Socia said, “Only reason you’re still walking, Kenzie, is because we got things to talk about. Hell, I might just send someone over anyway, have them take a hammer to your spine. All I need’s your mouth as it is.”

I sat up and scratched an itch near the small of my back. I said, “Send them by, Socia. I’ll do some more amputations. Pretty soon you’ll have an army of cripples. The Raven Gimps.”

“Easy to talk that way, sitting nice and safe in your office.”

“Yeah, well look, Marion, I got a business to run.”

“You sitting down?” he said.

“Sure am.”

“In that chair by the boom box?”

Everything went cold inside of me, a flush of chipped ice spilling through my arteries.

Socia said, “You sitting in that chair, I wouldn’t get up anytime soon, less you want to see your ass blow past your head on its way out the window.” He chuckled. “Was nice knowing you, Kenzie.”

He hung up and I looked at Angie and said, “Don’t move,” even though her moving wasn’t the problem.

“What?” She stood up.

The room didn’t explode, but I damn near fainted. At least we knew he didn’t put a bomb under her chair too, just for fun. I said, “Socia said there’s a bomb under my chair.”

She froze, a wax statue in mid-stride. The word “bomb” will do that to people. She took a deep breath. “Call the bomb squad?”

I tried not to breathe. The possibility existed, I told myself, that the weight of the oxygen going into my lungs could put pressure on my lower extremities and detonate the bomb. It also occurred to me how ludicrous that was since the bomb was obviously triggered by a release of pressure, not a gain. So now, I couldn’t exhale. Either way I wasn’t breathing.

I said, “Yeah, call the bomb squad.” It sounded funny, talking while I held my breath, like Donald Duck with a cold. Then I closed my eyes and said, “Wait. Look under the chair first.”

It was an old wooden chair, a teacher’s chair.

Angie put the phone down. She knelt by the chair. It took a few moments for her to do that. No one wants their eyes an inch from an explosive. She bent her head under the chair and I heard her exhale loudly. She said, “I don’t see anything.”

I started to breathe again, then stopped. Possibly it was in the wood itself. I said, “Look like someone might have tampered with the wood?”

She said, “What? I can’t understand you.”

I took a chance and let out my breath and repeated the question.

She was down there for six or seven hours, or so it seemed, before she said, “No.” She slid back out from under the chair and sat back on the floor. “There’s no bomb under the chair, Patrick.”

“Great.” I smiled.

“So?”

“So, what?”

“Are you going to stand up?”