Bethany was easy company and she pronounced him a good listener, which made him feel a little guilty, since he hadn’t been listening so much as letting her words pour in his ear like talk radio. Although he now knew more than he really needed to know about “contouring.” She’d asked intelligent questions about Hellcat Canyon and she was enthusiastic about her job and he was charmed by both of those things and by the simplicity of her happiness. She’d laughed at nearly everything he said, which made him feel more suave than he knew himself to be, and all her innuendos and little touches made it abundantly clear she found him very attractive. It was undeniably pretty pleasant. Maybe not invigorating. But a guy could do worse than pretty pleasant.
He’d dropped her off back with her grandma at Heavenly Shores and told her he hoped he’d see her again, and he made his escape before he felt obliged to make a concrete plan. He was back in his uniform and his cruiser by three o’clock. Looking for crime was oddly the first time all day he’d begun to relax.
He hooked a right back onto Main again. He waved at Greta, who was in her window arranging a stack of books—something about “manifesting,” he could see from the shiny gold letters on their covers—and Lloyd Sunnergren, who was chalking the wordSALE!on an easel board out in front of his feed store, then headed up toward the Angel’s Nest, the big, lacy lilac colored Victorian bed-and-breakfast. From there he could see the The Baby Owls billboard out on the highway, and he imagined seeing Glory up there one day.
He took the on ramp out onto the highway. A few hundred feet later he was surprised to see that instead of fifty-five the speed limit on the side of the sign now read
TITS
And a boy of about twelve years old was shinnying down the pole with a can of green spray paint in his hand.
Eli pulled his cruiser sharply over to the shoulder and grabbed his loudspeaker microphone.
“Hold it right there!”
The kid glanced over his shoulder and then nearly shot skyward out of his jeans in fright. His legs scrabbled futilely on the gravel for a moment, like Fred Flintstone in his Stone Age car, and then he got traction and bolted straight for the bushes in the median.
Eli scrambled out of his cruiser and bolted after him.
The little bastard was fast and low to the ground and Eli felt like he was chasing a damn squirrel. But Eli also had longer legs, he was pissed now, and no one knew better than him how to tackle. He lunged and grabbed a fistful of striped shirt.
The kid thrashed frantically. “Help! Police!”
“Iamthe police, you knucklehead! Stop wiggling!”
The kid’s legs were going like egg beaters. Eli twisted in time to avoid taking a heel in the nuts. He made a grab for the kid’s spray paint and swore again when he came away with a hand sprayed green.
Some days there was just no dignity in this job.
He finally got a look at the kid.
“Aidan? AidanParker? Knock it off. Hold still, for fuck’s sake, or I’ll spray painttitson you.”
This made the little jerk laugh a little and he went limp.
Eli wasn’t about to let go of him. He kept a grip on his arm.
“Deputy Barlow, please don’t tell my dad!”
“Don’t tell your dad you risked your life and limb to spray painttitson a speed limit sign? Yeah, I think he’s gonna want to know.”
Eli already had his phone out. He told Siri to call Parker’s Hardware and conveyed the info tersely over the phone to Aidan’s dad.
Not more than seven minutes later Aidan’s father came screeching up behind Eli in a red Ford F-150. He was already yelling on his way out of the truck.
Aidan’s dad owned the hardware store in town. He’d just inherited it fromhisdad, who’d inherited from his dad, and so forth on down to about 1930 when it first opened.
“Why, Aidan? Are you out of your mind? You could have been killed! Why in God’s name did you risk your life to spray paintthatword?”
“What else would I spray paint?Math?And I can’tdraw.”
This was twelve-year-old logic at its finest.
Eli had a hunch math was a sore point in the Parker household.
“Why do you have to spray paint anything atall?”
Doug and Eli exchanged looks. Honestly, from about Aidan’s age on it was pretty much the only thing on a guy’s mind, and they both knew that. That word, and its various titillating cousins. It emerged in all kinds of inconvenient ways. Eli himself had gotten in trouble for drawing a penis in pencil on a desk when he was twelve. He wouldn’t have gotten caught except Jonah couldn’t stop laughing.
