Not one minute after nine in the morning Tom Jahnke had called one of the lawyers in town for an appointment as soon as possible. However, according to his secretary, the lawyer was tied up in a court case in Walsenberg, so probably wouldn’t be back until that afternoon. Tom was leafing through the yellow pages, trying to figure out which lawyer to call next, when the front doorbell rang.

Alan got up to go answer it, but Tom stopped him. “It might not be anyone you want to talk to,” he told his son. “Better let me get it.”

Alan sat back down at the kitchen table, where he’d been nursing a cup of coffee. He sort of hoped the caller was Summer Trevetheck; he’d had an awful good time with her the night before, along with Jack and Vixen, of course. In fact, Summer had been prominently featured in his fantasies for the last few hours; he’d dreamed for years of having a girlfriend, and while she didn’t really count yet, it was a step in the right direction.

He was just a little disappointed to discover that the caller was Chief Wexler from the city police. Not terribly disappointed, though – he’d just figured that the cops had forgotten about his affair with Frenchy and his buddies. “Hi,” Chief Wexler said. “Are you Tom Jahnke?”

“Yes,” his father replied warily. He’d been having the same sort of thoughts as Alan, and as they’d talked it over this morning had come to the same conclusion.

“Good,” the policeman said. “Is your son here?”

“Yes, he is,” Tom said. “What can we help you with?”

“I wanted to come over and talk about that business Friday night,” the policeman said. “I’d have been here sooner, but I had to go out of town over the weekend. I’m sorry about that.”

“Well, come in,” Tom replied, sounding a little relieved. “Can I offer you some coffee?”

“I won’t turn you down,” Chief Wexler smiled as he followed Tom out to the kitchen. “This shouldn’t take too long.”

Alan had seen Chief Wexler around town before, and was a little surprised that this guy was a policeman at all, let alone a Chief. Alan was, if anything, bigger than he was. As Tom started to pour some coffee, the chief explained. “Normally, on a deal like this, I’d have been notified on Saturday, but since I was out of town it got buried a little. As it turned out, it may have been for the best that it did.”

“How do you figure that?” Tom asked. “It’s been very frustrating to go all weekend and finding nothing happening.”

“Well, the main reason is that part-time officers aren’t always the best people to follow up on something like this,” the chief explained. “Mostly, it’s because they’re part time and aren’t always around to do the details like this deserves. The officer who saw you Saturday morning went off shift not long after he saw you, and he’s not scheduled again for two weeks, so you actually get quicker service this way.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Tom conceded. “You’re saying you’re going to do something about this after all?”

“I’m going to try,” the chief smiled. “Our young Mr. LeDroit has a reputation as an arrogant young punk, and it would be nice to knock him down a bit.”

“Arrogant young punk hardly describes it,” Alan snorted, “but Dad says I’m not supposed to use the kind of language that would.”

“I think we agree on that,” the policeman smiled. “Unfortunately, there are reasons we both know why he seems to have gotten away with a good deal more than he should have.”

“Football player,” Alan snorted again. “They get a free pass on almost everything.”

“Not everything,” the chief grinned. “Look at me and see if you can figure out what I think about football players and why I’m a cop.”

“You too?” Alan smiled, eyes wide.

“You got it,” the chief smiled. “Some things never change. I don’t have all the standing I’d like to have over at the school for reasons we don’t need to get into, but this isn’t the school, and it’s not a school issue. But let’s get down to business.” He opened a briefcase and pulled out a hard copy of the incident report. “The officer you saw Saturday has the reputation for being a good interviewer, but he left a note that he was rather rushed in getting this report out. So I’d like you to read this over and see if he missed anything I should know.” He handed the report to Alan, who started reading it, while the chief pulled a note pad out of his briefcase, and sipped at his coffee.

Alan finished reading the first page and handed it to his father, who read it over carefully as well. There was silence for several minutes as the Jahnkes plowed their way through the report. Alan finished first and said, “There’s a few details missing, but he hits it pretty close.”

“All right,” the chief said. “What are the details? This is one of those things where we want to have everything we can.”

They spent several minutes going over minor things, mostly involving things that Frenchy had said, before both were satisfied. “So are you going to arrest him?” Alan asked when they’d finished up.

“Yes, but not right away,” the chief told him. “Frankly, what this report tells me is where the ducks are, and I haven’t even started lining them up into a row yet.”

“I don’t follow you,” Tom said.

“This report,” Chief Wexler said, “probably gives me sufficient cause to go out and seek a warrant for our young Mr. LeDroit. The problem is that it probably wouldn’t stand up in court. In any case, he’d be out on a personal recognizance bond almost immediately, and knowing his history, what’s he likely to do?”

“Come kick my ass,” Alan said without elaborating.

“That’d be my guess,” Chief Wexler smiled. “Like I said, some things never change, and people like him seek immediate gratification, rather than looking at the long-term consequences. Look at this realistically. You don’t have any witnesses, other than the kids along with him, and what are they likely to do?”

“Lie about it,” Alan nodded. “They’ve lied him out of trouble before, especially Effingham and Coopshaw. I don’t know about the girls, but it wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Me, either,” Chief Wexler said, “but the situation is not hopeless. Five people can’t coordinate a lie like that, especially if they don’t have their stories planned out before they’re interviewed. Do it right and one or more is likely to break. Do it poorly and the lie stands. When the time comes, I want this LeDroit character so tangled up with the truth that he doesn’t have any chance to lie his way out of it. In fact, I don’t even want him to have a clue of what direction he’d have to take. If I can take a case to the prosecutor and Judge Dieball, I want it so well prepared that LeDroit won’t know what hit him. It really won’t be all that difficult, but I can’t do it immediately.”

“Yeah,” Alan nodded. “I guess nobody ever took the time before.”

“You’re probably right,” the chief smiled. “Whatever’s happened over at the school probably hasn’t been sufficient to get me involved, and probably because nobody ever bothered to dig deep enough to find out the truth. My guess is that when someone gets into it with LeDroit over there, somehow it becomes their fault and they’re the ones who get disciplined, while LeDroit and his buddies walk.”

“Sure as hell,” Alan said sadly. “There are probably half a dozen people I can think of who have been caught up like that.”

“Then we need to take a look at that angle, too,” Chief Wexler said. “If we can show Judge Dieball a history of these sorts of events, then we stand a good chance of teaching our young friend a lesson. I need you to help me get started on who these people are, what happened, and that kind of thing. Have you got time for me to pick your brain on that?”

“I can only think of one thing I’d like better,” Alan smiled, “and that involves a girl.”

“Hey, I can understand,” the chief smiled. “I was your age once, too.”

“A question,” Tom said. “This is going to take several days, right? ”

“Most likely,” the chief nodded. “It wouldn’t surprise me if it takes till the end of the week before we’re ready to move.”

“What happens if LeDroit finds out you’re working on this, and that it was us who precipitated it? Isn’t he going to try to seek revenge?”

“That could happen,” the chief said. “Frankly, I’d advise you to get a personal protection order as soon as possible. It might not stop him from trying, but if he busts the order it’s contempt of court, and that could get him some time across the street from my shop without a trial.”

Alan and Tom both knew the allusion to “across the street” referred to the county jail. “It’d almost be worth it to see him there,” Alan said.

“We were trying to get a lawyer to get us set up with a personal protection order when you came in,” Tom admitted. “And we were thinking about a civil action.”

“A civil action runs into the same questions as arresting him and making it stick. Witnesses and proof, I mean,” the chief said. “So you’d be best off if you waited until I’ve done what I can of what we just talked about. Also, I’d point out that there’s only so much you can get out of a civil action, and it might not control the problem. As far as the personal protection order, though, you can save money on a lawyer, since I can go to Judge Dieball to set you up with that. If he’s not busy, and I don’t think he is, we might be able to have something by today or tomorrow.”

“Let’s get the ball rolling,” Tom suggested. “Then I suspect that Alan can tell you more than you want to know. If not, I suspect he can point you in the right direction.”

Howie Erikson didn’t have the “early to bed, early to rise” ethic of his brother. In fact, he thought his brother was a little crazy for getting up before dawn to go out and watch his stupid birds.

However, at the moment that the phone rang, Howie wasn’t thinking about that, or anything else. He was sound asleep, dreaming of a certain redhead in a white bikini. Unfortunately, the ringing of the phone made the dream go away, so he swore, stumbled out of bed, and headed to the phone out in the hall. It would have been nice to have a phone in his room, but his parents had decided that having the phone in the hall kept it from being tied up quite as much – and gave them at least a little inkling of what their kids were talking about. “Hello,” he said, half sleepy and half angry at being yanked away from such a wonderful dream.

“Good morning, Howie,” Misty’s sweet voice came over the phone, “and how are you this morning?”

“Too early to tell,” he yawned. “Good grief, is the sun up yet? ”

“Oh, it’s been up for hours,” Misty snickered. “Are you feeling better today? No headache or dizziness?”

“Like I said, too early to tell,” he snorted. He stopped for a minute, took stock of himself, and finally added, “Yeah, I guess I’m all right. My face still hurts though, but I guess not as bad as yesterday.”

“Well, gee,” she snickered again, “I guess there goes my playing nurse to you again today.”

Howie may not have been all the way awake, but he wasn’t dumb, either. “Oh, I think we can manage that if you want to,” he said. “The dressing on my face is getting a little gunky, you can change that if you want to.”

“I thought you might say something like that,” she laughed. “I can ride my bike over in a little while, and bring some different Nintendo cartridges. That way maybe I can change the dressing and keep you company.”

“I could come over there,” he offered to be gentlemanly.

“I don’t think so,” she replied. “Rusty is still a pain in the ass this morning. Mom and Dad won’t even let him go outside, and he’s not a happy camper. Besides, I just heard from Laurel Haeussler that your brother and Frenchy got into it down at the Fiesta a little while ago. They didn’t fight, but Frenchy is a little pissed at the fact that you hurt his poor little knee. You might not want to get very far outside the house yourself.”

“Oh, shit,” he said. “I was afraid that might happen.”

“It’ll probably blow over in a few days, at least that’s what Rusty said. Give him a chance to get pissed at a few other people and he’ll probably forget about you, but if I were you, I’d lie low for a few days. But I’ll help you pass the time. Get yourself dressed and cleaned up, and I’ll hop on my bike. I should be there in half an hour or so.”

“Looking forward to it,” he said.

Well, so much for going back to sleep, he thought as he hung up the phone. He glanced at the clock. School was going to be starting all too soon, and then he’d have to have been up for hours at this point. The bed would feel good, but having Misty around was actually a little more appealing. When he got right down to it, the thought of Misty and bed together would have been best of all, but that wasn’t going to happen soon. Still, he was off to a good start in that direction, and last night he’d even had a brief touch of first base. Or was it second base? Who knew? It didn’t matter, it was all new territory and deserved to be much more thoroughly explored.

Since Misty was coming over, he figured he’d better get cleaned up a little more than he normally did on a summer day. He hadn’t taken a shower last night, and he figured he needed it. Plus, it might not even be a bad idea to shave. He hadn’t been shaving all that long and only needed to rarely, but well, Misty wasn’t exactly one of the guys.

He headed back to his room, got undressed, and headed for the bathroom. It was nice to be able to do that naked since no one else was in the house. The shower at least helped him clear his head some, and Jack’s electric razor was enough to clear up the thin and fine hairs on his face. What was it about girls that made guys go to all this trouble, anyway?

Back in his room he got dressed, shorts and a T-shirt, then headed down to the kitchen, remembering to unplug the Nintendo and take it down to the living room with him. Might as well have some breakfast, he thought – he hadn’t eaten much last night, and now was hungry. Rather than his normal cereal, he took a couple breakfast burritos, popped them into the microwave and waited until it dinged.

He had them on the table and was just getting set to tie into them when the phone rang again. It proved to be his buddy, Mike Untermeyer, who spent the weekend with his father down in Camden. “Yo, Howie,” Mike said. “So did you have a good weekend? ”

“Not too bad,” Howie admitted, without wanting to get into the subject of Misty. Mike would probably tease him about it if he did; after all, before yesterday he would have teased Mike if he’d gotten involved with a girl, assuming that a girl could be found who might be willing to have anything to do with him. “How about you? ”

“Not too bad,” Mike said. “Dad and I went to the short track races Saturday night. They had a school bus figure-eight race that was pretty cool. Man, it looked good to see all those buses torn up. It was a lot of fun. Then Sunday we went to the game. The Mudhens were in town, and we kicked their ass.”

“Sounds like you had a pretty good weekend,” Howie said, eyeing the burritos and hoping they weren’t getting too cold. They heated a little unevenly anyway.

“Not bad,” Mike replied. “Dad is a lot more fun than Mom. He had his new girlfriend with us at both the race and the game, and Mom was pissed when she heard about it. Tough shit, if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I guess I do,” Howie said. “That’s got to be a bitch, though.”

“Yeah, well, it’s another wonderful boring day here in Spearfish Lake. You want to hang out some? Jeff is still tied up with his aunt or whoever she is. I could come over and we could play some Nintendo.”

No way in hell, Howie thought. Apparently Mike hadn’t heard about Misty, and he didn’t need him around acting like an asshole while she was there. Among other things, it might get in the way of what he really wanted to do, which was some more of what he and Misty were doing the last thing the night before. Mike was an asshole anyway, but he wasn’t too bad when Greg or Jeff were around to take the edge off of things.

“Afraid I can’t,” Howie said, desperately thinking to come up with a believable excuse. “I got a couple things here, and Jack is taking me some place for some project he’s working on.”

“Well, shit,” Mike replied. “Maybe some other time.”

“Yeah, some other time,” Howie agreed as he hung up the phone. If this thing with Misty worked out, then some other time could be as late as possible. It wasn’t that he wanted to spend all his time with her, because his buddies were still his buddies and he’d known them a lot longer than he’d known her. The fact that he was hanging out with her couldn’t be kept from Mike for long; this was Spearfish Lake, after all, and word was bound to get out. Probably it was all around town by now, anyway, and only Mike being gone for the weekend would have kept him from knowing about it. When he did, Howie knew that Mike would both tease him and try to be part of the action. This might hold him off for today, but what about tomorrow?

“Well, shit,” Jack said while sitting in the Jeep in front of the garage, trying to deny the inevitable. “I guess the lawns won’t mow themselves. I suppose we might as well get to it.”

After the hassle with Frenchy, Jack didn’t really have the energy or the ambition to get started on the lawn, but he got out of the Jeep and got busy anyway. Remembering the fact that Howie had left him with dry tanks and he wanted to pay him back, he filled the tank on the trimming mower about half way, and the tank on the lawn tractor somewhat less than half.

“How do you want to do this?” Vixen asked. “I can run either the tractor or the trimmer.”

“What do you say we switch off from lawn to lawn?” he suggested. “Let’s do the best we can with the tractor, and just polish things off with the trimmer. I’ll take the tractor here first, since I know this lawn pretty well.”

The Erikson house had a fairly large yard for a lawn in the city, with much of it in a big back yard. As it was Jack could do a lot of it on the lawn tractor, and Vixen was done with the trimming well before Jack had finished the mowing.

After he finished the lawn, Jack pulled the tractor up to the garage, hooked up a small trailer, and put an edger, a lawn rake, and the gas can in the trailer, then picked up the trimmer and set it in the trailer as well. Finally, he added a single board with blocks to keep it from sliding off the sides of the trailer. “Not as comfortable a ride as the Jeep,” he smiled, motioning Vixen to sit on it. “But it beats hell out of walking.”

It turned out that Jack had about a dozen lawns to do, mostly around the neighborhood, but some of them half a mile or more away. It was clear to Vixen that it was a route he’d run many times, and several times he took the trimmer when it wasn’t his turn so he could use his knowledge to finish the lawns more quickly.

Being August, the grass had slowed down significantly from its speed of growth earlier in the year. Some lawns hardly needed mowing at all, just knocking down various ugly weeds in the brown and often-thin grass. Other people kept their lawns watered, so it was green and needed more work. It was hot and humid out there in the sun, even worse than they had expected from earlier.

Jack really didn’t care all that much for mowing lawns; while he liked summer for a good many reasons, mowing wasn’t one of them. In fact, mowing made winter look pretty good to him, and the comments Vixen made while they were traveling from lawn to lawn made him think she felt pretty much the same way.

Jack’s distaste for mowing in the heat and humidity was made even higher by the fact that, like it or not, he spent a lot of time watching over his shoulder for Frenchy and his pals. It could well be that they might be looking for a chance to follow up on the hassle at the Fiesta station earlier in the day. Jack could feel in his gut the fact that something was going to happen soon, and probably end unpleasantly. This day had started out pretty decently, but Frenchy had gone a long way toward lousing it up.

The one thing that could be said about the morning is that it went pretty well, what with Vixen helping him. The lawns went a lot more quickly, and while there wasn’t a lot of conversation between lawns, it was pleasant having her around, so that made the time pass more quickly too. Several times the homeowners offered the two cold drinks to help keep them going, and money added up in Jack’s wallet – a five here, a ten there, a couple places a twenty.

Eventually, they got to the last lawn on Jack’s list – Mr. Bowliter’s place. There was a good acre and a half of grass there, and much of it was on an uncomfortably steep slope. It was a little tricky to use the tractor safely on the steep lawn, and under the circumstances Jack figured that he’d better do the main mowing while Vixen did the trimming and the small area on the other side of the house. As luck had it, they finished about the same time. Jack was feeling hot and sticky from working in the sun, sweat filled his eyes, and Vixen looked hot and uncomfortable too.

“Well, that’s it,” he said to Vixen as she shut down the trimmer so he could load it in the trailer.

“About damn time,” she said in exhaustion. “At least it’s done. I’m pooped. I need to cool off a bit before we head out birding again.”

“You and me both,” he agreed. “Tell you what. Let’s run this rig back home, grab something cold, run by your place so you can change, and go soak in the lake for a while.”

“It sounds like about perfect,” she smiled. “Except that we don’t have to head to my place. I thought that might find its way onto the list, so I threw a swimsuit into my clothes bag in the Jeep. Let’s get rid of this mowing stuff and go get wet.”

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