Page 40 of The Bad Weather Friend

In any other circumstances, their performance would have been amusing, even laughable, like two cold-blooded assassins earnestly trying to delude themselves and each other into believing that they were embarked on a romantic evening and that both of them had their virginity to lose. None of this was funny, however, because the one who wasn’t Handy Duroc was Jill Swift. The same Jill Swift who, just one day earlier, had been Benny’s future bride, who was a top agent not at Surfside but at Belle Maison, who apparently regarded her former fiancé’s misfortune as a career opportunity.

Handy must have sensed something amiss. He turned off the power to his rotating pelvis and opened his eyes and looked at Benny with far less delight than he displayed when admiring the half-life-size model of a McLaren Speedtail in his office. “What the,” he said, and then again, “What the,” unable to decide which third word would properly complete the question.

Jill wasn’t able to shut off her pelvis and breast works until Handy’s second “what the,” and when she opened her eyes, she had to turn her head to see Benny. During their courtship, Benny had never seen her lovely face contorted all at once by surprise and anger and vicious intent, as it was now.

Before his ex could think of a line from Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga, Benny reached farther back in pop-music history and recited a line from Dion’s “Runaround Sue.”

The dancers were so stupefied by this interruption that they decoupled in slow motion from each other’s arms and hips, like a space shuttle disengaging from the airlock of the International Space Station in a zero-gravity environment.

The aplomb, graciousness, and professional congeniality of a highly successful real-estate agent deserted Jill. Taking a step toward them, she became a venomous, sneering harridan out of a bad soap opera. “Puppy dog Benny shifts into stalker mode. Watch your manners, puppy. Don’t pee in the house. And who is this perky little refugee from a Disney after-school special?”

Before Benny could respond, his companion astonished him by saying, in an entirely perky way, “Remember those times he was making love to you and he called you Harper? That’s me.”

“Ah,” said Jill, “little Miss Funny Hat has a sharp tongue.”

“Don’t be bitter,” Harper implored tenderly. “You’ve lost the only man who ever satisfied you, but you’ll find someone else.”

Harper had knowingly pressed a psychological button that Benny hadn’t realized existed. For reasons that he could not understand, Jill the Beautiful abruptly uglified herself and became Wicked Jill, who would have elicited a scream from him if he had encountered her in a dark alley. Her exquisitely contoured body twisted subtly yet profoundly into the spiky anatomy of Cruella de Vil. Her face hardened, and every feature grew sharp, and the blood drained out of her as if she had just provided a banquet to Dracula. She’d been so triggered that she said something quite other than what she meant to say. “For your information, Braindead Barbie, I’ve satisfied a lot of men,a lot.” Handy appeared surprised, although not in the way a person looks when given a nice gift, and Jill appeared as mortified as she was angry. She hastily revised her statement, though it still failed to conveythe information she wished to impart: “I mean a lot of menhave satisfied me.”

Benny felt such sympathy for Jill that he wanted to give her a hug and tell her everything would be okay. Because he intuited that she might bite off his fingers, however, he resisted the impulse.

Rather than correct herself a second time and plummet deeper into misstatement, she said, “Handy, dammit, do something. This isyourhouse. What’re they doing here?”

On the nearest cooktop, a skillet rested on a cold burner, as if later in the evening Handy intended to sauté something or flambé black cherries for a jubilee. He grabbed this unconventional weapon of home defense and brandished it and said, “Benny, I don’t want to hurt you. We’ve always had such a cordial relationship.”

“Until yesterday,” Benny said.

“You were like a son to me, almost like a son, like I’d want a son to be if I’d ever fathered one.”

“You don’t want to be my father,” Benny said. “It’s a dangerous gig. My father was shot in the back, and my stepfather was stabbed in the back.”

“Don’t go dark on me, Benny. We parted amicably. Let’s put on our big-boy pants and admit what happened was beyond our control. We have so many good memories to cherish. Let’s not sully them.”

Following a growl of exasperation, Jill Swift said, “Good God, give me the skillet,” her clear intent being other than sautéing or flambéing.

With an incomparable sense of timing and a flare for making memorable entrances, Spike the craggle stepped through the archway and into the kitchen.

This apparition inspired a long moment of thoughtful silence before Handy Duroc responded as he might have when he’d been a young surfer and lifeguard. He smiled warmly at the giant and gave him the two-finger peace sign. “Dude. Wha’sup?”

Benny said, “This is our friend, Mr. Spike,” because maybe the wordcragglewas proprietary information. “He’s not an attorney or anything like that. You don’t have to worry this is about anyone suing anyone. We just need to come to a better understanding about why my career was destroyed.”

Returning the skillet to the cooktop, Handy said, “Cool. Be a better world if we all tried to understand one another.”

“Where do you go these days,” Jill asked bitterly, “when you need a man for the job?” She picked up the skillet.

Spike wagged an enormous finger at her. “That will be of no avail to you, Ms. Swift,” he rumbled.

“You’re a big sonofabitch,” she said, “but you don’t scare me. Now get out of here, all of you.”

One arm extended to full length, palm toward Jill in a talk-to-the-hand gesture, Spike spoke in what might have been Latin or an even more ancient language. To Benny, in his agitated and stressed condition, the tumble of words sounded something like, “Wop bop a loo bop a lop bom bom,” but he wouldn’t swear to that if the evening ended in a police interrogation.

Pulses of amber light issued from Spike’s open palm, washed onto Jill Swift’s face, formed two whirlpools, and drained into her eyes.

Face contorted in anger, mouth hanging open as if a series of additional obscenities were on the way from her brain to her vocal cords, Jill was cast into stasis. She stood there as motionless as the Statue of Liberty, though with a skillet raised instead of the torchof freedom. She was in the same condition as Bob Jericho, who still posed with his pistol in the garage of the house in Corona del Mar. When she was released from this spell, she wouldn’t remember anything of what had happened, including how she’d been mortified, which was the only thing that gave Benny hope for the future of humankind.

Taking a step back from the giant and a step sideways from Jill, Handy said, “I am seriously psyched out.”

“She’s just in stasis,” Benny said. “He sidelined her. She’s breathing. She’ll be fine when Spike releases her.”

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