Shawn's Law (6 page)

It was a fair point. I nodded. “Okay. I won’t do it again. Next time I’ll tell her I’m here for her sexy son and that her father has given me permission to take
him
out.”

A shudder made its way through Shawn. “God, no. Don’t tell her that. Most days she doesn’t remember she has a son. If you tell her who I am, it’ll require hours of explanation, for naught. Now hang for a moment while I tell Bernice I’m leaving, and we can get on our way.”

We waved good-bye to Bernice, the woman from the respite agency, and jumped in the car. I checked out Shawn’s attire and completely appreciated his casual dark blue shirt and jeans. His black hair was gelled into spikes and he appeared to have shaved recently. I approved of his looks, not his choice of clothes. I would leave the lecture about how some poor twelve-year-old girl was paid a pittance to sew those jeans and just enjoy the sight of Shawn’s legs and butt in the taut material.

“Nice jeep,” Shawn commented. I was a little surprised at his first subject, since he didn’t give off a car-mad vibe. I wondered if we would be talking oil changes and horsepower all night. “Do you have it serviced regularly?”

“Yes,” I told him. “Just two weeks ago, if you need to know.”

“Oh, good,” Shawn answered. “We shouldn’t break down, then.”

If I knew what I know now, I wouldn’t have laughed at that comment. It’s remarkable how many roadworthy cars stop working when Shawn is in them. Recently we caught a taxi home after consuming too many alcoholic drinks. The taxi lost all electrical power in the middle of the road. The driver tinkered with the dash and even popped the hood to take a look. Shawn giggled in the backseat next to me, then whispered, “I reckon I can walk twenty meters away and it’ll start.”

He climbed out and walked up the path a bit. Sure enough, about ten steps away from the car, the driver called out in relief that it was working again. He started the car and looked at me in the back seat, and then at Shawn walking up the road.

“You still need ride home, eh?” he asked in broken English.

“Can you pull up and pick up my mate?” I asked.

He placed the car in drive and moved up the road. As we pulled up next to Shawn, the car died again. That’s my Shawn—a man of superpowers. We gave up on the taxi, paid the man for his trouble, and walked home, taking a little detour through the nearby park where no street lights shone and where Shawn demonstrated some of his other superpowers to me.

However, for our first date, it wasn’t my car that caused us trouble. Six o’clock on a Friday evening meant that peak-hour traffic was still clogging the roads in and out of the city. I joined the queue of drivers, and we chatted about my job as we made our way along. It was hot, so we both had our windows down for relief. Inching along at between twenty and forty kilometers an hour, the open windows kept us cool without blowing us away.

Then, out of nowhere, there was such a loud noise that I swear I jumped two feet in the air and peed my pants at the same time. Despite being a well-rounded traveler to over fifteen different countries, I’d never heard a gunshot fired at close range. That was the first thing my mind jumped to as I slammed on the brakes, trying to work out from what direction the sound came. Shawn and I both looked to the left as a car shot forward and crashed into the van in front of it, creating another loud explosion and clueing us in to the source of the initial sound. Sure enough, a small white hatchback rolled past us where we were stopped, its bonnet crumpled and airbags deployed. A young girl was behind the wheel with her hands over her face in horror.

“Shit,” I cried.

It became obvious that the white hatchback had hit the car in front of her, causing that car to hit the van. They couldn’t have been doing any more than about forty, so there weren’t likely to be injuries. Cars these days are built to crumple on impact and take the kinetic forces, so it seemed worse than it was. But vehicles stopped all around the accident, bringing the freeway to a standstill. I looked at Shawn.

“Shall we help?” he asked. “Do you think anyone is hurt?”

A flash in my rearview mirror caught my attention. I shook my head in disbelief. “You wouldn’t believe it. What good luck. There’s an ambulance and a police car about three cars back. The police car has already parked itself across the three lanes to stop the traffic.”

“Good luck?” echoed Shawn. “You think it’s good luck to get in an accident?”

“No,” I said, “I think it’s good luck to have an ambulance and police car behind you
if
you’re going to get into an accident.”

The van driver was already getting out of his vehicle to inspect the damage. We were one of four cars stopped on the accident side of the police car, but not involved. “Did you see anything before the accident that could help the police?” I asked Shawn. He shook his head. “Do you have any first aid skills that could be used?”

He gave me a look to say I was being a dumbass. “I have trouble putting Band-Aids on.”

“Alrighty, then. I guess we’re not any help and should get going to clear the area.” The road ahead was now empty, with the tail end of the traffic snaking up and around the bend. I drove off, carefully maneuvering around the van driver and picking up speed on the now-unoccupied freeway. My adrenaline was still pumping and my heart racing. That part usually came at the end of my dates, not the beginning. I smiled at Shawn and reached for his hand. “Lucky, weren’t we?”

He squeezed my fingers and grinned back at me. “Let me check my undershorts when we get to the restaurant before I count myself lucky. When that bang came I—Look out!”

By this time we were tooling along at nearly the maximum speed allowed on the freeway. I hadn’t yet caught the traffic jam, but other cars had joined the road from the on-ramps and were racing beside me. I caught the flash a moment before Shawn’s warning cry. An older model red car was towing a rusty old trailer, and it was trying to merge into the sparse traffic up ahead. I caught the motion as the car suddenly swerved around something on the road. I saw a flash of black on the road—probably someone’s tire blowout—as the red car and trailer jerked to the side. The trailer blindly followed the car, but its right tire didn’t. Like a goofball movie scene, I watched the trailer jerk to the left, and its right wheel slip off the axle and continue on its merry way, veering slightly to the right—directly into our path.

It lost momentum almost immediately, which meant we were on a direct collision course. Fortunately that adrenaline was still pumping around my body, making my reflexes superquick. A brief glance in the mirror to check if there were any other cars traveling beside me, and I swerved around the tire. The trailer had dropped to the road and was throwing off sparks as it was dragged along the tarmac. I dashed between the rolling wheel and the sparking trailer, and skirted the braking car. Then I made for the emergency lane on the left where I halted suddenly, leaving black rubber in two strips because I had stomped the brake pedal.

There was silence in the car as we both struggled through the last four seconds of our lives until I could finally reach over and turn the car off. My hands were shaking.

“You okay?” Shawn asked.

“I’ll need to check my undershorts at the restaurant before I can answer that,” I quipped.

He laughed and looked over his shoulder, back down the road. At the rate we’d been traveling, the car and broken trailer were a sizeable distance away. “We’re going to have to stop this time,” Shawn said, and I had to agree with him. I took a glance in the mirror and scoffed in disbelief.

“Oh, my God. You wouldn’t believe how lucky we are. A cop car just pulled up behind us.”

“Lucky?” Shawn asked drolly. “We were just nearly cleaned up by a stray wheel, and you think we’re lucky?”

“Yep. Lucky for us we don’t need to call the cops, because they’re already here.”

I jumped out and noticed one police officer had already donned his fluoro vest and was waving a light around to direct traffic to the far right lane. The car and trailer were blocking the two left lanes. Somehow, the spare wheel had hit the concrete barrier on the right, turning its path left once again, and it was now settling in the center lane, only a dozen meters from us.

Despite the fact that there was no one injured, and despite the fact my car wasn’t involved, it still took us an hour to get things sorted. Constable Warren Martin told us to move off the roadway and up a little on the verge while he saw to getting the car and trailer off the road. If a rubbernecker decided to have a collision, we would be well away from the danger. Shawn goes red and grumbles about our first date, but I quite enjoyed finding a bit of shade on the side of the freeway and chatting with him. I would’ve preferred it to be over a nice curry with some wine, but we got all the first-date stuff out of the way—my job, his job, my family, his family, my aspirations in life, his dreams.

Then Constable Martin came over to get his statement. “Sorry about that, lads,” he apologized. “We needed to get the freeway moving again before I could get to your statement. I hope I’m not ruining plans for you tonight.”

I grinned at him as I stood and brushed off my backside. “Warren, you’re totally gate-crashing my first date. I wanted it to be memorable, but I think this is a little over the top.”

The policeman looked discomforted, but Shawn came to the rescue. “You haven’t been arrested in front of me, so this makes it an awesome date. Remember I told you my last date was with my cannibal, serial-killer boyfriend?”

This got a reaction from Constable Martin. “No way. You were Rory Davidson’s next intended victim?”

I didn’t know if I was chuffed or horrified that my date was known to police. Shawn took it all in stride. “I prefer the term clueless boyfriend. There was never any evidence to suggest he planned to murder me. So, I like to think I was the one who might have been able to keep him on the straight and narrow.”

Warren looked skeptical. “He was a gay man who killed four gay men and ate them. How straight do you think his path was?”

Shawn nodded at this. “Yeah. Most probably. Maybe straight to hell?”

We all laughed at that one. “I just think you’re one lucky bastard,” Warren said. “Now, how about you both tell me what happened here tonight, and I’ll let you go on your lucky way?”

I now shake my head despairingly at the amount of times the word “luck” was used that night.

Our statements were taken and we were directed to drive carefully to our destination. Constable Martin’s partner called him and I overheard something about a “hot call.” They took off with lights and sirens blaring, so Shawn and I got back in the car. You may think that it was enough excitement for the night, but my man has
superpowers
. He can make things go
awry
.

We made it to the city without further mishap, and I paid an exorbitant amount of money and promised my firstborn to park for three hours. Or at least that’s what it seems like every time I need to park in the city. My restaurant was just around the corner, and we walked up the block in companionable silence.

Remember I said my man has
superpowers
? We turned the corner together and were confronted by a large crowd of people standing on the sidewalk and the road, surrounding a bunch of police cars, two ambulances, and a news van.

“Is that the restaurant where we’re headed?”

“Yes,” I groaned in misery.

“Hey, is that Constable Martin? It is. Look. Hey, Warren,” Shawn called out.

The man was trying to move people away from the doors of the restaurant and set up a police-tape barrier. “Hey, Shawn. Don’t tell me this is where you guys were heading for dinner?”

“Yes.” I was a little concerned about how cozy my date was getting—with another man.

“Well, hell. You
are
a lucky bastard, then. If you hadn’t been delayed, you might’ve been inside when it all went down.”

“What happened?”

Constable Martin looked a little cagey, but finally said in a confiding manner, “I can’t really make any comments, but I have some words of wisdom for you, okay? This has absolutely nothing to do with what happened inside, right? All I’m going to say is that people look a lot better without bullet holes in them.”

I think Shawn and I both paled at that thought.

So we ended up eating food that was some Australian version of Chinese instead of authentic. Shawn insisted he enjoyed it, and I know I immensely enjoyed his company, but I was disappointed my plans had gone
awry.

The tickets for the comedy night I’d purchased were calling, and we pushed to finish our meal in time to make the session. It turned out that we need not have rushed—the night was canceled due to the star getting severe gastro. The signs on the door promised me a refund plus a bonus 10 percent off my next purchase, but that didn’t make me feel any better.

“Shit,” I cursed as we stood outside the theater with a dozen other patrons, wondering what the hell we should do. Shawn clapped me on the back with sympathy.

“Don’t sweat it, Harley. It happens to me all the time. It doesn’t matter what we do on our date, does it? I’m having a good time.”

“But I wanted it to be perfect,” I groused.

Shawn got this cheeky little smile on his face. “Perfect? Do you want perfect?”

“Of course.”

He grabbed my hand and began to tug me down the block. “C’mon, then.”

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

We strolled through the concrete jungle and crossed the train tracks to Party Central.

Fine, okay. It isn’t actually called Party Central, it’s actually called Northbridge. A very original name for the suburb north of the railway tracks near Perth City. During the day, Northbridge is a lovely little collection of small businesses and friendly people. After dark, it’s a wonderful place with a variety of brilliant and fantastic little authentic restaurants. I used to love hanging out in Northbridge.

But once 9:00 p.m. hits, you don’t walk the streets alone there unless you’re young and drunk. Northbridge is where all the trendy nightclubs and bars are located, so people wanting to get smashed for the night flock there for booze, drugs, and a little scuffle. At least one serious incident goes down here every weekend. After 11:00 p.m., police patrol the area on horses to try to keep the drunk lunatics from killing each other. On a single block, you’re bound to encounter drunk people, stoned people, groups of people looking for a fight, homeless people, pimps, drug dealing, underage drinkers, lost tourists, and sadly, groups of children who feel safer in Northbridge than they do at home.