Steve’s Gym was an upscale place just off the PCH that catered to serious jocks. Tad pushed open the door, got a blast of frigid AC in the face, and almost had an orgasm from the cold rush.
Lifting weights had never been Tad’s thing. As a kid, his lungs had been too bad to let him do squat physically. Between the bronchitis and asthma that later opened him up for tuberculosis, and his naturally skinny frame, he was never gonna be able to bulk up, so he hadn’t ever tried.
With the Hammer working, he could probably go over and grab one of those big barbells and twirl it like a drum majorette’s baton if he wanted to, but why bother? Nobody here he wanted to impress.
“Can I help you?” came a deep voice from off to Tad’s right.
He looked. There was a woman there who looked like the Incredible Hulk’s sister: She was big, heavy, ugly, and looked as if she needed a shave. But she had tits—fake ones—and the red leotard she wore showed an absence of male equipment down south. A definite woman, sort of.
Tad smiled, enjoying a particularly nice rush of something in the chem cocktail. “Steve around?”
According to Bobby, Steve was the owner of the gym. He was a former Mr. America, Mr. Universe, and Mr. Whatever Came After That, past his prime but still as big as a rhino and plated with slabs of steroid-cured muscle. Maybe six two, two sixty, down twenty or thirty pounds from his competition days, Steve was still as wide as a door with arms as big around as most guys’ legs. Bobby wasn’t in the same class as most of the bodybuilders who came in to move mountains of iron plates, but he was buffed enough so nobody laughed when he took off his shirt, and in better shape than most of the celebrity jocks who made it a point to be seen here. Guys like the Zee-ster, who had personal trainers the way most people had toothbrushes, would stop by, do a few sets, work up a sweat, and have their pictures taken by their publicity guys as they left, all pumped up and manly.
Anyway, Bobby had told him to talk to Steve, who’d be happy to help out any friend of Bobby’s. Bobby dropped a lot of money in this place, doing private sessions, buying T-shirts and vitamins and shit.
The Amazon said, “He’s with a client right now. Maybe I can help you?” Her expression at seeing his pipe-stem frame in his black clothes said she didn’t really think she could help him, that God Himself would have trouble helping such a pencil-necked geek.
Tad smiled, his mind zipping along quickly, making connections and drawing conclusions that were usually beyond him. The Hammer made you strong as Superman, but it also gave you Lex Luthor’s brainpower. That wasn’t just subjective on his part, either, he had done some things that convinced him the increase in processing power was real.
He said, “Nah, it’s personal biz.”
“He’s gonna be about an hour,” the woman said. “You can wait if you want.”
Normally, Tad might have gone for that. An hour was nothing when he was straight—well, more or less straight. But when the Hammer was pounding in your brain, doing nothing for an hour when you were in the gotta-move stage was pretty much impossible.
Another body rush swept over Tad, and as it did, he got an erection, a woody that came up all of a sudden, like a switchblade opening, boing!
He looked at the woman bodybuilder. She probably outweighed him by thirty or forty pounds, and no way, no how was she his type, but she was female and she was right here. He said, “You want to screw? I bet I can wear you out in an hour.”
The woman laughed, a deep, resonant rumble way down in her belly. “Oh, wow, that’s really funny. You and me? Ha!”
Tad smiled pleasantly.
“Even if I was into men, which I’m not, you’d be the last guy I’d choose, fuzz-brain. I’d want somebody who could pick me up and put me down easy, and you don’t look like you could pick up an empty beer bottle without help.”
Tad continued to smile. Quickly, he stepped up to her, scooped her up, and held the startled bodybuilder cradled in his arms like a baby. “You mean like this? So, I passed the test, right?”
With that, he used his left arm to support her weight, reached over with his right hand, caught the leotard between her breasts and ripped it down the front, all the way to the crotch. The cloth fell away like tissue, showing the muscular nudity underneath.
The woman was still behind the curve, so startled by what he had done and probably that he had been able to do it, her mouth just gaped.
“Nice hooters,” Tad said. “You get a good deal on ’em?”
He stuck his hand between her legs, and whatever surprise she felt faded enough for her to scream and punch him at the same time.
Tad ignored the loose fist she threw as it bounced off his cheekbone, and sought to explore the area his hand had found. She started kicking and screaming, and even with the Hammer, he was having trouble keeping her still.
The cavalry arrived then, three guys who together probably weighed as much as a small car.
“Hey! What the fuck are you doing?!” one of them said. “Put Belinda down, asshole!”
“You got a security cam setup in here?” Tad asked.
“You’re damned straight we do, you fucking psycho!”
“Where is it?”
“Charlie, call the cops. And call an ambulance for this moron,” the guy said.
“You must be Steve, right?”
“That’s right, dickweed, and you’re dead. Put her down!”
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.
All done now.
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 had to oblige ’em.
Now that that was over, he could relax and let the Hammer swing him along.
Gonna be a good night, yessir, he could tell.
Let’s move it, Thor!
21
Newport Beach, California
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 mouth.
Definitely a cousin worth kissing, Maggie. If it hadn’t been her brother’s funeral, he would have thought about hitting on her, though the family would have howled at that. Shoot, he wasn’t going to marry her or have kids, what did it matter if they were cousins? He’d seen the way she looked at him, she’d be up for it.
His father said, “How are things at work, Robert?”
He came away from his mild sexual fantasy. “Fine. I’m up for a promotion. They are considering me for head of Polymers. Be worth another ten thousand a year.”
“Congratulations.”
“How is Arizona? The dog okay?’
“Fine. The dog is fine.”
That pretty much exhausted everything Drayne and his father usually said to each other. But sitting here waiting for some preacher, who at best probably had not seen Creepy in ten years, to talk about what a wonderful boy he had been and God’s plans and all, Drayne felt an urge to poke at his father. He said, “You hear about what happened at HQ in L.A.?” There was no need to identify HQ, that was all it had ever been called in their family.
“I heard.”
Drayne wanted to grin, but of course, that would have been inappropriate in this place at this time.
“Sounds like something you’d pull,” his father continued.
For a second, Drayne felt a cold splash of terror. “What?”
“I haven’t forgotten the incident in your English class.” His tone was stem, disapproving.
He felt a sense of relief, and at the same time, of irritation. Jesus Christ! The old man was still pissed off about that? Drayne hadn’t thought about it in years.
It had been nothing. He’d made a little stink bomb, one with a kitchen match and a cheap ballpoint pen, the kind of things kids did. You took the ink cartridge out, put the match inside the body of the pen, and rigged a bobby pin in the spring, then screwed the thing back together. The bobby pin stuck out where the ballpoint tip had been, so when you pulled it back and let it go, it thumped into the head of the match, lighting it. But since the flame didn’t have anywhere to go, it flared up and down the pen’s barrel and vaporized some of the cheap plastic before it went out. The result was a short blast of godawful smelly smoke; that was it.
Drayne had been fourteen, in the eighth grade, when he’d dropped one of the pen stink bombs into the garbage can next to the English teacher’s desk when she hadn’t been looking. It had been a hoot, that stinking smoke belching from the trash, but some goody-goody had seen him do it and ratted on him. He’d gotten two days off to consider the heinousness of his crime, and the old man had taken his belt to him when he found out. And never let him forget it.
“I’m not fourteen anymore, Dad. That was a long time ago.”
“I didn’t say you did it. I said it s
ounded like the kind of childish prank you used to do.”
Drayne didn’t say anything, but it pissed him off that the old man was still throwing up ancient history in his face. Even though he had done the FBI prank, that shouldn’t have been the first thing out of the old man’s mouth.
“Nobody got hurt, did they?” Drayne finally said.
His father had been thinking about it. He came back fast: “But they could have been. People unwittingly exposed to drugs are at risk. Somebody could have been injured. What if some of the agents or staff had been allergic to the drug? On medication that it might have interacted with? What if there had been some kind of emergency needing a prompt response? A fire in the building, maybe a bank robbery or a kidnapping, and they had been unable to respond properly? The idiot who thought it was funny to chemically assault an office of federal agents didn’t think about those things, you may be sure. It was an irresponsible, criminal act, and he’ll be caught and punished for it. I hope they lock him up and lose the key.”
Drayne gritted his teeth. It would be a bad idea to say anything. Just let it go. What did you expect? The old man was gonna express admiration for the cleverness of the stone job? C’mon, Bobby, you know how he is. Now is the time for all good men to shut the fuck up.
But he couldn’t help himself. Drayne said, “Maybe not. From the reports, it didn’t sound as if they had any leads. Maybe the guy was too smart for them.”
The old man turned to look at Drayne, blinking at him as he might at seeing a dog turd dropped into a church social punch bowl. “If he had been smart, he would have known better than to assault agents of the FBI. They’ll get him.” He paused a second. “Do you admire this criminal, Robert? Is that what you are saying? Didn’t you learn anything from your upbringing?”