He came down with his right foot, all his weight on it as he prepared to charge at me, to smear my smug, taunting face all over the construction site we were standing in. He landed on the canvas that covered the ground rather than the boards that I had been walking on, though, and his remaining eye widened as he disappeared through the ground, falling through the trap I had laid for him. The board I had walked on followed after him, along with the canvas that covered over the new public swimming pool that the citizens of St. Paul had commissioned to be built in the summer, the one that hadn’t opened yet, and that the construction company hadn’t bothered to move their equipment out of yet. Times were tight, after all, and with winter coming it hadn’t been likely that they’d get another contract to build something before spring thawed the earth. Which was why they locked all their tools and supplies up in the corrugated metal container and hoisted it a hundred feet up in the air with the crane. No one was going to steal a crane, after all, even if they knew how to use it—which I didn’t.
I took limping steps over to a rope I had tied to the release for the cargo container. I didn’t know how to use a crane, but I knew how to pull a lever, and I’d attached a rope to it earlier that day expressly for that purpose. Doubtless whoever had secured it hadn’t considered the possibility of a girl with my athletic prowess coming along to drop it.
I heard stirrings in the empty pool below, the sound of angry grunts as Clary righted himself and ripped his way through the canvas tarp that had hidden the pool from his sight. “Dammit, girl, I am gonna skin your ass alive now, that and the whole rest of you, too. I’m gonna lay a whooping on you so hard that you’re gonna wish your ass had been trampled to death by a herd of cows, because it’d be faster and sweeter. Old Man Winter said not to kill you, but dammit, I’m gonna do everything short of it—” His head appeared above the lip of the pool and I tossed him a cordial wave with my broken arm as I pulled hard on the rope with the other. There was a subtle groan a hundred feet above us and Clary looked straight up. I could imagine his remaining eye widenening as it came down on him, but he didn’t move, not nearly in time.
I had estimated, when I had been up on the rig earlier to attach the rope, that the container weighed at least a couple tons. It was laden with all manner of machinery, and when it hit Clary it made a loud noise, about what you’d expect from tons of metal hitting a man-pig-sized object also made of metal. The force and sound of the impact was something that would have set off the car alarms all around if there had been any. A cloud of dust swept over me from the impact as I eased up to the edge of the pool. The cargo container had caught Clary perfectly; he was pinned beneath it, both arms trapped under his body. The beam of it ran over his shoulders, arched from landing on him, bent from hitting the immovable object that was Clyde Clary.
“Girl … “ Clary said, and his voice was low and menacing, “you are gonna PAY for this.”
“You keep saying that,” I replied and took a slow walk around the edge of the pool. His head swiveled to follow my progress as I walked toward the small hut that housed the mechanical equipment to keep the pool clean. “And I’ll admit, you did a hell of a number on me, Clyde.” I paused. “But that’s the last time you’ll ever lay so much as a fingertip on me.”
“Oh, I’ll take that bet. You know this ain’t gonna keep me down forever,” he grumbled, and I saw him strain to lift it. It moved, but only subtly, and he stopped. “Just a matter of time before I work my way outta this, and I will find you. And I will HURT you. Worse than you have ever been hurt before in your entire mean-girl life.”
“No, Clary,” I said, resting my hand on the long handle of a wrench I’d left attached to the fire hose spigot built into the side of the mechanical hut. I assumed it was required by zoning regulations because it didn’t make an overabundance of sense to me why a fire hose would ever be needed on a pool, but since it worked to my advantage I didn’t intend to complain. “You won’t.” I turned the wrench and opened the spigot. The water surged on, spraying past me to the edge of the pool, drenching the sidewalk and running over the edge. “You’ve just about oinked your last.”
The spray was blasting now, the loudness of the surging water drowned out his next response. I walked back around the edge, closer to where he lay in the deep end of the pool. Water was beginning to collect now, running toward him, starting to gather around him. His face was wet from it, just a little bit thus far, and I saw the eye calculating as he strained against the container that had him pinned. “This ain’t funny, girl.”