“Owl Crap!” At such times, he was wont to blame the nut or the wrench, but since he had put the bolt in himself, and the wrench and socket were both fairly new Craftsman tools, he knew he had nobody else to blame.
From the kitchen, he heard Toni call out.
“You okay?” Must have yelled louder than he’d thought.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Stupid piece of crap Chevrolet!” Toni drifted into the garage doorway. He was leaning over the fender on the passenger side, under the hood, so he saw her. Five months pregnant, in one of his T-shirts and a pair of drawstring sweatpants, she was, if anything, more beautiful than ever.
She smiled.
“That’s not what you said when you were convincing me you needed to have it.
“A fifty-five Bel Air convertible,” you said.
“A classic.” his “Yeah, well, that was before I had a chance to spend time with it. Thing is engineered like a tank.” “Also a selling point, if I recall.” He looked at the nut. It was tight enough, he decided.
He put the wrench down, grabbed a red rag and some of the pungent lanolin hand cleaner and started wiping grease off his fingers. Well, it was a classic car. Created by the chief engineer of General Motors in the post World War II years, Edward Coles, with legendary designer Harvey Earl, the “55 introduced the small block V-8 engine, the 265, later the 283, and then the 327.
These engines became the standard against which all others were measured for more than forty years. A convertible in top condition would cost $60,000 to $75,000, easy.
Even one in so-so shape like this one wasn’t cheap.
He smiled back at her.
“I thought it was your job to keep me from running off half cocked.” “I don’t recall that part of the marriage vow.” He walked toward her.
“How did your djuru practice go?” Her smiled disappeared, and frown lines wrinkled her forehead.
“Terrible. I’m all off-balance! I try to do the turnaround, I almost fall down. When I sweep, it’s all I can do to keep from falling over.
When I dropped into the squat for djuru five, I farted!” He couldn’t help it; he laughed.
Her face clouded up, tears welling.
“It’s not funny, Alex! I feel like a big fat cow!” Michaels hurried to her. He hugged her to him.
“Hey, it’s all right.” “No, it’s not! Nobody told me this was going to happen!
If I can’t practice my silat, I’ll go crazy!” This was not the time for him to point out that her doctor had told her to avoid exercise because of some bleeding early in the pregnancy. Everything seemed to be all right, but just to be sure, Toni was supposed to take it easy. That theoretically included Toni not doing the short dances of the Indonesian martial art in which she was an expert. No, definitely not the time to bring that up. A wrong word, and she’d start crying, which was so unlike her that it still amazed him every time. It was just hormones, the doctor had said, a normal part of pregnancy, but Michaels still hadn’t gotten used to it. Toni could kick the crap out of most men, even some who were fairly good martial artists themselves –he had seen her do it a few times–and for her to well up and cry at the drop of a hat was, well… it was spooky.
“Maybe you should just, you know, take a break from djurus. It’s only another four months until the baby is born.” “Take a break? I’ve done djurus almost every day since I was thirteen. Even when I had pneumonia, I only missed three days. I can’t just give them up for four months!” “Okay, okay, it was just a suggestion.” Maybe it was better if he just kept his mouth shut. It had been a long time since he’d been around a pregnant woman. When his first wife Megan had been carrying their daughter, Susie, he had still been working in the field and was gone quite a bit, sometimes for a couple weeks at a time. He’d missed a lot of the experience, and at the time he’d been sorry he had. Now he was the commander of the FBI’S elite subunit Net Force, and maybe he might be spending a little more time at the office until things settled down at home. * ö ÷ He immediately felt guilty at that thought.
“I know it’s not your fault,” Toni said.
“Well, okay, it is your fault, technically speaking.” She grinned.
“But I don’t blame you.” He smiled back at her. Her mood swing was instant, zap, just like that, from angry to happy.
“Go on back and finish installing your carburetor,” she said.
“You putting in the four-barrel?” “I decided to go with three deuces,” he said.
“You know, pep it up a little.” She shook her head.
“You’ve been watching that old movie American Graffiti again, haven’t you? Boys and their toys.
You won’t be able to afford to run it, you know. It’ll get what? Ten miles a gallon? You’ll have to take out a loan to fill the tank.” “Well, I really am going to sell it.
Eventually.” “Uh-huh. Go on, go scrape some more skin off your hands and curse the guys who made that big chunk of Detroit iron. I’m going to sit down and see if I can’t get your son to stop kicking my bladder.” “You sure are pretty when you’re pregnant,” he said.
“Forget it. One baby: That’s my limit.” Toni went to her computer and slid the VR band down over her eyes, adjusting the earplugs and olfactory bulbs so they were comfortable. The set was wireless and had a pretty good range, so if her ankles started to swell, at least she could go lie down and prop her feet up on a cushion while she was on-line. She put on the tactile gloves and was ready.
She allowed the system’s default scenario to play, and there was a small moment of disorientation as the virtual reality program took over and constructed a shopping mall in place of the small office that had been the guest bedroom.
She found herself in front of a virtual elevator, the door of which opened. She stepped inside, along with other shoppers.
“Arts and Crafts, please,” she said.
Somebody tapped a button.
The sensation was of rising rather than falling. After a moment, a chime sounded and the door opened. Toni alighted from the elevator and looked at the sign a few feet away. you are here pulsed in a pale green light. No, I’m at home in my office with my shoes getting tighter.
But the suspension of disbelief that was VR was easy enough to accept. She found the place she was looking for listed: Hergert’s Scrimshaw. It was not far away-though it could have been if she wanted a long walk in VR–AND she headed toward it.
When she and Alex had been on their honeymoon in Hawaii, they’d gone to an art gallery in Lahaini, on the island of Maui. There had been some world-class work in the gallery, in all kinds of media and materials–everything from pencil drawings to oil paintings to sculptures in wood or bronze or even glass. Seascapes and dolphins and whales were big, but what had impressed her the most was a small display of micro scrimshaw There were pictures engraved on small bits of fossilized ivory, old piano keys and billiard balls, even a couple of sperm whale teeth. Some of the images were smaller than her thumbnail but, when viewed under magnification, showed a wealth of detail she would not have thought possible.
There were sailing ships and whales, portraits, nudes, tigers, and several with fantasy elements.
She had been particularly impressed by a tiny black-and-white rendering of a long-haired, naked woman sitting in a lotus position and gazing up at the heavens, but floating two feet above the ground. The image had been done on a pale ivory disk the size of a quarter.
“How do they do that?” she’d asked Alex.
He’d shaken his head.
“I dunno. Let’s ask.” The gallery manager was happy to explain: “There are different ways,” she said, “but in this case, what the artist did was to polish the ivory smooth, then use a very fine pointed instrument, probably something like a sewing needle, to put thousands of tiny dots into the material, it’s a process called stippling. Then he rubbed the color onto it. This is a Bob Hergert piece, and he prefers oil paint to ink. I believe he uses a shade called lampblack.
“Once the piece was covered with paint, he wiped it clean, and the oil paint filled up the stipple marks but came off the polished part. It has to be done under magnification, of course, and it is, as you might suspect, rather painstaking work.” “I can only imagine,” Toni said.