“That was then, honey chile, this is now.” He waved his backpack.
“It came?” She knew right away what he was talking about. That was one of the things he liked about her. She wasn’t the most beautiful girl in the world, but she was athletic, and she was very quick.
He nodded. “Yep. In this morning’s mail.”
“Lemme see, lemme see!” She reached for his backpack, and he quickly jerked it back.
“Hey, easy! I don’t want you to damage it.”
“I’ll damage your head if you don’t give it up right now!”
He laughed. From inside the backpack, he produced the object in question — a new boomerang.
And not just any boomerang, but a Larry Takahashi KinuHa—a Silk Leaf — a paxolin MTA L-Hook identical to the one that Jerry Prince had used to win maximum time aloft at the Internationals last year. It had cost him sixty-five dollars, plus insured shipping, and it came pre-tuned and ready to throw. Prince had spiraled his up at the Internationals in Sydney last summer and hung it for five minutes and sixteen seconds — with a thirty-klick-per-hour wind blowing. On a calm day, word was he could keep it in the air a whole lot longer, in practice anyway.
The boomerang was lightweight, thin, and flexible, made from layers of linen and glue, and colored a psychedelic electric blue with a black leaf stenciled on the long arm. The blue made it easier to spot if you missed a catch and it augered into the grass.
“Wow,” Nadine said.
“So, are you going to come with us?”
She looked up from the ’rang. “I dunno. My mom planned to have me doing yard work this summer. Mowing the lawn, helping the old lady across the street with her garden, like that.”
“It’s not the whole summer, it’s only three weeks. My mom said she’d talk to yours. C’mon, Nadine, how often are you going to get a chance to enter the Junior Nationals, if they aren’t here in town?”
“Oh, I’ll ask, ’cause I’d love to go. Oregon.” She pronounced it “Ory-gone.”
“My dad is borrowing an RV from somebody he knows,” he said. “It’ll be cheaper than staying in motels and eating out. It’ll sleep like eight, and there’s only four of us. Dad says we’ll take five or six days to drive out, spend a week there, then a leisurely drive home. We’ll get there like two days before the JN, have time to practice.”
“It sounds great. Doesn’t it rain all the time out there, though?”
“Nope. My dad goes out there in the winter sometimes for survival training. It’s desert and snow and all on the eastern side of the state in the winter, but pretty green and sunny in Portland in the summer.”
“They still have Indians out there, don’t they?”
“Yeah, they own casinos. And the cowboys herd cattle in helicopters or riding on ATVs. It’s the northwest, dummy, not Bali.”
“You talk too much. Show me what you got.” She waved at the new ’rang.
“No, you get to throw it first,” he said.
“Really? No, I couldn’t.”
“Yeah, you can. Then I can beat you and make you feel bad.”
“Hah. Gimme it.”
He smiled as she took the new boomerang and headed out to where they had chalked a throwing circle. He sure did like her. She wasn’t gorgeous like Belladonna Wright, and Nadine didn’t make his heart race as Bella had done with a touch or a look, but he enjoyed being around her. She was somebody he could hang with, not exactly like a sister, but not somebody who stirred up his hormones too much, either. Outside of his pal Jimmy-Joe Hatfield, he didn’t have any other close friends. And boy, she could throw.
He watched her limber up her arm and shoulder, drop some pixie dust to check the wind direction, then set herself for the throw.
The new boomerang whirled from her hand and soared, climbed steeply, twirling into the morning sunshine. Man. Look at it go.
4
As he usually did when things got dicey in his personal life, Alex Michaels buried himself in work. Which was why he was at the office at nine P.M. on a Friday night, keeping busy. He scanned computer files, logged into reports annotated by his staff, and tried not to think about anything else.
Somebody was scamming old people by selling phantom retirement property from a website that appeared to be located in some kind of moving vehicle in south Florida.
Another third world country had joined the net, peddling drugs you couldn’t buy without a prescription in the U.S., and for a third the cost.
Some hacker had broken into the Sears mainframe and was threatening to wipe all the memory clean if they didn’t pay him half a million dollars.
It was the usual kind of thing that Net Force handled, and there seemed to be more and more of it coming their way every day.
It had been a long day. He noticed he was getting very stiff in his chair, hunched over the keyboard. He could operate his computer with his voice, of course, and voxax was as fast as he could do it manually — faster, even — but he’d never quite gotten used to dictating reports. He’d speak, the words would appear on the screen, and he could do it leaning back and comfortable, but it somehow didn’t feel the same. Maybe they used different parts of the brain, keyboarding and speaking.
Or maybe he was just getting old and the future was passing him by…
He thought about going down the hall to the gym and doing his djurus. Toni had been teaching him pentjak silat for six months, since after he’d almost been assassinated, and he officially knew four of the short forms. She’d started him with the simple ones from Bukti, but after he’d gotten two of those, she decided to skip over the rest and go right into the more complex Serak system. Bukti was pretty much a filter, she’d said, a perfectly good system of self-defense, but used to strain out casual students from the really serious ones. After you learned the eight Bukti Negara forms, then you were allowed to proceed — if you were lucky — into the parent art, Serak. Toni had decided he was serious enough, apparently. So he had already learned the first two from the mother art and had bagged practicing the others. This was pretty quick, she’d told him. Some teachers only showed students two or three djurus a year, and he had twice that in six months.
And Michaels already knew the third one, pretty much. He’d watched Toni enough to pick up the moves, though he didn’t tell her that. So he was way ahead of the learning curve here.
Probably helped if you were working out every day. Not to mention sleeping with the teacher, Michaels thought.
Though that wasn’t happening anymore.
Shit. Let’s not even go down this road again, okay? Either work out or get back to the computer, but don’t sit here whining!
Yeah. I hear that. The computer. He could practice his silat later.
He looked around. Most of his regular crew was gone, only the night shift was on. Gridley and Howard were on vacation, and Toni was in England.
Very quiet around here.
“Why all the secrecy?” Toni asked.
Carl smiled. “Come on, everybody likes pleasant surprises, don’t they?”