Greg Rucka: Critical Space

"You'll forgive me," I said. "You're all right? You feel okay?"

"I'm fine, Mr. Kodiak."

I took my hands off her and slid back. She was flushed, still breathless, but as best as I could see she was telling the truth. "We're taking you back to the hotel."

"I heard. Somehow I didn't think Mr. Matsui was racing us to the party. It would be anticlimactic after all of that, I think," Lady Ainsley-Hunter said lightly. She smiled.

Then she put her hands on her thighs, doubled over, and vomited.

I pulled her hair out of the way, realized I was holding something in my left hand, and tried to imagine what it could be.

When the heaves became dry, Lady Ainsley-Hunter pushed my hands away, then sat up once more. Tears were streaking her face now, shimmering in her eyes, and her mascara had run. She wiped her nose with her fingers, and I found my handkerchief and handed it over.

She took it and blew her nose energetically, dabbed at her eyes, tried the smile on me again. "I'm sorry."

"Not to worry. It's a natural reaction."

"I'm afraid I've made a mess."

"Dale'll clean it up."

She laughed, just barely, but I took it as a good sign. Then she focused on my left hand. "What's that?"

"I'm not sure," I said, and opened my hand to see a chunk of metal about four inches long. "I think it's the slide."

"The slide?"

"From the gun."

From the front seat, Dale said, "From the what?"

"The slide-stop must've snapped when I was trying to force it back," I said. "Came off in my hand, and I was too amped up on adrenaline to drop it."

Lady Ainsley-Hunter leaned back and used the handkerchief again. "Nicely done," she said. "Taking the man's gun apart like that."

"Oh, hell yeah," Dale said. "He so meant to do that."

"How do you know I didn't?" I asked.

"I know you."

The plane was descending into Kennedy, and I was watching the sunset light slide away from Rockaway below us, thinking it was a beautiful thing, that it would be a beautiful image to keep and preserve. Much more worthwhile than yards of videotape and mountains of photographs that almost, but didn't quite, tell the truth.

It was the cameras that did it, that lofted me and the rest of KTMH into the same orbits as Skye Van Brandt and Carson Fleet and even Lady Antonia Ainsley-Hunter. The still photos and the endlessly looped videotape that showed, again and again, what appeared to be my magic trick, the effortless one-handed dismantling of Jeppeson's gun. The full-color photo that, for one week, was on the cover of Time, taken the moment after Jeppeson hit the deck, showing me with the slide in one hand, my weapon in the other, and Lady Ainsley-Hunter dashing past, sprinting for the car.

Within days of the attempt on Lady Ainsley-Hunter, we were swamped with requests for our services, everything from legitimate protection work to puff show jobs to one query asking if we'd be willing to fly out to Idaho for a week and train a militia unit in the finer points of personal protection. We took a pass on that one; we said yes to just about everything else. We were invited on talk shows, including a couple of national ones. We appeared on Charlie Rose and Larry King Live. New York magazine did a cover story, entitled "The New Security." Natalie, certainly the best looking of us, got singled out for particular attention, with one photograph of her running with the caption, "Cover me!"

We weren't working out of Dale's house in Queens anymore. We had an office in Manhattan, below the West Village by the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, in what was once the Printing District. We were almost rich, and certainly comfortable. We had more work than we could handle, and of late Natalie and Dale had been agitating for hiring on another couple of hands, just to help with the load.

We were, by all reckoning, successful.

My dumb luck.

It was six past nine when the cab let me off in front of my apartment building in Murray Hill, and I unlocked the foyer door and checked the mail, discovered the box empty. I took the stairs two at a time to the top and let myself into the apartment. Elvis Costello was playing on the stereo, and beneath his voice I heard others, though those stopped when I shut the door. I locked up after me and tossed my bag into the bedroom, which is inconveniently right off the front hall, then turned around and saw Bridgett Logan as she came around the corner from the living room.

She smiled when she saw me, and that made me feel better. I'm a sucker for her smile, for the way her mouth opens and the way the lower left corner of her lip kind of tugs off to a side a little bit. Then again, I'm a sucker for just about everything about her, and in more ways than one, from the hoop through her left nostril to the tattoo on the back of her right calf. She's an inch taller than me, long and lean and with pale white skin that makes her black hair and blue eyes all the starker, and I think she's a total knock-out, but I freely admit to a bias. We've known each other just over three years, and in that time we've gotten together, pissed each other off, made separate, concerted efforts to sabotage our relationship, and finally returned to one another in a shaky comfort. A year ago, we were barely speaking.

Things change. When she got out of rehab, we began spending more and more time together. Now, often as not, Bridgett was at my place as much as her own apartment in Chelsea. She had a shelf in the bathroom for her toiletries, two drawers in the bureau for clothes, and slowly books and music from her collection had been migrating across town.

In May, I'd asked why she didn't just move in already and get it over with, and she'd told me that this was enough, then cut off further discussion by saying that she didn't want to be pressured. She asked me not to ruin it.

So I tried not to ruin it.

That didn't keep me from saying, "Hi, honey, I'm home," though.

Her smile broadened and she came down the hall toward me, so I moved to meet her. We caught up with each other at the kitchen and necked briefly, and then she pulled off the kiss and I put my face into her shoulder, and we held one another like that for a bit longer. She was wearing a black tank top, and her skin was warm and smelled of the oatmeal soap she now kept in my shower.

"Never, ever, say that to me again," Bridgett said.

"Let's go to bed," I told her shoulder.

"Hmm." She moved her mouth closer to my ear, and I heard her teeth clink against my earrings. "Tempting, but you've got company."

I let her go, straightening my glasses to see Natalie waiting at the end of the hall, watching us. She was in slacks and her blazer, and she didn't look very happy, and I guessed that she'd come from work.

"Hey, Nat."

"Atticus."

I opened the refrigerator and got myself a bottle of Anchor Steam, then offered one to each of the two ladies. They said no. I had a swallow, then dropped into one of the chairs at the table and began removing my necktie.

"That Skye Van Brandt's autograph?" Natalie asked.

"She's got a hell of an arm." I smoothed the tie down on the table, trying to get the creases out.

"Her manager called this afternoon, screaming his head off," Natalie said. "Says you walked out on her. Then Skye called, asking where you were, if you were coming back, sounding pretty distraught…"

"She's an actress," I said. "She gets distraught if her makeup isn't right."

"She's a movie star, actually," Natalie corrected. "Then her agent called, and he got shrill with me, saying that Skye couldn't work like this, whatever that means. Then Skye called back, but this time she had a bitch on, and when I told her I hadn't been able to reach you…"

"I shut off my phone."