Night Tides

by Alex Prentiss

  The traffic along Willie Street was light; in a couple of hours, when the bars all closed, the streets would flood with drunks and be truly dangerous. She wondered idly which of the half dozen vehicles parked nearby might turn out to be Patty’s.

  MARTY WALKER LOOKED across the table at his brother. “Why am I here?”

  Ethan took a swallow of his beer. “Kinda deep for this place, isn’t it?”

  They sat in the Sparkler, a pizza restaurant directly across Willie Street from Father Thyme’s. Run by an extended Hmong family, it was well regarded by the late-night-munchies crowd and equidistant between Ethan’s home and Marty’s. The staff always chattered away when they saw Marty, convinced he would eventually understand, despite his protests that he barely knew any of their language. They seemed disappointed at his thorough Americanization; sometimes, so was he.

  Now, though, his disappointment and annoyance were directed entirely at his brother. “It’s after midnight, Ethan. I should be at home, asleep. So should you. So why did you call me?”

  Ethan looked down at the tabletop and mumbled, “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “So take some NyQuil.”

  “That’s not why. I…” He took another swallow. “Okay, here it is. I can’t get the woman from the diner out of my head.”

  “Rachel?”

  “Yes, Rachel. I want to see her again, but she practically threw me out when I was there before.”

  “‘Practically’?” Marty said.

  Ethan’s eyes narrowed. “Have you talked to her since?”

  “I go in there all the time. It came up.”

  “What did she say?”

  Marty sighed, shook his head, and deadpanned, “I can’t repeat it, it was too harsh. My virgin ears are still burning.”

  Ethan smacked him lightly on the side of the head. “Don’t make me come over there.”

  Marty laughed and took a swallow of his own beer. “Man, you are tense.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said that she was sorry for throwing you out, and that if you came back, the first cup of coffee was on the house.”

  Ethan looked like a schoolboy granted a reprieve by the principal. “Really?”

  “Cop’s honor.”

  Ethan tapped idly on his beer bottle and looked out the front window. “So do you think I should go?”

  “Can you keep your balls under control this time?”

  “Look, the guy was an asshole, and—”

  “And the diner is hers, not yours. You have to let people handle their own stuff.”

  “Even if they do it wrong?”

  “Wrong or just different?”

  Ethan sighed. After a moment he said, “Want to know something else? I called Julie earlier.”

  Marty’s eyebrows went up. “No.”

  “Well, she called me first. I saw her number on my phone. I didn’t talk to her or leave a message or anything. But she’ll know.”

  “You don’t need to get caught up in that again. Seriously. It was okay before you went overseas, but after that, something really fundamental changed in both of you. Once you got back it was like watching two sharks fighting over the last minnow.”

  Ethan looked away from his brother’s steady gaze. The change, he knew, had been in him; Julie simply reacted to it. “I know. I’ll ignore her next time.”

  “Good. I don’t like to give advice—”

  Ethan laughed. “You love to give advice.”

  “Okay, I love it, so listen to it, why don’t you? Stay away from Julie. Go talk to Rachel. Move forward, not back.”

  Suddenly Ethan looked past Marty, out the window. His expression was so odd, Marty turned to follow his gaze. He saw nothing. “What?”

  “This may sound crazy,” Ethan said, “but I thought I just saw Rachel across the street, outside Father Thyme’s.”

  THE COFFEEHOUSE DOOR opened with a loud squeak, and for a moment Patty stood silhouetted in the light. “Good night,” she called back inside, then stepped out and let the door close. She’d gone halfway up the block before Rachel realized that she wasn’t going toward any of the vehicles. She was walking home, alone, in the middle of the night.

  Rachel slapped her palm against her forehead. This whole neighborhood was made up of students, for blocks and blocks in every direction. How could she not have thought of that? And each of those darkened houses and tree-shrouded streets represented a potential ambush.

  “THAT IS CRAZY,” Marty agreed. “It’s going on one A.M., and she opens her diner at seven.”

  Ethan nodded, accepting Marty’s explanation. But his reflexes, honed by the constant readiness necessary in the Middle Eastern desert, told him he’d been right.

  Those same reflexes froze him in his chair when the Sparkler’s door opened and Caleb Johnstone entered. The gray-haired man was out of breath and sweaty and did not notice Ethan. He walked to the counter and spoke to one of the Hmong girls, who took his money and handed him a pizza. Without looking Ethan’s way, he went back outside and walked off down the street. He kept looking around, like a guilty man haunted by past misdeeds, until he turned a corner down the block.

  “Now what?” Marty asked, waving his hand in front of Ethan’s face. “You’re awfully jittery tonight.”

  “That was the guy I ran out of Rachel’s,” Ethan said.

  “Caleb?” Marty said. “Well, he’s allowed to eat pizza too.”

  Ethan glanced back across the street, toward the coffeehouse. He was certain of what he’d seen, but there seemed no point in making an issue of it. Rachel was entitled to a late-night cup of coffee in someone else’s establishment, and she had been alone. That, at least, was reassuring.

  When he went to the counter to get his next drink, he noticed a tiny red smear on the floor that hadn’t been there before. The only patron he’d seen near the spot was Caleb. He started to call Marty over, to see if the red stain was paint or blood, but then decided that would really sound paranoid. Besides, it was most likely just pizza sauce.

  RACHEL MOVED AS silently as possible behind Patty, using the pools of shadow as she’d done earlier. Patty seemed oblivious to her presence, whistling and practically skipping up the sidewalk. She turned left, went down two blocks, crossed the street again, and headed up a slight hill toward the big houses that overlooked Lake Mendota. These were old structures now sliced into small apartments, the outsides covered with networks of wooden stairs.

  A couple of cars passed but no other pedestrians. Rachel’s exhausted calves burned with the effort of following the girl uphill. She slipped on a discarded beer can, and the noise of metal scraping on concrete tore through the relative silence.

  Patty stopped and turned. Rachel dove into the shadows beside a car parked on the street, hoping this one didn’t have a proximity alarm. Her breathing sounded like an industrial compressor in her ears, and she felt her pulse thump in her temples.

  Patty stayed very still for a long moment, silhouetted beneath a streetlight. Then she resumed her trek.

  Rachel crouched against the car. This was nuts. She’d done all she could, and that was that. She’d barely have time for a shower and nap by the time she got home, and she was too old to keep staying up all night this way.

  Then, just as she was about to abandon Patty, the lights of another vehicle swept the empty street. She dropped back against the car as a Ford pickup rolled slowly past.

  Rachel’s throat constricted. She somehow knew, with utter certainty, that this was the truck she’d seen outside her diner and that it meant Patty harm. She tried to see the license plate, but the spot on the bumper was empty. She realized too late that the plate was displayed in the cab’s back window.

  The girl had reached the top of the hill and turned along the lakefront road. The truck was almost at the corner as well. Except for Rachel, there seemed to be no one around.

  Rachel knew this was the moment. She had to do something; she couldn’t just let Patty be snatched off the str
eet. She looked around for any inspiration and found it in a red Wisconsin W bumper sticker slapped haphazardly on the car hiding her.

  She stood and ran up the hill, deliberately letting her feet slap the sidewalk to make as much noise as possible. “Whooo-EE!” she yelled as if drunk. “Go Badgers! YEAH!”

  Patty turned toward her, then walked on more quickly. The truck stopped, turned in the opposite direction, and drove rapidly away. Rachel reached the corner in time to see Patty rush up the steps to one of the apartment houses. The door slam echoed in the night.

  Rachel put her hands on her knees and bent over, stretching her hamstrings and gasping. Okay, there: princess saved, dragon thwarted. That should make the spirits happy. Now all she had to do was run three miles back to her apartment and grab what little sleep she could before it was time to open the diner again.

  She listened once more for the truck’s motor but heard nothing. Satisfied, she jogged wearily toward home.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  RACHEL, HEAD DOWN, watched her own feet slap on the sidewalk. It was a bad habit, one of the main ones she’d tried to break since taking self-defense classes in college. Walk with your head up, the instructors had warned, as if you can handle anything that comes your way. Looking down implies weakness. And usually she did so, but tonight she was just too tired.

  Which was why she didn’t notice the truck pacing her, lights out, until it was almost too late.

  Her mind was whirling with the night’s events. What did it mean that the lake spirits could pull her from her body at will and send her wherever they wanted? Would it happen again? And why, after displaying only scenes from the past, did they now show her a glimpse of the future? Did it signal some change in the dynamic that had sustained her all these years?

  A tire crunched over a discarded plastic soda bottle. Rachel looked up sharply and saw the truck. Its lights were out, and the dark shape behind the wheel radiated malevolence.

  The outline alone was enough to spook her. With no conscious decision, she ran, cutting across a yard and tearing down the sidewalk toward home. She didn’t glance back to see if the truck followed. By the time she stopped beneath a tree, huddling in its shadow, the vehicle had vanished. She waited to make sure it didn’t reappear.

  Had it been the same truck? She couldn’t be sure. She began to tremble, delayed shock looking for a foothold in her system. She refused to give it one, though, and instead took off toward home, running as fast as her weary legs would go.

  As she ran, her common sense took the time to berate her for being a fool. Was she a detective? A bodyguard? A night watchman, even? No, she was a restaurateur, for God’s sake, a glorified fry cook. All she could do, all she should be expected to do, was pass on information so that the people trained and paid to deal with these problems would know where to look for them. All along she’d assumed the spirits were omniscient, or at least had access to more information than her limited human consciousness. Now she knew better. Who sent a fry cook to do a bodyguard’s job?

  IT SHOULD’VE BEEN enough terror for one night.

  She stopped a couple of blocks from the diner to walk and cool down. Because it was late, and quiet, and she still twitched from adrenaline, anything out of the ordinary stood out in sharp relief. So the black truck parked in front of her diner, engine running, muffled music audible, might as well have been under a spotlight.

  She ducked into the shadow of the old battery factory. Luckily the night’s other events had pretty much burned out her need to panic; now she was only weary and annoyed.

  What next, an alien invasion?

  But this wasn’t the same truck as before. It was newer, a Nissan, and had some sort of writing stenciled on the door. She was at the wrong angle to read it, though.

  She wiped sweat from her eyes with the tail end of her shirt. If she went back to the corner, she could cross the street, go up two blocks, and approach the diner from the other side. Then she could slip in through the back kitchen door, and whoever sat in the truck would never see her. She would, as always, be safe and secure.

  Part of her, though, wanted to force the confrontation, to see the face of whoever was waiting for her. She was angry now and at the end of her patience.

  After the last stalking incident with Curtis the obsessed delivery driver, she swore she would never tolerate such behavior again. She had done nothing to encourage him, yet he left her flowers, sent her cards, and finally began driving past the diner at all hours. She learned to recognize, and dread, the sound of his truck’s diesel engine. Still, it did not terrify her until he began showing up just at closing or right before opening, his angular face pressed against the glass, a smile more predatory than seductive splitting his face. She’d called the police, notified his company, and sworn out a protective order against him. The new driver on his route told her he’d left the state. It had been weeks, though, before she truly felt safe again.

  She had a gun in her apartment, bought right after the Curtis incident. She kept it loaded, cleaned it once a month, and told absolutely no one about it. Not even Helena knew. Given her other secrets, keeping this one was a snap. But she’d always wondered if, in the moment, she could pull the trigger on another human being.

  If they pushed things tonight, she knew. They’d go down. Et tu, babycakes.

  She quickly circled the block and, staying in the shadows, crept to the kitchen door. She slipped her key in the lock and turned it. There was no resistance; the door was unlocked. Only she and Helena had keys, and Rachel never forgot to lock up.

  She opened the door enough to peek inside. It was dark and silent. “Helena?” she hissed. There was no response. More loudly she said, “Helena, it’s me. Are you here?”

  She got no answer. She entered quietly and closed the door behind her, careful to lock it. Then she stayed in the shadows, crept to the front window, and peered out. The truck was there, engine idling, music playing. She still could not make out the words on the door.

  She rushed up the stairs to her apartment. That door was still locked, and she opened it in record time. Without turning on any lights, she went to the dresser. Tainter, sensing her mood, halted midway through his bound of greeting and scampered aside.

  She lifted the gun, reassured by its weight in her hands. It was a short-barreled .38 revolver, the classic Colt “ladies’ gun.” The smell of metal and oil gave her a rush of power. She purposefully strode to the window, the weapon held against her thigh. Carefully, she turned the handle on the blinds so that they slowly angled down.

  She had a clear line of sight at the driver-side tires, and the windshield gleamed with reflected street light. She might not be able to see who was in there, but she could surely take him out.

  Her thumb flicked the safety off. In her mind, her ex-husband, Don, her stalker, Curtis, her lecherous uncle Hammy, all stood before her. You just need to do it until you learn to like it, Don said. I can’t wait to put my tongue all over you, Curtis panted. And worst of all, Hammy, saying in that tone adults use when kids are being stupid, It’s just so you’ll know what to do to your boyfriends when they kiss you, honey.

  None of them believed she’d shoot. They were about to learn different.

  Whoa, she thought suddenly. I am panicking. This is anger, not sense. I’m pissed off because of the other things, not this thing. I should handle this thing differently, before I really mess things up.

  The anger dissipated almost at once, leaving behind a sense of chagrined calm. She closed her eyes, counted slowly to ten, and made sure the rage was gone for good. Then she flicked the safety back on, replaced the gun in her nightstand, and dialed 911. She gave a concise report of the truck sitting outside her building. The operator assured her a car would be sent immediately. She snapped the phone closed, dragged her old bar stool to the window, and waited.

  It took ten minutes, but finally a police car did pull up beside the truck, and its blinding spotlight shone into the cab. After a moment the driver
’s window rolled down and her stalker leaned out into the light. She could see only his dark hair and wide shoulders. But when the door swung open and he stepped out of the vehicle, she immediately recognized him.

  Ethan Walker.

  She gasped as her body, despite all the night’s drama, responded to this realization.

  ETHAN SQUINTED into the policeman’s light and waited politely. Never speak first, Marty always told him. Nothing pisses a cop off worse than a mouthy perp, and a pissed-off cop is more likely to hurt you.

  The thick-bodied black woman looked at Ethan’s driver’s license and saw that it was the same name as written on the door of the truck. She said, “Sir, have you been drinking?”

  “No, ma’am,” Ethan said. The buzz from the pizza place had faded, and he’d picked up a cup of coffee from Denny’s on his way here.

  “Then what are you doing out here?”

  He took a deep breath. There was no point in making anything up. Sheepishly, he said, “I met a girl here yesterday. I don’t know how to get in touch with her. I just sort of… I don’t know, I just wanted to come by. Visit the scene of the crime, you know?”

  “Crime?” the officer repeated.

  “Yeah, you know.” He grinned. “Where she stole my heart.”

  For a moment she kept her stern, straight face. Then she busted out laughing. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Halfway,” he said with a shrug.

  “That might be cute, if you were fourteen. But by all appearances, you’re a grown man.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’d think you’d be able to handle a schoolboy crush a little better than this.”

  “Crush” doesn’t do it justice, he wanted to say. Instead, he said, “I suppose you’re right. I didn’t think it through very well.”