Point of Impact

is priceless. Pure joy. Long as my malpractice insurance and my hands hold up, I’m going to keep doing it.”

He clapped Michaels on the shoulder. “What I personally think is that this pregnancy is going to do fine, if your wife will just kick back and let it roll along.”

“Thank you, sir,” Michaels said. “I appreciate it.”

Now, as Toni slept and Michaels puttered around the condo, he hoped the doctor had been right in his assessment. Toni wanted the baby, and he did, too. It was going to be the center of their new family and life together, and it would be devastating to lose it.

Him, not it.

In the living room, he came across the box with the two kerambit knives. He took them out, put one in each hand, got a feel for how they worked. Odd, to be playing with knives and thinking about a new baby.

Well, maybe not, given the boy’s parents.

He moved the knives slowly and carefully. It probably wouldn’t do Toni’s stress level any good at all for him to accidentally slice his wrist open. Not to mention his own health. Still, the little blades seemed familiar in his grip, comfortable, and the djuru moves didn’t seem to put him in any danger of cutting himself. At least not this slowly and carefully. One hurried wrong move could put the lie to that quick enough, though.

He put the knives up, and tiptoed back in to check on Toni.

26

Somewhere Over New Mexico

On the flight home, Drayne felt pretty good. The computer guy was as good as he’d been cracked up to be. The police in SoCal and Steve’s Gym no longer had any reference to one Robert Drayne in their systems. More, the techno-whiz was able to determine that they hadn’t gotten around to where his name had been to assign anybody to check it before it had magically vanished. Nor had it been printed out to a hardcopy. The list had been renumbered, and unless you knew somebody had been erased and knew precisely where to look and how to look, you wouldn’t be able to tell it had been done. And even if you could tell that, you wouldn’t know who was gone.

Once again, Drayne was golden. And all it had cost was a promise of free dope as long as the guy lived. Cheap beyond measure, even if he had to pay it.

Drayne smiled as the flight attendant walked along the first class rows, asking if anybody wanted complimentary champagne. Probably the stuff was Korbel, or at best one of the California domaines owned by the French. Not bad if you had no experience with the really good stuff, but as far as Drayne was concerned, he wouldn’t use it to clean the chrome on his car bumper. Still, the attendant was a babe, not wearing a wedding ring, and the flight from Dallas-Fort Worth to LAX was still hours out from landing. He could strike up a conversation with her, maybe get her number. Say, have you ever considered acting? You have great bone structure….

The attendant stopped to talk to a woman Drayne thought he recognized as somebody in L.A. politics, a city council member or maybe a spokesperson for the mayor’s office. Drayne glanced at his watch.

About now, Tad would be buying the computer whiz a dinner at a great little out-of-the-way Italian restaurant locally famous for its fresh produce, ostensibly to make arrangements to deliver a dozen caps of the Hammer as a first payment of a lifetime drug supply. The computer geek, a health nut, had raved about the place. The salad that came with the meal featured fresh wild greens, mushrooms, and other local herbs, and was terrific, he’d said.

Drayne had smiled, regretting that he had to be back in L.A. and would have to miss that, but hey, Tad loved salad!

The last time Tad had eaten a salad or anything remotely healthy had probably been twenty years past. Anybody who looked at him could see that. But a guy as full of himself as Mr. Computer Wizard would skate right past that obvious fact without blinking. People saw what they wanted to see, not what was really there.

So the guy had chosen his own exit and made it easy for them to hold the door open.

If everything went as planned, just as the computer geek was about to lay into this garden delight, he was going to get a call on his com. Tad had the number programmed into his own com, and a touch of a button would do the trick. While Mr. Wizard was distracted, Tad was going to add a couple of different kinds of sliced mushrooms to the man’s salad that weren’t on the menu. These grew wild in places as hot and damp as Austin still was this time of year, easy to find if you knew where to look, and once they were sliced were virtually identical to any other small, white-fleshed mushrooms.

The first variety of these particular’shrooms contained heavy concentrations of amatoxins and phallotoxins, either of which could be fatal, and both of which would almost certainly destroy liver and kidney functions, leading to death within a week to ten days 80 percent of the time.

The second variety was chock-full of Gyromita toxins, which, while not quite as nasty as the others, also attacked the liver and kidneys, plus the circulatory system, leading to heart failure in extreme cases. Mostly Gyromita poisoning was uncommon in the U.S. because cooking these mushrooms usually mitigated the toxin. Nice, crisp, raw ones in a salad would still pack a nasty punch, however.

Mr. Computer Wizard would enjoy his meal. He and Tad would part company on the best of terms. A day later, maybe two, Mr. Wizard would come down with flulike symptoms: nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, cramps. His doctor would probably miss the diagnosis at first, but even if he didn’t, the only way to keep the victim alive would be a liver and maybe a kidney transplant, and even then, the heart was still at risk.

No guarantee, of course, but eight chances out of ten he would croak weren’t bad odds. And if he made it, he’d be a long time recovering, on immunosuppressive drugs if they could find him a new liver, and unable to screw with his body chemistry if he wanted to stay alive. And if he made it that far? Well, they could always pay him another visit.

If he died, it would be due to mushroom poisoning, a terrible tragedy, a freak accident. Bad for the restaurant’s reputation and insurance carrier, but, hey, that was how life went sometimes. You want an omelette, you gotta break a few eggs.

The flight attendant approached. “Care for champagne, sir?”

“That would be nice. Look, I don’t want you to think I’m hitting on you, but I’m a movie producer. Have you ever considered acting?”

He held up his producer business card and smiled.

She took the card, looked at it, and smiled back. “I’ve thought about it. I was the lead in my high school play.”

Life was very good.

* * *

Life is crappy, Toni thought. Nobody had told her what might happen when she got pregnant, nobody had said she’d be reduced to the mobility and muscularity of a slug. She hated this.

Alex had hung around to take care of her, but she had made him leave. He was sweet, but she wasn’t going to be pleasant company, and she didn’t want him thinking of her as a constant bitch. Better he should see her smiling and at least offering some pretense of being happy once in a while.

“You sure?” he’d asked, after three exchanges on the subject.

“I’m positive. Go.”

And he had, and that pissed her off, too. Yes, she had said for him to, she had insisted that he do so, but she hadn’t really wanted him to leave. Why didn’t he know that? How could he just… take her at her word that way? Why were men so stupid?

Yes, yes, all right, she knew it was illogical, but that was how she felt.

Now that Alex was gone, she was at a loss for what to do with herself. The doctor had made it crystal clear she was on light duty from now on, and since a big part of her had always been physical, this was proving to be intolerable. She couldn’t move, she might as well put down roots and turn into a fucking houseplant. She really hated this.