Free Not Quite an Angel by Bobby Hutchinson Page A

hands, and pressed her lips to his in an awkward, closed-mouth kiss that shook him to the marrow.

CHAPTER FIVE
    â€œH AWK, COME TAKE A LOOK at this.” Bernie’s voice over the intercom had summoned Adam, and they were both now in Bernie’s office.
    It was Monday morning, and Bernie’s eyes were riveted to the computer screen. An oversize mug of coffee rested precariously near the edge of the desk as his deft fingers accessed the daily occurrence log—crime reports from the Los Angeles Police Department.
    â€œLook here. See the item about Mrs. Hammerstein. This is another one of those scams—it’s the third one that’s come up in two months. If we could convince these women to get Blue Knights to check on where their money’s going, things like this wouldn’t happen.”
    â€œThings like what? For God’s sake, Bern, you know I can’t decipher that crap on the screen.” Adam knew he sounded grumpy and out of sorts. He was tired. For two nights now, when he ought to have been sleeping, he’d been lying awake thinking about Sameh Smith.
    Both nights, in the darkest hours before the dawn, he’d allowed himself to consider the utterly impossible. Maybe she was telling the truth. Maybe she was from the future. Maybe she had supernatural powers and maybe she really could conjure up a bolt of some vile kind of energy and send it winging toward the part of his anatomy that was the most vulnerable. At 3:00 a.m. he was almost ready to believe her preposterous explanations for who and what she was.
    Fortunately each new morning brought the return of his reason. But this morning had also brought the loss of his good nature, because he’d called a contact he had at Universal Studios first thing, and after some confusion, his friend had found out that yes, they’d had a major power outage when they were working on the dinosaur flick a few months back.
    Besides that disquieting news, Adam had spent all Sunday afternoon and evening with Myles, and it had drained him. Myles Fontaine was the closest thing he’d ever had to a father. Myles had once been the wisest and strongest man Adam knew. To see him now, his body skeleton thin, his long-fingered hands moving aimlessly, his mind wandering in some gray world invisible to anyone but himself, was a wrenching agony for Adam.
    Myles seldom knew him anymore, but Adam kept going to the nursing home on Sundays, kept on talking and talking to Myles, hoping against hope that some afternoon his friend and mentor would shake the cobwebs out of his elegant silver head and be himself again. Well, it sure hadn’t happened yesterday. Adam knew it probably was never going to happen, and it was a bitter knowledge, a knowledge he hadn’t yet come to terms with.
    And all afternoon, as he carried on a one-sided dialogue with his old friend, a corner of his mind persisted in going over and over the whole complicated issue of Sameh Smith. He told himself time and again that if he had any sense, he’d hand the whole matter of Sameh straight back to Bernie, break his date with her for tonight, forget he’d ever laid eyes on her and get on with business as usual.
    He knew he wasn’t going to do any of those things, though. In spite of everything, he wanted to see Samehagain. He had to see her as soon as possible. Some part of him was already counting the hours until dinnertime. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he was obsessed with a woman, and he didn’t like it one bit.
    â€œOne of the reasons you don’t like computers, Hawk, is that they’re not shaped like a woman,” Bernie was saying. “Another just could be that you haven’t heard a single word I’ve said in the past five minutes. You’ve been staring at that calendar on the wall, and it’s two months out of date.”
    Adam stared at the computer screen again, feeling put upon. “All I can see on that