Page 70 of Theta

He doesn't return my grin. "Abso-fucking-lutely true." He frowns, winces, tips his head to one side. "I just…I guess I wish we could explore this when we're not under duress."

"It's A1S tradition at this point, Killy. Everyone we love got together under duress." I cup his cheek. "And I'd venture a guess that wherever your sister is and whatever she's doing, there's a hunky fella involved somewhere."

Killian snickers. "A hunky fella? Okay, Ethel.”

I blink in confusion at his joke, and then the penny drops. "Is that another old joke, Killian Harris?"

“You said hunky fella, Story. Yes, it was. You're twenty-seven, not eighty-seven."

I pinch his cheek and adopt a creaky approximation of an old woman's voice. "Well, sonny boy, in my day, you showed respect to your elders."

He bats my hand away. "C'mon. Let's get a room."

I glance down at myself again. "I'm sorry. I just can't. This is ridiculous."

The vest under the scrub top is a joke. It's like the Chris Farley "fat guy in a little coat” skit from SNL, the scrub top stretched to its limit around the bulk of the tactical vest. I fight my way out of the top, remove the vest, and put the top back on, and then cram the vest into the backpack. "I'll take my chances. I go in there looking like that, and they'll know something weird is going on, but no one will think twice about your shirt sitting weird." I huff. "Men have it so freaking easy, I swear to god. You could walk in covered in blood and carrying a gun openly, and it would cause less of a ruckus than if I went in wearing tactical body armor under a scrub top."

He frowns. "You're probably not wrong."

“No, I'm not."

He lifts my hand and kisses the back of it. "C'mon, fiancé. Let's go get a room."

13

A Brief Interlude

Story's hand fits in mine like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. I've got our bag on my shoulders and a pistol tucked in the back of my waistband—which, let me tell you, is a lot more uncomfortable than they make it seem on TV. We leave the car with the key fob clearly visible in the cupholder and the doors unlocked, windows down—hopefully a very clear invitation to steal it.

The group of recently departed young people was only a portion of the full group, and they're all speaking the same language—something from the middle of Europe, maybe, I don't know. It's not English, Spanish, French, German, or Russian, but my knowledge of languages is pretty damned dismal. There's another group of ten or fifteen twenty-somethings milling in the tiny foyer, chattering, laughing, and trying to check out while the harried proprietor looks ready to pull his hair out. Which would be unfortunate, since he doesn't have much to begin with.

I tuck Story against my side and push through the crowd to the counter, my arm hooked around her waist. The proprietor, an older man with thin, graying hair and a wispy goatee, is trying gamely to manage the chaos of something like two dozen checkouts. He sees us, but the cluster of people trying to hand him their keys so they can, I assume, make the ferry to the mainland prevents him from getting to us.

I peel a pair of one hundred euro bills from the stack now in my hip pocket and flash them at him with a raised index finger.

He nods, gestures to the pair of young men in front of him and snags a key from a hook behind him. He snatches the bills from me and shoves a clipboard into my hands. "Fill it out and bring it back, per favore. Room two-one-six." Two-ah-one-ah-six.

"Grazie," I say, and then look around for the stairs; it seems simple, but the tiny room and too many people make it harder than it should be, and the microscopic foyer is already cluttered with stands containing things-to-do-in-Olbia flyers, cartoon maps of the town, takeaway menus for nearby restaurants, and things like that.

Story, however, has already solved that problem while I was talking to the proprietor, and drags me through the chaos to a narrow doorway marked by a placard indicating a stairwell. Once we round the first flight, the din reduces dramatically.

"Jesus, what a clusterfuck," I mutter.

"Yeah, but it works in our favor," Story answers. "He won't think twice about us. Even if Pugli's goons do track us this far, he won’t be able to give us a description of us."

"True, true."

We ascend to the second floor and find our room—microscopic, with a sagging twin bed and decades-old oak two-drawer nightstand, a pitted, tarnished mirror, and a single high-backed chair from a dining set that likely dated back to the Truman administration. But then, this building probably predates the United States by a century or two at least, so by those standards, a seventy-year-old chair is an upstart young whippersnapper.

There's no A/C, but the window is open, and a steady breeze flutters the gauzy white curtains and cools the air and reduces what would otherwise be a stultifying stuffiness.

"Well, Fred, here we are," Story says to me, lowering herself gingerly to the bed; the frame legit squeaks, as in actual rusty springs protesting. "Oh. Oh wow." She bounces up and down—squeaksqueaksqueak. "Wanna keep up the whole neighborhood?"

I stand with my back to the door, eying her. "Fred?"

"Fred and Ethel?" she looks at me expectantly. "Fred and Ethel Mertz?"

I shrug. "What are you talking about?"