married seven years, and during that time they had lived and worked an
played together virtually twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Bobby had never been the kind who liked to hang out with a bunch of guys
at a bar or ball game-partly because it was difficult to find other guys
in their middle thirties who were interested in the things that he cared
about: big-ban music, the arts and pop culture of the ’30s and ’40s, and
classic Disney comic books.
Julie wasn’t a lunch-with-the-girls type either, because not many
thirty-year-old women were into the big-band era, Warner Brothers
cartoons, martial arts, or advanced weapons training. In spite of
spending so much time together, they remained fresh to each other, and
she was still the most interesting and appealing woman he had ever
known.
“What’s taking them so long?” she asked, glancing up at the now-lighted
windows of Decodyne, bright but fuzzy rectangles in the mist.
“Be patient with them, dear, Bobby.”
“They don’t have the dynamism of Dakota and Dakota. They’re just a
humble SWAT team.”
Michaelson Drive was blocked off. Eight police vehicle cars and
vans-were scattered along the street. The chill night crackled with the
static and metallic voices sputtering out of police-band radios. An
officer was behind the wheel of one of the cars, and other uniformed men
were positioned at both ends of the block, and two more were visible at
the front doors of Decodyne; the rest were inside, looking for
Rasmussen. Meanwhile, men from the police lab and coroner’s office were
photographing, measuring, and removing the bodies of the two gunmen.
“What if he gets away with the diskettes?” Julie asked.
“He won’t.”
She nodded. “Sure, I know what you’re thinking-Wizard was developed on
a closed-system computer with no links beyond Decodyne. But there’s
another system in the company, with modems and everything, isn’t there?
What if he takes the diskettes to one of those terminals and sends them
out by phone?”
“Can’t. The second system, the outlinked system, is totally different
from the one on which Wizard was developed. Incompatible.”
“Rasmussen is clever.”
“There’s also a night lockout that keeps the outlinked system shut
down.”
“Rasmussen is clever,” she repeated.
She continued to pace in front of him.
The skinned spot on her forehead, where she had met the steering wheel
when she’d jammed on the brakes, was no longer bleeding, though it
looked raw and wet. She had wiped her face with tissues, but smears of
dried blood, which looked almost like bruises, had remained under her
right eye and along her jaw line. Each time Bobby focused on those
stains or on the shallow wound, a pang of anxiety quivered through him
at the realization of what might have happened to her, to both of them.
Not surprisingly, her injury and the blood on her face only accentuated
her beauty, making her appear more fragile and therefore more precious.
Julie was beautiful, although Bobby realized that she appeared more so
to his eyes than to others, which was all right because, after all, his
eyes were the only ones through which he could look at her. Though it
was kinking up a bit now in the moist night air, her chestnut-brown hair
was usually thick and lustrous. She had wide-set eyes as dark as
semi-sweet chocolate, skin as smooth and naturally as toffee ice cream,
and a generous mouth that always taste sweet to him. Whenever he
watched her without her being fully aware of the intensity of his
attention, or when he was apart from her and tried to conjure an image
of her in his mind, he always thought of her in terms of food:
chestnuts, chocolate toffee, cream, sugar, butter. He found this
amusing, but he always understood the profundity of his choice of
similes: She reminded him of food because she, was more than food, she
sustained him.
Activity at the entrance to Decodyne, about sixty feet away at the end
of a palm-flanked walkway, drew Julie’s attention and then Bobby’s.
Someone from the SWAT team had closed the doors to report to the guards
stationed there. A moment later one of the officers motioned for Julie