Jennifer Crusie - GETTING RID OF BRADLEY

“Your blonde’s leaving,” Anthony said and they both turned to watch.

They were splitting up, the brunette heading for the back door to the parking lot, the blonde to the street door. Just before she got to the door, the brunette turned.

“Lucy,” she called, and it sounded like an order. “I mean it. As soon as you get home.”

“All right, all right,” the blonde said. “As soon as I get home, I will get rid of Bradley.” Then she turned and walked out the door.

“Instinct,” Zack said and took off after her.

“I hate it when you do this,” Anthony said, and moved toward the parking-lot door to stop the brunette.

The February wind cut at Lucy’s face as she set off at a dead run to find her car, her purse banging heavily into her hip. She’d almost reached the alley next to the lot when somebody grabbed her arm, and she swung around and fell against the brick wall of the building behind her.

It was the black leather from the restaurant. “Excuse me?” he said. “We need to talk.” He blocked her against the wall and reached inside his beat-up leather jacket. “I’m-”

“No.” Lucy shook her head until the street blurred. “I’m very busy. Really. You probably noticed me staring at you? That was a mistake. I’m sorry. I have to go.” She tried to slip away, but he caught at her arm again.

“I have to ask you about Bradley,” he said, and Lucy stopped pulling away. “I’m-”

“Bradley? Oh, you mean with my sister back there? Getting rid of him? That was a joke.”

He smiled down at her, and Lucy lost her breath. He was too intense to be handsome and too electric to be ignored. “I love jokes,” he said. “Tell me about it.”

I’d tell you anything, Lucy thought, and then she heard a sound like a car backfiring. There was a pinging sound and a chip of the brick wall behind them struck her on the cheek and the man swore and yanked her into the alley. He shoved her behind a trash bin and pinned her to the metal with his body, so close to her that her heart thudded against his chest. He was solid and a lot stronger than she was, and she tried to push him away, but he didn’t budge.

“What are you doing?” Lucy tried to push him off. “Let go.”

“Quiet.”

He eased himself off her slightly, reached inside his jacket, pulled out a gun, and aimed it carefully at the street.

Lucy froze, part of her mind marveling at seeing a real gun in the hand of a real felon, the rest of her mind in meltdown. Move, she told her feet, but she stayed frozen against him. She shoved her chin up his chest to get a better look at him, trying to decide whether he was just run-of-the-mill violent or totally deranged.

He looked big and tense and concentrated. His anvil-like jaw was clenched and his crazy blue eyes swept up and down the street.

Totally deranged.

She shifted again, and he whispered without looking at her, “Would you hold still, please?”

Please? At least he was polite.

She tried to shove him off her, but he weighed a ton, so she decided to fall back on her former strong suit: brains. “You’re squashing me,” she said, trying to breathe around his jacket, and he eased off her a little more, just enough to give her room to lunge for the street He caught her by the coat before she could take another step, yanking her back and yelling, “Are you crazy?”

“Me?” Lucy yelled back, trying to jerk her coat away. “What about you? Grabbing women? Let me go.”

“Listen, lady,” He tried to push her back behind the Dumpster. “I’m…”

“Let go!” She swung her purse filled with five pounds of physics book and connected with his solar plexus.

His gasp was an inverted scream, and his grip tightened on her convulsively. She jerked away again, and her shoulder bag swung up hard into his face, catching him solidly on the mouth and neatly splitting his lip. His head jerked up, and then Lucy slugged him along the temple, this time on purpose, not even wincing as his head made a thock sound when her book-filled bag connected. After the last blow, he let go of her and lurched back a step, and she ran down the alley in the opposite direction, propelled by so much adrenaline that when she finally rushed out into the next street, she almost ran into the patrol car that was cruising by.

“Some horrible man just grabbed me and dragged me into an alley,” she said to the two patrolmen who piled out of the car. She jabbed her finger behind her. “He’s big, and he’s got dark hair and a big jaw, and he’s wearing a horrible old black leather jacket, and he needs a shave, and he’s probably a drug dealer or something!”

The two men exploded into action, the taller, younger one pounding down the alley while the older, stockier one yelled at her to wait and then followed him.

Lucy paced back and forth beside the patrol car, vibrating with energy.

Wow, this was what Tina was talking about. Spontaneity. This was great. This was wonderful. She felt good. Of course, she couldn’t go around beating up every man she met, but…oh, she felt good. She felt really good.

She checked her watch. The police had been gone forty-five seconds. Einstein’s theory of relativity. Of course. Time passed slower when you were moving. Here she’d been standing still, watching her life rush past her, and all she had to do was do something and it slowed down and became this wonderful, rich…

Oh, she felt good.

Sort of.

She slumped suddenly against the side of the patrol car, her adrenaline spent. Maybe she’d killed him. He deserved it, but maybe she really had hurt him. That physics book was heavy. What had she done? What was she doing? She looked at her watch again. A minute gone now. She couldn’t stay there. She had to go. She couldn’t…

Lucy put her hand up to her face in confusion and when she brought it down again, there was blood on it. Her cheek. She was bleeding.

She tore a piece of paper out of her address book, wrote her name, address and phone number on it, and left it under the windshield wiper of the cruiser. Then she went back to her car and drove home, still vibrating with the aftereffects of the adrenaline, stopping only once along the way, at a drugstore.

“SHE SAID YOU WERE a horrible drug dealer.” The young patrolman grinned at Zack.

“Arrest her.” Zack tried to breathe normally. He leaned on the wall by the alley, his gaze still searching the street. “Lock her in the back of the car until I can breathe again. She knows something about the Bradley job.”

The young cop snorted. “She didn’t look like she knew her own name.”

Zack looked at him with distaste. He was tall, blond, and reasonably good-looking if you liked the movie-star type, but mostly he was just young. “Look, Junior,” Zack said. “When you’ve been around as long as I have, you’ll find out that it isn’t what they look like, it’s what they do.” He touched his lip, and his fingers came away bloody. “Ouch.”

“And I heard you were a tough guy.” The younger cop grinned again.

Zack stared him down until his grin faded. “You know who you remind me of? The kid cop in Lethal Weapon 3. You know, the one who says, ‘It’s my twenty-first birthday today,’ and right away you know he’s dead meat? You knew the bad guys were going to drill him.” Zack squinted at him. “Of course, in your case, it’ll be friendly fire.”

“Ha,” the young cop said.

“So where’s my suspect?” Zack said. “Do not tell me you’ve lost her. She’s the only link we’ve got to an embezzler.”

“My partner Falk went to get her.” He grinned again. “He said he knew you, and that I shouldn’t shoot you even though you were obviously a dangerous drug dealer. They’re gonna love this back at the station.”

Zack glared at him, and he swallowed and said, “Really, he’ll be back any minute.” He looked over Zack’s shoulder, suddenly relieved. “See? Here he comes now.”

Zack eased himself off the wall with great care. Then he looked in the patrol car as it pulled up and straightened quickly. “Where is she?”

“Wait.” Falk held up his hand as he got out. He slammed the car door and waved a piece of paper at Zack. “The good news is, she left her address.” He handed it over to Zack, who had slumped back against the wall. “You want Matthews and me to go pick her up?”

“ ‘Lucy Savage,’ ” Zack read. “Well, the last name’s right. That woman’s damn near feral. No, I don’t want you to pick her up. The reason I have to go pick her up now is because the two of you couldn’t hold on to her. I’ll handle it.”

“You want us for backup? She must have been all of five-seven, maybe one thirty-five. You probably only got six inches and sixty pounds on her.”

“Very, very funny” Zack pushed himself gingerly away from the wall. “Call Forensics and get some lab people down here. There’s a bullet in this wall.”

“Your instincts tell you that?”

“No,” Zack said with obvious patience. “The chunk of wall that sliced that hellcat’s cheek told me that. Somebody was shooting at her.”

Matthews went over to the wall. “He’s right.”

“Well, of course, I’m right. Just what I need- infant cops checking my work. Will you call that in? Please?” Zack glared at the younger man, who stomped back to the car, grumbling.

“Was I ever that obnoxious?” Zack asked Falk.

“What do you mean, ‘was’? You still are. You sure they weren’t shooting at you? I’m serious,” Falk added hastily when Zack turned his glare on him. “Not everybody loves you like we do back at the station.”

“No,” Zack said. “It was her.” Zack looked back at the wall. “Helluva sloppy job, though. Broad daylight, not a chance of hitting her unless he was a lot closer. This guy is either a real amateur, or he was just trying to scare her and didn’t care if he picked off an innocent bystander. Like me.”

“You sure you don’t need backup on this?”

“Yeah.” Zack turned back to him. “I think I may just possibly be able to handle one medium-size woman by myself.”

“I don’t know. She did a nice job on you. I think you need us.”

“Oh, yeah, I need you and Junior here.” Zack jerked his head at the other cop who’d joined them again. “What was it, Falk? Nobody would work with you, so you stopped by the junior high for help?”

“Hey,” Matthews said. “I’m twenty. I got two years of college.”

“So do I,” Zack said, touching his lip again gingerly. “Fat lot of good it’s doing me here. Get on that bullet” He turned and walked toward the parking lot and his own car.

“Hey, Warren,” Falk called after him. “Did you have one of those famous instincts of yours right before she nailed you? Or right after?”

“All great men are persecuted,” Zack said and kept on walking. He knew he was right about this Bradley thing. And Lucy Savage was very shortly going to be very sorry that she and John Bradley had ever messed with him.

As soon as he took some aspirin and got some ice on his damn lip.

LUCY UNLOCKED HER massive front door with its jewel-colored leaded glass and then crossed the vestibule to unlock the beveled-glass inner door. It immediately burst open under the pressure of the three dog bodies that were pressed against it.

“Easy,” Lucy said, still worn-out from her adrenaline surge. She dropped down onto the tiled floor to pet them, and they piled around her in the warm glow of the colored sunlight that streamed through the stained glass.

Einstein, the big sheepdog, flopped down beside her, but Heisenburg, the walking mop, and Maxwell, the little miscellaneous dog, both climbed into her lap to lick her face and burrow under her hands. She gathered them all to her, loving them and the warmth and color of her beautiful old house and, for once, herself.

“I beat up a mugger today,” she told the dogs. “He attacked me and I beat him up. I won.” The dogs looked suitably impressed. That was one of the many great things about dogs. They were easy to impress. Not like Tina.

But even Tina would be impressed with this. Carefully tipping the little dogs off her lap, Lucy stood and went inside the house.

Her house. Every time she walked into it, she felt safe. The living room was papered in huge flowers in shades of rose and edged with wide oak woodwork, and the floors gleamed in the soft sunlight that filtered through her lace curtains. The fat, worn, upholstered furniture was splashed with flowers, too, in roses and blues and golds, and the mantel and tables were crammed with pictures, and flowers in vases, and books. She sank into the big blue overstuffed chair by the wobbly piecrust phone table and looked through the archway into her dining room, warm with the glow of the stained-glass windows there.