LITMIR.BIZ

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service. “You’re being a wee bit evasive about the drug question. Do I take that as a yes?”

      His lined face grew sober and he scratched at his ear, where a silver loop dangled, giving him a pirate look. “I can’t see that you have probable cause for a search, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you turned up some wacky tobaccy. Personal use only. Hard drugs I don’t tolerate.” It was a cliché that the law in Canada ignored pot smoking, but Holly held up a placatory hand and adjusted her posture to official, not combative. She didn’t want this to escalate. No needles or paraphernalia were in view, and no children would be hanging around under Bill’s watch. “No worries, then. If you’re not bothering anyone, stay as long as you want. But let’s get to my reason for coming, the panhandling complaint.” She arched an eyebrow in a 60-40 serious look.

      Bill sat down with a grunt on an overturned blue recycling box and flexed his knee. “I’ll tell you straight. Any guy around here pulling any of that crap answers to me. I don’t want problems with the law. We mind our own business. That one asking tourists for money like some bridge troll, I told him to quit it. Next morning he showed up with a camcorder. Said he won it in a card game at the Legion, the liar. It was a high-end Sony.”

      Her interest was piqued. One strand led to another in law and society’s tangled webs. She gave a light laugh. “Nobody gambles with camcorders. Probably he stole it. Is he around?”

      “Went to hock it, ask me.”

      Holly frowned as possibilities tumbled through her mind. “It’s too far to Victoria. More likely he sold it to a kid on the street, or for nothing at a junk shop. What’s his name?” She took out her notebook.

      “Says he’s Derek Dunn. I don’t ask for IDs. Hell, sometimes I change my own middle name. Dick used to be an ordinary handle. Now...” He reached down for a bottle of an over-the-counter painkiller, shook out a few, and showed her one. When she blinked, he washed it down with water from a plastic jug.

      Dating a fresh page, she wrote down the name and got a brief description, including a shortened right index finger which Derek said had been cut in a table-saw accident. “Thanks for the information. I’ll check on it. For the record, how many...people are staying here now?” She could see at least four makeshift tents of tarps, branches, and plastic sheeting, more for privacy than rain protection, since it was dry under the bridge. All she could smell was the briny tang of the ocean. Where did they take their garbage? And where did they do their business? In the woods? She’d peed on her shoe in the bush more than once. If it were a crime to drop trou in the deep and dark, ninety per cent of the province would be in jail.

      He said, “Varies a bit, more on weekends. I draw the line. Should have been a social worker. If a kid tells me he’s been abused, I know where to send him. A youngster didn’t even start shaving came last week. Said his parents were okay with his travelling, but I sent him packing. So...there’s three, counting Joel Hall.” He nudged a thumb toward a sleeping pad on cardboard beside the concrete bridge support. “Haven’t seen him since last night when we had a bit of an altercation. Could be he’s found a lady friend with a soft bed. He’s past fifty but a charmer when he wants to be. You want to hitch into town, any guy with a pickup will stop.”

      Holly gave the scene a final scan. Recently a surprising legal decision had cities scrambling. When the B.C. Supreme Court ruled that since the number of shelter beds was “insufficient” for the area’s needs, the homeless had earned the right to erect tents and sleep overnight in parks. Officials were outraged, since they had just spent tens of thousands cleaning up a camp hidden deep in the dense bush of Mill Hill Park, a wild green space in a millionaire community. The next week, a number of homeless people in Victoria had pitched camp in legendary Beacon Hill Park, managing to squash rare flowers. In a renewed game of push and shove, the city responded by counter-ruling that no fires would be tolerated and that tents had to be taken down by seven each morning. The issue of impromptu bathrooms went unmentioned. In the moral outrage and confusion that followed, suddenly another forty-five shelter beds materialized. Out here, far from civilization and away from most eyes, things were different. As long as they kept relatively out of sight, cleaned up their mess, and remained peaceful, people were left alone. They weren’t displacing lawn bowlers or frightening carriage horses in front of the legislature.

      “Thanks...Bill. I appreciate your honesty and sense of responsibility,” she said, shaking his hand. “But there is one final important thing.” Timing was critical in policing, and she had learned this technique from her father’s Columbo tapes.

      His light green eyes crinkled in suspicion. “What’s that, officer?”

      “The dry season is well underway. You’ve seen those signs prohibiting open burning. Even in provincial parks, fires aren’t allowed. We may be rainforest, but the undergrowth gets like tinder. A cigarette butt tossed out a car window can do it. And with those winds off the strait...” She gestured to a colourful para-sailor skittering down the bay.

      He gave a cooperative nod. “I hear you. But we gotta boil our water, like for coffee. We don’t want to get sick. It’s hard to haul plastic gallons around. We don’t exactly get deliveries from Culligan.”

      “Understandable. Just keep it under the bridge and very small. Leave plenty of clear space around.” As cars whizzed overhead, she looked up at the noisy belly of the bridge. “Sparks won’t travel far under here. A small propane stove would be easier for cooking, though.” She wondered about the black eye but didn’t want to press her advantage. Men were more likely to let the hormones surge. Women had their ranks among the homeless, but they wouldn’t strand themselves so far from services and safety. Even so, in Vancouver during a savage winter, a woman had burned to death trying to light candles for warmth under her overturned shopping cart.

      She left him with a card. “Not that you have a cell phone handy, but any problems or questions, we know each other now.” “Have a good day” wasn’t a phrase she could tolerate. “Glad we could talk” made more sense.

      * * *

      Her shift over, Holly continued east, passing Gordon’s Beach, a thin strip of land with a dozen tiny properties on limpet lots, from tumbledown shacks to half-million-dollar Hobbit houses with rounded doors, mullioned windows, and driftwood sculptures. The Beach Box. Four hundred thousand dollars worth of cute. She turned up from West Coast Road onto Otter Point Road then turned left again, climbing into the hills. In the nineteenth century, nearly every acre of the island had lain under timber-company rule, one western god of commerce. Then came the settlers with their agriculture. Only twenty years ago, the street had been farmland, parcelled off in lots of a third of an acre. One bonus was that everyone on the dead-end road knew everyone else’s business. When the police blotter in the weekly Sooke News Mirror listed action, Otter Point Place never made the Hall of Shame. She passed a llama farm, a pottery, and several B&Bs before slowing as two horses clopped down the narrow verge, their young riders wearing equestrian helmets. Some kind soul usually arrived with a shovel and biffed the road apples into the berry hedges as fertilizer.

      At a time when she had recently tasted independence in her seven years with the force, Holly found herself living at home, a modern reality for which she made no apologies. With housing prices skyrocketing, few rental opportunities, and relocation every three or four years, she had little choice but to move in with her father. Paying him a nominal fee for bed and board eased her conscience. As well, she mowed the lawn and took out the recyclables and garbage. He cooked. She cleaned. Fair trade.

      She parked next to his sassy blue Smart Car in the driveway of the white-sided villa. Except for its cedar-shingle roof, it would be more at home in the Aegean than overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The mighty peaks of the Olympics faced her, snowpack still spilling from the uppermost ranges like vanilla ice cream onto the purple peaks below. From eleven to seventeen kilometres wide, the strait was a living creature whose face changed with the prevailing winds. In summer, with the warmer water, fog banks began the morning, first on one side then the other, clearing to blue skies in the afternoon. “It must be June. I can’t see the street,” her father joked.

      Floppy-leaved banana plants nearly seven

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