“Well, excuse me for breathing,” Bruce said, as snarkily as he could.
“Since we won’t be doing anything for—or to—each other, I suppose I will,” Vanessa answered. “If we were… If we were, you’d want to worry about whether you kept on doing it.”
He started to laugh. Almost as soon as he did, he realized she wasn’t kidding, not even a little bit. The laugh came out as a strangled snort and quickly cut off.
That left her with better feelings about herself than she’d had in Camp Constitution. But it also left her without payback on Bronislav Nedic. If men weren’t such rotten horndogs… It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been plenty hot for Bronislav while they were together. The bastard knew what he was doing in bed, damn him. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t a bastard. It only defined what kind of bastard he was: a fucking bastard, of course.
Not too long after they got back to the widget works, Nick Gorczany called Vanessa into his office. He steepled his fingers and looked at her over them. “Did you ask Bruce to do something that might be illegal?” he inquired.
Bruce, Vanessa presumed, had been in there ahead of her, telling tales. “Who, me?” she said, doing her best to project innocence. “Of course not, Mr. Gorczany. Asking anyone to do something illegal would be, well, illegal.”
“Right,” Gorczany said tightly. Maybe her innocence projector had a burnt-out bulb. He went on, “Bruce went into some detail.”
“Did he?” Vanessa said. Her boss nodded. She continued, “Was one of the details he went into that he said he’d do it if I put out for him?”
“Mm, no,” Nick Gorczany answered. “You told him no dice?”
“You bet your sweet ass I told him no dice,” Vanessa said. “Yeah, I want to get even with Bronislav. But I don’t want to be even with Bronislav and then spend all my time figuring out how to get even with Bruce.”
“Oh.” Gorczany thought that over. After a few seconds, he nodded. “I think that’s a good plan. I also think Bruce may not know how lucky he is not to get all the way on your bad side.”
“Why, Mr. Gorczany, sir! You say the sweetest things!” Vanessa batted her eyelashes at him.
She made him laugh. “Okay. We’ll leave it there, then,” he said between chuckles. But he got serious again in a hurry. “Do me a favor, please. If you want to get even with this guy, that’s your business. Can’t say I blame you, either. If you use people who work here to help you get even, though, and especially if you get them to do things for you that are against the law… In that case, it turns into my business. So don’t do that any more, all right?”
“All right,” Vanessa said reluctantly. It wasn’t, not so far as she was concerned, but she could see where Gorczany was coming from. If one of his employees got into trouble for doing something like that, the widget works could wind up in trouble, too.
She walked out of the boss man’s office. A few minutes later, the enchanter Bruce walked back in. When he emerged once more, he seemed unhappy with the world. Catching Vanessa’s eye, he sent her a dirty look. Her answering stony stare made him find a new direction for his gaze in a hurry.
That would have been funny had Vanessa been in any mood for jokes. She wasn’t, and making Bruce flinch was no more reason for pride than scaring some other puppy. Damn his big, stupid mouth to hell and gone anyway! Because he’d tattled to Nick Gorczany, she couldn’t recruit anyone else at the widget works to give Bronislav what he deserved (and a little more besides—anything worth doing was worth overdoing, wasn’t it?).
Life wasn’t fair sometimes. Life sucked, when you got right down to it. And so did all the alternatives.
One of the amazing things about kids, Kelly Ferguson was discovering, was how fast they changed. Deborah was rolling over. She was crawling. She started to talk, and to walk. All of a sudden, she was potty-trained. Kelly definitely approved of that. So did Colin. “Looks like she’ll turn out to be a human being after all,” he exulted.
Kelly looked at him. “And how long have people been saying the same thing about you?” she asked in her mildest tones.
Her husband didn’t so much as blink. “Hey, babe, I’m a cop. Cops don’t even come close to human beings. Ask anybody. Heck, even the stupid cat knows that.”
The stupid cat in question lay asleep on the rug in front of him. The cat’s name was Playboy, in celebration of Marshall’s best sale. In spite of his name, he’d been fixed. One of the secretaries at the station had been sure her cat was fixed, too, regardless of the attention all the male felines in the neighborhood gave it. Four kittens later, she discovered she was wrong. Colin brought Playboy home with the idea that Deborah would like him.
Deborah did. She loved him, in fact. She squealed and chased him and rubbed his fur the wrong way when she petted him. Playboy was fine with grownups. Whenever Deborah showed up on his radar, he ran like hell.
He was a handsome beast, a gray tabby with an enormous plumy tail. Even the vet thought his tail was impressive, and the vet had seen and traumatized whole regiments of kitties. Unfortunately, while standing in the line for tail twice, Playboy had forgotten about the line for brains.
Colin leaned down to pet the cat. Playboy purred and stretched and rolled over so his belly fur stuck up in the air. He wasn’t a lap cat, but he was friendly enough… on his own terms, and always provided you didn’t shriek “Kitty!” in his ear when he wasn’t expecting it.
“Remember when he met the mirror monster?” Colin said, chuckling.
Kelly snorted. “I’m not likely to forget it. Oh, my God!”
Playboy’d been a kitten then, and brand-new to the house. He’d staggered up the stairs and wandered into Colin’s study. The study had begun life as a bedroom. It boasted sliding, mirrored closet doors, like the other upstairs bedrooms. Playboy, then, spotted another cat in the mirror.
The kitty in the mirror saw him, too. Playboy had thought he was the only cat in the house. He angrily arched his back. So did the kitty in the mirror. He stuck his majestic tail straight up in the air and bottlebrushed it. The kitty in the mirror did, too. Playboy hissed and showed off his pointy teeth. The kitty in the mirror did the same thing.
Provoked past standing it, Playboy charged. The kitty in the mirror charged, too. They slammed together at top speed. Bang! The kitty in the mirror turned out to have a much harder head than Playboy did. And Colin and Kelly, who’d watched the confrontation with wonder and amazement, rolled on the floor laughing their asses off and scared the cat.
“He only did that once,” Kelly said: the best defense of Playboy’s poor battered brain cells she could give.
“I should hope so!” Colin exclaimed. “If he’d done it twice, he would’ve killed himself.”
Deborah came into the front room. Playboy rolled over onto his stomach again and got his feet under him, ready to light out for the tall timber if the small, noisy human launched a sneak attack. But Deborah didn’t have killing cats on her mind right this minute. She was clutching a piece of paper, on which she’d been coloring in crayon.
“Look!” she said importantly, and displayed her artwork: a large blue blob.
“That’s very nice,” Kelly said, and then, “What is it?” With preschoolers, as with adult abstractionists, you were allowed, even encouraged, to ask such questions.
“It’s a whale,” Deborah answered.
“That is nice,” Colin said. He’d picked up a whole series of children’s nature guides on the cheap somewhere. Deborah loved them—she had some of them practically memorized. So if he felt chuffed just then, Kelly wouldn’t have said he hadn’t earned the right.