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Silence.
For about half a second.
“What in hell did you do that for?” she roared, her face turning red with temper as she stepped closer, unconsciously balling her right hand into a fist.
“I thought you were trying to quit cussing,” he taunted.
“You’d drive a saint to cussing!”
“That let’s you out, doesn’t it?”
“You’re damn right!”
He eyed her right hand. “Are you going to use that, or are you going to be reasonable?”
“What—?” She glanced down and saw that her arm was half-cocked, her fist already drawn back. With great effort she uncurled her fingers. They immediately assumed the fight position again. She really, really wanted to slug him, and she got even angrier because she couldn’t. “Reasonable?” she yelled, stepping even closer. “You want me to be reasonable? You’re the one who scared the hell out of me and turned off my mower!”
“I’m trying to sleep,” he said, enunciating the words with clear pit stops between each one. “Is it asking too much for a little consideration?”
She gaped at him. “You act as if I’m out here mowing at dawn. It’s almost ten o’clock! And I’m not the only one who’s committing the high crime of cutting grass. Listen,” she commanded, as the muted roar of neighborhood mowers hummed up and down the street.
“They aren’t mowing right outside my bedroom window!”
“So get in bed at a decent hour. It isn’t my fault you stay up most of the night!”
His face was getting as red as hers. “I’m on a task force, lady! Irregular hours are part of the job. I sleep when I can, which, since you moved in, hasn’t been very damn often!”
She threw up her hands. “All right! Fine! I’ll finish the job tonight, when it cools down.” She made a shooing motion. “Just stagger on back to bed. I’ll go inside and sit for the next eleven hours. Or will that disturb your beauty rest, too?” she inquired sweetly.
“Not unless you have firecrackers in your ass,” he snapped, and stalked back into his house.
There was probably a law against throwing rocks at someone’s house, she thought. Fuming, she wheeled her lawn mower back into the garage, carefully padlocked the doors, then retrieved her car from the curb. She’d like to show him what she could do with a few firecrackers, and she sure wouldn’t be sitting on them.
She stomped inside and glared at BooBoo, who ignored her while he washed his paws. “A task force,” she growled. “I’m not unreasonable. All he had to do was explain, in a calm voice, and I’d have been glad to put off mowing until later. But nooo, he’d rather make an ass of himself.”
BooBoo looked at her.
“Ass isn’t a swear word,” she said defensively. “Besides, it isn’t my fault. I’ll let you in on a secret about our neighbor, BooBoo: Mr. Perfect, he’s not!”
four
Jaine managed to get through the weekend without another confrontation with her jerk neighbor and was at work fifteen minutes early in an effort to atone for her Friday lateness, even though she had worked overtime on Friday to make up for it. As she stopped at the gate, the watchman leaned out and eyed the Viper with disapproval. “When’re you going to get rid of the piece of junk and buy a Chevrolet?”
She heard it almost every day. This was what happened when you worked in the Detroit area in anything remotely connected with the automotive industry. You had to show brand loyalty to whichever of the Big Three directly or indirectly employed you. “When I can afford it,” she replied, as she always did. Never mind that the Viper had cost the earth, even though it was used and had over fifty thousand miles on it when she bought it. “I just bought a house, you know. If my dad hadn’t given this to me, I wouldn’t be driving it.”
That last was a direct lie, but it tended to get people off her back for a while. Thank God no one here knew who her father was, or they would have known he was a Ford man through and through. He had been insulted when she bought the Viper and never failed to make a few derogatory remarks about it.
“Yeah, well, your dad should have known better.”
“He doesn’t know anything about cars.” She tensed, expecting lightning to strike her dead for that whopper.
She parked the Viper at a back corner of the lot, where it was less likely to get dinged. People at Hammerstead joked that the car was being shunned. She had to admit it was inconvenient, especially during bad weather, but getting wet was better than letting the Viper get injured. Just driving on 1-696 to get to work was enough to give her gray hair.
Hammerstead occupied a four-story red-brick building with a gray arched portico and six curving steps leading up to impressive double doors. That entrance, however, was used exclusively by visitors. All the employees entered by a metal side door with an electronic lock into a narrow, puke green hallway, on which were the offices of maintenance and electrical, and a dark, dank room labeled “Storage.” Just what was stored there, Jaine didn’t want to know.
At the end of the puke green hallway were three steps that led up to another metal door. This one opened onto a gray-carpeted hall that ran the length of the building, front to back, and off which offices and other hallways branched like veins. The two lower floors were reserved for the computer nerds, those strange and irreverent beings who talked in a foreign language about bytes and USB ports. Access to these floors was limited; one had to have an employee’s access card to get into the puke green hallway, then another to enter any of the offices and rooms. There were two elevators, and at the far end of the building, for the more energetic, were the stairs.
As she entered the gray-carpeted hall, a large hand-lettered sign caught her attention. The sign was posted directly above the call buttons for the elevators. In green and purple crayon, outlined with black Magic Marker for emphasis, was a new company directive: EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY, ALL EMPLOYEES WILL BE REQUIRED TO TAKE A COMBINATION OF GINKGO AND VIAGRA, SO YOU CAN REMEMBER WHAT THE FUCK YOU’RE DOING.
