Ultraviolet

by Nancy Bush

  I placed a last call to Dwayne. “I’m going in, Coach.”

  “Taking your cell phone?”

  “Putting it on vibrate and keeping it close.”

  “Call me when you’re leaving.”

  “If my parents come looking for me, tell them you haven’t seen me. No matter what they do to you.”

  “I won’t give you up,” he said, the smile sounding in his voice. “The team’s behind you.”

  “Later, dude.”

  “I’m right across the bay.”

  Somehow that was comforting. I clicked off and stuffed the phone in my pocket. Bending my head against the driving rain, I picked up another rock and stuffed it in the sweatshirt pocket, then picked my way through the mud and dirty water toward the construction site.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The kids who’d gone to the game—either playing or watching—hadn’t arrived yet, but there were more than a few others hanging around. My buddy Brett was there and upon my arrival, grinned like a goof and came over to me, throwing an arm around me. This seemed to be the usual form of greeting, and I tried like hell not to let on that I’m not a huge fan of the full body hug. There are only three reasons to connect so fully with another human body, in my opinion: sexual foreplay, grief comfort and as a way to stave off death in freezing temperatures. I didn’t think any of the three applied, but I smiled at Brett anyway, as if I’d been waiting all day just for this.

  “Hey, sorry about last time. I didn’t know you were still around. Tina just kinda came over.”

  “No problem,” I said. “We’re still friends.”

  “We could be more,” he pointed out.

  I smiled crookedly and let it pass. The way I saw it, when he and Tina hooked up, it had taken the onus off me being his exclusive find. I figured I could now do whatever the hell I wanted with impunity. It would have been trickier had he somehow marked me as his and then I backed away. Hard feelings might have surfaced. These dating rituals are complicated and it’s hard to skirt around them, but some of the rules are sacrosanct. Brett had thrown his arm around another girl while I was out meeting friends. I was a free agent.

  He released me long enough to find us both a beer. I was chilled and thought beer wasn’t exactly going to do much for me, but I dutifully accepted it, popping the top. He flung his arm over my shoulder and again the dead weight of it drove me nearly insane. I wanted to scream and fling it off.

  Note to self: work on relationship skills.

  One of the girls, shivering in a short furry coat over a miniskirt, puffed on a cigarette, sucking smoke in and spitting it out like it was a speed event. Though not a smoker myself, I felt she lacked a certain style, and isn’t that what it’s about at some level? Coolness? Sophistication? She could really use a remedial course. Another girl leaning against a post knew how to do it, inhaling slowly and deliberately, her eyes half closed, her throat arched, exhaling a soft cloud of smoke.

  “Gonna take ’em a while to get here from Clackamas,” Brett said by way of explanation. He lifted his beer and clinked it against mine. “Have to start without ’em.”

  I’d been wondering where Keegan was. And Dawn. With an inward sigh, I settled in for a wait. They hadn’t strung the red lights yet and it was dark and cold, rain pounding on the roof.

  Brett started telling me all the reasons he hadn’t made it to tonight’s game. I listened with half an ear, wishing I’d timed my arrival a little better.

  A flash of light strobed through. White. Then red.

  “Fuck,” a male voice whispered from somewhere outside the front door. “The cops.”

  I was on my feet and shooting downstairs to the backyard before my brain was in full gear. My heart jerked wildly in my chest. Behind me I heard the kids bumbling around and swearing, running into each other, but I was out the back and across the yard to Social Security before you could say, “Halt, you’re under arrest.”

  I threw my purse over the fence, then climbed with an agility that surprised me later, practically vaulting over the top. As I’ve said, fleeing is my first response and I’m damn good at it. I dropped into the gushy muck on Social Security’s side of the chain-link. Their yard was a mire that sucked at my shoes. Glancing back, I saw flashing illumination from Beachlake, an aurora borealis lighting up the area. Quickly, I scooped up my purse and hurried to the farthest side of their boathouse. Their canoe lay upside down, exactly as I’d seen it from Dwayne’s dock. I flipped it over, rain running down my neck.

  I set my purse down, searching the canoe’s interior. No oars. Panicked, I turned around in a rapid circle, scanning the surrounding grounds. Nothing. Tiptoeing to the end of the yard, which ended at a concrete skirt, I peered around the wall of the boathouse into its yawning black mouth. The skirt turned into a narrow concrete ledge that ran around the inside edge of the building. An old motorboat, suspended by canvas straps, groaned slightly as my hand touched the side of it for balance. It rocked gently. I steadied it and tried to get a handle on my rapid breathing.

  The oars were hung on the wall. I squeezed inside the boathouse and grabbed them. One slipped from my hand and clattered to the concrete, sounding like gunfire. Swooping it up, I morphed myself back around the edge of the boathouse, daring one glance toward the rear yard of Do Not Enter. Kids were running stealthily across Pet Cemetery toward Rebel Yell and Tab A/Slot B. The lights still flashed and then I heard the first whine of a siren from the direction of Lake Chinook.

  I could not be caught.

  With an effort I shoved the canoe into the water. It splashed loudly. I held on to one end, leaning over the water, sure I was going to fall in. Precariously balancing, I grabbed my purse with my free hand. After a moment the canoe steadied and I stepped inside, wobbling a bit. I sat down quickly. Glanced up at Social Security. Lights blazed on.

  Oh God. They’d heard me.

  I paddled west, quietly but with an inner urgency. Hurry, hurry, hurry. I could practically see Josh Newell’s face. I pictured handcuffs. A ride in the back of his police car for real.

  I dipped the oars as carefully as I could, opting for silence over speed. My jaw was clenched. My head bent to the driving rain. I slipped past other houses along Beachlake Drive, trying to calculate where the road dead-ended. It’s hard to tell because the houses continue past Beachlake’s final cul-de-sac, their access from a tangle of roads that delta off North Shore Loop. If someone hoped to follow me, they would have to head back to a main road and find their way to wherever I decided to pull in.

  I hoped to God they hadn’t seen me.

  But if they had…My mind was filled with images of a Lake Chinook prowler, silently creeping along the narrow roadways, tracking my progress.

  The siren grew louder and louder, its wooOOOOOO ooooooo-OOOOOOoooo splitting the still night air.

  I kept moving west. My vague plan had been to eventually circle around and cross the bay to Dwayne’s. But I couldn’t make myself do it. Too exposed. Too dark. Too dangerous.

  I struggled with the oars, clumsy and awkward. It felt like I was treading water. My teeth chattered, more from fear than cold, though there was plenty of that, too. The rain beat on me. I had to shake it out of my eyes. I thought about my car, parked on the street. Were they searching it? It could belong to any of the residents on Beachlake, couldn’t it? My purse was still over my shoulder, banging against me as I oared, but I wouldn’t set it down. I would rather drown with it than let it get away from me.

  I hugged the seawall, moving steadily away from Social Security. About six houses down, I glanced back. Were the police after me? Did they know I’d taken the canoe? I stopped oaring and simply slid my hand along the seawall, propelling the canoe toward the end of Beachlake. Hurry, hurry, hurry. Sweat ran down my back.

  A loud alarm sounded from the house I’d just passed, one of those spiraling screams that blare over and over again. I practically jumped from the boat and my gasp was a bitten off scream. My skin lifted in fear. Any minute I
expected a searchlight to pin me in its glare.

  Lights burst on in more houses along Beachlake. I gave up stealth and oared like mad to the footbridge that marked the end of the cul-de-sac. The bridge crossed over a tiny stream that fed into the bay. I kept paddling past the footbridge, past another house that wasn’t on Beachlake, past another. Get away, I whispered inside my own head. Get away.

  The siren cut off with an abrupt chirp.

  I was four houses past the end of Beachlake Drive, four houses into the next neighborhood. I didn’t know what street their addresses were, or how one would find them. I pulled up to a house that looked empty. It had a yawning boathouse that was four poles topped by a slanted metal roof, kind of like a carport for boats. There was no boat in residence, so I slid the canoe under its shelter, listening to the rain pound and ping on its hard roof. There was a rope at the end of the canoe, and I tied it carefully to a rusted cleat, then stepped onto a narrow dock whose boards were rotted and soft. My legs shook. I was soaked to the bone. Carefully I peeked from beneath my shelter toward the dark, gloomy house. Not one light. And the two houses on either side weren’t waking to the alarm, either. I hoped to high heaven this house was as abandoned as it seemed. Carefully, treading as lightly as I could, I edged my way through the thick laurel hedge on the home’s eastern side, looking for access to the front.

  There was a wrought-iron gate between me and freedom. My heart nearly stopped until I realized it wasn’t locked. It creaked as I pulled it open, so I squeezed through and left it ajar.

  Head bent, I scurried forward, my purse held tight to my side. My Lake Chinook sweatshirt had been worse than useless in this weather; it stuck to me, a sodden deadweight. I found my cell phone, comforted by its welcoming light, as I put a call into Dwayne.

  “Hey,” Dwayne answered, obviously recognizing my number.

  “Can you come get me?” I whispered.

  “Where are you?” He was all business.

  “Not sure. You know where Beachlake Drive ends? The houses that are further west, but you reach them by some access road? That’s the road I’ll be on.”

  “I hear sirens.”

  “No shit.”

  “They’re coming from Social Security.”

  My heart clutched. Had they seen me steal their canoe? “Better hurry, Dwayne.”

  He clicked off and was gone.

  I counted it a blessing, practically a miracle, that he’d gotten his full leg cast off and was more mobile. Mobile enough, anyway, to drive his surveillance car.

  I reached the road, which was covered by a canopy of fir branches high overhead, both from the trees lining the road and from a screen of Douglas firs that marched up the hill, nearly obscuring houses farther up. Pinpricks of light showed through the foliage, like tiny stars, illumination from the houses hanging on the cliffside with views of Lakewood Bay. I trudged along, moving ever farther west, away from Beachlake Drive but also from Dwayne’s cabana on the other side of the bay. The road curved to the left and circled to the right and I finally came to where it T’d into North Shore.

  There are no streetlights along these curvy lanes and for that I was grateful. I stayed outside the circle of illumination offered by a lantern on a stone entry post at the end of a drive and shivered convulsively. I could have been the only person on the planet. It was dark, wet, cold and miserable.

  I heard a car’s engine, quiet, and the glow of headlights approaching from around a corner. I stepped back and pressed myself to the side of a detached garage, sliding around to the back as the car neared, keeping myself well out of detection. The car purred past me but I didn’t dare look immediately. I managed a peek as its taillights turned the next corner. A black, unmarked police car. Jesus. Haven’t I said the Lake Chinook police have nothing to do? Haven’t I? They were treating Operation Teen Drinking like an FBI sting.

  Five minutes later another car’s engine sounded, also quiet. I kept to my hiding place and hoped the homeowners didn’t wake and see a figure crouching behind the back of their garage.

  This time the car that cruised by was a beige sedan. I punched autodial for Dwayne’s number. He answered on the first ring.

  “You just went past me,” I said. “A police car’s somewhere ahead of you.”

  “I’m stopping.”

  I ran from my hiding place and hurried to the car. Dwayne had pulled to the edge of the road and I jumped into the passenger side. He was already in motion, smoothly moving forward. We drove around North Shore for a quarter of a mile, then took a turn that eventually landed us on Iron Mountain Boulevard. As we headed back toward Lake Chinook proper we passed the unmarked prowler going the other way.

  “The lights are on at Social Security.”

  I nodded jerkily. “I’m free–ee–zeeing.” I couldn’t get the word out through teeth that had a mind of their own.

  “There’s a jacket in the back. Can you reach it?” He was trying to twist around but it wasn’t easy for him.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You all right?”

  “I’m ohhhh–kayyy.” I grabbed the denim jacket with clammy hands that scarcely had feeling in them. I wrapped it around my shoulders. It smelled like Dwayne.

  “Your makeup’s kind of scary,” he said.

  I refused to give in to the almost pathological desire to look in a mirror. Instead I told him what he could do to himself in vivid terms. He grinned, and I instantly felt better.

  We made it back to Dwayne’s without incident. The alarm from Social Security had finally been silenced and activity had diminished. We kept Dwayne’s lights off but looked through the binoculars and his sliding glass doors. Through the bay window on Social Security’s main floor we could see an older gentleman in a robe and pajamas talking heatedly with two policemen.

  “I don’t know what that’s about,” Dwayne said. “But I think the wife went to the hospital. The ambulance showed up, lights flashing, no siren.”

  “So it wasn’t a raid on Do Not Enter.”

  “No. Kids started pouring onto the backyard as soon as the ambulance showed. Someone must have reported them running, because the police came but the kids were gone. Then the house alarm started.”

  “Maybe the old guy thought someone was stealing a canoe from him,” I ventured, hugging Dwayne’s coat against me.

  “Hunh,” Dwayne said.

  “Yeah. Hunh.”

  We watched for a while more. The police left and the old guy changed his clothes and headed to his car. I felt a little nervous for him driving through this miserable weather, but his wife was at the hospital, so I guess that’s what happens.

  Dwayne put me in his shower to warm me up. I tossed my clothes in a pile on the floor. Behind the shower curtain, I heard the bathroom door open and stood frozen in place.

  “Got some clothes here for ya,” he said, and let himself back out.

  I peered around the shower curtain. I could see a pair of gray sweatpants and one of his denim shirts.

  I scrubbed my face and stood with my head under the hot spray until my muscles began to thaw. It took a while before I felt warm enough to turn off the taps and step from the shower. I toweled off and put on my cold, wet underwear before sliding into Dwayne’s clothes. A few minutes later I padded barefoot to the kitchen, where he was leaning against the counter, watching coffee brew, a stream of dark liquid bubbling into the coffeemaker’s glass pot.

  “How do I look?” I asked.

  He examined me from the top of my wet head to the peek of my toes beneath the folds of his sweats. “Warmer.”

  “I was really afraid I’d be caught contributing to the delinquency of minors.”

  “You wanna give this up?” He poured me a cup, handing it to me, our fingers brushing.

  “You mean drinking beer with teenagers, running from the police, stealing canoes, freezing in the rain?” I drank the coffee, feeling it run hot down my throat. “I don’t know. Dawn wasn’t there yet, and neither was Keegan. You think the
y’ll still meet at Do Not Enter after this? I wouldn’t.”

  “It’s a perfect place for them. Yeah, I think they’ll be there next week.”

  “They’d be nuts.”

  “They’re teens. They don’t have many options. It’s parent-free and has a roof against the rain.”

  “The police know about it.”

  “Do they?” Dwayne pulled a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the cupboard above his head and raised it up to me in a question. I held my cup out to him and he gave me a liberal dose. “I think the kids left before they were raided. The cops responded to a call from the neighbors when they saw them running over their yards. I’m not sure any of ’em were collared.”

  “So, what are you saying?”

  He made a face. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s time for Hal Jeffries to put away his binoculars.”

  I should have been thrilled to hear it. Should have wanted to dance in the streets. But Dwayne, blast him, had hooked me on Dawn’s problems and I wanted to bring down Keegan Lendenhal in a bad way. I murmured something about that being a good idea, finished my coffee, then asked Dwayne to drive me to my car.

  It turned out the old guy had simply hit his home alarm by accident after he called for an ambulance for his wife. The police followed up on the alarm and Mr. Social Security had been so upset over everything he’d bawled them out. They had not, apparently, chased the high school kids. Mrs. Social Security had suffered chest pains and a minor heart attack and was home by the end of the weekend, apparently okay.