Chapter 3
They were gone by the time I could take a full breath.
I got to my feet. I made my way to the mouth of the alley.
The music from a calliope rolled down from the next intersection, mixed with the familiar, excited babble of tourists.
They thronged the block: a man shepherded two sulky tweens across the street with zero regard for oncoming traffic (Deputy Bobby would have had a fit), and a middle-aged woman was blocking half the sidewalk as she tried to button up a quilted parka (this is a Pacific Northwest thing—I mean, it was June and people acted like they were polar explorers), and two excited little girls had decided this was an opportune moment to test drive their new hobby horses (literally, not figuratively).
But there was no sign of the two women who had—what was the polite way to say beat the crap out of me?
My hands were scraped. My shoulder throbbed. And—I discovered a moment later—my wallet was gone.
My wallet was gone?
But it was. And when I went back and checked the alley, I didn’t find it. I remembered one of the women poking and prodding at me, and the only conclusion seemed to be that they’d taken my wallet. And my ice cream.
So, maybe I hadn’t been too far off when I’d called this whole debacle a heist. I mean, heists—by their nature—always involved more than one person. And these ladies were clearly in the business of heists—not just my ice cream or my wallet, but also, I suspected, that beach bag full of clothes.
So, what was I going to do about it?
I could tell Deputy Bobby, but there were two problems with that.
First, by the time I found him, the women would probably be gone.
The second woman had said they needed to find Phyllis and leave, and that sounded like they weren’t going to stick around while I pulled Deputy Bobby away from traffic duty.
If they got away, I didn’t think I’d be able to track them down—I didn’t have a good description (aside from that hideous hat), and I only had a first name.
There were probably a fair number of women called Joan, especially of a certain age.
The other (more serious) problem was that I’d look like a wuss.
I mean, I hadn’t exactly taken it like a man when a little old lady had stolen my ice cream cone.
And while Deputy Bobby and I were just friends (I mean, even if I’d wanted it to be something more—which I didn’t—he already had a boyfriend), the thought of running back to him with my tail between my legs, to tell him a story about how some senior citizens were mean to me—well, that was too much for my already shattered dignity.
That was that. I was going to have to find them myself.
It turned out not to be quite as simple as I’d imagined.
“One of them had white hair,” I explained to a mom. She was busy wrangling a boy who was trying to peg passersby with an old-fashioned yo-yo. “And the other had an ugly hat. I mean, truly hideous.” My earlier flash of genius came back to me. “Like if Tinkerbell threw up.”
The mom stared at me; she dodged the yo-yo, without even seeming to see it, as it whistled toward her head. And then she looked around.
I followed her gaze, and my heart sank.
Just about every third person was a white-haired lady. And ugly hats—sun hats, bucket hats, knit caps, trucker hats—stretched as far as the eye could see.
The mom drifted away in pursuit of the yo-yo-wielding boy, but I barely noticed.
It wasn’t that the tourists who came to Hastings Rock were exclusively senior citizens.
But, on the other hand, they did make up a large share of our visitors.
I mean, this was the Oregon Coast—it wasn’t exactly where the next episode of The Real World was going to be filmed.
(Was The Real World still even a thing? Did young people say filmed?) How was I going to find these women before they escaped with my wallet and whatever else they’d managed to steal?
Okay, I told myself: think.
Hastings Rock wasn’t a big town, and the tourist section was even smaller.
Since these women were taking advantage of the crowds of out-of-towners (evidence: the beach bag, the ugly hat, the fact that the shopkeepers were easily distracted by other customers), it made sense that their friend Phyllis would be somewhere in the tourist section too.
And that narrowed my search considerably, to a matter of a few blocks along the waterfront and Main Street.
I set out at a brisk walk. In my head, I divided the tourist section of town into a grid, and I began a methodical search.
It was slow going, not only because of the tourists (one dad type was so enthused about being in Hastings Rock that he was having his son take a picture of him with a trash can), but because the layout of the tourist section was, frankly, a maze.
The town hadn’t originally been laid out with a shopping district in mind, and so as the tourism industry had reshaped the waterfront and Main Street, buildings had been changed, adapted, and, on many occasions, thrown up on every available inch of ground, so that shopping plazas and courtyards branched off the street in every direction.
Ten minutes later, I spotted them: the ugly hat was unmistakable (the fact that it was threaded with tinsel helped catch the eye), and I recognized the lady named Joan (who had stolen my ice cream cone).
They were with a third woman who had to be in her sixties and was built like a linebacker, and between the three of them, they were carrying at least a dozen bulging beach bags.
It looked like they’d hit the stores pretty hard; I’d heard from locals that shoplifting was a real problem during the tourist season, but these women were taking it to a new level.
What I wanted to know, though, was how they were going to get out of town.
They couldn’t walk, not carrying their ill-gotten loot (was it only loot if you were a pirate?), so where was their vehicle?
As though in answer to my question, the women turned down a narrow cobblestone pathway between a candlemaker and a place that sold bronze busts of weird old man heads.
(If it’s artsy, you can buy it in Hastings Rock.) I picked up the pace—the winding paths off the street could take them all sorts of different places, and I didn’t want to lose them.
I jogged down the cobblestone path, which was empty, and my steps rang out and echoed back from the buildings on either side of me—a shuttered bookstore, a psychic parlor with the windows papered over, a café that must have closed years ago, its faded sign reading PAQUI’S.
The air smelled faintly like mildew and brine and, strangely, like glue.
The path opened onto a small asphalt lot with a handful of cars. I had a moment to think that this must have been their plan—to get away in a vehicle they’d hidden off the main street. And then a shoe scuffed the pavement, and something jabbed me in the back.
“Don’t move,” a gruff voice said.
I didn’t move. In the first place, because I was too busy cursing myself out for having stumbled into what had to be the most obvious trap in the history of the world. And in the second, because I was pretty sure this person—the Phyllis, I assumed—was holding a gun to my back.
There was something strange about the gun, though. The shape of it, I mean. It didn’t feel right. And while I didn’t exactly have a lot of experience with guns, I’d recently had someone else try to hold me at gunpoint, and let me tell you: the memory is vivid.
Before I could pinpoint what felt different, a hand grabbed my shoulder and turned me toward a line of Port-a-Potties. Phyllis shoved me into one and slammed the door. Something scraped across the ground outside, and then there was a heavy thunk against the Port-a-Potty’s door.
“Come on,” Phyllis said in that same gruff voice. “We need to go.”