by Junie Coffey
“Are you kidding? Right on! I’ll be back in a flash with the guns and ammo.” He chugged the beer, then took off at a trot around the side of the house and down the street.
Nina sat on the veranda and made her way through a bag of tortilla chips while she waited for Danish. She trained her eyes on Les, enjoying being irritated by him. She watched Les eat his burger. Then she watched as Les painted a birdhouse in what Nina would have thought were bird-repelling black-and-yellow stripes. He must think it looks homey, she thought. It was almost sweet. Almost enough to make her stand down from her mission. But not quite.
Danish came back a short while later, dressed in neon paint-splattered army-surplus fatigues, a plastic toy gun in each hand.
“I could only find pink paint pellets. They’re not that easy to come by around here,” he said.
“That’ll do,” said Nina. “OK. How do I work this thing?” Although she grew up in Maine—big deer, moose, and bear country—she had never learned to shoot a gun.
“Well, you look through the sight at your target, and when you’ve got him in the crosshairs, let ’er rip. Press the trigger,” said Danish.
“Does it hurt?” asked Nina.
“No,” said Danish. “It’s like being pinged with a rubber band. I’ve adjusted the velocity so we can lob the paint pellets at him like Nerf balls.”
“OK. Let’s do it,” said Nina, shaking her head to clear it. She squinted up at the crowns of the palm trees towering over her cottage. The rustling of the fronds was almost deafening. She and Danish sat cross-legged on the edge of the veranda facing Les’s deck, following his movements through their gun sights. Les finished painting his bird feeder and set it on the deck’s railing to dry. He stood at the top of the steps down onto the beach, stretching his arms above his head, then doing a few lunges, oblivious to the crosshairs on his butt.
“Why does he bother you so much?” asked Danish while they waited for Les to stray off his deck into the forbidden zone. “Is it his scrawny little butt? Why don’t you just look the other way? Up the beach toward Fortress Matthews, maybe. In fact, I think you should take a good hard look in the mirror, Nina, and ask yourself this: If that was Ted frolicking on his deck in his birthday suit, would you be so offended? Are you just targeting Les just because he doesn’t have the posterior of a male swimsuit model?”
She turned to look at him sternly. “The point is, Danish, that a normal person like Ted would not do that. Why should I have to suffer for Les’s lifestyle choices? Look! There he goes!”
She retrained her sights on Les and watched him trot down the three stairs onto the beach and stroll toward the water, doing arm circles as he went. Nina began to have second thoughts about the wisdom of her plan. Perhaps shooting Les wasn’t the best tack after all. She started to lower her weapon.
“Oh, I don’t know, Danish. Maybe this is wrong,” she said. As the words left her mouth, Danish pressed the trigger on his paintball gun, and a fraction of a second later, a splat of fluorescent pink appeared on Les’s backside. He yelped and spun, looking around wildly for his assailant. He looked first down the beach toward town, then up the beach toward the fishing lodge. Nina and Danish flattened themselves on the deck of her veranda.
“I didn’t give the word!” hissed Nina.
“I didn’t know that was the plan!” whispered Danish. “I thought this was what you wanted!”
“I know, I know!” said Nina. “We’ve got to get inside before he sees us. If I open the door, he’ll notice.” She crawled on her hands and knees to the edge of the veranda on the side away from Les’s house and rolled off it onto the patchy grass. Crouching, she edged along the side of the house to the front door, Danish right behind her. They straightened up as they rounded the corner. The screen door was unlocked, and they slipped inside, hurrying to peer out the window at the beach in front of Les’s house. He had disappeared.
“I think I may have to reevaluate the Les situation,” said Nina, collapsing onto the chintz sofa. “My strategy might be veering a bit off course. I’m going to have a nap first, then think about it.” She lay down and closed her eyes. A few minutes later, she heard a car drive up and stop in front of Les’s house, then two car doors slamming shut.
“It’s the police!” Danish hissed. “Les called them! If Roker catches me, I’m done. He already has it in for me. He’s never thought I was good enough for Alice.”
“This is my fault,” said Nina. “Go out the beach door and leave through the vacant lot. I’ll take the heat.”
After Danish took off, Nina casually situated herself on the sofa with an iced tea, the paintball guns stuffed under the seat cushion. She felt strangely calm as she waited for the police to knock.
A couple of minutes later, two young officers were at the door, their uniforms too big for their barely postadolescent frames. The one with glasses cleared his throat.
“Ah, Ms. Spark? We’ve had a report of a paintball shot in the area. Have you heard or seen anything unusual?” he asked.
Nina was never very good at lying, and she caved immediately. She held out her hands for the cuffs.
“OK, it was me. Take me away. Let’s go.”
The officers looked at each other, then the same officer motioned for Nina to follow him to the police Jeep. At the station, they put Nina in a holding cell in the basement, and then she was alone. She sat on the hard bench and stared at the wall, trying to clear her still-fuzzy head. She watched a gecko scurry along the wall and up into the rafters. The room didn’t offer much else to look at—the two holding cells along the back wall, a small metal desk and chair, and a poster above a chipped white porcelain sink in the wall opposite reminding everyone to wash their hands.
After several minutes, Nina heard footsteps coming down the corridor toward her. The slow, measured gait of Blue Roker. He entered the room with a couple of file folders in his hand, pausing at the door to look at Nina for a moment before walking over to stand in front of her cell.
His mouth was a straight line, and his eyes radiated annoyance. “So, Nina. You decided to disregard my advice to live and let live and have gone vigilante.”
She looked up at him from the bench. “I know, I know. He’s just so annoying.”
She clutched the edge of the bench with both hands to keep from sliding off. She was feeling a bit dizzy. Blue stared at her for a long moment, his eyes trained on hers. His nostrils flared briefly.
“Yeah,” he said, and turned away from her, crossing the small room to sit at the metal desk. He took a pen out of his shirt pocket, opened a file folder, and proceeded to ignore her. Nina sat on the bench with her head in her hands, watching him read.
“Are you going to charge me, Blue, or what? I don’t think you are allowed to just throw people in jail and leave them there to rot.”
He turned toward her, leaned back in his chair, stretched his long legs out in front of him, and sighed.
“It’s been five minutes. Nina, you are high. Way up in the clouds on your own magic-carpet ride. Your clothes reek of marijuana. I’m keeping you here for your own good. What are you doing? Shooting your neighbor with a paintball gun. Smoking ganja. I’m baffled and, to be honest, disappointed. I thought you were a woman with more sense.”
“It’s a contact high!” Nina protested. “I was trapped in a van all morning with Danish, Razor Hudson, and a couple of local businessmen—Warren and Fuzz? Perhaps you know them? With the windows up and the AC going full blast!”
Something occurred to her. “And may I refresh your memory and remind you that that’s how we know Razor has a major-league grudge against Philip. A motive, you might say. I took a reefer for the team!” She giggled at her own joke.
Blue stared at her, tight-lipped, for a couple of seconds more, then turned back to his papers and started writing again. Nina rested her head against the bars of the cell and watched him. What could he possibly be writing in that big, thick file? She read the Pineapple Cay weekly newspaper. The cri
me reporter usually had so little to report that he had also been assigned the “Dear Auntie” advice column for the lovelorn. And he wrote the recipe section. Blue was left-handed. Very interesting.
He closed the file and pushed it to the edge of the table, then pulled another one closer. He opened it, scanned the first page, then quickly signed the bottom. He did the same with the next page and the next. Requisition orders or other administrative papers of some kind, Nina deduced. How very exciting. This was getting old. She shifted her attention from the files to the man himself.
He was tall and muscular, his hair shaved close to his skull. He had a coiled intensity as he sat folded in the battered metal chair. It was hot in the room with the small, high windows shut and the ceiling fans turning slowly overhead. Nina could feel a trickle of sweat running down her neck and her thin coral-pink T-shirt sticking to her back, but Blue’s khaki uniform was still crisply pressed, his trouser legs tucked into polished black leather boots. He glanced up at the clock on the wall, his ice-blue eyes startling her as they always did. He lowered them again to his paperwork, and it was like a light had blazed briefly and been extinguished.
It occurred to Nina that every time she’d seen him since she arrived on Pineapple Cay, he’d been in uniform. Did he own a pair of jeans? He must do his gardening in civilian clothes. She tried to imagine him in a T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. Sneakers with grass stains on the toes. In a bathing suit, emerging from the surf like Daniel Craig in Casino Royale . . .
“Nina, really!” she whispered aloud to herself. Blue looked up at her for a moment, then back at his paperwork.
Nina scrutinized the chipped pink polish on her nails, thinking—not for the first time—that she really shouldn’t bother with the nail polish. She couldn’t keep up on it. She wanted to be a glamorous woman with polished nails, but maybe that just wasn’t who she was. She looked over at Blue again. She wondered if he was the type of man who liked ladies who wore nail polish, or if he went for the no-frills, outdoorsy type, being a no-nonsense man himself. She wondered if he had a type at all. In her two-plus months on Pineapple Cay, she’d never seen him with a woman or heard about any hot romance involving the chief of police, something she’d think the Pineapple Cay bush telegraph would be all over. Strange. He had the tall, dark, and handsome thing down cold, but if any of the numerous females drawn into his orbit had stuck, Nina hadn’t heard about them. Maybe she’d just ask him.
“So, Blue, did anyone ever tell you that you have the most beautiful eyes in the world?” she said. His pen paused for a millisecond, then he resumed writing, without looking up.
“Of course they have,” she said. “It must get so boring, people always telling you how handsome you are. How smart. How scary.”
He glanced up at her briefly and sighed audibly, then looked back down at the file in front of him. She watched him in silence for a moment, then ran her eyes again over the stained concrete wall, looking for the gecko. It was now watching her with its beady little eyes from the crumbling concrete sill of the small barred window up high in the corner of the cell. Watching her judgmentally, it seemed to Nina. OK, so that was a bit tacky. Flirting with the chief of police while she was in a holding cell. Especially when kind, handsome, upstanding Ted was out somewhere on his boat with his fishing rod, hatless. She giggled. What was wrong with her? She must be high. She rolled her head back toward Blue, who was still reading his file.
“You know, Blue, this place could use a coat of paint. It’s sort of depressing. I saw a documentary once on television where they found that painting prison walls pink made the inmates calmer. Ever heard that?” she asked. No answer. “And upstairs. That’s a really nice, bright office. That dirty blue paint doesn’t suit it. You should paint it a nice fresh green or yellow, and maybe hang a few pictures.”
Still no answer. Blue turned a page in his document and kept reading.
“So, what were you like as a little boy, Blue? Little boy blue.” She giggled. “Did you always want to be a police officer? What did you study at the University of the West Indies?”
Blue looked up at her and sighed. Again.
“Marine biology,” he said shortly. “This is a police station, not a day care center. Although, lately, it is hard to tell the difference. I don’t want people to get too comfortable here. Being locked up is meant to be a deterrent to antisocial behavior.” He looked at her meaningfully.
“Oh, how very interesting,” said Nina, turning her whole body toward him and resting her chin on her palm, and her elbow on her crossed knee.
A man in a faded red T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops shuffled into the room carrying a battered black leather briefcase. He looked to be in his late fifties, with longish gray-blond hair swept back off his face, a lush handlebar mustache, and a small beer belly.
“OK, Roker. My client will not be making a statement, so unless you have the evidence to hold her, I suggest you let her go,” he boomed, ambling toward Nina’s cell.
“Who are you?” asked Nina.
“Frank Carson, attorney-at-law. Duty counsel.”
“I didn’t call a lawyer,” said Nina.
“You think I don’t know everything that goes on around here, sunshine? I know,” he said. “Let me do the talking, okeydokey?” He turned to face Blue.
“What we have here, Deputy Superintendent, is a classic case of he said, she said. Now, I happened to have just run into the complainant on the sidewalk in front of his house, and he is baked like a cake. Can’t clearly say whether the alleged assault came from the right or the left or from on high. Maybe it didn’t happen at all. My client here”—he glanced at the paper in his hand—“Ms. Spark. She does not admit to any wrongdoing. Anything she may have said to you or to your officers to this point, I will argue, has been drawn from her under pressure. So, what have you got, Blue?”
Blue rubbed his temples and stood, his hands on his hips and his weight on one leg. He glared at the lawyer for a couple of seconds, then shifted his gaze to Nina.
“Nina, I know you shot a paintball at Les. You know you did it. He knows you did it,” he said, gesturing at the lawyer. “It’s assault. A very serious charge. Not funny. However, as it happens, Mr. Carson is right. We do not have the evidence to press charges. Please find another hobby.”
“So . . . shall we?” The lawyer looked at Blue and gestured to the big lock on the cell door.
Danish strode into the room just then, brandishing an official piece of paper, which he slapped down on Blue’s desk. “Sharon told me to come on down and give you this,” he said to Blue confidentially, like it was the two of them against Nina and the other miscreants of the world.
“Well, well, Nina. You have been a naughty girl,” Danish said, shaking his head. He had changed his clothes and was now wearing his official Pineapple Cay Postal Service uniform.
Nina glared at him.
“Fortunately, Deputy Superintendent Roker here has shown you some mercy and is releasing you into my custody with a warning. I came as soon as I got the phone call,” Danish said. Nina turned her head to stare at Blue.
“Seriously?”
“What I actually said was that if Mr. Jensen went to the town office and paid your fine, he could come by and give you a lift home. I’ll inform Mr. Jones that justice has been served to its meager limits so he’ll get off my back, and we can all just get on with our day. I’ve got bigger issues to deal with, including fifty conference delegates and assorted members of hotel staff to interview this afternoon.”
Blue pulled a bulky ring of keys from his belt and unlocked the door, giving Nina a stern look as she rose and floated out of the cell.
“Aw, so you were going to let me go, anyway. That’s so sweet.” Nina smiled up at him. He stood aside in stony silence to let her pass.
Danish sidled over to Blue and said to him in a low voice that Nina could still hear, “Just for future reference, Blue, mano a mano, you didn’t do yourself any favors locking her up. It’s a
rare woman who can overlook being thrown in jail by a prospective suitor.”
Blue glared at him with his arms crossed until Danish exited the room, Frank Carson trailing behind. Nina started to follow them with her head down, not wanting to see Blue’s displeased expression, but the police chief caught her by the arm, and she looked up.
“Nina. Do me a favor and go directly home and sleep this off. Please leave Les alone. There’s more to life. All right?”
She smiled up at him. “All right, Blue. Sorry. I’m going to be a model citizen from now on, you’ll see. By the way, thanks for the gardening tip. My hibiscus is perking up.”
Nina could feel Blue’s steely glare on the back of her head as she hurried out of the room.
Mystery lawyer Frank Carson was waiting with Danish on the sidewalk in front of the police station when Nina emerged into the intense sunlight and heat of midafternoon. Frank dug around in his shorts pocket and brought out a bent business card, which he held out to her.
“If anything else comes up, here’s my card,” he said.
“Thanks,” said Nina. She stuffed it in the back pocket off her cutoffs.
“Now, it’s illegal for me to counsel you to destroy evidence,” said Frank, “but it’s possible that Roker will get a search warrant to look around your house for proof that you painted a pink flower on Les’s backside. If the evidence is not there”—he gave Nina a meaningful look—“well, then, that’s that. Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s a cooler full of beer and a few bonefish down near Sandy Point calling my name.”
“Wait,” said Nina as Frank started to walk away. “How did you know I was here?”
Frank fixed her with a pair of sharp hazel eyes from under his bushy eyebrows.
“I’ve been keeping tabs on you since you arrived on-island, sunshine. You’ve got issues with the neighbors, a history of getting mixed up in police matters, and maybe a litigious streak. I’m thinking you could be my retirement plan.”
Retirement from what, exactly? Nina wondered, looking at his flip-flops and T-shirt.
