It was six AM and Liz was on her eighth cup of coffee and her twelfth recitation of why her job wasn’t hell on earth and her last straw when McGuinty picked up the radio, listened, then hung up.
“It’s go time,” she said.
“The fuck?” Liz blurted out.
“I said it’s g-”
“Yeah, I heard. I was just wondering WHY.”
“Because it’s go t-”
“Listen to yourself. Jesus. ‘Go time.’ Whadda maroon.” Liz shook her head, drained half her cup, threw the other half out the window, and farted mournfully into the car’s cheap seat. “Let’s just – let’s just fucking go, okay? Let’s go. Let’s go let’s go let’s go.”
“Yes. Go time.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
McGuinty grinned at her unrepentantly, flipped the switch that started the lights, and plugged in the siren, which immediately started broadcasting angry beluga noises mixed with mating moose.
Ahead of them, the sleepy little collection of tents and trailers half-stirred, half-froze, shocked into immobility and clumsy panic.
“Get ‘em,” said Liz around a mouthful of Advil. She swallowed it dry, coughed herself senseless, and looked up just in time to see a screaming man in Hawaiian shorts and nothing else beach himself on the car hood, arms flailing furiously, sunburn iridescent in the morning light.
God. She hated vacationers.
***
With the tremendous energy and boundless enthusiasm of someone who did what they loved for a living, McGuinty leapt from the car with a taser in each hand and plunged electricity-spurting prongs into the fleshy torsos of two silverback lawnchairers. They writhed and ground their way into the dirt with mouths wide, screams roaring from their red-streaked, flabby mouths, Coronas spewing limes and liquid across the ground.
“VBI! Freeze!” she shouted at the convulsing bodies, then drew her baton. “Cease resisting!” she said, picking one of them up and hurtling him into a tent. “Cease resisting! Cease resisting! WoOOOOOOoohoooOOO!”
Liz stumbled out into the morning, eyes fluttering like dying moths. She threw up and watched Advil fly into the beach’s sand, shook her head twice, threw up again, and waved one arm at the couple frozen in the act of launching their kyak.
“VBI. You’re under arrest for vacationing in an unvacatable vicinity. G’wan. Scoot. Get. Shoo.”
Very, very, very slowly, the kayak was beached. Then the larger and more tanned of the two charged, paddle in both hands, sunscreen glistening on his skin.
Liz watched as he slipped on her vomit and slid head-first into the car’s tires.
“Stay down,” she said to the world in general as she patted her pockets. Fuck. Where were her cuffs? She brought them, right? They were in the car, right? They weren’t at home in the junk drawer, right? And she’d remembered to fix them, right?
Ah, shit.
A helicopter roared overhead – that’d be Eckhart and Zamboni, doing boat control. Darts streamed like mosquitos from the big drum-fed cannon underneath its fuselage, riddling the gnarled and sun-riddled hides of their prey, injecting them with potent cocktails of sobriety pills and tranquilizers to render them tired, depressed, and bleary-eyed. The outboarders were dealt with quickly, leaving the yachters afloat in their big canopied bastards as they leaned on their horns and shouted obscenities to the heavens.
“May you never tan!” screamed an eighty-six-year-old man as Liz cuffed his arms behind his back, using his spine as leverage. “May you spend every weekend booked solid! May your spouse cancel on you without explanation or care!”
“Heard it all before,” she told him.
“Eater of overtime! Rat of the rat race! Receive no compensation for your unused vacation from now until the end of your days, you maggot of the middle-class!”
“Yeah. Okay, I’m gonna administer a sobriety test now, you got that? Hold still.” She cracked her neck, riffled through her belt, and shot both prongs of her taser into the elder’s spine.
“WAAAAUGH!”
“Yeah you’re sober. Wait was that the taser? I didn’t mean to use the taser. Ah shit.”
Liz squinted at the hubbub surrounding her – the vactioners were being pushed into the shallows of the lake. Only a few had broken for the trees and they’d been intercepted by VBI agents hidden amongst the ferns and evergreens, decked out in camo jorts and tactical crop tops.
“Hey! Anyone got a spare sobriety test?” she called.
McGuinty threw a pair of brass knuckles over her shoulder without looking as she sprinted into the water and tackled a roaring bikinist into the reeds.
“Thanks,” said Liz. “Now sir, I’m going to hit you until you tell me it stops hurting, okay? This is very scientific.”
She started being scientific. Overhead a slight breeze blew, perfectly accentuating the warm sunlight. The air smelled of flowers and opened beers. In the distance, a loon wailed.
God, it was so beautiful that she wanted to throw up again.
***
The last holdout was under siege. A canoeist wearing three lifejackets: armour-plated, indomitable, insane. Froth spewed from paddle and mouth as she thrashed and surged in the midst of the lake. The helicopter could not stop her; the VBI scuba experts could not hold her. A harpoon gun was being set up onshore by the artillery team.
Liz was on her ninth cup of coffee. McGuinty was working off her high by wandering around the cages saying ‘stop resisting’ to the perps and kicking them.
“They aren’t resisting,” Liz pointed out.
“That’s not the point. Stop resisting. Stop resisting. Stop resisting.”
Liz poured her coffee into the dirt, watching with no interest but total concentration as it drowned an ant. “I’ll be right back,” she said.
“Where you going? Stop resisting.”
“Walkabout.”
“Stop resisting. ‘Kay. Stop resisting. Stop resisting.”
Liz walked about. She walked about the car cordon, with its flashing lights and gnashing teeth. She walked about the perimeter, where the earth was torn and ravaged by frantic sandals and desperate tanners. She walked about the lake, where the ripples from the last efforts of the skinny-dippers to avoid capture were still spreading in pretty little concentric rings as faint as a dove’s breath.
She looked left and right and up and down and all around and then she slipped her pants down and sat in the sand and picked up a discarded beer can and took a long, cold swig.
The suntan lotion was in her belt, in an empty pepper spray can. Deniable, undetectable. She took some and spread it on her palm.
“Thank fuck it’s Friday,” she said.
The approach had been silent, flawlessly so. But the gasp wasn’t even close: loud and unrestrained.
McGuinty didn’t try to hide. She stood frozen amongst the bushes, eyes wide with shock.
“What the fuck.” It was a flat statement, a confrontation and an admission of a thing that should not be.
“I can explain,” said Liz. And THAT was a dead assertion, a denial that was listless in its believability.
“What the fuck,” said McGuinty.
“I can explain,” said Liz.
“What the fuck.”
“I can explain.”
“What the fuck.”
“I can explain.”
“What the fucking fuck,” said McGuinty, and that was the inflection point. The stall had ended; things were about to start happening again.
There was a ‘thunk,’ fat and meaty and liquid. The harpoon gun had been fired, and hit. It made McGuinty’s eyes half-dart away, and in that flicker Liz moved.
The gun was already in McGuinty’s hand, but that just made it an easier target for the pool noodle. It was slapped clear into the middle of the lake, and as she tried to recover it before it made it all the way Liz’s other hand came around and it was holding the crude stub of the beer can.
COORS LIGHT turned into CRS LT as it crumpled against McGuinty’s skull. Beer flew everywhere, mixed with just a tinge of blood, but the wound was minor. The surprise was the real impact, and that was what led them both to roll over and over into the shallows and stay there until the bubbles stopped.
Sound bled back into Liz’s awareness. The canoeist was screaming as she was reeled in to shore, thrashing and roaring and laying about with her paddle. She had a few more seconds to hide McGuinty’s body. Blame it on a rogue sunbather she’d stepped on. That’d do it. Everyone knew she was a deadly eye in a brawl but totally useless at spotting things right in front of her nose.
But she could do that in five minutes.
Just five minutes.
Sit down again. Toes in the sand. Eyes on the sky. No mosquitos, no traffic, no phone. Across the bay the canoeist’s calls ended in the wet and muffled thumps of a ten-body pileup. Somewhere in the distance, a loon politely inquired as to what the hell was going on, and it was beautiful in every way.
“Thank fuck it’s Friday,” Liz said again. And it didn’t work quite as well, but there was always Saturday ahead, wild and untamed. And a rarest of prizes: a Sunday empty of guilt.
God, she loved the long weekends.