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try to fix up the door?”
    â€œYeah. I guess I’ll . . . watch some TV . . . or something.”
    â€œAll right.” As he started out of the kitchen, she added, “You know, I was planning on doing some shopping tomorrow. Would you feel up to going with me? I know you enjoy a little outing now and then.”
    â€œYeah, I suppose . . . I could do that.”
    â€œIt’s settled, then . . . depending on when someone can come to work on the door, of course.” Impulsively, she came over to him, bent down, and kissed him on top of the head. “Don’t worry about a thing, Peter. I’ll take good care of you.”
    â€œThanks,” he rasped. This was the first time a pretty girl had kissed him in, Lord, he couldn’t remember when. Nun or no nun, he wasn’t going to complain.
    She was wrong about one thing, though, he thought. He got hold of the knob on the chair’s left arm and pushed it forward, then to the left so that the slowly rolling chair went into the hall instead of the living room. He went back to his bedroom and stopped the chair beside the dresser.
    With his good arm and hand, he opened the top drawer and reached into it, sliding his hand under the pile of underwear until his fingers closed around cool metal. The side of his mouth that still worked curved upward in a grin.
    That damn cop might have taken the Ruger with him, but Pete still had the Browning Hi-Power. Sister Angela’s heart might be in the right place, but if there was ever any real trouble to be dealt with, a few well-placed 9mm rounds would be a hell of a lot more effective.
    â€œHeh,” Pete said happily as he looked at the semi-automatic pistol. They would just see who was gonna take care of who.

Chapter 7
    C harles Lockhart looked at the turkey dinner he had just nuked in the microwave of his apartment kitchen. What a sad, pathetic thing dinner for one was. For a second he considered picking it up from the counter and dumping it in the trash . . . but he was hungry. And public schoolteachers didn’t make enough money to afford such extravagant gestures as throwing away perfectly good food.
    Charles’s father had always accused him of having his head in the clouds, but he had a practical side, too. He carried the previously frozen dinner from the counter to the table and set it down, then got himself a bottle of non-alcoholic beer from the refrigerator.
    Happy Thanksgiving , he told himself as he sat down to eat. He recognized the bitterness in the thought, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it right now.
    Besides, there was a part of him accustomed to the bitterness, almost like it was an old friend.
    The hour was fairly late for Thanksgiving dinner because he’d slept in, then watched what was left of the parade, followed by the dog show that was on every year. Charles liked dogs, and if he’d had a house, he would go to one of the shelters and adopt a rescue dog. Maybe two. It would have been all right for him to have one pet here in the apartment, but that didn’t really seem fair to him. He was saving up for a down payment on a house with a nice backyard, so one of these days . . .
    Yeah, just like one of these days he’d be married and have a family and be a respected educator. People would actually listen to him.
    The day before, when the bell rang for early dismissal, he had tried to tell the juniors and sophomores in his English II class good-bye and wish them a happy Thanksgiving break, but nearly all of them dashed out the door before he could say a word. They might not be little kids anymore, but sometimes they still acted like they were, and one of those occasions was when school was dismissed early for a break.
    In this case, that break was only four days. They’d been bitching all week because they had to go to school on Wednesday. None of the other districts in the area did. In fact, some of them were out all week and called it