around in my chest, and the roots of my hair had started to sweat. I plopped down on the couch and dipped my fingers into the space between the cushions. No gun. I ran my hand under the cushion next to me. Still no gun.'
'What are you doing?' he wanted to know.
'I'm looking for a cigarette,' I said. 'I need one last cigarette to steady my nerves.'
'Forget it. Time's up.' He lunged at me with the knife, I rolled away, and he plunged the knife into the couch cushion.
I let out a shriek and scrambled on my hands and knees, looking for the gun, finding it deep under the middle cushion. Munson came at me again, and I shot him in the foot.
Bob opened one eye.
'Son of a bitch!' Munson yelled, dropping the knife, grabbing his foot. 'Son of a bitch!'
I backed away and held him at gunpoint. 'You're under arrest.'
'I'm shot. I'm shot. I'm gonna die. I'm gonna bleed to death.'
We both looked down at his foot. The blood wasn't exactly pouring out. A small spot by the little toe.
'I must have just nicked you,' I said.
'Jesus,' he said, 'what a lousy shot. You were right on top of me. How could you have missed my foot?'
'Want me to try again?'
'It's all ruined now. You ruined it just like always. Every time I have a plan you have to go ruin it. I had it all worked out. I was going to come over here, cut off a nipple and set you on fire. And now it's ruined.' He threw his hands into the air in disgust. 'Women!' He turned and started limping toward the door.
'Hey,' I yelled, 'where are you going?'
'I'm leaving. My toe is killing me. And look at my shoe. It has a big rip in it. You think shoes grow on trees? See, this is what I'm talking about. You have no regard for anybody but yourself. You women are all alike. Just take, take, take. Gimme, gimme, gimme.'
'Don't worry about the shoe. The state will see to it that you get a new one.' Along with a nice orange jumpsuit and ankle chains.
'Forget it. I'm not going back to jail until everyone's convinced I'm insane.'
'You've made a believer out of me. And besides, I've got a gun, and I'll shoot you again if I have to.'
He held his hands in the air. 'Go ahead and shoot.'
Not only couldn't I bring myself to shoot an unarmed man, but I was out of bullets. They'd been on my shopping list. Milk, bread, bullets.
I raced past him, snatched my shoulder bag off the wall hook and dumped everything onto the floor, since that was the fastest route to finding my cuffs and pepper spray. Munson and I both dived at the scattered junk, and he won. He snatched the pepper spray off the floor and hopped to the door. 'If you come after me I'll spray you,' he said.
I watched him do a sort of gallop down the hall, favoring the injured foot. He stopped at the elevator doors and shook the pepper canister at me. 'I'll be back,' he said. Then he stepped into the elevator and disappeared.
I closed and locked the door. Terrific… for what that was worth. I went to the kitchen and searched for something comforting. The cake was gone. The pie was gone. No Mounds bars hid forgotten in the dark recesses of a cupboard. No booze. No Cheez Doodles. The peanut butter jar was empty.
Bob and I tried a couple of olives, but they weren't totally what the situation called for. 'They need frosting,' I said to Bob.
I scooped up the mess on the foyer floor and dumped it back into my shoulder bag. I put the broken alarm on the counter, turned the lights off, and returned to the couch. I lay there in the dark, and Munson's parting threat kept replaying in my mind. It really didn't matter if he was crazy by design or for real; the bottom line was that I'd come close to being nippleless. Probably I shouldn't go to sleep until I got a bolt put on the door. He'd said he'd be back, and I didn't know if he meant in an hour or a day.
Trouble was, I could hardly keep my eyes open. I tried singing, but I drifted off somewhere in the middle of 'Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.' Last I remember I was at fifty-seven bottles of beer, and then I was jolted awake with the feeling that I wasn't alone in the room. I lay perfectly still, my heart skipping beats, my lungs in suspended animation. There had been no sound of shoes treading across carpet. No deranged-madman body odor disturbed the air around me. There was just the irrational knowledge that someone was in my space.
And then, without warning, fingertips settled on my wrist, and I was galvanized into action. Adrenaline spiked into my system, and I catapulted myself off the couch into the intruder.
We were both caught by surprise, the two of us crashing into the coffee table, going down to the floor in a tangle of arms and legs. And in an instant I was pinned beneath him, which was not an entirely unpleasant experience once I realized it was Ranger. We were groin to groin, chest to chest, with his hands locked around my wrists. A moment passed while we did nothing but breathe.
'Nice tackle, babe,' he said. And then he kissed me. No doubt about the intention this time. Not the sort of kiss you'd give your cousin, for instance. More like the sort of kiss a man would give a woman when he wanted to rip her clothes off and give her a reason to sing the Hallelujah Chorus.
He deepened the kiss and ran his hands under my T-shirt, splaying them flat on my abdomen. Thank God I still had both of them! A rush of electric heat contracted my nipples.
My bedroom door cracked open and Grandma stuck her head out. 'Is everything okay out here?'
Great.
'Yep. Everything's just fine,' I said.
'Is that Ranger on top of you?'
'He was showing me a self-defense move.'
'I wouldn't mind knowing some self-defense,' Grandma said.
'Well, we were sort of finishing up here.'
Ranger rolled off me, onto his back. 'If she wasn't your grandmother I'd shoot her.'
'Darn,' Grandma said, 'I always miss the good stuff.'
I popped up onto my feet and adjusted my T-shirt. 'You didn't miss much. I was just going to make some hot chocolate. Do you want some?'
'Sure,' Grandma said. 'I'll go get my bathrobe on.'
Ranger looked up at me. It was dark in the room, with only a shaft of light coming from the open bedroom door. Still, it was light enough for me to see that his mouth was smiling but his eyes were serious. 'Saved by the grandma.'
'Do you want hot chocolate?'
He followed me out to the kitchen. 'Pass.'
I gave him the piece of paper with the house design on it. 'Here's the diagram you wanted.'
'Anything else you want to tell me?'
He knew about Alexander Ramos. 'How do you know?'
'I've been watching the beach house. I saw you pick Ramos up.'
I poured milk into two mugs and put them in the microwave. 'What's the deal with him? He flagged me down to mooch a cigarette.'
Ranger smiled. 'You ever try to quit smoking?'
I shook my head.
'Then you wouldn't understand.'
'Did you used to smoke?'
'I used to everything.' He picked the motion detector off the counter and turned it over in his hand. 'I noticed the broken security chain.'
'You weren't my only visitor tonight.'
'What happened?'
'A failure to appear broke into my apartment. I shot him in the foot, and he left.'
'You must not have read the
I mixed the cocoa into the hot milk. 'Ramos wants me to return today. He offered me a job as his cigarette smuggler.'
