wink.
'And I with your father,' she said.
'But, God.' The Beck ignored them both, couldn't let the topic go. 'I mean, think about Gina. She kisses him?' She shivered at the thought.
'More than that, I bet.'
'Thank you, Vincent,' Frannie said. 'That's enough.'
'And since it is,' Hardy said. 'I've got a fun new game. The Beck can go first.' He turned to his daughter. 'Here it is. You try to say a whole sentence without using the words 'like' or 'mean.''
The Beck was a very intelligent child. She hesitated not at all before smiling cruelly at him. 'Then I wouldn't be able to say that I like my daddy even though he's really mean.'
This tickled Vincent, who held up both hands as though she just scored a touchdown. 'Good one, Beck. Six points for the Beck.'
Hardy grinned all around. 'Six points, true, but unfortunately, grounded for life. It hardly seems worth it to me.'
After dinner, the adults adjourned to the living room with the last of their wine while the kids cleared the table and started washing the dishes, a relatively new development in the Hardys' ongoing campaign to increase the quality of their life at home. Frannie sat on the couch with a leg curled under her, Hardy in his wing chair with his feet on the ottoman. Without benefit of the kids' comments, they had returned to the subject of Freeman's upcoming nuptials. 'Do you think he's all right?' Frannie asked. 'I mean physically.'
'David? He's a horse. Why do you ask?'
'Just that it seems so sudden. I wonder if he found out he's dying or something and maybe wanted to have his estate automatically go to Gina.'
'He could just as easily put her in his will.' He shook his head, smiling. 'I think they love each other, strange as it may be.'
'Why do you say that?'
Hardy sipped some wine, lowered his voice. 'Well, the Beck wasn't all wrong at dinner. David's not exactly Brad Pitt, you know. He's not even Wallace Shawn.'
'And this matters because…?'
'It doesn't, I know. We should be above all that superficial stuff. Still…'
Frannie put on her schoolteacher look. 'And we wonder why the Beck worries so much about how she looks.'
Hardy was grinning broadly. 'At her very worst, light-years better than David.'
'I'd hope so, but just for your information, I would take a David Freeman any day over, say, a John Holiday.'
'That's very noble of you, but I believe you'd be in the minority.'
'And fortunately,' she said, 'I don't have to choose. I've already got a perfectly acceptable husband.'
'Perfectly acceptable,' Hardy said. 'And people say the passion goes.' He finished his wine, looked at the glass as though wondering where it had all gone. 'But you just reminded me…' He was getting up.
'What?'
'I've been so swamped at work with these depos; I wanted to check in with John. The thing he called about Friday.'
'Is he in more trouble?'
'Probably not. I hope I would have heard. I-' The telephone rang and got picked up in the kitchen on the first ring. He turned back to Frannie and made a face. 'Well, if that's Darren, there goes an hour.'
But his daughter yelled back. 'Dad! For you.'
Matt Creed tried the front door, then shone a light around the spacious lobby of the Luxury Box Travel Agency. Everything was as it should be, and this was not a surprise.
This was the upscale portion of his route, close up to Union Square. In spite of the city's recent campaigns to discourage vagrancy in the high-tourist area, the vast majority of security problems this far north in Thirty-two still had to do with the homeless or mentally disabled population.
Unlike many of his colleagues, Creed didn't try to roust these unfortunates completely out of the beat. He didn't want them sleeping, parking their shopping carts, urinating or taking care of other personal needs in the doorways or elsewhere on the property of the client buildings, but beyond that, he was happy to leave them alone.
But tonight, late now, in the last hour of his shift, he had turned right onto Stockton and taken maybe ten steps when he saw an exaggerated movement, a shadow in the mouth of the alley across the street. Creed knew the spot pretty well. Since it ended at the delivery bay for a building on the next block over, it was more a driveway than a true alley. After the workday, in the lee of the prevailing winds and equipped with a dumpster that often doubled as a drop for leftover cooked food from some nearby restaurants, it had become a popular sleeping site for the area's homeless. Normally, Creed walked right by it on the last leg of his route.
But when some kind of bottle came skittering up the street toward him, slamming the curb and shattering at his feet, he stopped. He would never have done so normally, but perhaps because of leftover jitters from his recent Shootout, tonight he pulled his weapon and crossed over. At the mouth of the alley, Creed could still hear the footfalls of the man running away. He stopped there, then stepped to the side against the adjacent building to catch his breath. After the excitement at Silverman's last week, he considered just guarding the opening and calling for some backup. Roy Panos was undoubtedly somewhere in the beat and could be here in ten, max.
But then he thought about the grief Roy would give him. A homeless guy throws a bottle in Creed's direction and he can't handle the situation himself. He needs backup. It might even cost him points with Wade, who made no secret of his disdain for cowardice, or timidity of any type for that matter. If you worked for Panos, you were macho or you were soon unemployed.
But Creed's jaw was tight, his teeth clamped down, all of his senses on alert. One part of him knew that it was all because of last week, of getting shot at. He thought of Nick Sephia's boast last night that getting shot at made him horny, and couldn't even find a shred of humor in it. Or truth. Even thinking about it now-
But what was he thinking of? This wasn't anything like a burglary in process. It was a homeless guy-Creed had seen him, or his shadow anyway. A homeless man who'd somehow scored a bottle of wine and got mad when it was empty. He probably hadn't even seen Creed, much less aimed at him. Shaking his head at his own demons, he realized with surprise that he still held his weapon, and he holstered it-whatever this was, he was sure it wouldn't call for a drawn gun-and turned on his flashlight.
Taking a last deep breath, he walked into the alley.
It wasn't much over ten feet wide, seventy or eighty feet deep. The beam on his light was strong, but at this distance still only dimly illuminated the dumpster at the end, on the left side. Normally, at this time of night, there would be a couple of guys sitting on the delivery dock, maybe three or four piles of debris that turned out to be men wrapped in their newspapers and layers of clothes at the small indentations of doorways along the alley. Tonight he saw nothing.
But the alley had no egress except the way he'd come in. The guy who'd thrown the bottle had to be hiding in or behind the dumpster. Creed walked another ten or twelve steps. 'Hey!' he yelled, his voice echoing eerily off the walls on three sides. 'Come on out here. We've got to talk.'
Nothing.
Creed swore to himself, stood a long moment shining his light on the dumpster. 'Come on,' he said again. 'Whatever it is, we'll get it worked out, all right?' He had half a mind to forget about it, to simply turn and walk out of the alley to Stockton and back to the precinct, where he could tell the lieutenant that there was this possible problem he might want to send some guys to look at. That wouldn't even involve either of the Panoses. And what was he going to do with this guy when he came out, anyway? March him down to the precinct? Knock him upside the head? Clean him up and buy him some coffee? Not.
Screw it, he thought. This is dumb.
He turned around and started back toward the street. He'd gone six or eight steps when another bottle exploded a few feet behind him, the broken glass spraying the ground around him with little diamonds. Creed nearly jumped out of his shoes.
