Red Tide

by G. M. Ford

  “We hit mirrors,” Stevie said disgustedly.

  Dougherty slid across the seat and peered along the side of the cab. Where the side view mirror had once been was now nothing more than a jagged pair of torn-out screw holes in the yellow sheet metal. She turned in the seat, looking for the truck, but the bus completely blocked her view.

  “Oh…man…I’m gonna be in deep shit over the mirror,” Stevie said as he wheeled wildly down the street. “Gonna get my ass fired for sure.”

  “The damage is on me,” Dougherty breathed. “You just catch him.”

  He snuck a peek over his shoulder, making sure she was serious, and then floored it.

  The street ahead was temporarily clear. “Come on…come on,” she whispered as they raced down Denny Way, her hopes fading with every passing block.

  Halfway down the hill, a yellow Penske truck was trying to turn left onto Summit Avenue, holding a dozen vehicles hostage as a steady stream of uphill traffic prevented the maneuver. Brian Bohannon and the gray van were third in line behind the truck.

  “There’s our boy,” Stevie said.

  Dougherty dove forward, once again hanging over the driver’s seat and peering intently out through the windshield. “Sure is,” she said. She clapped him on the shoulder.

  The van was ten cars in front of them. They sat and waited. Another dozen vehicles crawled uphill before the truck was able to make the turn onto Summit.

  Stevie glanced over at the torn metal where the side view mirror used to be and then turned to meet her gaze. “You sure you don’t wanna just call the cops on this guy?” he wanted to know. “This is getting hairy.”

  “No,” was all she said.

  He lifted his hands from the wheel in an unspoken question. She answered.

  “I don’t know, man,” she said. She stared straight ahead as the traffic began to move. “I used to dream about what I’d do to him…all the ways I’d make him pay for turning me into a freak…” Stevie began to object, but she kept on. “How I’d sit in court and watch him get sent off to prison. Or even better how I’d take care of him myself. How I’d…” She stopped…shook her head once and clamped her mouth shut.

  Stevie fed the cab some gas. Several cars turned off, disappearing this way and that, reducing the number of vehicles between the cab and the van to five. Stevie closed the gap.

  “What were you gonna do to him?” he asked.

  She shook her head again. Made a wry face. “It all seems so silly now,” she said.

  “And you ain’t no freak,” Stevie said with a mock frown. “That’s no way to be talkin’ about yourself.” He waved a hand and put on a boyish smile. “You keep that kinda talk up and I’m gonna have to ask you to vacate the cab.”

  Before she could reply, the van made a sharp left. The cab hustled up the street and followed suit. By the time they rounded the corner, the van was making another turn, right, downhill again, toward Olive Way. “He used to live on this block,” Dougherty said. “Back when we first met.” Stevie snapped off the headlights.

  A series of images flashed across her mind’s eye. Of parties that ran long into the night, parties where nobody ever had to be anywhere in the morning, where the politics involved ridding the world of corporations, and their long-range plans never ventured further than the following week. She could see him there with his Billy Idol hair and that smug smirk on his lips, as if to say he had no doubt about anything, when if you knew him at all, you could see right away it was just for show, and under all the bullshit was a scared little boy who knew he was never going to live up to his rich parents’ expectations and so had decided not to try, had decided to go the other way so that nobody, not even his worst tormentors, could say he’d failed…only that he’d chosen a different path.

  Stevie pulled to a stop. A block down, the van was backing into a parking space. They sat in the darkness, watching Bohannon take three tries to work the van to the curb.

  “Shitty driver,” Stevie commented as they watched the lights go out and Brian Bohannon’s shadowed form appear on the sidewalk, hands thrust deep in his jacket pockets as he headed down the hill at a loose-jointed shamble.

  Dougherty popped the door handle and stepped out. A car rounded the corner at the head of the street, its ultrabright halogen lights sending Dougherty’s shadow halfway down the block. She shaded her eyes and waited for the car to pass, but apparently the driver was otherwise occupied. The car didn’t move. Just sat there, lights ablaze, throwing a painful purple glare over the entire block.

  Dougherty leaned down and looked into the cab. In the bright artificial light, Stevie looked like he had only half a face. “I’m gonna…” she began.

  He nodded. “I’ll meet you at the Starbucks on Olive,” he whispered.

  And then, without warning, the lights went out and the street faded to black. She jerked her eyes in that direction. Blinked a couple of times. The car was gone. No headlights. No taillights. No nothing.

  She had only a split second to wonder. Brian Bohannon had nearly a full block lead on her. Another short stretch of sidewalk and he’d be down on East Olive, where the lights grew brighter while her chances of going unnoticed grew dimmer.

  She reached down, pulled off her shoes and began to jog down the street with the black pumps bouncing in her hand like a scuffed bouquet.

  The sidewalk was uneven, cracked by time, heaved by tree roots, the concrete slabs tilted this way and that like some funhouse promenade. She kept her eyes on the uneven ground as gravity pulled her into a full run that stretched her long legs until her hip joints began to loosen and she settled into her stride.

  Her bouncing eyes watched him turn right, up the little sliver of street that fronted the Hillcrest Market. She was thirty yards away and closing quickly when he turned along the front of the market and disappeared from her view.

  She short-legged it to a stop. She could feel the rough sidewalk through the freshly worn holes in the bottoms of her stockings. Her mouth hung open, but she was breathing easily as she peeked around the corner. No Brian.

  Another step forward and she could see into the store. He was at the counter, buying cigarettes. Waving his hands around, making small talk with the four hundred pounder on the other side of the counter.

  Dougherty crossed the side street, angling over to a small traffic island and a pair of battered utility poles. She settled into the semidarkness just in time to watch Brian emerge from the market. Through the space between the poles, she watched as he opened the cigarettes, shook one out into his hand and then lit it with his silver Zippo lighter and a practiced flip of the wrist. He liked to think he smoked like James Dean. All cool and casual like. His hair was dark now and combed forward in a series of waves. Working the butt, he watched the passing parade until he spotted a break in the oncoming traffic and then stepped off the curb, all squinty-eyed, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.

  He got three steps into the street when she heard the roar of an engine rise above the hiss of traffic. Brian must have heard it at just about the same time because he snapped his head around toward the dark blue Mercedes sedan screaming up the hill, full-tilt boogie, lights out, coming right at him like a high-end German missile. He started back for the sidewalk, but slipped and went to one knee in the street, before scrambling to his feet and limping back the way he’d come.

  The driver must have been drunk. As he rocketed closer and closer, he began to veer toward the right almost as if he was intentionally trying to catch Brian before he made it to the curb. Nearly on him now, the driver snapped on the headlights as if to fix his quarry in the beam at the moment of collision.

  Involuntarily, Dougherty turned to face the terror. She pressed her back into the rough surface of the poles. The car, lights ablaze, engine screaming, was now coming right at her. She opened her mouth to scream, but all that came out was a hoarse croak, the sound of which was swallowed whole by the scream of the approaching Mercedes.

  The right fr
ont tire bounced over the curb six feet away from her. She closed her eyes and waited for the impact…and then…a violent whoosh of air stirred her clothes and the heat of an engine rose to her cheeks as the driver veered back into the street, missing Dougherty and the telephone poles by no more than a couple of feet.

  Breath raced like a hurricane in her chest. Her knees shook so badly that, had it not been for the utility poles, she would have dropped to the ground. And then she remembered Brian. And the evils she’d mentally visited upon him over the years. The horrific pictures she’d savored. Pictures of his bent and broken body as it paid in blood for what he’d done to her in ink. And…she began to cry.

  She turned slowly and flattened her chest against the poles. The smell of creosote filled her nostrils as she drew in a long breath and held it. And then she heard his labored breathing and the small keening sound that was coming from his chest. He sat on the pavement, gathering himself. She watched as he struggled to his feet and then staggered out of view. Dougherty pressed her cheek against the rough wood and listened to his heels clicking on the pavement. After a moment she peeked around the utility poles and watched Bohannon limp back up the side street toward the van. His gait was unsteady and his line crooked as he moved from shadow to streetlight and back until finally, about halfway back to the van, he stepped into a thick blotch of shadow and…then…somehow…never stepped out. She waited, staring intently into the darkness. Her eyes thought they detected a sudden rush of movement in the darkness, almost as if he was dancing, and then, above the rumble of traffic, perhaps the sound of a strangled cry. And then nothing. Nothing at all.

  She hurried up the street, taking advantage of a break in the traffic, loping diagonally through the intersection, all the way to the far curb and then up the opposite side of the street, staying in the deep shadows as she moved abreast of the spot where she’d lost sight of him. A narrow alley running between apartment buildings. At the far end of the passage, a glint of light on metal caught her attention and she thought she could make out a car, its headlights dark, as it bounced backward across the sidewalk and disappeared from view.

  9

  Corso rested his cheek on one of the rear tires and watched as the robot rolled back out onto the sidewalk. The fireman in the orange haz-mat suit and breathing apparatus waved his arms, signaling the operator to stop while he untangled the plastic from the rear of the device. Then waved again when the robot was free.

  The operator spoke into his microphone. His partner in the suit nodded that he’d heard and reached for the back of the robot, where he pulled open a panel and reached inside. Corso didn’t get a chance to see what the guy was removing. Up the street, where the cops had all the people collected, all hell suddenly broke loose.

  A woman screamed, not in agony, not in pain, but with a guttural bellow of outrage and hate. Corso rolled over twice and peered uphill between the front wheels. A riot had broken out. Hoarse shouts filled the night air. He inched forward for a better view. A deep voice was screaming the same thing over and over, something about fascist Nazi bastards.

  The crowd had pushed over the sawhorses and spilled out of the enclosure, battling the cops hand to hand in the street. At the front of the impromptu skirmish line, a middle-aged man wore a strip of yellow police tape across his chest like a beauty queen while swinging wildly with a briefcase, lashing back and forth, then finally coming straight down as if he were chopping wood, until the case shattered on the nearest cop’s plastic helmet, driving the cop to his knees with the force of the blow, breaking open the case, spewing the contents into the street, where the swirling breeze separated sheet from sheet until the spilled paperwork roiled around their ankles like an angry flock of pigeons.

  The cop was halfway back to his feet when an angular African-American woman threw herself onto his back, driving him down again, forcing him to duck and cover himself from the hail of fists and knees and elbows which she directed his way. She was screaming at the top of her lungs. Something about her children, Corso thought. Totally out of control, tight black skirt forced up over her ample hips, her pantyhose torn to pieces by the violence, she windmilled her fists and knees into the downed cop with a strength generally only seen in moments when maddened mothers summon sufficient adrenaline to lift automobiles from their stricken children.

  Corso pulled his eyes upward. The scene he’d been watching was being repeated all over the street as enraged citizens fought the police in a frenzy. He watched as another line of helmeted cops waded into the fray, holding their batons in front of them like steel offerings, only to be driven back by the frenzy of the mob.

  The nearest of the reinforcements spotted the downed cop and moved directly to the rescue. He threw his baton around the kneeling woman’s throat and lifted her completely off the ground. Her eyes bulged in her head as she clawed desperately at the steel shank crushing her throat. Her long legs flailed in the air as she fought for breath.

  Corso watched her eyes roll back in her head, and still the cop applied more pressure. He wanted to shout but stopped himself. He could see the moist pink interior of her mouth when, without willing it so, he found himself moving. Scuttling forward on his belly until he was out from under the front of the van and then on his feet. Took him three long strides to get to the barrier and another second to duck beneath. She hung limp now, only her twitching fingers in motion. That’s when things got dicey up on the hill, pulling the cop’s head around, loosening his choke hold until the woman dropped on the pavement in a heap and he hurried toward the riot. Corso slid to a stop.

  He felt the blood heat in his face. His breath was shallow and his hands were knotted so tightly his fingers ached. The woman had rolled to her knees and was puking in the street. In between heaves, she looked around uncomprehendingly and gasped for air. Corso pulled his eyes from her and looked up the hill toward the flailing mass of bodies filling Yesler Street.

  The crowd had taken the street. Outnumbered and outgunned, they were nonetheless pushing the line of cops backward. Batons swung wildly in the night. Screams and curses assaulted the ears. The crowd had taken on the look of a single beast, a throbbing collection of arms and legs moving to and fro and nowhere at all as the give and take surged from curb to curb and back again.

  An SFD SUV bounced over the curb, rocked to a halt on the sidewalk, wedged between the mammoth cop van and the boarded-up windows of a defunct bodega. The doors burst open and four firemen clomped up the hill to reinforce the cops. The sight of their brethren in motion sent the robot’s operator and his orange-clad partner hurrying up the street to join the fray. Corso watched as the arrival of the reinforcements stopped the retreat and, by sheer weight of numbers, began to force the crowd backward.

  At the crucial moment in the conflict, when things could have gone either way, something flickered in his peripheral vision. He swung a glance over in the direction of the robot…and there she was. Like she’d been beamed down from space. Stepping out of the mouth of an alley on the north side of Yesler Street. Maybe five-eight in her low heels. Striking features, blonde hair cut short, wearing a black raincoat that stopped just above her shapely ankles. Her eyes met his, sending a chill down his spine. Even at a distance, something cold and disinterested rolled from her gaze. A gaze that made it clear…if it was mercy you were looking for, you’d better look someplace else because around here that shit was in short supply. She looked him over like a lunch menu. As her eyes crawled over him, he thought he saw a slight flicker, as if in recognition, before she began to move, covering the ten yards to the mouth of the bus tunnel, where she pushed the plastic back, threw Corso one last look and stepped inside. Corso watched dumbfounded as the apparition slid across the concourse, hesitated for a moment at the top of the stairs and then disappeared from view.

  He never got a chance to decide what came next. “You,” the rough voice boomed. “Over against the wall. Now! Move it.”

  Another half dozen officers had abandoned their motorcycle
s and squad cars to help with the battle in the street. A burly motorcycle cop pointed a black glove at Corso. “Get up there with the others,” he screamed.

  Corso gestured toward the puking woman, whose lower lip was now joined to the pavement by a silver filament of spit. “She’s hurt,” he said.

  He fixed Corso with an angry stare. The cop was torn. Part of him wanted to vent his rage…right there…right then. Another part wanted to throw his anger into the surging crowd. A sudden series of shouts and curses and a final surge from the crowd helped him make up his mind.

  “You stay right here,” he yelled, shaking a fist at Corso. “You hear me?”

  He was already running uphill by the time Corso assured him he wasn’t going anywhere. Corso stepped over and went to one knee at the woman’s side. Uphill…away from the path of the thick stream of vomit.

  She twisted her neck far enough to look into his eyes. Beneath the dark roast brown, her complexion had taken on a burgundy tinge, as if the skin were merely floating on an ocean of blood. Her eyes had leaked water down her cheeks, and she’d lost one of her gold hoop earrings.

  “You gonna be okay?” Corso asked.

  She gave a small nod and then reached out and grabbed his sleeve. “My…” she croaked. Swallowed twice and tried again. “My children…”

  Corso put his hand on her shoulder. She was trembling like an idling engine.

  “I gotta go,” he said. “Everything’s gonna be all right.”

  She reached for him again, as he got to his feet. He took a step back and looked around. The crowd had turned its collective shoulder and was grudgingly giving ground. An umbrella lashed out from the crowd, its wicked point deflected by a black visor. Out in the middle of the melee somebody bull-rushed the officers and was quickly thrown back.