Someday Never Comes

Chapter One

I-5 Corridor

April, 2016

A few years prior, wedged into one of the too small chairs in my optometrist's waiting room, I'd read a blurb on so called "exit strategies." It was one of those nether-page cultural color shtiks The Stranger is so good at churning out. A touch of whimsy to cushion the blow of the page one tell-all on the dangerous pesticides that could be contaminating your dope.

Ways to escape your crapshoot of a life, is what it had added up to. Lifetime movie worthy scenarios one might play out after they'd beat a hasty retreat into the dark of the night.

The reader's option included such thrilling vocations as living on the lam and camping out in ramshackle apartments over fashionable coffee shops. Or flipping pancakes in a corner eatery by day and reading paperbacks in a leaking clawfoot tub by night. To the light of an exposed 60 watt, naturally.

All this and more could be had for the low low cost of checking all common sense at the door.

Over-imaginative romanticism or, as I remember thinking at the time, a steaming pile of crap. Why I'd held on beyond the first paragraph was anyone's guess. A testament maybe to the sheer boredom that a solid twenty minutes of canned light rock and a wall of eyewear adverts is capable of inducing in anyone with a pulse.

Judging by the stunning lack of concern for death, taxes and the minimum wage, it was text aimed at someone of a far younger persuasion than mine. And if the emphasis given to chocolate and sandy beaches in the moonlight was anything to go by, someone not in possession of the Y chromosome I had knocking around in my DNA. Equally in question then, was how it had taken up residence in my twenty-something male brain and lay in silent wait, only to resurface without warning at an Oregon traffic light.

Five years and three hundred miles separated that waiting room from the red light I was idling under and sure, the elderly woman at the corner bus stop was thoroughly bespectacled, but she did little to harken me back to those posters of trendy eyewear.

It wasn't as though I was fleeing into the night, Jane Austen novels clenched firmly to my metaphorical bosom. Sometimes you simply reach a point where the only thing left to do is bow out. My career in the police force, my reputation, had reached a premature expiration date and no amount of denial and mandated head shrinking was going to change that.

I had to accept it.

I did.

And so I'd canceled my lease, packed up what would fit into the cargo bay of my Forester and left Seattle to get my head on straight.

Barring unexpected deaths or a particularly entertaining divorce in the immediate family, I figured I had a solid two months before my parents emerged from their respective work induced dazes long enough to realize I'd flown the ancestral stomping grounds. Three months, with a liberal application of birthday cards and deceptive return addresses.

All of this assuming, of course, that my now ex-partner didn't fly off the handle the second he noticed my absence and narc on me faster than a yuppy drug dealer.

I wasn't holding my breath on that front.

Sighing out my disgust at that prospect, I reached for my coffee.

Outside it was cool and grey. A typical late spring day in the valleys that border the western slopes of the Cascade mountains.

The weather in the Willamette Valley is mild as a rule, rarely climbing above eighty in summer and seemingly unknown to snow. Rain and fog on the other hand, abound, and one of the aforementioned wet weather's victims sprinted the crosswalk while I was gulping tepid, caffeinated crude. A 1980s fashion time traveler decked in studded leather, he raced through at the end of the walk light, his neon mohawk lilting to one side like a doomed frigate. As I spectated over the rim of my cup, he shot for cover below a nearby bus stop canopy and slammed himself down onto its sole bench. The bench's only other occupant, a silver haired granny in rain boots and an ankle length peasant skirt, spared him a sidelong glare before returning to her crossword.