Murdermobile (Portland Bookmobile Mysteries) (21 page)

“My God!” Hester recoiled.

*     *     *

Oh, boy, is the captain going to owe me for this, Nate
Darrow kept telling himself as sweat stains spread up the side of his T-shirt
under the blazing sun. Across the back was the slogan “Hopped Up on Full Sail
IPA,” an homage to his favorite Columbia Gorge craft brewer.

Portland might get rain and ice in the winter, but it
could also get beastly hot in the summer, Darrow had been warned as he headed
into his first June in the city, after moving north from the university town of
Eugene. Rivers bring some breezes, but Portland is 100 miles up the Columbia
River from the cooling ocean air.

But this was too early for this kind of heat, everyone
agreed.

As the new guy in the Portland Police Bureau detective
squad – and one of few who’d come up through the ranks and had memories of
“those good ol’ days of traffic duty,” he’d been reminded – Darrow had been
“volunteered” to help supervise in staging the parade, one of his captain’s
favorite public-service projects.

Darrow expected it also had something to do with his
“rising star” having risen too fast in his first months, when the press
overplayed his part in “single-handedly” reviving the bookmobile librarian
after she’d fainted at finding a body in her bookmobile. 

 For this one day, it meant he was organizing 15
traffic cops, a half dozen bike patrolmen, eight meter maids, and even the
horse patrol.

Finally the first part of the parade had reached the
end point, where Taylor Street crossed over the Stadium Freeway. The tall
detective, with a runner’s build and a prematurely graying thatch of hair over
luxuriant chestnut eyebrows and a strong aquiline nose, watched with
satisfaction as a stocky, baldheaded uniformed cop in aviator sunglasses
furiously waved the Rose Queen float into a church parking lot.

In the First Aid tent at the lot’s edge, two red-faced
and grimacing men in their 50s were prying off wooden shoes as they showed a
nurse their blisters.

The brassy notes of a Sousa march wafted up the block.
But another sound clashed in Darrow’s ear, causing him to turn and look back
down Taylor. There in the middle of the parade, a buckskin-clad man with a wild
animal on his head waved his arms like a band conductor and split the ranks of
mountain men marching behind him.

And through the middle came the new Sara Duffy
Memorial Bookmobile, its air horn blaring as if it were a fogbound freighter
crossing the Columbia River bar.

As Darrow stared with dropped jaw the big bus ground
to a halt 10 feet away. Clouds of steam fogged its windows.

The front door popped open and Hester McGarrigle, her
face red as a beet, stumbled to the pavement.

Seeing Darrow, she started to speak, but all that came
out was a squeak. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she slumped in a faint
just as Nate Darrow rushed forward to catch her.

“Oh,
Ms. McGarrigle, we really need to stop meeting this way,” he said under his
breath as he carried Hester to the First Aid tent.

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