Free Are You There and Other Stories by Jack Skillingstead Page B

she said.
    He didn’t say anything.
    “You were,” she said.
    “Yeah.”
    Something clutched at her heart. “It’s the best day ever,” she said.
    “I give it a seven point five.”
    “You don’t know anything,” she said. “You got your spooky girl and you had an adventure and you saved the whole world.”
    “When you put it that way it’s a nine. So come on. I’ll buy you a hot drink and you can tell me about the tourists from the fifth dimension.”
    “What time is it?” she asked.
    He looked at his watch. “Five of eleven.”
    “I don’t want a hot drink,” she said. “Can you take us some place with a nice view where we can sit in the Vee Dub?”
    “You bet.”
    The city spread out before them. The water of Elliot Bay was black. Rain whispered against the car and the cooling engine ticked down like a slow timer. It was awkward with the separate seats, but they snuggled together, Kylie’s head pillowed on his chest. He turned the radio on—not to his loud noise music but a jazz station, like a compliment to the rain. They talked, intimately. Kylie invented a life and gave it to him, borrowing from stories her mother and grandmother had told her. He called her spooky, his term of endearment, and he talked about what they would do tomorrow. She accepted the gift of the future he was giving her, but she lived in this moment, now, this sweet inhalation of the present, this happy, happy ending. Then the lights of Seattle seemed to haze over. Kylie closed her eyes, her hand on the explosive sphere, and her mind slumbered briefly in a dark spun cocoon.
    *
    Kylie punched through, and the sudden light shift dazzled her.

Double Occupancy

    C ab Macarron left his patrol car at the state barracks but he didn’t bother to change out of his trooper’s uniform. He picked up Joe Rodriguez at the Penny Diner in Goldbar and they headed straight to the Soams’s place as dusk was descending on the North Cascades. If there was going to be trouble Cab wanted backup. He had played football with Joe in high school. Back then, only five years ago, they had called Rodriguez “The Monster.” He was still a big son of a bitch. Cab and Joe had always stuck together, pulling a three-year hitch in the Marines and then going for troopers.
    Cab’s Jeep Cherokee handily negotiated the county road. The snow was like wedding cake frosting marred once by somebody’s fingers—the narrow tire tracks left behind Nancy’s snappy little Honda Civic. The Honda tracks slewed around pretty good. That car was light , and Nancy had no business coming up here anyway.
    “She called you?” Joe Rodgriguez said.
    “I already said she did.”
    Cab parked behind the Civic. He reached into the Cherokee’s glove compartment for his flashlight, a rugged, four-cell job with a steel cast barrel.
    Their boots made a crumping noise in the snow. Cab pointed his flashlight through the ice-encrusted window of the Honda. It was like peering through clear water, everything appeared wavy, the suitcases and brown grocery bags. Cab could plainly see the AGA logo on the bags.
    “Looks like she’s moving in,” Joe said.
    Cab shot him a glance, measured his friend’s innocent observation, and shook his head.
    “Nancy’s seventeen,” Cab said.
    “She’s got a mind of her own, though.”
    Only Joe Rodriguez, whom Cab had known since boyhood, could get away with telling Cab anything about his kid sister Nancy.
    “I seen it in her before she was twelve,” Joe said, pushing it.
    “Seen what?”
    “That she wasn’t going to stay put,” Joe said. “Not for you or anybody else, not after your mother passed.” Cab’s mother had held the three of them together after Cab’s father was killed in the Panama invasion. A military funeral and a posthumous Medal of Honor didn’t mean a thing to Nancy; she had barely been out of diapers. But for Cab, being handed his father’s Medal of Honor was like being presented with the burden of his own premature