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.“I don’t think there’s any harm telling you how he was killed,” the chief said.“As the gentleman said, he was strangled with a mouse cord.”This set off a muttered chorus of exclamations.One voice rose above the rest.“Wow!” one of the graphic artists exclaimed.“Just like Meg showed us!”Chapter 6“Just like Meg showed us?” the chief repeated, glaring at me.“You’ve been showing these jokers how to strangle each other with mouse cords? Any particular reason why you failed to mention this?”“Oh, God,” I muttered.“Purse fu.”“Beg pardon?” the chief said.“I was demonstrating a martial arts technique one day,” I explained.“My teacher showed me some self-defense moves using a belt.Which works great if you have a belt, and enough time to take it off before you’re actually attacked.But I happened to remark that I almost never wear a belt, and neither do many women, and would the same techniques work with a purse strap.”“And they work great,” Rob exclaimed.“Meg foiled a mugger with them once!”“Anyway, the subject came up around the office one day last week,” I said.“And Rob asked me to demonstrate.And my purse was locked in my desk drawer, so I used what was handy.”“A mouse cord,” the chief said, nodding.“Actually, it was a Kensington security cable,” Jack said.“You show him,” Rob said to me.“I’ll pretend to attack you!”I instantly went into an alert, defensive mode, the way I usually did when Rob offered to pretend to attack me.I was getting way too familiar with the kind of damage Rob could do when he was pretending to attack.Not that he meant any harm, any more than Katy the wolfhound did when she bounded up to greet me in the morning.But both of them were very young, even for their age; and they didn’t know their own strength.“My hand is still bothering me,” I reminded Rob.“You don’t have to do it hard,” Rob said.“Just show how it works, like you did last week.”“I don’t have my purse,” I said, keeping my eyes on Rob, in case he did something stupider than usual.“Borrow a belt from someone,” Rob suggested.“Are you sure—?” the chief began.“Here,” Jack said, handing me his belt.I gripped it with both hands, which wasn’t easy to do, given that the left was still bandaged.I settled for wrapping it around the fingertips of my left hand, which wouldn’t work on a real assailant, but would do well enough for a demonstration.“So pretend I’m a mugger,” Rob said to the chief.“And I’m going to come up and take a swing at Meg.”Which he did.A very healthy swing.As usual, he’d forgotten that you were supposed to move more slowly when demonstrating.Out of the corner of my eye, I could see several of the cops start.I was holding the belt with both hands, leaving about a foot and a half of the strap between them.When Rob swung, I snapped up my arms, bringing the belt taut in the path of Rob’s arm.“And then she—,” Rob began, but I’d decided if he was going to swing at full speed and strength, I wasn’t going to hold back on my response.With a quick twist of my right hand, I wrapped the belt around his arm.Then I stepped to the left and pulled down at the same time, trying to take as much of his weight as possible with my good right hand.Rob stumbled and put out his arm to cushion his fall, and by the time he hit the grass, I was standing behind and over him.His right arm was still caught in the belt, and I’d wrapped the rest of the strap around his throat.“Isn’t that cool!” he exclaimed, sounding slightly choked.Apparently I’d overcompensated for the hand.I loosened the belt and sighed.That was one of Rob’s better and more guilt-inducing characteristics: he enjoyed showing off his friends’ and relatives’ skills and accomplishments as much as his own.And I had to admit, if he were just a little bit more predictable, he’d make the perfect uki.If you translate it literally from the Japanese, uki means “receiver.” If you ask me, it ought to mean either “punching bag” or “fall guy.” In the martial arts world, the uki was the person whose job it was to pretend to attack the teacher so the teacher could demonstrate how easily you could foil your attacker and do unto him something at least as nasty and painful as he was planning to do unto you.Ukis spent a great deal of time horizontal, contemplating their bruises.I made a fairly rotten uki—I had a tough time not losing my temper and playing too hard.But no matter how many times you flipped, tripped, kicked, punched, or knocked the wind out of Rob, he’d get right back up, smiling.He might get up a little more slowly by the twentieth or thirtieth time, but he never seemed to resent being thrown, or to lose his optimistic belief that next time he’d get the drop on you instead of the other way around.He also knew how to fall down—largely through being an utter klutz.A vastly underrated skill, falling down.Most people tense up and try to resist a fall, which is the worst possible thing to do.You break and sprain things much more easily that way.Which is why some martial arts teachers spend a lot of time teaching their students how to fall properly—something life had already done for Rob.Tripping and falling was such a normal part of his everyday experience that he almost always landed with the boneless relaxation the rest of us had to work years to cultivate.From his seat on the grass, he was prattling happily about the wonderful advantage the belt gave me, despite the differences in our weight and size.“Not bad,” Jack said as I handed him back his belt.“Rob’s not hard to impress,” I said with a shrug.“I am,” he said with a slow smile that set off all kinds of alarm bells in my head.Yes, definitely time to bring in the New Year’s photo.Jack looked down at my hand and frowned.“You’re bleeding,” he exclaimed.“Oh, sorry,” I said.“I hope I didn’t get too much of it on your belt.”“Never mind the belt,” he said.“You need a bandage.”“That’s one thing I have plenty of already,” I said.I loosened the butterfly clip that held the end of the gauze down, unwound a couple of loops, and wrapped them around my knuckles.Time to get Dad to redo my bandage, I noted [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]