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the things that he cared about: big-band music, the arts and pop culture of the ‘30s and ’40s, and classic Disney comic books. Julie wasn’t a lunch-with-the-girls type, either, because not many thirty-year-old women were into the big-band era, Warner Brothers cartoons, martial arts, or advanced weapons training. In spite of spending so much time together, they remained fresh to each other, and she was still the most interesting and appealing woman he had ever known.
    “What’s taking them so long?” she asked, glancing up at the now-lighted windows of Decodyne, bright but fuzzy rectangles in the mist.
    “Be patient with them, dear,” Bobby said. “They don’t have the dynamism of Dakota and Dakota. They’re just a humble SWAT team.”
    Michaelson Drive was blocked off. Eight police vehicles—cars and vans—were scattered along the street. The chilly night crackled with the static and metallic voices sputtering out of police-band radios. An officer was behind the wheel of one of the cars, and other uniformed men were positioned at both ends of the block, and two more were visible at the front doors of Decodyne; the rest were inside, looking for Rasmussen. Meanwhile, men from the police lab and coroner’s office were photographing, measuring, and removing the bodies of the two gunmen.
    “What if he gets away with the diskettes?” Julie asked.
    “He won’t.”
    She nodded. “Sure, I know what you’re thinking—Whizard was developed on a closed-system computer with no links beyond Decodyne. But there’s another system in the company, with modems and everything, isn’t there? What if he takes the diskettes to one of those terminals and sends them out by phone?”
    “Can’t. The second system, the outlinked system, is totally different from the one on which Whizard was developed. Incompatible.”
    “Rasmussen is clever.”
    “There’s also a night lockout that keeps the outlinked system shut down.”
    “Rasmussen is clever,” she repeated.
    She continued to pace in front of him.
    The skinned spot on her forehead, where she had met the steering wheel when she’d jammed on the brakes, was no longer bleeding, though it looked raw and wet. She had wiped her face with tissues, but smears of dried blood, which looked almost like bruises, had remained under her right eye and along her jawline. Each time Bobby focused on those stains or on the shallow wound, a pang of anxiety quivered through him at the realization of what might have happened to her, to both of them.
    Not surprisingly, her injury and the blood on her face only accentuated her beauty, making her appear more fragile and therefore more precious. Julie was beautiful, although Bobby realized that she appeared more so to his eyes than to others, which was all right because, after all, his eyes were the only ones through which he could look at her. Though it was kinking up a bit now in the moist night air, her chestnut-brown hair was usually thick and lustrous. She had wide-set eyes as dark as semi-sweet chocolate, skin as smooth and naturally tan as toffee ice cream, and a generous mouth that always tasted sweet to him. Whenever he watched her without her being fully aware of the intensity of his attention, or when he was apart from her and tried to conjure an image of her in his mind, he always thought of her in terms of food: chestnuts, chocolate, toffee, cream, sugar, butter. He found this amusing, but he also understood the profundity of his choice of similes: She reminded him of food because she, more than food, sustained him.
    Activity at the entrance to Decodyne, about sixty feet away, at the end of a palm-flanked walkway, drew Julie’s attention and then Bobby’s. Someone from the SWAT team had come to the doors to report to the guards stationed there. A moment later one of the officers motioned for Julie and Bobby to come forward.
    When they joined him, he said, “They found this Rasmussen. You want to see him, make sure he has the