"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.
Saturday, December 25th, 2:15 p.m. Ambush Flats, Arizona 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 this this?
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.
Saturday, December 25th, 12:25 p.m. Boise, Idaho 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 bailed and gone back to his hotel.
At a point when Megan had gone to check on the turkey she was cooking, and Byron had gone to get some more wood for the fire, Michaels remembered the little present Toni had given him. It was in his coat pocket. He walked to where he'd hung his coat, fished the little gift out, and opened it.
When he saw what it was, he laughed.
"What's funny, Dadster?" Susie yelled over the blasting noise she thought was music.
He tucked the present into his shirt pocket. "Nothing, sweetie, I just remembered something."
Toni had gotten him a pair of electronic earplugs. According to the instructions, they would allow the wearer to hear normal sounds, but would damp any high-decibel noises that might damage a wearer's hearing. Funny woman, his assistant.
His virgil cheeped.
He frowned. He had forwarded all incoming calls to his vox mail. The only messages he should be getting were Priority One coms, and if that was what this was, it was bad news. He checked the caller ID. Jay Gridley.
"What's up, Jay?"
"Chief, we got a major problem here. Somebody just tried to hijack four shipments of plutonium. We headed off three attempts, but at one in France there were a lot of dead bodies after the smoke cleared, and at one in Arizona we were too late, they got away with it. Colonel Howard is on the way with a strike team, we got National Guard and state police and local cops crawling all over the place down there, and about half a bomb's worth of plutonium on the loose."
"That's awful, but why is this our our problem? Shouldn't it be CIA for the foreign and regular FBI for the domestic?" problem? Shouldn't it be CIA for the foreign and regular FBI for the domestic?"
"Well, it's ours because the message giving the yahoo militia who did it the times and places came out of a Net Force workstation, Chief. Right here in HQ."
"Oh, shit!"
"Yes, sir. You might want to think about going to Arizona or coming back here or something."
Michaels looked up and saw Megan frowning at him from the hall.
"I'll call you back."
"What?" Megan said.
"Something has come up," he said. "I'm going to have to miss lunch. Sorry."
"Big surprise," she said. Her voice was bitter. "Got to go save the goddamned world all by yourself again, don't you?"
"Listen, Megan-"
"They can't get along without you for one day? It's Christmas!"
With bad timing, Byron chose that moment to step into the room with an armload of split oak and alder for the fire. "What's going on?"
"Alex isn't staying for lunch." She said it loudly.
Susie came out of her music trance. "What? You're leaving? You just got got here!" here!"
"Daddy's work is more important than staying to visit, honey," Megan said. "You know that. He's a very important man."
Michaels glared at Megan. Then he looked at his daughter. "I'm sorry, baby, but it's an emergency."
"It's okay. I understand."
But she didn't understand, he could see that. And Megan wasn't going to make it any easier. "I'll get back as soon as I can to visit you again," Michaels said.
"About the time Hell freezes over," Megan said.
Michaels gritted his teeth. "In the hall," he said to Megan.
"Excuse me?"
"I'd like a word with you in the hall, please."
Megan stared daggers at him. Michaels went to hug his daughter and kiss her good-bye. "You learn how to work this thing, and when I come back you can show me all the songs you know."
"Exemplary, Dadster. I love you."
"I love you too, little bit. You take care of your mother."
In the hall, Megan stood with her arms crossed, so tight she was almost humming with tension. Byron was right behind her.
"You come all the way out here, drop off a present, and leave. That's just great, Alex. You're a terrific father." Her sarcasm was so acid you could etch glass with it.
And it hurt, just as she knew it would. She knew how to find the cracks in his armor. She always had. And the needle she used to stab him was loaded with poison, just as it had been during the last year of their marriage, and during the divorce. When she got pissed off, she stopped playing fair. He said, his voice tight, "I'm doing the best I can."
"Your best is crappy. If you loved your daughter, you'd do better."
"So you told me a couple of thousand times already. Must be nice to be perfect in every way. How do you stand being around us mere mortals?"
"Hey, take it easy there," Byron said. "No point in getting nasty."
Michaels looked at the big bearded man as if he had just turned into a giant upright toad. "Excuse me? She can tell me I'm a lousy father and that I don't love my daughter, but I can't fight back? Why don't you go get some more firewood, Byron? This is a private conversation."
Megan flared at that. "Anything you can say to me, you can say in front of Byron."
"Really?" Michaels's temper was smoldering now. He was about to flame on, and if he did, he would say something he would regret. He tried to hold onto as much calm as he could. "Listen, you don't want me here, you and Byron have been doing everything short of tearing each other's clothes off, and I suspect some of that was for my benefit. Fine, you made your point."
"It doesn't matter how I feel about you, Alex. It's how your daughter feels."
"I'm not going to let you beat me over the head with that anymore! I love my daughter and she knows it. If If you really loved her, you wouldn't be turning her against me at every opportunity. You can really be a bitch when you want, you know?" you really loved her, you wouldn't be turning her against me at every opportunity. You can really be a bitch when you want, you know?"
That got her attention. It was the first time he'd ever said something that direct about her, and her eyes went wide in surprise.
It got Byron's attention too.
"That's it, pal," he said. "You're outta here!" He reached out and grabbed Michaels's arm with both hands.
Boy, was that that the wrong thing to do. the wrong thing to do.
Michaels reacted without thinking. He swung his elbow at Byron's head, keeping it in tight, as if he were holding a marble in the crook of his arm, just like Toni had taught him. Bone met bone with a solid thwack thwack! and Byron fell as if his legs had suddenly vanished.
Son of a bitch. It worked!
Megan dropped to her knees and grabbed at the fallen man. "Byron! Byron! Are you okay?"
Susie's music boomed from the other room where she played, thankfully oblivious to all this.
Byron blinked, tried to sit up. "What happened? Did I slip on something? Why am I on the floor-?"
He'd live, he was just stunned.
Megan looked up from the fallen man at Michaels. She said, "We're getting married! And Byron wants to adopt Susie!" Her voice practically dripped venom.
Michaels felt his soul freeze, then begin to shrivel. There it was, in black and white, no mistaking it. He had loved this woman beyond measure, and she was doing everything she could to hurt him. How could he have been so blind?
When he could find a breath, he spoke, and his voice was cold. "Congratulations. I'll send you a toaster. But he will adopt Susie over my dead body. I'll spend every penny I have and every penny I can borrow on private detectives and lawyers. And if Byron here spends a night under this roof before before you get married, you'll find yourself in a custody battle like you wouldn't believe! You want to play rough? Fine." you get married, you'll find yourself in a custody battle like you wouldn't believe! You want to play rough? Fine."
With that, he turned and stalked out.
In the cold air, snow clouds gathered and threatened. Perfect. Just perfect!
Well. You wanted an excuse to leave, didn't you? Better be more careful what you wish for next time, Alex. You might get that one too Better be more careful what you wish for next time, Alex. You might get that one too.