His sweats were already soaked, but Platt figured he could do a couple sets of chins and dips, no weight, alternating, to finish off his pump. Half an hour in the sauna and hot tub, a shower, and he was done.
He wondered if that bento place over on Wisconsin was open today, A couple plates full of grilled chicken skewers and rice with hot and sweet sauce would sure taste good about now. He'd go check it out.
The big fire roaring away pushed the cabin's chill into the room's corners. The place smelled of cedar and woodsmoke and pine. Wonderful. 'Merry Christmas,' Joanna Winthrop said. She raised her champagne glass and tapped it against the glass Maudie held. 'Same to you,' Maudie said. They drank. 'Mmm. This is great,' Winthrop said. 'It ought to be. It cost eighty bucks a bottle.'
'Jesus, you spent that kind of money on
'Not me. It was a gift from an admirer. I think he wanted to lick it off my naked body.'
'Why didn't you let him?'
'Because we went to a movie and he made a disparaging remark about one of the actresses who was a few pounds overweight.'
'Ah. Fat jokes, the squash of death.'
'Unless you're fat — then it's okay.' Maudie sipped at the champagne again. 'I'll send him a nice thank-you e-mail for this.'
'I'm sure he'll appreciate it.'
They giggled.
'So, tell me more about this Sergeant What's-his-name. Anything serious in the offing?'
'Too early to tell. So far, all we've talked about is computers, about which he knows zip. But he seems like a sweet man. And he admires me for my mind.'
'Uh-huh.'
'Well, either he does, or he's very, very clever about taking the long way around to get my pants off.'
'Hah. Men will cross a desert in July on their hands and knees over broken glass if they think they'll get laid when they get to the other side.'
'True. But I have a good feeling about this one. How many men have you met who will admit they don't know something about everything?'
'So far? Let me see… oh, if you total them all up, about, roughly, approximately… none.'
'So I'm one up on you.'
'Oh, girl. You got a picture? How about a com number?'
'Oh, no, you don't. You should be able to find one in California.'
'You'd think so, wouldn't you? I'm thinking about putting an ad in the personal sections of the local alternative weekly paper. ‘Fat, ugly woman, smart, looking for man who can appreciate me for my mind.' It would be interesting to see who answers.'
'I'm sure that would work.' She lifted her glass. 'Cheers.'
'Uh-huh.'
They drank. They laughed some more. There were worse ways to spend Christmas.
Chapter Fourteen
Jay Gridley was getting a little tired of the Western scenario and he considered switching it. He hated to do that in a VR session, though, jump genres. After this time, he'd use a different program.
At the moment, he was in the small Western town of Ambush Flats, walking up toward the telegraph office. A Christmas wreath hung in the window.
'Mornin' Marshal,' the telegraph clerk said. The man wore a card dealer's green eyeshade, a boiled shirt, and a thin, dark tie. 'Happy Christmas. Shame you got to be travelin' on such a day.'
'And you workin',' Jay said. 'Any messages for Marshal Gridley come through here?'
'Nossir, I don't believe they have.' The man made a show of checking the stack of yellow paper next to his key. 'Nope, don't see none.'
'Uh-huh. And any messages a marshal ought to know about pass through your ears or fingers?'
'Nossir. I'm a law-abidin' citizen, Marshal. I don't truck with such things.'
It wasn't that Jay didn't believe him — but he'd learned the hard way that truth was a valuable and sometimes rare commodity on the net. And Jay needed to know if that was what he was dealing with here.
There were several ways he could do this. He could pull his gun and order the telegrapher to lie down on his belly. He could point out the window, and when the man looked, clonk him on the back of the head and knock him cold. Or he could use subterfuge, which was his preferred method. 'Well, I appreciate it, friend. Thanks. Adios.'
Jay left the telegraph office and moseyed around to the back of the building. There was a wooden barrel of trash next to the door. He pulled a strike-anywhere lucifer from his shirt pocket, scratched it on the barrel's metal hoop, and tossed the flaring match into the trash. Paper caught, flamed, and in a few seconds, there was a hot little fire blazing away in the barrel. Jay looked around and spotted some weeds growing from under the building. He pulled a handful of the greenery and tossed it into the flame. Thick white smoke poured out as the green plants began to burn.
Jay walked around to the front of the building, found a shady spot under an overhang, and leaned against a porch post. He didn't have long to wait.
'Fire!' somebody yelled. A bell started to ring. Folks came a'runnin' too.
The telegrapher sprinted through the front door of the office, away from the sudden smoke pouring in from the back, and looped around the building to see what was what.
Jay sauntered back into the building and began to go through the stack of telegrams. Nothing to see.
There was a locked wooden drawer next to the telegrams out in plain sight, and he used his Barlow jackknife to slip the simple lock so he could get at the hidden documents in the drawer.
He grinned. Breaking into an encrypted e-mail sorter using a brute-force generator didn't sound nearly as colorful as rifling the telegrapher's desk in his marshal persona. It wasn't as much fun either.
There was a lot of junk in the drawer. Some shady money exchanges, illicit love letters, porno, the usual stuff people tried to hide. Technically speaking, what he was doing wasn't altogether legal, but he wasn't going to use it in court, he was just looking for information. If he hurried, he would be gone before the telegrapher got back, and nobody would ever know he'd been snooping in private affairs.
Looked like a waste of time again — hello? What was
Jay read the message, growing more alarmed as he went. Somebody had sent particulars on the routes for four shipments of plutonium — that didn't translate into this scenario as dynamite either — to a group calling itself the Sons of Patrick Henry! Jay had heard of them. They were a militia group that danced on the edge of treason and had a membership that made Alula the Hun look like a flaming red Communist.
And the stuff was moving today. Holy shit!
Clutching the message tightly, Jay ran.
With the racket blaring from Susie's new musical toy, having a conversation was difficult. Not that Michaels felt much like talking anyhow. Megan was making it perfectly clear by the way she kept touching, leaning, or rubbing against Byron exactly what she wanted her ex-husband to know. At first, the jealousy had been so powerful it had made him feel heartsick and nauseous. Now he was beginning to gel pissed off. Megan had a cruel streak he had always known about. He'd loved her in spite of it, but it wasn't pretty to be on the receiving end of it. She could have asked her bearded boy toy to stay home and let Michaels have this time with his daughter, but she wanted to show Susie's father exactly where he stood with her mother — which was outside her house, peering in through a locked window.
He was supposed to stay for lunch, and if he hadn't thought it would upset Susie, he would have already
