A Ghost of a Chance (6 page)

The officer towered a good head above Keenan and filled the dark blue uniform out very well. At eye level, Keenan focused on the intricate Portland Police badge that was shining dully in the sparse light. The man could have picked Keenan up and folded him into origami.

“Keenan Swanson. This is my house, sir.”

“Sergeant Thompson. You got any ID?”

Keenan had no idea how he was going to explain this, so he dug into a reserve of brilliance he rarely used. “My cat…”

“Huh?”

“He got out. I chased after him and the door closed. Locked myself out. I swear this is my house.”

Sergeant Thompson wrinkled his nose at him suspiciously and rubbed his chin, giving Keenan enough time to wallow in uncertainty. Keenan’s artistic instincts chose that moment to kick in; Thompson would have made a great model: tall, muscular, an Adonis god with rugged manly features. A guy Keenan was certain could shake the fillings out of his teeth.

They chattered when he said, “You can check with Smith next door. He knows me.”

As if on cue, the porch light on the house alongside Keenan’s puffed away the darkness. The front door opened a slit. He could see the pulsing red and blue lights reflecting off his neighbor’s glasses and nervous white steam escaping into the night.

Phil Smith was a royal pain in the ass and a prissy little fellow, but they were on a forced cordial basis, so Keenan hoped he’d ID him.

Thompson nodded to one of the officers, but before he could move, Phil closed the door to slide the chain off the latch then opened it quickly scooting outside before a draft could break into his warm house. Wrapping his arms around his shoulders, he crunched his way across the icy grass in his slippers and stopped well away from them. Looking like an avenging accountant, he eyed Keenan as if he were a serial killer.

Thompson hooked a thumb in Keenan’s direction. “You know this guy?”

Phil took off the frameless glasses and rubbed them against the sleeve of his robe, elongating the torment. When he put them back on, he peered at Keenan and nodded.

“Absolutely, officer. That’s my neighbor Keenan Swanson. Has he done something wrong?” The question was spontaneous, gleeful, and it made Keenan sore.

“Good night, sir,” the officer said. “Go back home. We’ll take care of this.”

“I always thought he was a little shifty…crazy too.” Smith was relishing the experience and Keenan made a mental note to have one of his posse scare the bejesus out of him later.

Thompson pressed a button attached to a wire on his shirt. “7-2-2 clear. Stand down from alert.” He turned to the other two officers and pulled a key out of his pocket. “Thanks, guys. I’ll finish this up.” The two nodded simultaneously and headed for their cruisers. Thompson turned Keenan around with one quick push.

As the patrol cars pulled away, the cop fitted the key into the cuffs and turned it, releasing Keenan’s hand, and then scowled at the loitering neighbor.

“Good night, sir.” This was an order and a good one. Smith turned on his heel and flitted back to his house in a heartbeat, slamming the door behind him.

When Keenan was loose, Thompson surveyed the house by running his flashlight over the structure, stopping at the broken window. “That the only way in?” he asked.

“Yeah.” Keenan had no idea what was on the cop’s mind and didn’t like it much.

“Meet me at the front door, sir.” Thompson slurred the title apparently still not trusting Keenan. Without preamble, the large cop pulled out the rest of the glass and slid through the open window disappearing into the darkness. Keenan made his way to the front porch.

After an agonizing series of long seconds, the front door finally opened and Keenan scooted inside. The heat felt good but didn’t take away the weakness in his legs. Thompson’s jaw was so tight Keenan could barely see his lips.

“I’ll need to see that ID. Where is it?”

“Uh…” Keenan’s brain went on break and it took him a moment to locate the memory containing his wallet. “It’s in my jeans in the bedroom.”

“Come with me, sir.” Thompson didn’t wait for a reply, and Keenan was an obedient shadow behind him as they made their way through the house.

When they got to the bedroom, Keenan flicked the light switch, but it didn’t work. He tried the hall light and it flared on but didn’t send much in the way of illumination through the door.

He scurried through the darkness to find his pants and pull out his wallet, crunching glass under his rubber soles. Disentangling it from the inside-out jeans with shaking fingers took forever, but it finally gave with a good tug. The stuffed old leather overflowed with cards of all kinds, some expired, some not, along with lots of miscellaneous junk. Buried in the back somewhere, it took Keenan a few seconds to extract his driver’s license from the tight wad.

When he handed it over, the burly man in blue rumbled at the ID under his flashlight and finally handed it back. That was when he leveled a stern look at Keenan. He played his light over the broken glass, disheveled bed, and scattered remnants of Keenan’s personal life.

“Would you care to explain this?” he growled.

Keenan did some dancing.

“Mice,” he said. “Big ones.”

Apparently, Officer Thompson had no sense of humor since he didn’t even crack a smile. He tucked his flashlight into his belt, then put one hand on his holster and the other on his nightstick, obviously trying to figure out which he should use first.

Keenan put up his hands and tried to smile. “Kidding…sorry. Chasing the cat…”

Thompson shook his head and turned for the door. Keenan barely made his way past the officer to show him through the house.

When Keenan led him to the front door, the officer gave his house a professional once over with his eyes and left without saying another word.

Keenan closed the door carefully, turned his back to it, and slid to the floor. This had been one hell of a night.

Chapter Five
Apparition Advice

When Keenan was twelve his mother married husband number six, Jack, a brute of a man who worked as a longshoreman on Swan Island. Jack wasn’t like a lot of the others; he was mean right down to the bone. A yeller by trade, Jack sat on his ass more than he worked. The only exercise this guy got as far as young Keenan was concerned was a daily workout that involved smacking the boy around the room. Keenan got to the point where he thought everyone heard ringing in their ears.

On a very dark November night a day after his fourteenth birthday (which was only noted as a black scribble on the calendar hanging on the fridge), Keenan got home from his job at the bread store to hear a loud shouting match coming from his house. He stopped on the sidewalk and contemplated just turning around and heading back to work another shift, but his hunger proved a stronger impulse. He thought he could sneak in and just grab a quick bite first.

The row was nothing unusual; hell, the two went at each other pretty much every night lately. When he walked through the door, before he even hung up his backpack, a loud slap and a thump echoed into the kitchen followed by his mother’s scream.

What Keenan did next surprised the hell out of him. It wasn’t that he and his mother were exactly close; he spent hours figuring out ways to avoid her. It wasn’t even the fact that she was his mother. What goaded him into action was something ingrained into him by her from the day he was born. A man
never
strikes a woman.

He found himself charging straight for the son of bitch at full speed. Another
smack
,
smack
,
smack
got his legs moving even faster. Keenan wasn’t a big boy at fourteen, but he had hit his spurt early so he was tall and what his mother used to call gangly. Six hours kneading bread at the store every day for the last two years had given him a healthy set of arms and shoulders.

When he reached Jack, Keenan grabbed him by the back of his shirt, twisted his hands in the fabric until Jack’s arms were pulled almost straight back, and lifted him off his feet. The smell of cheap gin, cigarettes, and sweat added fodder to his anger.

Jack countered the action by bringing his head back and hitting Keenan hard on the collarbone. It hurt like hell and Keenan let go. When Jack turned around with a solid right, Keenan ducked, but not very well. The fist caught him squarely on the side of the face, and he went flying. He hit the wall at full speed, but fortunately, his backpack took the brunt of the impact.

Jack didn’t wait for him to catch his breath. He charged at young Keenan with fists curled, teeth bared, and a roar of alcoholic rage. The booze was making Jack sloppy or he would have figured out what Keenan would do next. When Jack was almost on top of him, Keenan lifted both of his long legs from the ground and caught Jack right in the stomach. Jack doubled over Keenan’s feet and Keenan pushed with all his might. Jack’s body hit the far wall at full impact. He crumpled into a heap on the floor groaning.

Keenan got up off the carpet and bent over to get air back into his lungs. His mother jumped up and for the first time in years, he thought she was going to hug him. He was wrong.

When his mother reached him, she hauled off and slapped him across the face. “You son of a bitch! You hurt him!” The gin-drenched words permeated every inch of his awareness and cut his heart in half. She ran to her drunken husband and cooed over his misfortune.

Keenan didn’t stay. He pulled the front door open with such force he heard glass break on the wall behind it. He didn’t care. Leaving the door open, Keenan disappeared into the night.

Why that particular recollection happened to snap into his mind at that moment was beyond him.

He had had an entire night to get his tangled nerves to behave, but it was no good; he just couldn’t get it out of his head and had been too exhausted to stay at home and confront his broken bedroom anymore. Keenan had finally stumbled to the Bagdad Theater Saturday afternoon for popcorn and a micro-brew, his favorite comfort food. But the movie was as listless and depressing as his mood, so he left early.

As he passed the yuppie shops on his way home from the theater, the memory of Jack stood up between his ears like a marauding bear. It made his stomach cringe and usually he pushed it down as quickly as it came up, but now it was stark against the inside of his eyelids. He forced his mind to think instead about what happened later that night.

He was so enraged, young Keenan started to walk. The pounding of the sidewalk was all he was aware of for hours. It barely registered, but as he moved along, each streetlight he passed went dark, some in a shower of sparks. Something wrong with the electricity, maybe, but he didn’t care; heartsick and numb, Keenan finally decided to let his feet take him wherever they wanted to go. Where he ended up startled him at first, but it eventually made a kind of sense.

Laurelhurst Park was an oasis tucked in the middle of southeast Portland. Thirty acres of lush stands of green, expanses of well-tended lawns, and a huge pond that housed hundreds of swans, geese, and ducks, the park had been a mainstay of Keenan’s childhood. His best memories were of chasing the squawking birds and throwing pieces of stale bread to feed them.

His feet apparently knew something he didn’t because when they finally stopped it was at the edge of that same pond.

Keenan figured it must have been midnight. Low clouds had snuck in while he walked, obscuring the stars, the moon, and anything else that might have been in the sky that night. He had never been to the park this late; it was pitch black except for the far away lights on the street that surrounded it.

Apparently, the birds had all gone to bed because there wasn’t a sound except the swish of the water as it lightly lapped the shore.

He sat down on the bank and finally let the tears come. It was only the second time in Keenan’s life that he allowed grief to take over his self-control. The first had been when his mother had forgotten him when he was four and no one could find her. She appeared the next morning all sunshine and apologies, but even at that ripe young age, Keenan knew she had spent the night at the bar… or somewhere even more unsavory.

The tears on this particular night were abundant; they washed over his heart until everything trembled into sobs. He wasn’t sure how long he sat there, but finally the tears dried up and he was able to breathe without the waterworks. A kind of euphoria settled over his shoulders that spun the matter between his ears. He felt better.

With a final deep sigh, he focused on the water, uncertain what his next move should be. A mist had gathered over the lake until it hung in a sheet of white that illuminated the trees around him. Keenan was impressed; he had never seen fog this thick.

It was only then that something caught his eye… something that shouldn’t exist.

The clouds parted and out of the water rose a black woman in a ratty blue housedress with large curlers all over her head. She had no legs that he could see, and he could just make out the lake
through
her. It was very disconcerting and Keenan couldn’t make any sense out of it.

Apparently, there
were
geese on the water because all of a sudden the air exploded with their noisy squawks, their wings flapping like crazy, their necks thrust out toward the opposite shore as they churned little yellow legs as fast as they would go.