Busted Flush

“Billy!” She looked around. It was a private room, but with an open door and a big window on the corridor and nurses’ station beyond. “Not here!”

“Nah, not for that,” he said. “I just want to feel you next to me again.”

Carefully, she climbed up. He put his unencumbered arm around her, feeling foolishly triumphant. He soon fell asleep. Some time later, his cell phone rang. He awoke instantly, feeling refreshed and alert, untroubled by dreams. The Angel, still at his side, reached out and took it off the bedside stand and handed it to him.

“Yeah,” he said.

“It’s Jamal,” a voice said. “We’ve found them.”

Ray looked out of the tacky gift shop across the street from the seedy motel called the Love Lodge, where Moon had tracked the Racist and his companion after they’d abandoned the stolen car in a lot six blocks away. Fortunately, Ray thought, even ace criminals needed to sleep. They thought they’d muddied their trail enough, but they hadn’t counted on Moon’s hypersensitive sense of smell. They hadn’t counted on a lot of things, including Ray’s fanatical sense of outrage. And now they were going to pay.

Stuntman sidled up to him in the darkened shop and whispered in his excitement, though there was no way they could hear him in the motel across the street even if it wasn’t 3:00 A.M. and they weren’t asleep.

“All set,” he said, putting a certain amount of grim satisfaction into his whisper.

“The Marines in place?” Ray asked.

Norwood nodded. Ray had requisitioned a platoon of Marines, as well as half a ton of material, from the base and placed them around the back of the motel. No one was going to slip away from this party.

Ray nodded. “All right then. Let’s go.”

He looked almost normal in his fighting suit, except for the bandage covering most of his neck, and his right leg, abnormally thickened and stiffened by the brace and wrappings that made it possible for him to move slowly and gingerly. The tendons behind his knee, severed little more than twelve hours earlier by the Racist’s blade, hadn’t totally healed yet. But the doctors had listened to his orders and sewn them together. They were holding precariously. Getting old, he reflected, was a pain in the ass. He set his crutch aside. The Angel took his left arm, and they shuffled forward together. Stuntman stepped in front of him.

“I’m going to get a shot at that loser, right?” he asked.

Ray looked at him. “I won’t be up to any fancy dancing for a couple of days. You’d better take a good shot at him. Moon and Angel will back you up.”

“Yes, sir,” Stuntman said happily, almost as if he meant it. He went out through the back of the shop to join Moon in the adjacent alley.

“You sure you want to do this, Billy?” the Angel asked.

“Hell, I’m not dead, yet,” he said. “I want to see the look on that shit-head’s face when we bust him. And I really want to see the look on his face when he tries to run.”

The Angel shook her head. “All right.”

As they went through the darkened shop Ray stopped before they reached the door, grabbing an object that was dangling from the ceiling. “Hey,” Ray said. “Just what I need.”

The Angel looked at him, frowning. “What in the world is it?”

“It’s a piñata shaped like Tachyon’s spaceship,” Ray said, putting it on the counter. “I promised my secretary I’d bring her one. Remind me to pick it up later.”

The Angel started to say something, thought better of it, and shook her head. They went out into the dark street together, carefully, shuffling silently, Ray’s disability only part of the reason for their slow and careful movements. They sidled through the motel’s parking lot and came up to the right door.

Ray turned and waved back toward the alley mouth and two black shapes stepped out into the street. The man-sized one was Stuntman. The beast-shaped one was Moon in her most terrifying form, the dire wolf. Her hunched back was almost as high as Norwood’s head. Her fangs gleamed in the moonlight.

Ray turned to the Angel. “Take down the door for me, would you?”

“Certainly,” she said with a smile, and smote it off its hinges with a single blow. Ray followed it into the room if not as gracefully as usual then with at least the usual fervor. He flicked on the overhead light as he came in shouting, the Angel following him in with her blazing sword clasped in her hands.

“Wakey, wakey, scumbags. Time to go home to the big house.”