Tad grinned. As it sometimes did when he got excited, the drugs in the Hammer came up full blast, roaring in like a tornado.
“Here,” he said. He threw Belinda at the three. Charlie had stepped away, heading for a phone, but Belinda hit Steve and his Neanderthal buddy hard enough to knock them over. All three of them tumbled to the floor, hard.
Tad leaped at Charlie, grabbed him under the armpits, and lifted him into the air until his feet cleared the floor. Charlie had to go about two fifty, maybe two sixty, a nice hefty lad. “Which way is the security cam control room?”
Charlie, who hung there like a kid’s doll, stammered, “Th-th-there!”
He pointed.
Since Steve was almost back on his feet, Tad turned and threw Charlie at him. The collision of beef was pretty hard.
Tad ran for the unmarked door, didn’t bother to use the knob, and knocked it open. There was a video monitor and a computer set up, a big hard drive working.
Tad glanced around. No diskettes stacked up anywhere, no removable drives on the shelves. He moved closer and divined that the security device was no more than it appeared to be: a short-time recorder that ran a cycle, recording over and over, using the same storage device.
He grabbed the thing, smashed it against the floor, and shattered it into several pieces. The HD disk popped out, and he picked that up and broke it in half, then stuck the pieces in his back pocket. Never knew but what they could recover stuff even if it was busted.
He started for the door.
Steve, too stupid to know when he was outmatched, came at Tad, swinging a steel bar. Even without weights on it, the bar had to go fifteen pounds, and it would have broken something had it hit him.
Tad dodged, ducked, and the bar whistled over his head, slammed into the wall, and punched a long hole in the Sheetrock. The force of Steve’s swing buried the steel rod half its length in the wall.
Tad drove his knee into Steve’s kidney, and the big man went down as if his legs had suddenly vanished.
Nobody else got in Tad’s way as he left the building.
He headed for his car.
Nobody came after him. Just as well, too. He had enjoyed wrestling with the folks in the gym, and if they’d come out for him, why, he would just have
Now that that was over, he could relax and let the Hammer swing him along.
Gonna be a good night, yessir, he could tell.
21
The Newport Beach Community Presbyterian Church (USA) was not as ostentatious as, say, the Crystal Palace, but certainly it was L.A.: in your face enough so it wouldn’t pass for a church most other places. Philosophically, God’s frozen people tended to have conservative views on politics, conservative views on social issues, and of course, conservative views on religion. They were very liberal on converting the heathen, though, and never let a chance to start up an overseas mission pass by unmolested. An old running joke in the church was, the Presbyterians had offered to completely fund the Red Cross and CARE, provided those organizations would let them pack a dehydrated minister in with each big shipment of blood or food. They were mostly Republicans, Drayne figured out back when he was still going to church, mostly white and old Republicans, at that. His family had been members since Grandpa Drayne, a deacon of his church back home in Atlanta, had moved out here eighty years ago. The synods were different, but California and Georgia weren’t that far apart as far as the basics were concerned.
The building itself had a lot of glass, giving it a light and airy look, and the air conditioning unit out back, roaring to keep the assembled cool, was the size of a half-ton pickup truck. Drayne figured the reason the Baptists always preached about hellfire was because in those un-air-conditioned Southern churches, the congregation could relate to the concept. If the AC went out during a mild spring hot spell in a Presbyterian church, services would be canceled for fear the assembly would all die of heat stroke.
The place sure didn’t seem somber enough for a funeral, and most of the mourners were wearing anything but black. Looked like a flock of parakeets, all the pastel colors. What could you expect? It was L.A., wasn’t it?
Drayne’s father had been a deacon at one time, though his FBI travel had cut into that, but last Drayne knew, the old man still attended church every Sunday down in Arizona. If he wasn’t a true believer, he sure gave that impression.
Drayne himself had skipped every Sunday when his father hadn’t been around to make him go, and hadn’t been inside a church except for a couple of weddings since he’d left home for college. Oh, and that once when he made a major chemical sale to somebody who thought a Catholic church in Berkeley would be a safe place to do a dope deal. Turned out the buyer was wrong. He got busted after a fender-bender accident leaving the parking lot.
Drayne had managed to dig up a dark suit, a white shirt, and a plain tie that were all five or six years old, unworn for almost that long, knowing that if he came in a T-shirt and shorts, his father would probably pull his gun and shoot him. And even though he was retired, the old man always carried a piece when he went out, a habit he couldn’t let go of. He’d still be protecting the republic when he was in a wheelchair and blind.
Despite the fact he was pushing seventy, the old man still looked pretty healthy. His hair was white, and his fair skin, pale most of his life, was now a ruddy color that was almost a tan, from spending more time out of doors in the Arizona sunshine. Drayne knew he looked just like a younger version of his father. The family resemblance had always been strong, even though he had refused to believe it for a long time. Then one day he’d caught sight of himself in a rest room mirror as he was washing his hands, and lo! there was the face of his father staring out at him. Assuming he lived so long, the old man was what Drayne was gonna look like at his age.
Amazing, that.
His father stood outside the church, looking at his watch, waiting for Drayne. He wore a black suit, probably one of a dozen black or dark gray ones he owned, and since he hadn’t gotten fat after he retired, it still fit. A better fit than the suit Drayne himself had on.
“Robert,” his father said.
“Dad.”
“Let’s go inside. We’ll sit with Edwina.”
People were still filing in. The service wouldn’t start for another twenty minutes. Drayne knew that his father would be early, and that he expected everybody in the family to be early, and so it was.
Drayne offered condolences to his aunt and uncle and cousins. Irene, the girl who had showed him hers while he showed her his when they’d been nine, had grown up to be a good-looking woman, though she was married with three kids of her own now, and a little on the hefty side. Sheila, the middle girl, wore dark-rimmed glasses and a black dress with long sleeves, and had also gotten a little chunky. But Maggie, the youngest, who’d been a little geeky-looking girl with thick glasses, was now a beautiful redhead of twenty-five who, he had heard, taught aerobics somewhere in the Valley, and looked as fit and as tight as a violin string.
“Hey, Maggie. I thought you wore glasses. I don’t see any contacts. You have the laser surgery?”
“No, I’m on the NightMove system. You wear these hard contact lenses to bed, and when you wake up, you can go without glasses or contacts all day.”
“No kidding?”
“Yeah, it’s called Ortho-K. Been around for a while, but they finally got it pretty much perfected. You can go sixteen, eighteen hours, and in my case, I have twenty/ twenty without glasses.”
“Great. Hey, I’m sorry about Creepy.”
“Thanks, it’s such a shock. Can’t believe he’s really dead.” She leaned over and kissed him on the edge of the
