Jennifer Crusie: GETTING RID OF BRADLEY

Then Zack slammed Jerry down on the floor.

Anthony rolled to his feet to help. “You all right?”

“Me? Oh, I’m as good as I get,” Zack said, breathing a little heavily as he reached for his handcuffs. “Which is a hell of a lot better than Jerry is right now. How about you?”

“There were people in that hall.” Anthony went out the door to see what Jerry had hit on the other side while Zack cuffed him.

“You have the right to remain silent, you jerk,” Zack said and finished reciting Miranda sitting on top of him. Anthony came back and lounged in the doorway.

“Congratulations,” Anthony said to Jerry when Zack was finished. “You shot a water fountain.”

“Up yours,” Jerry said, but it came out more embarrassed than defiant.

Zack stood and glared down at him. “We’ve got to start hanging out with a better class of criminals.”

“Actually, this is the cream,” Anthony said, checking his jacket for damage. It was, as always, spotless. “You want to work Vice or Homicide?”

“No,” Zack said. “I want to arrest polite people who don’t point guns at me. In fact, I don’t want to arrest anybody anymore. I want to hang out with good people. Is that possible? Are there any good people anymore?”

“Well, there’s you and me,” Anthony said patiently. “We’re supposed to be the good guys. Are you sure you’re all right? You’ve been acting strangely lately.”

“Could you guys hurry this up?” Jerry whined from the floor. “I’m not real comfortable down here.”

“You know, Jerry-” Zack was suddenly soft-spoken as he looked down at him “-I could kick your brains out very easily right now.” He gently nudged Jerry’s head with his foot. “Resisting arrest. Don’t push your luck.”

Jerry shut up.

“Here’s some advice, Jerry.” Anthony reached down and hauled him to his feet with one hand. “Don’t get smart with a guy you just pointed a gun at. He’s likely to be feeling hostile. And frankly, Jerry, we didn’t like you much before you pulled the gun.”

Jerry closed his eyes.

“I was kind of hoping he’d resist arrest,” Zack said.

“No, you were not,” Anthony said. “You have plans for lunch. You’re arresting a master embezzler at Harvey ’s Diner. What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing.” Zack pushed Jerry into the hall. “The weather. I hate February. And I hate office buildings.” He looked around at the smooth gray walls. “Maybe I will quit. Get a nice job out in the open someplace. No guns. You think I’d make a good forest ranger?”

“You know, you worry me,” Anthony said.

“That’s your problem.” Zack moved down the hall, prodding Jerry in front of him. “So, Jerry, what’d you do with the money?”

LUCY SAT SLUMPED across from her sister in a battered turquoise booth in Harvey ’s shabby diner and tortured her salad.

Tina scowled down at her own salad. “Are you sure it’s safe to eat here? I think turquoise Formica is bad for you, and I’m positive this lettuce is. It’s white.” She tapped a cigarette from the pack on the table and lit it smoothly, like a forties’ movie star.

Lucy leaned forward to put her chin in her hand so she could pretend to listen to Tina, and her brassy hair fell into her face again. Tina smoothed a dark, silky strand of her own precisely cut hair, and Lucy looked at her with envy. Maybe they weren’t sisters. Maybe Mother had lied to them. No, they had the same cat face: wide forehead, big eyes, little mouth, pointed chin. It was just that Tina looked like a purebred, and she looked like something condemned at the pound.

Stop it, Lucy told herself. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You’re just having a bad hair day.

Well, okay, a bad hair week. And then there was the divorce.

You’re just having a bad month. Pull yourself together. Spring is coming.

“You are going to get rid of his name, aren’t you?” Tina asked. “Lucy Savage Porter always sounded like you’d married a rabid bellboy.”

Shut up, Tina. Lucy blinked. “Could we talk about something else?” She squashed her hair back to peer around the dim restaurant, hoping no one else had heard. Since the place was not only dim but small, it was a real fear, but it was also almost empty. There was only a bored waitress leaning on a chipped plastic counter beside a fly-specked case of doughnuts, and two men in a booth identical to theirs on the opposite side of the room.

Lucy was having a hard time ignoring one of the men.

One was tall, slender, and elegant, leaning calmly back in the booth, not a crease in his beautifully cut tweed suit.

The other man was his antithesis. Shorter, thicker, tense as a coiled spring in a creased black leather jacket, he leaned across the table and stabbed his index finger into the Formica. His unshaven face looked as if it were made of slabs, his hair was dark and shaggy, and his smile came and went like a broken neon sign. He was so intense, he was practically bending the table with the force of his personality. Lucy had been reluctantly aware of him ever since they’d entered the diner, kicking herself for stealing glances at him but stealing them just the same.

This was the kind of man who could leave a woman scarred for life. She wasn’t so dumb after all. She could have ended up married to somebody like him instead of Bradley.

But think how much excitement she would have had before the end.

“No, that would have been dumb,” she said aloud.

“What would be?” Tina asked.

“Nothing.” Lucy turned back to her. “That’s a beautiful suit you’re wearing.”

“It should be. It cost a fortune. You couldn’t afford it. If you had to make a bad marriage, and I suppose you did since it runs in the family, couldn’t you at least have chosen somebody with money?”

“No.” Lucy picked up her fork and jabbed at her salad, spearing a cucumber slice because it was there. “Money isn’t important.”

“Oh? And what is important? And, whatever it is, why did you think that loser Bradley Porter had it? In fact, why did you marry him at all?”

Lucy thought of several cutting things to say about her sister’s second and third husbands and then blinked instead. “I married him because of the second law of thermonuclear dynamics.”

“You married him because of a physics theory?” Tina put her cigarette out in one of her salad tomatoes, pushed the bowl away, and lit up another. “Well, at least you didn’t say ‘for lo-o-ove.’” She blew her smoke away from Lucy. “So what’s the second law of thermodynamics?”

“It says that isolated systems move toward disorder until they reach their most probable form, and then they remain constant.”

“I don’t get it. And what does that have to do with Bradley?”

“Nothing. But it has everything to do with me.” Lucy pushed her bowl away with one hand and shoved her hair out of her eyes with the other. “I was an isolated system. I mean, there I was, living alone in that little apartment with Einstein for company, and Einstein is great company, but he’s also a dog.”

“I wondered if you’d noticed that.”

“Well, of course, I noticed. And I’d been teaching science for twelve years. Lecturing to kids all day and then going home alone to grade papers at night The only real social contacts I had were at your weddings.”

Tina stuck her tongue out at her and pulled a pepper strip from Lucy’s salad bowl.

“And then one day in class, we got to the second law, and I thought, ‘That’s me. I’m an isolated system, and I’m just going to get more isolated until I reach my most probable form which is probably where I am now, living in an apartment with Einstein.’ So I decided to get unisolated. And that’s when Bradley picked me up in the library and I thought, ‘This must be it Physics has brought us together.’ I mean, his timing was so perfect. It was so logical.”