I GOT HOME around three in the morning, and rather than try to sneak into our bedroom without disturbing Sarah, I turned on the lights, plopped myself down on the bed next to her, and said, “You won’t believe what happened! We started following them, and then they were following us, and things were getting smashed, and then they started shooting, and we lured them into the parking lot at Midtown, and we came up around behind them, and that’s when Lawrence tried to shoot out their tires, and then they drove right up the side of a hill and took off and I can’t fucking believe it happened!”
Sarah sat up in bed, bleary-eyed. “Huh?”
I told it all to her again, more slowly this time. She asked a couple of clarifying questions, and then, once I was finished, said, “Are you out of your goddamn mind?”
“I was fine, really, Lawrence knew what he was doing. He’s a professional.”
“You are. You are out of your goddamn mind.”
I shrugged, then realized she might be onto something, and suddenly felt that I was going to lose my coffee and doughnuts, because car chases laced with gunplay are not typical activities for former-science-fiction-authors-turned-newspaper-feature-writers. I was breathing pretty rapidly, and Sarah let me fall into her arms. It’s possible that I was, perhaps very slightly, shaking.
“You are a stupid, stupid man,” she said quietly. “You’re not cut out for a life of adventure. You’re not Indiana Jones. If you tried to be, instead of carrying a whip tucked into your belt, you’d have a bottle of Maalox.”
“We’re going back out there tomorrow night,” I whispered into her hair, and she shoved me away abruptly.
“You really have lost your mind,” she said, suddenly looking angry enough to slug me.
I held up my hands, as much to protest as to defend myself. “We’re going into it with our eyes open this time. And Lawrence will be talking to the cops, and it’s not going to be the same kind of thing at all. We know what we’re up against.”
“So what does that mean? You’re taking a bazooka next time? Something big enough to bag an SUV?”
Seriously, I said, “I let Lawrence make the firepower decisions. It’s really not my area.”
She got up, stormed into the bathroom, and closed the door behind her. From inside, she shouted, “You’re done. This assignment is terminated. Write what you’ve got, it’ll be a fine feature.”
Whoa. Wait a minute.
“Who’s that in the bathroom?” I asked. “Is that my wife in there, or is it my editor?”
Sarah opened the door abruptly, a fierce expression on her face. “Take your pick.”
“Is that what you’d tell Cheese Dick Colby? If he was on this assignment, would you pull him off it, just when it was getting good, because he might hurt himself?”
“I don’t know. I don’t sleep with Colby.”
“I don’t even know how he sleeps with himself. You gotten close to him?”
She went back into the bathroom and closed the door. I shook my head, then unbuttoned my shirt and slipped off my pants. What was I supposed to do? Apologize? Had I done something wrong?
Maybe. Maybe not. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from twenty years of marriage, it’s that you don’t have to be wrong to apologize.
It was awfully quiet in the bathroom, so I went up to the door and quietly rapped on it. “Listen,” I said. “I—”
And the door swung open and Sarah, tears running down her cheeks, threw her arms around me and buried her face in my chest. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just don’t want anything to happen to you. Nearly losing you once was enough.”
Neither of us slept much during the three hours that were left before sunrise, which meant this was the second night in a row where I’d hardly had any sleep. Sarah, alternately staring at the ceiling and then spooning into me under the covers, said she was going to cancel going on her management retreat.
“Don’t do that,” I said. “Really, everything’s fine.”
“Maybe it’s got nothing to do with you. Maybe I just don’t want to go on the retreat.”
“Sure you do. No matter how bad it is, you’re out of the office for a couple of days, and that’s got to be worth something. Plus, there’ll be snacks.”
“That’s true,” she said quietly. “They will have to feed us.”
We were down in the kitchen as the sun came up. I heard the morning’s Metropolitan hit the front door and saw our delivery man working his way down the street when I stooped over to pick it up.