John was just a little nervous when he left the house Friday morning. It would be the first time he’d left Sally in the house without his being around. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her, but well, there was a little bit of him that really didn’t trust her, when it came right down to it. After all, she hadn’t been that good a friend in high school – in fact, not a friend at all, just a classmate he hadn’t liked. It was clear that while she was a survivor, she was also a drifter who tended to move around a lot; “Left No Forwarding Address” might as well have been her middle name. There really wasn’t that much in the house worth stealing, and that was mostly insured.

On the other hand, Teresa was going to be more or less homebound for a while, and with no wheels and no money it would be difficult for the two of them to just take off and leave no trace. Still, he made up his mind he was going to check in on them occasionally, either by phone or by dropping by the house without warning, at least until he was fairly sure in his own mind that things were going like they were supposed to. In addition, he’d had a quiet word with Max, both about keeping an eye on the place if someone with a tow truck should show up, and if anything else untoward seemed to be happening. That would have to do it; under the circumstances, it was about the best he could manage.

Mostly he tried to put it out of his mind as he drove toward the office. After all, he had other things that had to be dealt with. If he’d had any kind of luck, Annamaria would have gotten that kid she knew over to the office in the evening, and his computer might be up and running. That would be good; there was a lot of work that needed doing, starting with the Tomtucknee Regional bid, which had been at the head of his list for several days now, and which he’d just not had any opportunity to work on.

At least, for once he’d left early enough that he actually beat Annamaria into the office. That didn’t happen very often. Now, he thought, if she’d just show up half an hour late, I could be the one to glare at her . . . naw, it’d never happen.

He unlocked the place, turned on the lights, got the coffee going, and went into his office, where his computer was sitting right where it was supposed to be. Mentally crossing his fingers, he pushed the button. It seemed like a miracle when it lit up and started making all the normal booting up noises. What a relief . . .

The computer took its own sweet time booting up, like normal – long enough for him to take his mug out to the coffee pot and get a cup of morning eye-opener. Maybe, just maybe, things would get back to normal and this day wouldn’t be another madhouse.

He was just getting settled in at his desk and bringing up his e-mail when Annamaria came in, right on time; no glare needed, darn it. She came up to his office door and said, “Computer working OK now?”

“Seems to be. I just got it running. Anything too complicated?”

“Carlos said the power supply burned out,” she replied. “I took him back to his home and he took one out of a junker he had in his room. He’s got so much computer stuff in his room I don’t know where he manages to sleep.”

“Sounds like a kid,” John smiled. “Tell him he did a good job.”

“I already did,” she said. “I also wrote him a check for a hundred. Is that all right with you? It’s probably half what anyone else would have charged, and he got it done last night instead of next week.”

“Fine with me. It’s working, and that’s what I needed.”

“Carlos said you probably shouldn’t trust the power supply too far. The one he put in it ought to be good, but it came out of a junker he picked up along a curb someplace, so he doesn’t know for sure. He said he thought it was probably too late last night to go to a store and get a new one.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers.”

“He also said you really ought to get a new one to put in it, just to be safe. On the other hand, he also said that computer is so old it ought to have gray hair and be sitting in a wheelchair. You’re asking a lot of it considering some of the software you run. He says it’s surprising it runs some of it at all.”

“Some of it doesn’t run very fast, that’s for sure, but it does what I want it to do. He’s a kid, he probably wants it to run the biggest memory-hog game software there is.”

“Probably true,” she grinned. “But he’s right. You ought to get a newer machine, one that will run something newer than Windows 3.11. He’s probably right – there’s software I use that won’t run on something that old.”

“Well, all right,” he told her. “Let’s get it on the agenda. It’s not something that has to be done today, but soon.”

“Maybe I ought to ask him what he thinks we need.”

“I’m sure he knows more about it than we do,” John admitted, turning to his e-mail.

There were several items in the e-mail folder that needed attention. Some of them could have been answered with a simple “yes” or “no” but he was just old-school enough to believe that e-mails ought to at least contain full sentences. Cripe, they’d hardly even had computers when he had been in high school, and he’d never gotten to play with them very much. Kids like Carlos . . . how did it get to be a different world so quickly?

He set to work on the first e-mail in line. It was from Sid, his regional salesman in Arkansas. Sid was a pretty good salesman but he couldn’t write a coherent sentence to save his ass. What was worse, it was a complicated question regarding service agreement options, and John couldn’t make heads nor tails of it. The service agreement options were pretty clear-cut, but somehow a potential customer had come up with a quibble that didn’t make sense to John, and probably didn’t make sense to Sid, either, and Sid mangled the translation even worse.

John made two or three starts at trying to write a halfway sensible reply, but each time got bogged down before he got very far. There was a bell rattling around in the back of his mind, something that didn’t make much sense, and that wasn’t helping things very much, either. Something Annamaria had said . . . what was it?

Finally it struck him. “Annamaria,” he said into the intercom. “Could you step in here a minute please?”

“Sure thing, John.” It only took her a moment to come to his door.

“Do I remember you saying that Carlos liked to build computers for kids who didn’t have them?”

“Yeah, that’s his hobby. He builds them up from junk, sort of a mix-and-match thing. They pay him what they can, and sometimes it’s not much.”

John got a smile on his face. “It just so happens I know a kid who’s going to be stuck in a wheelchair for the next couple months, and I’ll just bet she’d love to have some computer games to help kill the time, and maybe some Internet access. I don’t know how much she knows about computers, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s not a real lot.”

“That girl you’ve got staying with you?”

“Right,” John smiled. “It probably doesn’t need to be a whole lot of computer, but I’ll make sure it’s worth Carlos’ time, and if he has to buy a new part or two, fine with me. It’ll need a monitor, keyboard, and all the other accessories. Tell him to load it up with games and stuff a girl a little younger than he is would like to mess around with. He might have to go over and show her how to play some of them, but I’ll bet she’d like a visitor, too.”

“That’s not a bad idea, and it’s sweet of you, John.”

“Sweet, hell. I’m trying to keep from having to paint over the scratch marks from where she’ll be climbing the walls if I don’t do something. Do you have any idea what it costs to bring a painter in to redo a place?”

“Of course,” she smiled. “I have a cousin who’s a painter.”

“Hell,” John snorted. “If there’s any occupation known to civilized man, you probably have a cousin who does it.”

“They don’t miss many, that’s for sure,” she laughed back at him. “I won’t be able to do anything about it until after school, and it’ll probably turn into tomorrow.”

“A day or two isn’t going to matter much, but it isn’t going to be long before she’s going to be going nuts from boredom. I’d like to head that one off at the pass if I can.”

“You’re right, something like that would be hard for any kid. I’ll get him going on it.”

John turned back to his computer, feeling pretty good for having figured that one out. There were a number of different ways it was a win-win. He really hadn’t had much time to talk with Teresa, but she seemed like a pretty good kid, if a little overwhelmed with what had happened to her. If he could arrange a little diversion for her, then so much the better. And, of course, if she could get a little friendly with a kid close to her age, like Carlos, well, there were worse things in this life than being a kid and not having a friend or two to share stuff with – but not many worse. It wasn’t like he was trying to set them up or anything, maybe just open a door or two.

Finally, John realized he had to get back to work; after all, there was a ton of it remaining and he’d already lost much of the week from not being able to get to it.

Even after some more skull work, Sid’s e-mail still didn’t make any sense. John finally decided he’d better send an e-mail back to ask Sid for clarification on several issues. His reply might not clear up everything but might at least help him figure out what was being asked in the first place.

Finally, after more than a half hour of piddling around, John managed to put together a reply e-mail that covered most of the bases and raised a few issues of his own.

John’s relief at being able to get started on the next e-mail was only momentary, as it was about a proposed service amendment – that was pretty clear – but it came out of the Murasaki head office in Japan, and had been composed by someone in pure Japlish. Or, at least, someone who didn’t know English as well as they thought they did. It was a major headache in dealing with Murasaki, and sometimes their manuals didn’t make a lot of sense. It had once been worse; in recent years the Las Vegas office had taken to rewriting the manuals in English, but the Vegas versions were not a neatly printed manual but typewritten sheets run off on a Xerox machine. It struck John as pretty damn amateurish, and was a point of contention he had with them; a discussion about it came up every damn time he was in Las Vegas.

At least this wasn’t a major issue for right now. About all he could do was to forward the e-mail to Las Vegas, with the addition of, “Do you have any idea of what this actually means?”

It took him an hour or more to work his way through the incoming e-mail and all the spam that seemed to go along with it. The spam messages disappeared with mouse clicks, but they were the only easy ones to deal with. Everything else consisted of things that took some serious time – not necessarily trouble, but time consuming; many things were obviously not going to be settled with a single response, and some had been batted back and forth for weeks.

Finally he finished dealing with the e-mail, at least until something else appeared. At least in the old days when stuff came in on paper, there could be time to deal with it, and stuff appeared only once a day. Now, a crisis could appear on his computer screen at any second. Finally, he could actually get to work on the Tomtucknee Regional bid, as he’d been trying to do for days. He pulled a spreadsheet up on the screen, trying to find something he could offer for bait, without impacting income too badly. The problem was that he’d already cut his stock agreement to about as tight as he could manage, so there wasn’t very much wiggle room.

He was staring at the computer screen, looking for ideas, when Annamaria’s voice came over the intercom. “John, I’ve got the monthly report worked out for the accountant. I need you to look it over pretty quick, so I can still get it in the mail today.”

No doubt about it, that was important. He still had a few days left to work out something on the Tomtucknee Regional bid, but this had to be done quickly. “All right,” he told her. “Bring it in and let’s get started on it.”

Since John trusted Annamaria completely, it would have been easy just to eyeball it quickly, guess it was all right, and tell her to go ahead and send it out. However, he’d learned over the years that she appreciated having her work checked, and besides, interesting things sometimes showed up there which couldn’t be seen elsewhere. So he sat down with the papers, pulled up the adding machine from the corner of his desk, and started in, more to spot-check here and there rather than go over each number with a fine-tooth comb.

In half an hour, he didn’t find anything to argue about, other than to notice that Warren was indeed putting on a lot of miles. It was difficult to tell from the balance sheet, but it seemed to John, even knowing what he was up to, Warren could have scheduled his appointments a little more efficiently to cut down on the mileage he was stacking up. However, after the way Warren had helped out yesterday John couldn’t just get on his case about it. The best he could manage was to make a mental note to point out to Warren that all that mileage would look fishy to an IRS audit if one were to happen. If that didn’t do the job, in a month or two he’d have to word his warning a little more strongly.

But then, Warren was making a lot of sales, so . . . well, he’d have to keep an eye on it.

Of more concern was the fact that Hal, up in North Carolina, didn’t seem to be putting on enough miles. His sales seemed to be down over the last several months, too. Could that mean that he wasn’t covering the territory as effectively as he could? Hal wasn’t exactly his best salesman . . . something else to keep a close eye on to see if the trend continued.

The report itself seemed all right as far as he could tell, although there were a couple other places where the numbers revealed something that needed further thought or investigation. None seemed very pressing, but one of the things John had learned the hard way was that it was better to spot trends before they exploded in his face.

He was just finishing up the review of the reports when Annamaria’s voice came over the intercom again. “John, Russ Yager for you.”

Oh, crap, John thought. The odds were that he knew what that was all about. He picked up the phone and said in a genial salesman’s voice, “Yeah, Russ. What’s up?”

“My blood pressure,” Russ replied. “I just got word that not one, but two of my guys are getting called up. They have to report this afternoon for the official word, although as far as they know they’re not going to have to head over to the sandbox for a while. But, having them gone still leaves me in a bind.”

“So you’re shorthanded again this afternoon,” he sighed with a little relief. At least it wasn’t one of several potential issues about Sally and Teresa; those needed to be solved proactively, not defensively.

“Yeah, and it’s going to be a Friday afternoon. You know what that means.”

For no good reason John could put his finger on, Bradenton Muni seemed to get more calls than normal on Friday afternoon. If it could be pointed at one thing, like traffic accidents, it could have been understandable – people rushing home from work, trying to get in all the weekend they could. But it was a general, across-the-board increase that didn’t make a lot of sense. “Russ,” John sighed, “I’m still playing catch-up from helping you out Tuesday.”

“I realize it’s a pain in the ass,” Russ told him, “but I wouldn’t be calling you if I didn’t need the help. I’ve still got those four guys off at school. Next week it ought to be better.”

John glanced up at the computer screen, where the Tomtucknee Regional bid material was still patiently being displayed. Well, what the hell. He knew he could come in tomorrow, take the phone off the hook, and not be bothered by interruptions. Hell, he might even get some useful work done. Besides, there was the issue of paying for Teresa’s ambulance run on Tuesday. He knew that ultimately Bradenton Muni was going to have to charge it off, but maybe he could head off some of the whining and the paperwork, especially if he had Russ feeling like he owed him a big one.

“All right,” John sighed, bowing to the inevitable. “Have I got time to go out of my way and hit the Hob Nob on the way over there?” The old-line lunch stand with open-air seating served a righteous burger; he’d been lusting for one for days. Sliders were fine, but the real thing was the real thing.

“So long as you get here half an hour ago,” Russ told him. “I’m just afraid the roof is going to fall in on us any minute now.”

John glanced at the computer screen again, shook his head, and moved the cursor and clicked to start the machine shutting down; the Tomtucknee Regional bid material disappeared, along with any chance of working on it today. “All right,” he said, “I’ll be there as quick as I can. It may take a few minutes, though.”

It took a couple minutes to get ready to leave. As he walked through the front office, Annamaria smiled, “Same thing?”

“Yeah,” he sighed. “If it weren’t for the fact that I know Russ has three Sollarian ALS monitors and two defibs that are getting ready to die, I might not be quite as accommodating. I don’t see any way I’m going to make it back this afternoon, so you might as well lock up and go home when quitting time rolls around. Get Carlos hot on that box for Teresa, would you?”

“Sure will,” she said. “Any idea how far you want him to go?”

“No idea, just tell him not to go overboard. It’s not like she needs something that will outwork the National Security Agency. Two, maybe three hundred would be fine.”

“Take care, John. I’ll call you if he has something ready to go this weekend.”

Now that John had his mind on a quick pick up at the Hob Nob, he decided to go through with it. After all, it wasn’t very far out of his way. The traffic on the four lanes of Washington Boulevard wasn’t all that bad, so he pulled out his cell phone and called Sally. “So what’s happening around there today?”

“Not much,” she told him. “Teresa is watching TV. She thinks Dr. Phil is funny.”

“If she actually likes that yahoo, then there’s something wrong with her. Maybe I ought to stop off and get her some videos, or something.”

“I’m sure she would appreciate it. She seems to be feeling pretty good, but doesn’t like just sitting around doing nothing.”

“I wouldn’t either if I was in her condition,” John sighed. “I’m working on something else for her to do, but it’s not ready yet. Make sure she gets a nap or something. She may not think she needs it, but she will.”

“I was thinking the same thing. She’s acting a little tired, but I’d be tired if I watched TV all morning, too.”

“OK, fine,” he replied. “I’ve got to do some running this afternoon, and I may not be available if an emergency comes up. If anything comes up, call Annamaria out at my office. If she can’t handle it, she might be able to get in touch with me, even if I can’t come right away.”

“Everything is going quietly,” she told him. “I’ve been working on the bathroom. It really needed a cleaning.”

“I’m sure it was,” he said, noting that the Hob Nob was coming up quickly. “Hey, I’ve got to go. I’ll catch up with you later.”

John turned the cell phone all the way off and stuck it back in his pocket. He sure didn’t need it interrupting him while he was on a call this afternoon, although if a flat spot came up he could call Sally again, just on general principles.

This jazz of having to go fill in for Russ was showing signs of getting out of hand. Once in a while was one thing, but this was the second time this week. Granted, it was a special situation, but things couldn’t go on this way. He needed to get Russ aside and gently tell him that – but only after he’d made his point about Teresa’s ambulance bill.

As things turned out, it really wasn’t all that busy an afternoon – just comfortable, not frantic. A couple of fallen-and-can’t-get-ups, a couple of chest pains, three difficulty breathings, someone probably dead at home – and turned out to be – two minor PIs. All of them were very common calls in a senior citizen town like Bradenton and just enough to keep the two of them going continually. There was nothing terribly surprising, but enough to keep keep them from getting bored. As it turned out, John was working with Chad Gumble again, and again let Chad do the majority of the work – he was getting paid for it, after all.

At least in the middle of the afternoon John found the opportunity to talk with Russ a bit, letting him know that the quid pro quo for helping him out this afternoon was to deal with the paperwork on the Hanson kid from Tuesday. Once he told Russ about the situation, the supervisor had nodded and agreed that it pretty well looked like it was going to go that way, anyway.

“Funny thing, though,” he smiled. “It seems the kid disappeared from Cocalatchee General yesterday afternoon. I got a call wondering if I knew anything about it, and I told them I didn’t know a thing. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about it, would you?”

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