do much in the last ten or twelve years with their son running around the house. But now that he was in Canada, well, it was time to make hay while the sun shone.
“I’m fat and ugly,” Nadine said. “I don’t know why you want me around.”
“Well, you’re a pretty good cook,” he allowed.
She threw her shoe at him, but he was expecting it, so he managed to dodge it.
“Of course, you also have lousy aim.”
She reached for her other shoe.
The phone rang.
“Let the robot answer it,” he said.
“This from the master of duty? It could be Tyrone.”
Nadine picked up the phone. The extension in the bathroom was a faux antique dial phone that didn’t have a caller ID screen. “Hello? Oh, hey, baby!”
Howard had mixed feelings about the call. Of course he was happy to hear from his son. He’d have been a little happier if the boy’s sense of timing wasn’t so lousy. Half an hour earlier or an hour later, those would have been better. People who didn’t have children didn’t know what happened to their sex lives after the little ones got big enough to pad down the hall and shove the bedroom door open, looking for Mama and Daddy.
“Yeah, sweetie, he’s right here. I’ll put him on.”
Howard took the phone. Unfortunately, he stopped paying attention to Nadine as soon as Tyrone said hello. A mistake.
The second shoe hit him on the butt.
“Hey, ow!”
“Dad?”
“Nothing, son. Your mom is just being cute.”
The Hammer was coming on by the time Tad left the movie theater. Like he thought, there hadn’t been any surveillance cams set up in the theater proper. There was one installed in the redi-teller in the lobby, but neither he nor Bobby had used the money machine when the Zee-ster had done his private showing. There wasn’t any need; everything had been on the tab Zeigler ran.
By the time he got to the gym, the chem was working pretty good in Tad. It had come on faster than usual. Maybe it was because he had tripped such a short time ago and was still wrung out, or maybe it had to do with the other dope he’d been taking to stay ambulatory. Whatever. Thor was on a roll, urging Tad to join him in a night of ass-kicking and taking names, and it was all Tad could do to maintain control.
Steve’s Gym was an upscale place just off the PCH that catered to serious jocks. Tad pushed open the door, got a blast of frigid AC in the face, and almost had an orgasm from the cold rush.
Lifting weights had never been Tad’s thing. As a kid, his lungs had been too bad to let him do squat physically. Between the bronchitis and asthma that later opened him up for tuberculosis, and his naturally skinny frame, he was never gonna be able to bulk up, so he hadn’t ever tried.
With the Hammer working, he could probably go over and grab one of those big barbells and twirl it like a drum majorette’s baton if he wanted to, but why bother? Nobody here he wanted to impress.
“Can I help you?” came a deep voice from off to Tad’s right.
He looked. There was a woman there who looked like the Incredible Hulk’s sister: She was big, heavy, ugly, and looked as if she needed a shave. But she had tits — fake ones — and the red leotard she wore showed an absence of male equipment down south. A definite woman, sort of.
Tad smiled, enjoying a particularly nice rush of something in the chem cocktail. “Steve around?”
According to Bobby, Steve was the owner of the gym. He was a former Mr. America, Mr. Universe, and Mr. Whatever Came After That, past his prime but still as big as a rhino and plated with slabs of steroid-cured muscle. Maybe six two, two sixty, down twenty or thirty pounds from his competition days, Steve was still as wide as a door with arms as big around as most guys’ legs. Bobby wasn’t in the same class as most of the bodybuilders who came in to move mountains of iron plates, but he was buffed enough so nobody laughed when he took off his shirt, and in better shape than most of the celebrity jocks who made it a point to be seen here. Guys like the Zee-ster, who had personal trainers the way most people had toothbrushes, would stop by, do a few sets, work up a sweat, and have their pictures taken by their publicity guys as they left, all pumped up and manly.
Anyway, Bobby had told him to talk to Steve, who’d be happy to help out any friend of Bobby’s. Bobby dropped a lot of money in this place, doing private sessions, buying T-shirts and vitamins and shit.
The Amazon said, “He’s with a client right now. Maybe I can help you?” Her expression at seeing his pipe- stem frame in his black clothes said she didn’t really think she could help him, that God Himself would have trouble helping such a pencil-necked geek.
Tad smiled, his mind zipping along quickly, making connections and drawing conclusions that were usually beyond him. The Hammer made you strong as Superman, but it also gave you Lex Luthor’s brainpower. That wasn’t just subjective on his part, either, he had done some things that convinced him the increase in processing power was real.
He said, “Nah, it’s personal biz.”
“He’s gonna be about an hour,” the woman said. “You can wait if you want.”
Normally, Tad might have gone for that. An hour was nothing when he was straight — well, more or less straight. But when the Hammer was pounding in your brain, doing nothing for an hour when you were in the gotta-move stage was pretty much impossible.
Another body rush swept over Tad, and as it did, he got an erection, a woody that came up all of a sudden, like a switchblade opening,
He looked at the woman bodybuilder. She probably outweighed him by thirty or forty pounds, and no way, no how was she his type, but she was female and she was right here. He said, “You want to screw? I bet I can wear you out in an hour.”
The woman laughed, a deep, resonant rumble way down in her belly. “Oh, wow, that’s really funny. You and me? Ha!”
Tad smiled pleasantly.
“Even if I was into men, which I’m not, you’d be the last guy I’d choose, fuzz-brain. I’d want somebody who could pick me up and put me down easy, and you don’t look like you could pick up an empty beer bottle without help.”
Tad continued to smile. Quickly, he stepped up to her, scooped her up, and held the startled bodybuilder cradled in his arms like a baby. “You mean like this? So, I passed the test, right?”
With that, he used his left arm to support her weight, reached over with his right hand, caught the leotard between her breasts and ripped it down the front, all the way to the crotch. The cloth fell away like tissue, showing the muscular nudity underneath.
The woman was still behind the curve, so startled by what he had done and probably that he had been able to do it, her mouth just gaped.
“Nice hooters,” Tad said. “You get a good deal on ’em?”
He stuck his hand between her legs, and whatever surprise she felt faded enough for her to scream and punch him at the same time.
Tad ignored the loose fist she threw as it bounced off his cheekbone, and sought to explore the area his hand had found. She started kicking and screaming, and even with the Hammer, he was having trouble keeping her still.
The cavalry arrived then, three guys who together probably weighed as much as a small car.
“Hey! What the fuck are you doing?!” one of them said. “Put Belinda down, asshole!”
“You got a security cam setup in here?” Tad asked.
“You’re damned straight we do, you fucking psycho!”
“Where is it?”
“Charlie, call the cops. And call an ambulance for this moron,” the guy said.
“You must be Steve, right?”
“That’s right, dickweed, and you’re dead. Put her down!”
