Read Tarantula for Free Online Page A

leaving two small spots high above them. They glittered in her dark eyes. She looked into his face with what might have been concern. “Very well. I bathe every afternoon, on the beach, down there.” She pointed out towards the sea. “You will find me there tomorrow at two in the afternoon. I swim and I lie in the sun.”
    The waiter opened the door and waited there, ostentatiously, for them to notice.
    “We are shut,” Antonietta said.
    Milton walked with her to the door. The waiter was waiting outside with the key in his hand. Milton wondered whether he was connected to the Camorra, too. Probably.
    Antonietta held out her hand. “Goodnight, Signor Smith.”
    Milton said: “Two o'clock, then. I’ll see you tomorrow. Goodnight.”

CHAPTER EIGHT
    MILTON RETURNED to Castellabate the following morning. He spent an hour wandering the streets of the small town, hoping to get a feeling for the place. He followed a lazy and idiosyncratic route, designed carefully to flush out anyone who might be tailing him. He thought that a man who followed him for ten minutes might have been a possibility, but, if he was, he realised that Milton was onto him and faded away as soon as he paused in the local church that had been dedicated to Santa Maria. After that, the surveillance, if there was any, was more discreet.
    There was no point in worrying about Ernesto. Either he would meet him or he would not. He would deal with either eventuality when he knew what the Italians had chosen to do.
    Milton bought a pair of flip flops, shorts and a t-shirt. He bought a newspaper and ambled back to the restaurant. Tables had been dragged down to the promenade and he took a chair at one of them, turning it to face out to the sea. The sun was already hot, burning down from a clear sky, and the water in the wide bay sparkled and glittered. Milton opened his newspaper and read. There was nothing more on Number Three. His story, like his car, had sunk down beneath the surface to be forgotten. The table next to his was occupied by an American couple who, he quickly gathered, were on their own version of a Grand Tour, vacationing throughout Europe. They had a collection of postcards and spent half an hour filling them out. Milton tuned them out.
    Milton had an early lunch and paused for a moment in the restroom. The space beneath his left armpit where he usually carried his pistol was conspicuously empty, and it made him feel uncomfortable. He knew the men he was dealing with were dangerous, and facing them without a weapon was unsettling.
    He changed into the things that he had bought. The t-shirt was cut well up the arm and it revealed the wings of the angel tattooed across his shoulders.
    It was time to go.
    He turned on the tap and splashed cold water onto his face.
    Showtime.
     
    MILTON WAS sweating by the time he had walked the short distance from the town down to the beach. He stood for a moment in the shade of a beach café while he got his bearings.
    The café was in bad shape, obviously only used in the high season and left to rot for the rest of the year. He heard the sound of a smartphone playing Italian dance music inside. The proprietor offered sandwiches wrapped in polythene, the bread gone stale and the cheese limp. There were expensive bottles of water, cans of Coke and Orangina.
    There was a rocky breakwater that extended a finger out into the sea and, beyond that, a fashionable restaurant and bar. On the beach, a brown skinned local offered sun loungers and parasols for rent while a woman, his wife perhaps, stood guard over a small armada of pedaloes that had been dragged up onto the beach. There was a margin of flinty stones, fifty yards of sand, and then the hushing of the sea. There were a handful of bathers, two of them swimming out beyond the buoys that marked the start of the beach, the others splashing happily in the shallows. Milton counted eighteen people stretched out on the sand. He waited a minute, watching them quietly,