“This is good coffee,” said Coop. He was dog tired and just wanted everyone to shut up. He’d spent most of the previous night dreaming of spiders riding steel turds down an endless water slide. He’d almost called Giselle a couple of times, but chickened out. He looked at her now and she gave him a rueful smile. She squeezed his hand briefly before letting go and pulling away.

“Thanks for what you two did keeping Babylon out of the way last night. If he’d showed up, me, Phil, and Morty would have been double screwed.”

Bayliss and Giselle smiled at each other. Bayliss said, “I heard you left quite a mess for him when he got home.”

“Nothing a can of Raid and a bulldozer won’t fix.”

“He’ll know you did it, you know,” said Giselle.

“Good. He took a potshot at me once. I was just returning the favor.”

“Big talker,” said Nelson. “If he knows it was you, how long do you think you’re going to last in prison?”

“About as long as you out here if I tell everyone that you’re the one who forced me to pull the job.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“A bad boy like you with a drinking problem. Who knows who you owe favors to? You blackmailed me into doing your evil bidding. I begged and pleaded, but to no avail. A story like that wouldn’t be a hard sell.”

Nelson started to say something, but Salzman came in, a folder under one arm and the box in a clear plastic evidence bag in the other. He sat at the end of the table, placed the folder in front of him and the box next to it. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.” He looked at Nelson. “That’s quite a shiner you have there, Nelson. Cut yourself shaving?”

“No, sir,” he said. “I made a report about it last night.”

Salzman waved a hand at him without looking up. He opened the folder and began thumbing through the pages. “We’ll get to that,” he said. “Why doesn’t everybody have a seat and we’ll begin?”

Salzman looked up at Coop and said, “What did you think of our crawler? We have high hopes for it, but it hasn’t had much field service yet.”

Coop sipped his coffee. “The Stink Missile got us there and back and didn’t kill us. I give it a gold star.”

“Wonderful. It was a good plan you came up with, and without much time to do it in. We’re all impressed upstairs. In fact, Mr. Woolrich sent me down here to offer you a permanent job here at the DOPS.”

Nelson cleared his throat. “Excuse me, but how can he work here if he’s in jail? Aren’t we going to deal with the fact this man assaulted me?”