Sins Against the Sea Read Online Free Page B

no two were the same. She grew up in Marina del Rey, a coastal town near Los Angeles, and, every moment she wasn’t in school, she was down at the beach gathering shells, cataloging her finds, checking them against her reference books, and recording the Latin names for species and genus.
    Corey shook her head to bring herself back to the present. Shit. What brought on that little stroll down Memory Lane? The last thing she needed after the crappy day she’d had was for all the skeletons of her past to come dancing out of the closet like a Tim Burton chorus line.
    The day got off to a bad start. On the way to work, thanks to some idiot with no tail lights, she’d spilled coffee down the front of her blouse. Then, only moments after arriving at the office, she ran her pantyhose while trying to wash out the stain. Luckily, she kept an extra pair in her desk, but still. Pantyhose were an expense men, who still earned more than women doing the same job, didn’t have to incur. As she raced to pull on her new pair, her secretary called through the door, “Gird your loins. Peter’s on the warpath again.”
    Peter Blackwell, Corey’s unpredictable boss, was the president of Conch Oil. On a good day, working for him was like being a trained tiger in a three-ring circus. On a bad day, it was like playing Chinese Fire Drill on a rollercoaster.
    This had been one of the bad days. Normally, Corey worked late—sometimes until ten or eleven at night, but not today. Today, she started watching the clock right after lunch, counting down the minutes until quitting time. Peter’s latest game-changing scramble had given her a splitting headache and she couldn’t wait to get home, strip off her suit and stockings, and uncork a chilled bottle of liquid stress-relief.
    So, at the stroke of five o’clock, she’d made a beeline for her car, only to spend the next two hours stuck in the parking lot that was Pacific Coast Highway. She inched along, teeth grinding, knuckles white on the wheel, all the way from Wilmington, the refinery-scented home of Conch’s North American headquarters, to her string-bikini of an apartment in Belmont Shores.
    Welcome to Southern California.
    Thankfully, she lived at the beach, the only thing that made the stress of the job, the tooth-chipping smog, and the insanely overcrowded interstates even remotely tolerable. She might be a director now, but oceanfront real estate in Southern California was ridiculously expensive, and she’d much rather reside in a matchbox in Belmont Shores than something bigger in some inland hellhole like Lakewood or Cerritos.
    She took a sip from the wineglass in my hand, savoring the soft citrus finish along with the gentle sea-scented breeze blowing off the ocean. What she needed right now was more wine and to veg out in front of back-to-back reruns of Big Bang Theory , her favorite zone-out television show.
    Another swallow emptied her glass. On her way to get more, something on the television news caught her attention. A group of angry-looking protesters, many of them covered in what looked like oil, were chanting while holding placards. One of them was pushing a stroller. The baby, covered in the same black guck as the grown-ups, was holding a sign, too, which read, Drill, Baby, Drill. The others appeared to be shouting at the cameras as they held up their own signs.
    End Global Warning
    Break the Addiction
    Remember the Exxon Valdez
    Corey glowered at the screen. That last one was hitting below the belt. Who could ever forget the Exxon Valdez? She might have been just a kid when the tanker ran aground on Prince William Sound, but the images on the television news left an indelible impression: rocky shorelines edged with black goop, dead birds and fish coated in sludge, that iridescent sheen on the water, delicate habitats trampled by clean-up crews.
    Concern soon surpassed her umbrage. Had something happened or was it just a group of environmentalists vilifying the oil