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“The last battle was fought with sharpened snow shovels,” she told me.
“Now I know you’re screwing with me.” I snorted. Her expression didn’t change. “Oh, come on!”
“Missy will choose the weapon,” Ophelia informed me.
“She’s going to accessorize me to death?”
“Or she can choose hand-to-hand combat.” Ophelia nodded.
“I stand by my statement,” I deadpanned.
My arms finally healed up about an hour after Ophelia left me. She said she would come back an hour be fore my appointment with Missy the grieving ex to let me feed and update me on the duel arrangements. She even promised to serve as my second. How did I get to a point in my life where I needed a second?
Semierotic fisticuffs with Gabriel aside, I didn’t have any faith in my fighting skills. Walter had nearly splintered my skull with his bare hands, and from what I heard, he’d spent most of his time watching Battlestar Galactica in his mother’s basement.
After pacing, humming, yoga, and playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with the entire cast of Good Times, exhaustion finally got to me, and I managed to fall asleep. I dreamed that I was walking along that long, dark country road and felt the pain of Bud McElray’s bullet all over again. Only instead of finding me and turning me, Gabriel drove by in a big black Cadillac. He laughed and pelted me with cigars and drove away. Anyone care to interpret that?
I jolted awake, yelling, “Freud!” Dick was sitting in the corner of my cell, smirking at me. “I can’t leave you alone for two seconds, can I?”
“Dick?” I said, wiping an alarming amount of sleep drool from my cheek. “Wait, are you a ghost?”
He sat on the cot and grasped my knee, so I could feel he was substantial. “Nope, still as undead as ever.”
I removed his hand and put it back on his own knee. He gave me a blithe grin, which, Lord help me, made me hug him. He was clearly caught off guard by this and, after hesitating, gave me a completely innocent squeeze.
“Hey, you’re not trailer dust!” I exclaimed. “And your hand is on my knee again.”
“Sorry,” he said, not looking the least bit so. “And no, I’m not dust. I had a fireproof sleeping compartment built under the trailer a few years ago. I smelled the gas and jumped into it just in time.”
“Your sleeping compartment is fireproof?”
“I have my reasons,” he said, feigning indignation. “I just figured my place got torched by one of my less than civically minded associates. I laid low for a while. I didn’t know you’d been blamed for the whole thing until this evening when I heard about the duel. I couldn’t leave you locked up. With the public showers and the shackles—”
“Shh,” I said, holding a finger to his lips. “I’m glad you’re OK. Let’s not ruin that.”
He kissed the fingertip, which I then used to tweak his nose. He caught my hand and smelled my skin. He cocked an eyebrow and smirked, then rolled his eyes. If he could smell Gabriel on my hair before we had sex…
“If you say what is in your head right now, I will rescind my previous statement and kill you. For real this time,” I told him.
“Speaking of that, how about I give you a ride home?” he said. “There’s some stuff we need to talk about in private.”
“The stuff you cryptically referred to during your call? How did you get my cell-phone number, anyway?”
“We’ll talk about it later,” he said, dragging me to the door.
“Dick, they’re not going to just let me walk out of here. They think I tried to kill you. It’s apparently one of the big no-nos.”
“And obviously, I’m not dead. No harm, no foul,” Dick said.
“That doesn’t change the fact that someone tried to kill you and I’m still a prime suspect. I’m actually the only suspect, which I find insulting and surprising.”
“Look, I vouched for you, OK? I said there was no way you could have done this. It took some convincing, but Ophelia has agreed to release you into my custody. They figure if you really did try to kill me and somehow you end up mysteriously disappearing, it’s a wash.”
“I don’t want to know what you did to convince Ophelia, do I?”
Dick smirked.
Ophelia, Sophie, and Mr. Marchand were waiting in the hall, ready to offer me an apology on behalf of the council. Well, Sophie and Mr. Marchand were apologizing. I didn’t need telepathy to know Ophelia would not bother with a “trial/no trial” vote the next time I got into trouble.
