She supposed she ought to thank her lucky stars she’d got that much. She thought about asking him if she could adjust things when it rained, but decided not to. If she walked in dripping wet one morning, that might flick his conscience—assuming he owned such a critter.
Back at her desk, she worked out some of her anger at the transit district and at Nick Gorczany by eviscerating a proposal the company was getting ready to submit. She had a red pen run dry in the middle of her edit. She pulled out another one and kept on cutting. The engineers who’d drooled the first draft onto paper would turn fourteen different shades of puce. She didn’t care. This was what Mr. Gorczany paid her—not enough—to do.
If they wanted to take it to the boss, she also didn’t care. If he backed them and the widget works blew the contract as a result, she didn’t care much about that, either.
Or maybe she did. Because if that happened, what would they do? Blame her for not editing well enough. Of course they would—otherwise they’d have to blame themselves, and what were the odds of that?
The power was on, which was good. She took the edited draft to the copier and made a set for herself. Only after she’d preserved (and stashed) a record of what she’d done did she return the draft to the engineers who’d produced it. Sure enough, they bleated like sheep being sheared.
“If you’d written it in English the first time, it wouldn’t look like this now,” she said.
“Did you have to do all that?” one of them asked unhappily.
“No. I could have left it alone,” she answered. “The agency with the funding would have laughed its ass off if I had, but why worry about things like that?”
She hoped they would try to argue grammar with her. They’d grown leery of trying that; she won easily but not graciously. One of them plucked up his courage if not his common sense and asked, “What’s wrong with this? The spellchecker didn’t mind it.”
“That’s because the spellchecker is a moron.” Vanessa didn’t say and so are you, but the suggestion was there. “You wrote ‘We are lead to propose the following goals and objectives.’ Never mind the passive. Never mind the clunky structure. The present tense of the verb is l-e-a-d, pronounced leed. The past tense is l-e-d, pronounced led. L-e-a-d, pronounced led, is the metal that anyone who thinks it’s the past tense of l-e-a-d, pronounced leed, has between his ears instead of brains.”
“You’re not a good team player.” If the engineer couldn’t come down on her for being wrong, he’d come down on her for being right.
“If I were playing on a good team, I would be,” she answered, and walked away. If they fixed things, fine. If not, tough titty.
An hour or so later, Nick Gorczany stopped at her desk. “Try to work on your attitude,” he said. “Try.”
“When they defend the indefensible, it pisses me off,” she answered.
“Try anyway,” Mr. Gorczany said. “You know the old saying about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar.”
“I was trying to get rid of the flies,” Vanessa answered. Her boss rolled his eyes and went off to share old sayings with somebody else. That suited her fine.
XX
Colin Ferguson looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. He whistled a few bars of the Mission: Impossible theme. “Your job, should you choose to accept it,” he said as dramatically as possible, “is to button your shirt with both hands.”
Kelly was reading on the bed. “Go for it, honey,” she called. “Tom Cruise ain’t got nothin’ on you.”
Tom Cruise had nothing on him except umpteen gazillion dollars and two good arms. Colin’s left elbow and wrist worked all right. Whenever he tried to move his left arm from the shoulder, it felt as if he’d whacked a hornets’ nest in there with a stick. The physical therapist insisted that time and practice would make it easier, if not necessarily easy. The puckered scar from the 7.62mm AK round and the surgeons’ knife marks (some smaller ones newer and pinker than the rest—they’d gone in again, arthroscopically, to clean out more bone fragments) insisted that the therapist didn’t know what she was talking about.
Well, he had to try. He did. “Ffffudge!” he said—not quite a slip in front of Kelly, but mighty close.
“You want help?” she asked.
“No. What I want is to be able to do this by myself,” Colin answered. “I want it not to hurt so darn much when I do it, too. I can almost manage the first part. The other half isn’t there yet, though. Not even close.”
“I’m sorry. You got torn up, from what the doctors say,” Kelly told him.
“Yeah, I know.” He was still trying to decide whether buttoning down from the top hurt more than buttoning up from the bottom. He hadn’t made up his mind. Where he was right now, both seemed equally horrendous. He’d started getting good at doing buttons with just his right hand. Going back to normal felt like more trouble than it was worth. He kept at it anyhow. At last, he said, “There! I did it. And I didn’t age a day over five years.”
“Want a pain pill?” Kelly asked. “You’ve still got some left.”
He did want one. He shook his head all the same. “Thanks, but no thanks. I’m trying to do without ’em as much as I can, so I don’t get to like ’em too well.”
“Okay, but they’re there for when you really hurt. You’re making noises like you really hurt,” Kelly said. “You’re also making noises like a cop who’s scared to death of drugs.”
“Well, if I am, I’ve earned the right,” Colin retorted. “I don’t know how many people I’ve seen who messed up their lives ’cause they found out how much they liked getting loaded.”
“I can’t see you knocking over a pharmacy next week,” Kelly said.
“No, and I want to make sure you can’t see me doing anything like that,” Colin said. “Anyway, it’s kind of eased off now that it’s just hanging again.”
“Okay.” By the way she said it, it was anything but. She didn’t push it any further than that, though. One of the things wives—and husbands—needed to learn was when to back off.
Putting on jeans wasn’t such an ordeal—his left arm didn’t need to do as much. “I’m only glad I’m not a southpaw, and that the punk didn’t get me in the other shoulder,” he said. “Then I really would’ve been wrecked.”
“I’m not glad about any of it, not even a little bit,” Kelly declared.
“Well, neither am I,” Colin said. The more he tried to make his wounded arm work, the more he wondered if he’d ever be able to go back to the cop shop. He could do the part of the job that involved sitting at a desk. In the field, though, he’d be a liability—hell, a danger—to himself and to whoever was with him.
For that matter, he’d be a danger going to and from the station. You could ride a bike with one good arm as long as nothing went wrong. The second anything did, you were screwed. The same held true in a car, even one with automatic. You couldn’t even think about it if you had a stick.
He carefully went down the stairs. He could use the banister climbing them. It was on his bad side descending. If he slipped, he’d either fall or try to catch himself with his left arm and then fall. Stairs were dangerous. They got more dangerous when a cat fell asleep on them.