Jupiter is it that looks like a sausage-and-anchovy pizza?”
“Io.” Kelly dropped severity and laughed again. “It does look like a pizza, doesn’t it? You come out with the strangest stuff sometimes, but you’re right about that.”
“Wish I could take credit for it, but I read it somewhere,” Colin replied. “And speaking of coming out with strange stuff-” He stopped, muttering to himself. This wasn’t how he’d wanted to do things, dammit. Open mouth, jam in foot. The story of my life, he thought.
“Why? What other strange stuff was on your mind?” Kelly asked.
He sent her a sharp look, but couldn’t read the one she gave back. That he couldn’t read it threw gasoline on his ever-active suspicions. Did she already know, or at least have suspicions of her own? They’d been going together for two and a half years now. Probably something wrong with her if she didn’t have suspicions by now. Or maybe something was wrong with him for not getting to this point a hell of a lot sooner.
Only one way to find out. He took a deep breath. Even so, it was a good thing they were sitting side by side, because when he asked, “D’you want to marry me, Kelly?” she couldn’t have heard him if she’d been on the far side of the room.
“Sure,” she said. He blinked. He’d been expecting and hoping for yes and braced against no. Anything but one of those or the other screwed up his mental IFF for a few seconds.
Then he processed the meaning in the unexpected response. “Is that anything like yes?” he said, wanting to leave no possible doubt.
“Sure,” she said again, this time with mischief in her voice.
“You!” He pulled a small velvet box out of the trouser pocket where his keys usually lived. “Well, since it is kind of like yes, you may want to have a look at this, too.”
Kelly opened the box; the spring hinge clicked when she did. Even the compact fluorescent in the ceiling fixture was plenty to make the diamonds in the ring sparkle. Her eidened. “Ooh!” she said softly. “Pretty!”
“Try it on,” Colin urged.
“Okay.” She slipped it onto her finger. Then she smiled. “I like the way it looks. And it fits, too. I won’t need to get it sized or anything. How did you do that?”
“I hired a guy who used to work for the KGB, back when there was a KGB and a USSR and a bunch of other initials running around loose. These days, he smuggles blintzes and borscht in from Brooklyn. He went through your credit-card records and your cell-phone bills till he found your ring size in there. And he only needed to start working on it a year and a half before I met you.”
He spoke with such assurance, he might have been convincing a jury that no one else could possibly have pulled off this home-invasion robbery. “When you talk like that, I start believing you, no matter how much BS you come out with,” Kelly said. “It’s a good thing I love you, or you’d really be in trouble.”
“It’s a good thing you love me, or I’d really be in trouble,” Colin echoed. By his tone, he meant something different with the same words. He went on, “Good thing I love you, too. Darn good thing-best thing that’s happened to me since I don’t know when.”
“I like that.” Kelly nodded. “And if we both say it the same way thirty years from now, we’ll have done something right.”
“Here’s hoping,” Colin said. He’d thought the same thing, or close enough, when he said I do with Louise. And they did, and then they didn’t: not thirty years’ worth, anyhow. “I would drink to that here, but I’d rather go out to dinner and do it there. How does Miyamoto sound?”
“Too funky for words,” Kelly answered; he’d taken her there before. “Let’s go,” she added, pulling the flash drive out of the computer. Then she spread her fingers, the way women do when they flash a new ring. The diamonds did some more flashing of their own.
Miyamoto was a San Atanasio institution of sorts. Despite the Japanese name, it was a Polynesian place, one of the last survivors of what had been a common breed of restaurant in Southern California around the time Colin was born. It had Easter Island heads and tiki torches out front. The appetizers featured things like rumaki and foil-wrapped chicken, things you just didn’t see in other places any more. The surf-and-turf was lobster and teriyaki steak. The waitresses wore leis. The bartender made rum drinks you normally wouldn’t find anywhere this side of Honolulu.
“Two scorpions,” Colin told the waitress as they sat down in their bamboo-framed booth.
“Hey! What am I gonna drink?” Kelly said. Colin probably gaped. The waitress cracked up-she hadn’t heard that one before, and it caught her by surprise.
“One scorpion for each of us,” Colin said carefully. Still chuckling, the gal in the lei went back to pass along the order.
Colin wondered how many times he’d come here with Louise over the years. A lot, but he liked the place too much to cede it to her after they broke up. He’d never seen her here since. That might have been coincidence. Or maybe Teo was too organic to want to pollute his system with the high-cholesterol goodies Miyamoto dished out. More for me if he is, Coin thought. Less happily, he’d also come back once since the split to investigate a robbery.
The waitress brought back a couple of scorpions, each almost big enough to swim in. They spelled er k with a u here. Even they wouldn’t serve you more than two zombies. That made sense, because you weren’t just drunk after two of those. You were fucking embalmed.
“Are you ready to order yet?” she asked. She scribbled what they wanted and went away again.
Before the food came, the owner wandered over to say hello. Stan Miyamoto was short and stocky. He was about Colin’s age; his son had graduated from San Atanasio High in Vanessa’s class. “I want to say one more time what a good cop you are.” He was talking more to Kelly than to Colin. “The way you caught those guys who held us up, the way you sent them to prison-”
“Part of the job.” Colin didn’t want to tell Miyamoto the only way the crooks could have been dumber was to wear BUST ME! signs. To change the subject, he went on, “Stan, this is my fi-ancee, Kelly Birnbaum.”
The owner, of course, had come over to say hello when Colin visited with Louise, too. You never would have guessed by his smile. “Congratulations! You are a lucky lady, Ms. Birnbaum.”
“I think so. I hope so,” Kelly said.
Miyamoto turned back to Colin. “So you celebrate tonight, do you?”
“We sure do,” he agreed.
“And you choose to do it here? Dinner on the house!”
It was kindly meant. Colin knew that. Back when he was starting out, he would have thanked Stan and enjoyed it. But the world had changed. For better? For worse? For different, anyhow.
“Stan, I can’t,” he said. “I’d like to, but I just can’t. Too darn many regulations about police officers and gratuities. You’re gonna have to take my money whether you like it or not.” Now there was a sentence you didn’t get to trot out every day.
“I am not doing this for Lieutenant Ferguson,” the owner said stiffly. “I am doing this for Colin Ferguson, who is my friend. I hope he is my friend.”
“I hope so, too. But if you want to put your friend’s behind in a sling, you’ll feed him a free dinner. The city council and the accountants would land on me like a ton of bricks.”
“They should get in an uproar about things that need uproar. Heaven knows there are enough of them in this town.” By the way Stan Miyamoto said it, he could think of three or four himself. But he didn’t try to insist any more. Shaking his head, he went back to the kitchens.
Quietly, Kelly said, “I bet a lot of cops would have taken him up on that. I bet they would have got away with it, too.”
“I bet you’re right.” Colin shrugged. “If it doesn’t bother them, it doesn’t, that’s all. It bothers me. If I keep my nose clean all the time, I never need to worry about remembering which lies I told to which people. And if I don’t give an inch, I don’t have to worry about giving a mile, either.”
“Makes sense to me.” She quirked an eyebrow at him, though. “If I get a ticket, I guess you won’t fix it for me.”
“Good guess.” Colin had never fixed any for Louise or the kids. Nobody in his family was a bad driver, so he hadn’t had to worry about it much. Once or twice, a cop might have decided not to write them up when he realized who they were, but that was something he didn’t officially have to know about. He found a more interesting topic: “Here comes dinner.” s all. It was enough food for at least half a dozen people. Leftovers in styrofoam boxes
