Riding the roaring waterfall that used to be the street in front of my apartment building, a Hummer spun lazily around and around, unoccupied, the doors open and the radio blaring Heart's "Barracuda," if you can fucking believe it. The state was landlocked, so I wasn't exactly afraid of it being an omen, but as far as timing went, it was about as perfect a moment as I ever saw.
I stood out under an awning watching the rain come down. There was a stick of beef jerky in my hand, mostly to keep myself from reaching for a pack of cigarettes in my pocket that didn't exist. God hated a quitter, but I was giving it a shot for the umpteenth time since I started smoking.
For once, the media calling this "potentially the wettest year on record" was absolutely right. Ever since winter broke I was hard pressed to think of more than a couple days of sunshine. Rain, snow, sleet, hail, we had it all, and lately that was accompanied by winds so powerful it reminded me of my time in Florida, great, building-rattling gusts that always set my teeth on edge. That day, the wind wasn't so bad, but thunder rumbled in the distance, promising more good times ahead.
The Hummer ping-ponged off a couple parked crossovers and a delivery van, finally bumping into a street pole at an intersection and coming to a stop. As if on cue, someone came out of an alley down there, a homeless guy stuffed into a makeshift garbage bag coat who couldn't have weighed more than a buck thirty soaking wet, and he was. He clutched a pizza box over his head as an umbrella. Clever, I thought. He took a look around and scrambled for the Hummer, losing the pizza box when he was nearly swept off his feet by the water rushing across the intersection. But he made it, and pointed the Hummer away from the light pole. He had some trouble getting traction, but all of a sudden it jerked backwards into the torrent of rain heading down towards the financial district. This time, it didn't spin out, and the homeless guy was gone.
"Good luck to you," I said. I started to lift the jerky to my mouth when I heard a sharp peal of laughter from the same direction the Hummer came from. I turned and gaped as a slender figure rode down the hill in an honest-to-God canoe, flailing with an oar to try to steer.
"Mr. Waller, help!" the captain of the vessel shouted, and laughed again. I knew that laugh, and sure enough, when I stepped out onto the street, I recognized her, Ann Bellomy, one of the youngest residents of the building, and possibly its best looking. But that wasn't on my mind at the moment. I dropped the jerky into the rush of water and leaned over to try to snag the canoe as it passed. I caught the lip, but it was so slick I almost lost my grip
What I did lose was my balance. I jerked the canoe towards the sidewalk and fell sideways for the trouble, water crashing over me and making me sputter. I heard Ann's wild howls of laughter again as I rolled towards the sidewalk and pushed myself up.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she said, hopping out of the canoe and nearly bending double with laughter.
"No, I get the hint, I needed a bath," I said. The canoe started to slip away back towards the street. I grabbed it again and shoved it under the same awning I'd been standing under. There were plastic bags inside, tied tightly at the top and wrapped in even more plastic bags to keep whatever was inside dry. It looked like canned goods. Groceries. That sort of thing.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
Only then did I notice that the side of my head stung. I raised my hand to feel the wound, and came away with pinkish water on my fingertips.
Ann's smile vanished and she said, "Oh no, oh God, I'm sorry."
"No no, it's all right, it's not bad."
"Your vision isn't blurred or anything, is it? How many fingers am I holding up?"
"Three, but I was never very good at math. Jesus, were you grocery shopping in this?"
"No. I was housesitting for my parents, but I needed to come back and check on my cat."
I groaned. "Shit, I wish I'd known. I could have checked on it for you."
"No cell service," she said. "The news was saying expect power-outs too. So I grabbed a lot of canned stuff from my parents'."
"Let me help you get all that upstairs."
"Thanks, Mr. Waller," Ann said.
"Daryl. Please."
With her holding the door, I dragged the canoe inside. I unlocked my first-floor office -- which was really nothing much more than storage for most of the tools I needed to keep up repairs around the building -- and we put the canoe in there.
There was no helping the puddles we left in the lobby or the elevator on the way up to her floor. We both looked about as unsexy as we ever had. Ann's usual auburn ringlets now were plastered to her head like seaweed, and I must have looked like a nearly-drowned bear. But I got to be close to a pretty young woman twenty years younger than me, and that was definitely all right.
Ann was classically beautiful, with slim, delicate facial features defined by a cute little point of a chin and big dark expressive eyes. Her body -- when she wasn't covered up by a parka a size or two too big for her -- was quite a bit more sinful, with a big swell of an ass that usually led to every guy in a room watching her leave. Being the building's super, I ran into her often enough to know she did database management for a company downtown, but her real passion was her community theater group. I technically wasn't supposed to allow residents to post flyers in the lobby, but considering the management company I worked for was based out of Dallas and no representative had shown up in over four years, I didn't much care about the rules. So I allowed her to put up flyers for the group often, though I'd yet to catch one of her shows.
"What's your theater group working on?" I asked as we stepped out of the elevator. My fingers were going to go numb from the bags of canned food in the grocery bags if we didn't get in her apartment soon.
She lit up. "We're doing a stage adaptation of And Then There Were None."
I hadn't expected to have actually heard of the play her group was doing. "Good book," I said, surprised. We stepped off the elevator together and headed down her hallway.
"Great play," Ann said. "We're kind of doing our own spin on the ending. We'll have three performances with little tiny changes, and each night there will be a different killer. We've even got an app set up where during the intermission, the audience can vote on who they think did it. It's fun."
"That does sound like fun," I said.
"You'll have to come watch," she said as we stopped in front of her door. She gave me an overemphasized wink as she set down a bag to fish out her keys. "I'll play a seductress."
