Someday Never Comes

Chapter Ten

The Worth sibling fought like nothing I'd seen. Their's were the arguments of teutonic myth. Acts of nuclear fission rarely witnessed outside the annals of late night Springer reruns.

That first week in Colorado, there wasn't a day that went by without at least one breaking out.

Every action of day to day life was a possible trigger; a landmine waiting to be tread on. A passing look, an unwashed coffee cup in the sink. The most minor of infractions could have them wound up and ready to throw down.

It was like someone had locked a pair of rabid wild cats in a broom closet. Or Ghandi and Hitler, minus their shared love of vegetarian cuisine and sweaty German beefcakes.

Late Wednesday, when the opening shots rang out for the day's match, I was busy slipping into a hot water fugue state in the shower. Five days of hotel gutting in, I didn't have a single body part that wasn't pissed as hell. My back muscles pulled, my joints ached. My knees started bitching every time I had to bend down, feeling for all the world like someone was driving a rusty corkscrew through the cartilage.

It made my want to make the eighteen hour drive back to Seattle. Not to visit my parents. Or even to drop in on the boys back at the precinct. No, I just wanted to hunt down my old personal trainer at the 24 Hour Fitness on Queen Anne and hold the guy hostage at screwdriver point till corporate coughed up all those long years of $36.99 a month membership fees.

I was envisioning how I'd slowly bludgeon him with a fire retardant ceiling tile after the fact, when Erin started shouting.

The shouting itself wasn't enough to get my attention, what with its frequency. Probably would have tuned it right out and gone back to drowning myself if I hand't picked out my own name amongst the belligerent staccato. Fantastic.

Squeezing against the tub edge till I was clear of the spray, I cranked off the double taps; an act that required safecracker precision. Screw up and turn one just a nano-second faster and you could be guaranteed a full body icing to do Lake Cocytus proud. Just needed a few cries of the eternally doomed and Old Saint Nick perched on the john, chowing down on some Roman assassin ass to complete the effect. Then again, the plumbing had the first one damn-near down pat.

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"Don't gimme' that 'nine tenths of the law,' man of the house bullshit," I overheard Erin say as I was nearing the lobby.

They were standing in a semi-circle on the ugly-ass orange carpet, Jamie and Erin and a woman I didn't recognize- her and the omnipresent dog stationed a few paces back from the other two- what she must have judged to be safe spectating distance. Personally, I'd have added a mile or two to the gap. Just to be safe.

A bit of good advice I had every intention of following right then and there. Would have too, if the damn dog hadn't divined my presence from thin air like some evil, Tolkien-esque elf sensing my aura and narced. Hell, I thought, seeing its ears perk up in awareness.

No time to make it out of the room, much less the building. The group's attention pin-ball bounced from the dog, straight to my position in a second flat and I was made.

"Well now," New Lady drawled, voice thick with southern inflection, "speak of the devil."

She was small and svelte. Fine bones, straight, dark hair; all decked out in the universal biker chick uniform of ripped jeans and t-shirt, sleeves rolled up to her shoulders. A real knockout, no matter what team you pitched for. The kind of woman they always seemed to cast for the part of the 007 femme fatale. The one with a inexplicably concealed thigh holster.