“The last piece of Starfire is in orbit!” Brad shouted to the team members assembled around him. “Excelsior!” All the team members echoed their newfound motto, which was Latin for “ever higher.”
“I made reservations for us at Harrah’s Battle Mountain steak house,” Casey Huggins said, signing off on her smartphone. “They’ll be expecting us at six.”
“Thanks, Casey,” Brad said. “I’m going for a little run. I’ll see you guys at the casino concierge desk.”
“You’re leaving to go running?” Lane Eagan asked. “Now? Casey and Jerry’s microwave cavity was just delivered to a space station and will be installed in a couple days, and then Starfire will be ready to go. You should be having fun, Brad. Starfire is almost ready to test-fire! You deserve it.”
“I will be having fun, guys, believe me,” Brad said. “But if I don’t get a run in, I get cranky. I’ll see you in an hour at the concierge desk at Harrah’s.” He trotted off before anyone else could object.
Brad ran back to his room, changed into workout clothes, did two hundred crunches and push-ups, then picked up his cane and went downstairs and outdoors. Early October in north-central Nevada was almost ideal weather, not quite as warm and with a little taste of winter in the air, and Brad found the conditions perfect. In thirty minutes he had run almost four miles around the hotel’s RV park, which was a lot less congested than the parking lot, then headed back to his room to shower and change.
He had just started to undress when he heard a noise on the other side of the door. He picked up his cane, looked through the peephole in the door, then opened it. He found Jodie outside, tapping a note on her smartphone. “Oh! You’re back,” she said, surprised. Brad stepped aside, and she came inside. “I was just going to leave you a message to meet us at the Silver Miner’s Club instead—they have a pretty good jazz band playing now.” Her eyes roamed across his chest and shoulders and opened wide in surprise. “Crikey, mate, what in bloody hell have you been doing to yourself?”
“What?”
“These, mate,” Jodie said, and ran her fingers across his biceps and deltoids. “Are you on steroids or something?”
“Heck no. I’d never do drugs.”
“Then where did these spankin’ flexors come from, Brad?” Jodie asked, her fingers running across the top of his chest. “I know you’ve been working out, but holy dooley! You’ve got some spiffy gams there too.” She ran a hand across his abdomen. “And is that a six-pack I see, mate?”
“My trainers are pretty intense guys,” Brad said. “We do weights three times a week, in between cardio. They throw in speed bag and even some gymnastics, just to mix things up.” He still hadn’t told her about the cane, Krav Maga, and pistol training, but he knew he should do so soon. They weren’t officially a couple and hadn’t actually been dating, just seeing a little more of each other outside of school. They’d taken a couple trips in the turbine P210 airplane, but they were all quick one-day trips to see a baseball game in San Francisco or do some seafood shopping in Monterey.
Wow, Brad thought, she’s really upset about this—it was a reaction he completely didn’t expect. Arguing with her wasn’t going to help one bit. “I . . . I guess I just didn’t think,” he said. “I just reacted.”
“And it looked like you were trying to kill both guys!” Jodie thundered on, her voice rising enough to get the attention of others nearby. “You were pummeling that second guy so bad I thought he was going to puke up his guts, and then you nearly twisted his arm off! What in bloody hell was that?”
“The self-defense classes I’m taking . . .”
“Oh, so that’s it, eh?” Jodie said. “Your new buddy Chief Ratel is teaching you how to kill people? I think the farther you get away from that guy, the better. He’s brainwashing you into thinking you’re invincible, that you can take on a guy with a knife and stove a guy’s head in with a cane.” Her eyes widened in realization. “So that’s why you carry that scary-looking cane? Chief Ratel taught you how to attack people with it?”
“I didn’t attack anyone!” Brad protested. “I was—”
“You cracked open that poor guy’s head with that cane,” Jodie said. “He didn’t do anything to you. The other guy had a knife, so it was self-defense—”
“Thank you!”
“—but it looked like you were trying to kill the bloke!” Jodie went on. “Why did you keep on beating him like that, and why twist his arm so far back?”
“Jodie, the guy had a knife,” Brad said, almost pleading for her to understand. “An attacker with a knife is one of the most dangerous situations you can get into, especially at night and against a guy who knows how to use it. You saw how he came after us with his left hand after I knocked the knife out of his right—he obviously knew how to fight with a knife, and I had to take him out. I—”