Free Reilly 11 - Case of Lies by Perri O'Shaughnessy

second. I have a bad feeling.”
    The paranoid professional self kicked in immediately. She clipped her keys to her bag and stepped back. “What’s the matter, Bob?”
    “Maybe those caps-you never know. Maybe he wanted to distract us.” Bob apparently found that an adequate explanation.
    “From what, exactly?”
    But he had finished explaining. “Just wait, okay? Step away a long way from the vehicle.” He said it playfully, but she sensed he was trying to protect her in his own way.
    She stepped back, frowning, nervous and unhappy. Black clouds like the ones overhead clumped in her mind.
    Methodically, moving with the practiced ease of an experienced Gulf Warrior, or at least like a kid who had played quite a few video combat games in his day, Bob slunk around the car, examining each inch of the exterior, then shimmied underneath.
    “What are you doing? Don’t do that.” Nina kept the panic out of her voice with an effort.
    “Looking.”
    She swallowed, watching Hitchcock hurl himself against the window. “Anything?” she asked when she could stand the suspense no longer.
    “Well,” Bob said, “yeah.” He wriggled out from under the car, grabbed her by the arm, and pulled her farther away.
    “What’s the matter?”
    “Come on! I hate to tell you, but it’s bad.”
    “A tracker?” she asked. “GPS or something?”
    “Worse!”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Mom, I think it’s an explosive. Call the cops, Mom. You stay right here. I’ll get Hitchcock out…”
    “No! No! Stay away from it!” This time Nina did the pulling, and it took some lengthy argument and anguished begging to stop Bob from risking his life to save his pet.
    Once she felt she could trust Bob to stay away from the Bronco, she called the police, all the time watching Hitchcock’s liquid eyes, frightened for him and his big wet tongue. Oblivious, just wanting to get with the people he loved, he continued to assault the windows. Nina and Bob walked out of his line of sight so that he would stop.
    Within minutes several police cars arrived. Six officers carefully evacuated the restaurant, filing people out one by one, keeping them as far away as possible from the parking lot. People from the restaurant, unable to leave without cars, were joined by a crowd of neighborhood people. Everybody stood bug-eyed behind yellow caution tape, rubbernecking, but still unable to see much.
    “Our dog,” Nina said to a policewoman. “Our dog!”
    “We’ll try to save him, ma’am.”
    Was that supposed to make her feel better, she wondered, succumbing to an anxious gush of tears. Bob, glitter-eyed but too old to cry, patted her on the back.
    A bomb squad showed up in a white van. For another hour, they scurried back and forth between the parking lot and van. “What’s going on?” she asked everyone she saw who looked official. “What about our dog?” She imagined him inside, confused by the strangers invading their territory, banging against the window, and although she tried to stop such thoughts, she imagined him dead, in pieces flung all over the parking lot.
    In every scenario she had ever seen on TV, the car blew up. In this scenario, the police prodded spectators to move back, back, back. Everyone moved. They all heard the bass boom as the bomb detonated hundreds of yards away on a beach by Lake Tahoe, well away from the parking lot.
    They were informed that their vehicle was now “good to go.”
    Bob walked up to their car and stuck his hand through an open window so that he could touch Hitchcock. “I guess we won’t be doing any more rooster tails, Mom.”
    Back in the restaurant the newly returned, excited patrons plied her with questions, but Nina didn’t know what to say, so she beelined back to their table and tracked down their server. “You saw what happened. Was anyone around here-watching us or anything?”
    “There was a guy. He checked out your table after you left. I thought he might be hoping you ran out without