The guy flies towards him too easily, and the arm is small enough that his hand wraps right around it. It’s a kid. The realization loosens Cal’s grip a notch. The kid twists like a bobcat, with a hiss of breath, and sinks his teeth into Cal’s hand.
Cal roars. The kid yanks free and takes off across the garden like a rocket, feet almost noiseless on the grass. Cal starts after him, but in seconds he’s disappeared into the scribble of shadow by the roadside hedge, and by the time Cal reaches it, he’s gone. Cal shoves his way through the hedge and looks up and down the road, narrowed to a faint ribbon by the moon-shadows of the hedges crowding in. Nothing. He tosses a couple of stones into the bushes in various directions, trying to flush the kid out: no.
He doubts the kid had reinforcements—he would have yelled out, either for help or to warn them—but he jogs a circle around the garden just in case. The rooks are asleep, undisturbed. New footprints in the soil below the living-room window, same tread as last time; nowhere else. Cal backs himself up in the heavy shadow of the shed and waits for a long time, trying to quiet his panting, but there’s no rustle in any hedge and no shadow sneaking away across any field. Just the one, and just a kid. And not coming back, at least not tonight.
Inside, he takes a look at his hand. The kid got him good: three teeth broke the skin, and one place is bleeding. Cal got bit once before, on the job, which led to a maelstrom of paperwork, interviews, blood tests, legal wrangling, pills and court appearances that went on for months, till Cal got fed up keeping track of what was for what and just handed over his arm or his signature on request. He finds his first-aid kit and soaks his hand in disinfectant for a while, then sticks on a Band-Aid.
His food has gone cold. He nukes it up and takes it back to the table. Johnny Cash is still going, mourning his lost Rose and his lost boy, in a deep broken quaver like he’s already a ghost.
Cal isn’t feeling the way he would have expected. Kids spying on the new guy were the thing he was hoping to find, the best-case scenario. He figured he would shout vague threats after them while they zoomed away yelling and laughing and calling insults over their shoulders, and then he would shake his head and go back indoors bitching about kids nowadays like some old geezer, and that would be the end of that. Maybe they would come back for another round, every now and then, but Cal was basically OK with that. Meanwhile, he could return to doing his renovation and playing his music loud and adjusting his balls whenever he damn well pleased, with his police sense put back to bed where it belongs.
Except he doesn’t feel like that was the end of that, and his police sense isn’t going back to sleep. Kids screwing with the stranger for kicks should have come in a bunch, and they should have been rowdy, hopped up on their own daring like it was caffeine. He thinks of this kid’s stillness under the window, his silence when Cal grabbed him, the snake-strike ferocity of his bite. This kid wasn’t having fun. He was here for a purpose. He’ll be back.
Cal finishes his food and does the dishes. He nails up a drop sheet over the bathroom window and takes a fast bath. Then he lies on his mattress in the dark with his hands behind his head, looking out the window at the cloud-patched stars and listening to foxes fighting somewhere out across the fields.
TWO
The busted-up desk, when Cal gets it outside and takes a good look at it, is older than he thought and better quality: dark-stained oak, with delicate curls carved into the rail above the drop front and along the bottoms of the drawers, and a dozen little cubbyholes nested inside the drop. He had it stashed away in the smaller bedroom, since he wasn’t planning on getting to it for a while, but it seems like it might come in useful today. He’s hauled it out to the bottom of the garden, a carefully judged distance from the hedge and the rooks’ tree, along with his table to act as