There was a pretty good crowd at the Frostee Freeze, and it was a crowd that was in an exceptionally good mood, mostly from the absence of the more rowdy and arrogant of the football players and the knowledge that they weren’t likely to be showing up.

It didn’t take long for Alan and Summer to find Lyle; he was sitting alone at one of the picnic tables. “Hey Lyle,” Alan asked the big guy, “how’s it going?”

“Oh, not too bad,” he replied. “It’s busier than I thought it was going to be tonight. Ashley thought that it might be a little slow and we’d be able to talk some. That sure hasn’t been happening.”

“Yeah, the place is pretty busy,” Summer agreed. “You mind if we join you?”

“Not at all, glad to have you,” Lyle said. “If I can’t spend the evening with Ashley I’d just as soon spend some time talking with you. Ashley tells me that the two of you are getting to be quite the item.”

Alan and Summer sat down across the table from Lyle. “We’ve been spending some time together,” Alan explained, downplaying the relationship just a little. “So you’ve been hanging out with Ashley, I take it.”

“Well, some anyway,” the big guy admitted. “We spent most of yesterday afternoon just hanging out, and then this afternoon we went down to Camden to catch a flick before she had to go to work. Oh, well, if we don’t get a chance to spend much time together tonight, there’s always tomorrow. So what have the two of you been doing with yourselves?”

“Oh, just hanging out ourselves,” Alan said. “We’ve been trying to write a role-playing game to pass the time. It’s been fun, but we’ve sort of hit a snag.”

“I always thought it would be fun to mess around with role playing games,” Lyle smiled. “What’s this about?”

“Well, Christians versus Pagans, back in the middle ages,” Alan explained. It had mostly been his idea, although Summer had contributed a lot to it. “Back in the days of witch burnings, torture chambers, and inquisitions. Mostly the Christians trying to capture the Pagans, and the Pagans trying to live their own lives, avoid the Christians, and get even where they can.”

“Sounds pretty good,” Lyle grinned. “I’ll bet it can get pretty wild. What’s it like to play?”

“The problem is that we don’t know,” Summer admitted. “It’s broken down into modules, just so we can make sense out of writing it. We’ve been able to play some of the smaller modules to get an idea of how they’re going to fit into the game, but we haven’t been able to set up a trial run of the whole game yet. We think it’s going to take eight or ten people to play well, and we just don’t have enough people. Jack Erikson and Vixen Hvalchek have offered to help out, but they’re not gamers. They’d really rather be out looking at birds.”

“Yeah, that could be a problem” Lyle admitted. “Like I said, I don’t know much about those kind of things, but I’d be willing to learn. What’s more, I’ll bet Ashley would be interested, too. We sort of talked around things that we could be doing yesterday and today, and it would be fun to hang out with some people who are interested in using their minds a little. Tell me more about this game, why don’t you?”

It was no great trick for the officers down near the bonfire to help pour the three kids that weren’t capable of walking into the bass boat. The two guys were drunk and puking, and not really aware of what was happening. Sheriff Stoneslinger figured he was going to have a hell of a mess cleaning up the boat, but then, he reasoned that since it had been used for official business he might be able to have a couple trusties from the jail deal with the gross and disgusting job. The girl was pretty well out of it as well, but didn’t seem as drunk; she seemed more drugged and unaware of what was going on.

At least heading back up to the boat launch below the dam he could use the floodlights on the bass boat, which made it easier to see where he was going in the darkness. He could go a lot faster, and within ten minutes or so he was pulling the boat up onto the trailer. A few minutes later the six of them were heading back to the jail, where it was going to be one of the busiest nights in memory.

Part of the problem – he and Wexler had talked about it right from the beginning – was that even with pulling the other city car off patrol, between the city and the county departments there were still only five patrol cars with caged-in back seats available haul prisoners. The dog warden’s truck, which had been used to haul officers to the raid, couldn’t serve for that purpose. That meant that only ten could be hauled into the jail and booked at one time, and that was going to mean a lot more round trips, so it was going to take some time.

Another thing that was going to take some time was getting everyone booked, fingerprinted, mugged, and the like, especially with the department short staffed. Virtually everyone available had been in on the raid, so until deputies could be released from the site, the work was going to have to fall on Stoneslinger and Aaronsen. It was, no fooling, going to take half the night, and the sheriff expected that trouble wasn’t over with for the night.

One of the problems that Howie and Misty had to deal with was that Misty couldn’t stay out late – her folks had her under a curfew, which was reinforced by the wholesale increase in discipline since her older brother had screwed things up so badly. That meant Howie couldn’t be late in getting her home, and the time was getting tight.

Howie and Misty had been having a good evening at the Frostee Freeze. They’d enjoyed the ice cream, and they’d also enjoyed sitting around talking with friends, some of whom played Junior Varsity football, and others who didn’t. Because of the arrogance of the varsity, the JVs in Spearfish Lake mostly knew their place and didn’t get into hassles with the other kids like the varsity players did. That didn’t mean the junior varsity players weren’t all looking forward to when they would be on varsity and could be the kings of the hill.

Howie was expecting to have a good year. He was pretty sure he was going to be the starting quarterback for the JVs, and that meant he was going to have a good time. There were some kids on the JVs who knew something about football; while the team hadn’t done all that well the previous fall, as middle school players they’d had a halfway respectable season. With any kind of luck, they might win a few this year, and Howie figured that was going to do wonders for the respect he got around the school. Howie wasn’t sure how much he was looking forward to some of the stuff that seemed to happen on the varsity, but overall, it would be nice.

What was even nicer was that a lot of people saw he was there with Misty. Though they hadn’t been together very long, it had been an exciting time, and it made him feel proud and happy to be seen there with a cute girl like her. There were several comments that told him people thought that he was pretty lucky.

So Howie was genuinely sad when Misty turned to him and said, “Hey, hon, I think I’d better be heading for home.”

Howie would just as soon have hung around a bit longer, but he knew where his bread was buttered. “I can understand,” he told her. “I think I’d better ride home with you.”

“It’d probably be OK,” she replied, trying to look like she was giving him the option. “Nobody’s going to bother me, especially tonight.”

“Yeah, but still,” he said, realizing that he was racking up some serious points with her – and with some of the other girls looking on, if worse should come to worst, “it’s no big deal. I’d feel better if I went with you.”

“Well, OK,” she smiled as Howie got up from his seat at one of the picnic tables and followed her over to where the bikes were parked.

In a minute the two of them were riding out of the parking lot. Howie was giving some thought to coming back after he dropped her off, since he’d been having such a good time, but he reasoned that if she heard about it she might be all over him. Besides, once he got her home there hopefully would be a little kissing on the porch, and by the time that got over with the Frostee Freeze probably would be closing. Oh, well, it had been a nice night, he thought as they rode along side by side.

Their route from the Frostee Freeze to her house took them past the jail. “I sure hope Frenchy is enjoying himself tonight,” Misty said with a grin in her voice.

“Probably not as much as if he went to the beer bust,” Howie said sarcastically.

“Oh, they’re probably all drunk on their butts by now,” she shook her head. “Aren’t you glad you’re not on varsity and could hang out with me instead?”

“I can think of worse things,” Howie replied obliquely, realizing that almost anything else he said could have been taken as a negative response.

Just about that time they saw one of the sheriff’s patrol cars pull up in front of the jail, with a city car right behind it. The front doors opened, and they could see the cops get out and open the rear doors to help a handcuffed prisoner out. “Looks like someone stepped in it,” Howie commented as they rode closer.

“Yeah, someone’s not having a good night,” she agreed.

“Hey, fuck, give me a break!” they heard as they got closer. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“Shit,” Howie said in a low voice to Misty, “that’s Lanny Mundhenk!”

“Wow, no shit!” Misty replied. Without comment both of them stopped and stood astride their bikes to watch the scene in front of them. In the light of the street lights they could see that the others being unloaded from the cop cars were all football players, too. “My God,” Misty said, “they must have busted the party!”

“Come on, inside with you,” they heard a cop’s voice say as another patrol car, this one a county car, pulled up behind the first two. “We’re going to be half the damn night hauling you young punks in.”

“Holy shit,” Howie said, still keeping his voice low. “They did bust the party!”

“Sounds like they nailed a lot of people, too,” Misty commented. “God, would I like to head back to the Frostee Freeze and spread that word.”

“Me, too,” Howie grinned, relieved as hell that he hadn’t been at the varsity party. Getting arrested would have been really hard to explain to his folks. “We’ve still got a little time,” he said. “We’ll have to ride real fast.”

“Good deal,” she laughed. “Let’s do it.”

After what had seemed like a long time of crashing through the brush, there was an open space ahead of Darrell and Courtney. “Thank God,” she said. “I was beginning to think we were going to be lost back there forever. Now maybe we can go home.”

“Not just yet,” Darrell replied. “We don’t want to be near the road. There’s too good a chance that a cop could come by and spot us.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” she sighed. “But how are we going to get home?”

“Like I said, we’re going to have to wait it out,” he told her, pointing up the road to where they could see the glow of lights around the bend. “And I think maybe we ought to wait it out a ways back in the woods. If there’s someone else trying to sneak away, they might not be as careful as we are.”

She let out another sigh. “I guess you’re right, Darrell,” she said. “We’d better get back there. How long do you think we’re going to have to wait?”

“It could be a long time,” he said as he turned to lead her back into the woods. “We might want to just stay put till morning, just to be on the safe side.”

Up the road, in the lights of the grader, Charlie Wexler was counting noses – not of the people they’d arrested, but of the officers who had come with him. It was a little confusing, since some had left to start the process of hauling kids into the jail. It was more a case of remembering the names of everyone with him to the raid. He was pretty sure he had everybody but Leo Jarwaulski, who he knew had chased some kids out into the bushes. Well, he thought, Leo has a portable, but if he’s trying to sneak up on someone it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to give him away.

In the lights from the grader he could see another group of people coming up the two-rut, squeezing past the cars that littered the way. As they got closer, he could see that it was Cody Archer and a mixed bag of officers, bringing almost twice their number of people in Flex-Cuffs. “Hi, Chief,” Cody said when they got close. “We brought you a few more.”

“Is that everybody?”

“Yeah, the sheriff took three and two deputies,” Cody reported. “There may be some people hiding out in the bushes, but if there are we didn’t find them.”

“We could get them yet,” Charlie shrugged. “If they ran, sooner or later they’re going to have to come out to the road, and we’ll keep a pretty good eye on it as soon as we get done hauling people.”

Cody glanced at the crowd gathered in the lights from the grader. “That could take a while,” he commented wryly.

“It’ll be worth it,” Charlie said, as he noticed Leo coming out of the bushes, half pushing and half dragging a guy in Flex-Cuffs. Good, another runner caught, most likely the last one since all the officers were now accounted for. “No one is going to accuse us of ignoring this party this year. Why don’t you and a couple other guys hike a quarter mile or so up the road, find a dark spot, and wait to see who comes walking by?”

At least the drunks in the sport-ute with him hadn’t puked inside, Sheriff Stoneslinger thought as he pulled into the unloading line in front of the station, but the boat is a mess. The girl had passed out again – it had to be drugs of some kind. She was drunk, but somehow he didn’t think she was that drunk, at least not as drunk as the two guys with her. She wasn’t naked from the waist down anymore; there had been no sign of her pants or whatever it was she had been wearing, but with propriety to consider the sheriff had wrapped a towel from the boat around her waist.

It was easier to walk the drunks into the building than it was to carry them, and with some difficulty they were roused and helped into the building. It took a while, since it took two deputies to keep each of them upright, but some of the riders from the patrol cars helped. It was harder to wake the girl, but they were finally able to bring her around and help her walk very unsteadily up the walk. It was clear she had no idea of what was happening; halfway up the walk she somehow managed to get the towel off and say in a very slurred voice, “You wanna fuck me too?”

“Boy, is she out of it, or what?” Aaronsen said as they helped her stagger bottomless toward the jail as the sheriff stopped to pick up the towel and try to get it around her again.

“No fooling,” Stoneslinger replied. “Let’s get a good blood test on her. She’s on something besides Schadler’s, maybe a roofie or something.”

“There’s a lot of things it could be,” Aaronsen pointed out.

“True,” Stoneslinger said, “but I think maybe we’d better find out.”

In their excitement, Howie and Misty rode into the parking lot of the Frostee Freeze going as hard as they could go. Even though it was near closing there were still a lot of people there, too many to get to in the short time they had available if he was going to get Misty home before her curfew. Knowing that, he rode right up to the pickup window where Ashley was working, skidded his bike to a screeching halt, ran up to the window, reached in and grabbed the microphone Ashley used to announce that orders were ready. “Hey, everybody!” he yelled into the microphone before she could say anything, “the cops just busted the football team’s beer bash. They’re hauling kids into the jail right now!”

The announcement drew hoots and laughs. “That’s a good one, Howie,” someone yelled. “The cops in this town aren’t going to be busting any football players. There ain’t nobody going to touch them.”

“They did,” Howie protested. “Misty and I saw them haul Lanny Mundhenk into the jail along with some others. One of the cops said they were going to be all night hauling everybody into town. It sure sounds to me like the party got good and busted.”

The air was filled with words like, “Wow!” “No shit?” and “Cool!”

“Go over and see for yourselves,” Howie said. “It looks to me like they really got nailed good.”

“Howie, you’re not shitting us, are you?” someone yelled.

“Go look for yourselves,” he repeated. “I didn’t believe it when I first saw it either.”

“Come on, Howie,” Misty said. “We better get moving if I’m going to get home on time.”

It was busy inside the sheriff’s office. In addition to the two guards still on duty, there was only the duty dispatcher, Mary Tingley, and the duty deputy on the staff, and there was no way they were going to be able to handle the flood of people being brought in. The only thing the sheriff could do was to grab any deputies who brought the first group of prisoners and have them help out, leaving the city officers to drive the unmanned sheriff’s department patrol cars back to the scene.

It was going to be a job. They were faced with the normal booking procedures for anyone brought in – mug shots, fingerprinting, and the like – along with interviews with each of them after reading them their rights. In addition, the sheriff decided he wanted to run breathalyzer tests on everyone brought in, since it was clear that everyone arrested was under twenty-one and the breathalyzer results would be prima facie evidence of a minor being in possession of alcohol. If it was in the blood stream they were clearly in possession, after all. Interviews could most likely give the sheriff an idea of who and how many had been present, which would tell him how many had escaped, and perhaps some other information.

The normal procedure for minors under the age of eighteen to have been arrested for that class of misdemeanor was to release them to their parents once the booking procedures had been followed. Of course, that involved calling the parents and dealing with them at the jail, which Stoneslinger knew wouldn’t be a pleasant task for anyone involved. He suspected that there were kids who would really rather have been kept in jail instead of having to face their parents and what might happen after they went home.

However, considering the situation, that couldn’t happen for everybody. There were kids present who were over eighteen; they could be kept in the drunk tank, especially if they were really plowed like the two guys he’d brought back in the bass boat. In addition, there were several kids who were going to be facing more serious charges, including fleeing and eluding, assault on a police officer, and drunk and disorderly. If someone had slipped that girl something illegal, they were really going to be in a world of shit.

On top of that, there were two kids who were going to be facing contributing to the delinquency of a minor charges – something most likely over forty counts of it, in fact, depending on the final count of those arrested. Although they hadn’t been brought in yet, Stoneslinger knew by now who they were, and he even had the tag numbers of the pickup truck that had been filled with the beer, something like maybe a hundred or more cans of which hadn’t been consumed yet. Minor or not – he didn’t know yet – those two were probably going to be kept at the jail until Judge Dieball could set bail on them on Monday.

As Howie and Misty got back on their bikes the parking lot at the Frostee Freeze was emptying rapidly. It seemed like enough people took Howie and Misty at their words to drive or walk over to the sheriff’s department to watch the action, which was a lot of action for a sleepy town like Spearfish Lake.

Howie and Misty didn’t care – they were having to really hurry now to make it back to the Frankovich house in time to meet Misty’s curfew. They rode like the wind and came sliding into the driveway just as Misty’s father was coming out on the porch to check on her. Given the circumstances – and her father looking on – there was no goodnight kiss tonight, but both of them understood the reason why. All Howie got out of it was a smile from Misty as she said, “Thanks for bringing me home, Howie. I’ll give you a call in the morning.”

But, he also got a “Thanks for bringing her home on time,” from her father, which made it seem like all the hurry had been worthwhile.

Once she got inside, Misty told her parents she needed to use the bathroom, and went upstairs. But she didn’t go to the bathroom; she went to her brother Rusty’s room and knocked on the door. “Yeah, whaddya want?” she heard from inside.

Misty opened the door enough to talk to him; she didn’t want to go inside the room since she could see that Rusty was even grumpier than normal. Having been been seriously grounded for the last week he was very grumpy. “You know, Rusty,” she said, “you’re pretty lucky after all.”

“What do you mean lucky?” he snorted. “I could be out having a good time with the gang at the party. Instead, I’m stuck here.”

“That’s pretty lucky for you,” she smiled. “The cops busted the party. If you’d gone, you’d be in jail right now.”

“You’re bullshitting me,” he snorted. “The cops in this town don’t mess with football players.”

“Rusty, you’re wrong on a lot of things,” she grinned, “and you’re really wrong on that.”

The Frostee Freeze emptied out quickly, especially after the first arrivals at the sheriff’s department called their nonbeliever friends who had stayed at the drive-in. Since it was getting close to closing time anyway, Ashley’s boss told her she might as well knock it off for the evening. Ashley was ready for the break – it had been busy all evening long and she hadn’t had any time to talk to Lyle like she’d hoped. She’d seen that Lyle had been having a good evening, talking with Alan and Summer, and later a few other kids hanging around with them. When she took off her apron, clocked out and headed out the door, there were still half a dozen chatting around the picnic table. A little to her surprise, they were talking about some kind of game that she didn’t understand.

“Hey, Lyle,” she said, “I’m sorry I couldn’t pay any more attention to you than I did tonight, but it was kind of busy. I hope I didn’t leave you hanging too bad.”

“I could see you were busy,” he said, “but that’s all right. I had a good time.”

“You have some real good points on what we’re trying to do,” Alan said. “You’re right, we need to jigger it so it’s a little more even between the Christians and the Pagans. We can’t stack the deck one way or the other.”

“Has to be that way, either side can win, or else it’s not a game,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” Ashley asked.

“Oh, Alan and Summer are writing a role playing game. Maybe we’ll have to go over and play it with them sometime.”

“Sounds like fun,” Ashley said, “but I’m surprised you’re still here. I figured you’d all be over at the jail, catching the action.”

“We thought about it,” Lyle said, “but we figured it wouldn’t be long before you got off, and that you might like to come along.”

“Sure, love to,” she smiled, touched that Lyle had been so thoughtful after she’d pretty much had to ignore him all evening. “It’ll be good to see some of those jokers get theirs.”

The kids around the table piled into several cars and rode over near the jail. There were a lot of cars there, and they couldn’t park very close; they had to walk a ways to join the crowd clustered on the lawn of the sheriff’s department. Every few minutes another police car would pull in, and another couple of party-goers were led up to the building wearing Flex-Cuffs, having to run a gauntlet of teases, catcalls, hoots and insults hurled at them, mostly by kids they’d treated that way over the years. For Ashley and a lot of others, the turning of the tables was sweet indeed.

The highlight for Ashley came a few minutes after they’d arrived. They were standing on the grass, watching Alison DuQuoin and Shelly Battle get unloaded from the cruiser, wearing Flex-Cuffs, of course. As she stood there, Ashley remembered the snide comment that Alison had made to her the night before, and she wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to give it back. “Hey, Alison,” she yelled as loud as she could. “You’re going to jail, and we’re not!”

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