted the doors. It looked like it was the twenty-third room down. Room 223, if he were to guess.

  He waited to see if the guy left this one. He didn’t. It looked like this room would be good enough even for a McCoy.

  An hour later the guy left his room again— this time it appeared he was heading out to dinner; or to one of the many dive bars scattered down the ten miles of Front Beach Road.

  McCoy had changed into seersucker shorts and had slicked back what was left of his hair, a pair of Gucci loafers on his feet, the hideous insignia so obvious that anyone could see it, even if they were hunched down in a car almost two parking lots away.

  For someone with so much money, the McCoy jerk sure did look cheap.

  Lockwood didn’t care, as long as the jackass was leaving for a while.

  As he watched the guy’s car fade away into the night, he knew it was time to make his move.

  The parking lot was empty as far as people went, and the woman at the front desk had gone back into her office. The lot wasn’t lit for shit— there were shadows and pools of blackness everywhere now that the sun had set, another advantage for him as he quickly made his way across it, quietly gliding up the concrete stairs to the second floor and to— sure enough— Room 223.

  He was shocked to see this motel still used standard cylinder tumbler locks on its doors.

  Wow. He hadn’t expected it to be this easy.

  It almost felt like the Universe wanted the McCoy guy to die.

  Maybe it did. It would make sense with what Lockwood knew about the McCoys.

  Using a bump key and a swift shove, he was inside Room 223 within a few seconds.

  He softly closed the door behind him and then made himself comfortable inside the narrow closet at the end of the room, close to the balcony.

  It would be a while until the guy was back. But when he was, there was no time to be wasted.

  Lockwood had waited with the closet door open, knowing he’d have enough time to close it once he heard McCoy fiddling with his keys in the lock. He’d stretched out his legs and enjoyed th
e breeze from the open balcony. McCoy had been kind enough to leave the sliding glass door open before he’d left for the bar.

  Christ, it had been a long two days.

  And now here they were. They’d come to Panama City Beach with their own missions.

  He’d followed the guy from Los Angeles all the way to the Florida panhandle. No one knew either of them were there.

  But soon enough, that would change.

  McCoy finally came back to his room a little after midnight, clearly bombed out of his mind. Fortunately, he hadn’t brought anyone back with him. It had been the only thing Lockwood couldn’t plan for.

  Though, with the knowledge he had about McCoy and his purposes in Panama City Beach, he’d had a hunch there’d be no one coming home with him from the bar. He hadn’t gone to the bar to pick up women.

  He’d gone to the bar to drink his fill in liquid courage. That’s the only way men like him found it.

  Lockwood waited. The McCoy guy was sitting on the bed now, he’d entered the room while blabbering to someone on his cell phone.

  Lockwood didn’t want to do the job in the middle of a phone call. He needed time to leave the scene, as much time as possible, and that wouldn’t work if someone in McCoy’s life thought or knew he was in trouble— or worse, if McCoy told the person on the other end anything about him before he finished the job.

  So, he’d wait some more. In the meantime, he listened.

  “This place is a shit show,” McCoy hooted into his iPhone. “A lot of gorgeous women, but yikes. Daddy issues galore. But damn, what is it about trailer parks that makes their women so hot? That’s a mystery that needs to be solved. Explains a lot though.”

  Lockwood could see McCoy through the vents in the closet door. He was a pathetic, doughy man in his mid-forties. The coke bloat made him look closer to fifty though.

  “I can’t wait to see the look on her face when she walks in the door and sees me,” he laughed into his cell.

  Lockwood wondered who he was talking to. Not that it mattered. The scum in the McCoy family and businesses went all the way down. It was an endless line of dirt bags.

  “You know my dad always said, ‘if it flies, floats, or fucks, rent it’,” McCoy rambled. “Boy, was he right. This chick has been floating and screwing all over the world for money. She’s nothing but a damn yacht girl, just like he said she’d be. In the end, that’s all women like her are good for. I can’t wait to tell her that before I kill her. She needs to hear the truth. No one ever saw her as anything more than what she is.”

  Lockwood couldn’t wait for this. Now he understood what it felt like to want to kill someone.

  He would enjoy this. For the first time in his life.

  If only the guy would get off the damn phone.

  “I think I’m gonna fuck with her,” McCoy laughed. The sound of it was more like a wheezing. Years of vices and bad choices were in it, Lockwood could hear all of them in the guy’s voice and his grating chuckle.

  Lockwood saw him pick up the room phone. He dialed the front desk.

  Shit. No. This wasn’t good.

  Lockwood didn’t want her anywhere near what was about to happen.

  “Hello?”

  He could hear her voice on the other end. She was the girl working the front desk, she’d come in after eleven to replace the woman who had checked McCoy in.

  She was the reason they were both here. One of them to kill her, the other to save her.

  McCoy said nothing to her, he just hung up.

  “I’m gonna crank call her a bunch to lure her down here,” McCoy boasted to the person on his cell. “I’m under a fake name. She’ll come down here to see what’s going on and surprise! Damn I wish you were here to see it.”

  Lockwood hadn’t planned for this. He didn’t want to involve her more than she needed to be. She’d been through enough, after all.

  “Okay, I’m gonna go. I’ll call you in a bit, once I’m done. Yeah, once I’m finished I need to get the hell outta here. Dad has a plane waiting for me in Destin. It’s all set up. Alibi and everything.”

  The cell call ended. Lockwood watched McCoy call the front desk two more times, both hang ups. He was grinning to himself, like a cat that was about to catch the canary.

  Lockwood knew it was time. He couldn’t let the moron make one more phone call.

  It was quick, just like he’d planned.

  Lockwood slammed the closet door open, the gun releasing within a second of him entering the bedroom. Lockwood felt the Gulf breeze hit him from the still open balcony sliding doors as he pulled the trigger, a message from the divine if there ever was one.

  McCoy barely registered what was happening before he had one bullet in his head and two more in his chest, for good measure.

  He died with his eyes wide open, his last expression astonished.

  Lockwood’s only regret was that he couldn’t get rid of the body. He hated to think of her finding him like this. It was just more trauma she didn’t deserve.

  A rowdy group of snowbirds downstairs on the pool deck covered up most of the sound. Fortunately, this end of the motel was also mostly vacant, another bit of luck Lockwood hadn’t counted on.

  It seemed like the Universe really was working in his favor tonight.

  There was no time to dwell on it though. He needed to exit. Quickly.

  Within a minute of the hit he was out the door and down the concrete stairs of the motel, the set of steps on the end that no one used for the most part, the ones furthest away from the front desk where a woman who was supposed to be dead continued to work and wonder who was calling her from Room 223, oblivious for now about how close she’d come to being a victim for the final time.

  One

  Three Days Earlier…

  Her mother used to say, “A bad check always returns.”

  As Delilah Beckett stood outside in the sticky night air under the awning of the slumping Greyhound station in Eufaula, Alabama, she couldn’t help but consider that she’d become that bad check.

  She was returning to where she started, even though it was the last thing anyone wanted.

  There would be no welcome wagon waiting for her when she finally got to Panama City Beach. Delilah, who everyone called Dee, would be lucky if her sister would even talk to her.

  They hadn’t spoken in close to a decade.

  Dee pushed the thought of her sister away for now. Mercifully, she still had a considerable chunk of a day left before she had to face that problem.

  Instead, she fanned herself with her bus ticket. A man whistled at her as he walked by and she rolled her eyes. It was always the grossest men who thought a woman would be interested in their admiration. As if she existed just to please a stranger who looked like he hadn’t seen the inside of a dentist’s office in the whole of his pathetic life.

  “Get lost,” she replied without even glancing his way. Even though it was just after one in the morning, she still wore her Tom Ford sunglasses, so she could avoid eye contact with the miscreants surrounding her, all waiting for their own tickets out of town.

  She wanted to believe she wasn’t one of them, but she was here, wasn’t she? Waiting to climb aboard the same stuffy, crowded bus with the rest of the dregs, no less.

  The Alabama humidity made the synthetic fibers of her halter top stick lewdly to her chest and she cursed her choice in attire. She hadn’t expected early October to be this damn hot, in all fairness. Dad used to call it an Indian summer, but that wasn’t the appropriate term these days. Dee liked to think of it as second summer.

  Deceptive summer.

  The heat always caused her to make rash decisions. Dee hated sweating, more than almost anything. The soundtrack of her life would always involve the buzz of air conditioning in the background if she could help it.

  She remembered all too well what it was like not to have it.

  But that had been a long time ago.

  Dee was lucky. No one sat next to her on the bus a
nd she was able to snag a seat near the front, to boot. The driver was a woman, another thing that relieved her. She hoped to catch a little sleep on this leg of her trip and didn’t want anybody going through her bag or any men getting “friendly” with her. A woman driver seemed more likely to serve as a guardian angel to her than a male one.

  It had become difficult for Dee to trust men. She couldn’t remember when exactly that occurred, but it was so ingrained in her that it had become a reflex.

  As the bus pulled away from Eufaula, Dee leaned forward to speak to the woman.

  “How many stops before Panama City?” Dee asked, a smile in her voice.

  “Three for this route, honey,” the driver replied. Her accent reminded Dee of her sister’s. They’d been born and raised in Apalachicola and there was a cadence to it— a specific sort of drawl that reminded Dee of oysters and Sunday school.

  Dee wanted to ask the driver where she was from, but the idea of small talk exhausted her. She’d been on a bus for days now. She’d started in Los Angeles almost a week ago.