“Stop, asshole!”
He didn’t.
Both cops fired, couple, three times each.
Speedo kept coming, and they kept shooting.
Bert
People screamed bloody murder, but the cops kept blasting away. In some comer of his mind, Bert tried to keep count of the shots, but there were too many of them. How many rounds did those guns hold? Fifteen? Eighteen? They were going to town.
It was like some monster movie. The old guy in the red bathing suit just kept shambling toward the cops. He was hit at least six or eight times, but he wouldn’t stop.
“Fuck!” one of the cops yelled. He turned and ran.
The other cop clicked empty, then, when Speedo was almost on top of him, he threw the Glock at the old man.
Yeah, right. Guy takes a whole shitload of bullets and a plastic pistol is not gonna bounce off him like a cotton ball? Bert stared at the cop. Whaddayuz, stupid?
The old man grabbed the cop, managed to get him five or six inches off the floor—
— then the old man finally ran out of gas. He dropped the cop and fell, landing on the floor facedown.
It got real quiet in the casino then.
“Ho-ly
“Amen, sweet Jesus,” Mary Lou said. “Amen.”
1
Alex Michaels grunted as the socket slipped off the hex nut and his hand shot forward, scraping his knuckles on the rocker-arm cover.
“Ow! Crap!”
At such times, he was wont to blame the nut or the wrench, but since he had put the bolt in himself, and the wrench and socket were both fairly new Craftsman tools, he knew he had nobody else to blame.
From the kitchen, he heard Toni call out. “You okay?”
Must have yelled louder than he’d thought. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Stupid piece of crap Chevrolet!”
Toni drifted into the garage doorway. He was leaning over the fender on the passenger side, under the hood, so he saw her. Five months pregnant, in one of his T-shirts and a pair of drawstring sweatpants, she was, if anything, more beautiful than ever.
She smiled. “That’s not what you said when you were convincing me you needed to have it. ‘A fifty-five Bel Air convertible,’ you said. ‘A classic.’ ”
“Yeah, well, that was before I had a chance to spend time with it. Thing is engineered like a tank.”
“Also a selling point, if I recall.”
He looked at the nut. It was tight enough, he decided. He put the wrench down, grabbed a red rag and some of the pungent lanolin hand cleaner and started wiping grease off his fingers. Well, it
He smiled back at her. “I thought it was your job to keep me from running off half cocked.”
“I don’t recall that part of the marriage vow.”
He walked toward her. “How did your
Her smiled disappeared, and frown lines wrinkled her forehead. “Terrible. I’m all off-balance! I try to do the turnaround, I almost fall down. When I sweep, it’s all I can do to keep from falling over. When I dropped into the squat for
He couldn’t help it; he laughed.
Her face clouded up, tears welling. “It’s not funny, Alex! I feel like a big fat
Michaels hurried to her. He hugged her to him. “Hey, it’s all right.”
“No, it’s not! Nobody told me this was going to happen! If I can’t practice my
This was not the time for him to point out that her doctor had told her to avoid exercise because of some bleeding early in the pregnancy. Everything seemed to be all right, but just to be sure, Toni was supposed to take it easy. That theoretically included Toni not doing the short dances of the Indonesian martial art in which she was an expert. No, definitely not the time to bring that up. A wrong word, and she’d start crying, which was so unlike her that it still amazed him every time. It was just hormones, the doctor had said, a normal part of pregnancy, but Michaels still hadn’t gotten used to it. Toni could kick the crap out of most men, even some who were fairly good martial artists themselves — he had seen her do it a few times — and for her to well up and cry at the drop of a hat was, well… it was spooky.
“Maybe you should just, you know, take a break from
“Take a
“Okay, okay, it was just a suggestion.”
Maybe it was better if he just kept his mouth shut. It had been a long time since he’d been around a pregnant woman. When his first wife Megan had been carrying their daughter, Susie, he had still been working in the field and was gone quite a bit, sometimes for a couple weeks at a time. He’d missed a lot of the experience, and at the time he’d been sorry he had. Now he was the commander of the FBI’s elite subunit Net Force, and maybe he might be spending a little more time at the office until things settled down at home.
He immediately felt guilty at that thought.
“I know it’s not your fault,” Toni said. “Well, okay, it is your fault, technically speaking.” She grinned. “But I don’t blame you.”
He smiled back at her. Her mood swing was instant, zap, just like that, from angry to happy.
“Go on back and finish installing your carburetor,” she said. “You putting in the four-barrel?”
“I decided to go with three deuces,” he said. “You know, pep it up a little.”
She shook her head. “You’ve been watching that old movie
“Well, I really am going to sell it. Eventually.”
“Uh-huh. Go on, go scrape some more skin off your hands and curse the guys who made that big chunk of Detroit iron. I’m going to sit down and see if I can’t get your son to stop kicking my bladder.”
“You sure are pretty when you’re pregnant,” he said.
“Forget it. One baby: That’s my limit.”
Toni went to her computer and slid the VR band down over her eyes, adjusting the earplugs and olfactory bulbs so they were comfortable. The set was wireless and had a pretty good range, so if her ankles started to swell, at least she could go lie down and prop her feet up on a cushion while she was on-line. She put on the tactile gloves and was ready.
