Bad Guys by Linwood Barclay

and closed the door. I shook my head, then unbuttoned my shirt and slipped off my pants. What was I supposed to do? Apologize? Had I done something wrong?
    Maybe. Maybe not. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from twenty years of marriage, it’s that you don’t have to be wrong to apologize.
    It was awfully quiet in the bathroom, so I went up to the door and quietly rapped on it. “Listen,” I said. “I—”
    And the door swung open and Sarah, tears running down her cheeks, threw her arms around me and buried her face in my chest. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just don’t want anything to happen to you. Nearly losing you once was enough.”
     
     
    Neither of us slept much during the three hours that were left before sunrise, which meant this was the second night in a row where I’d hardly had any sleep. Sarah, alternately staring at the ceiling and then spooning into me under the covers, said she was going to cancel going on her management retreat.
    “Don’t do that,” I said. “Really, everything’s fine.”
    “Maybe it’s got nothing to do with you. Maybe I just don’t want to go on the retreat.”
    “Sure you do. No matter how bad it is, you’re out of the office for a couple of days, and that’s got to be worth something. Plus, there’ll be snacks.”
    “That’s true,” she said quietly. “They will have to feed us.”
    We were down in the kitchen as the sun came up. I heard the morning’s
Metropolitan
hit the front door and saw our delivery man working his way down the street when I stooped over to pick it up.
    “The thing is,” I said, scanning the front page as I wandered back into the kitchen, “if no one heard those shots being fired at the mall last night, and there’s no police report, there’s no sense writing anything about it now. In fact, if I did, it would give things away to whoever those guys in the Annihilator are. Assuming, of course, that they subscribe to
The Metropolitan
. They’d know who, exactly, had been watching them, and then they’d never come back.”
    “Wouldn’t that be a good thing?” Sarah asked.
    “Now, that’s my wife talking, not my editor. Of course we want them to come back. We want this story to have some sort of ending, a resolution.”
    “Here’s your coffee,” she said, handing me a mug. “I’ll talk to Magnuson. This is the sort of thing you have to let the managing editor know about. If a member of his newsroom is engaging in shootouts, even if he’s not the one actually pulling the trigger, well, he might want to have some input. I think he likes his reporters to maintain some distance.”
    “Magnuson,” I said, shaking my head. Bertrand Magnuson, a fixture in the newsroom for thirty years, a veteran of every major world combat and scandal through the sixties and seventies, was a fierce, take-no-prisoners kind of editor. He had these black eyes that you could almost feel boring right through you. “So you’ll talk to him on my behalf?”
    Sarah glared. “If Magnuson wants to talk to you, he won’t settle for talking to anyone else, believe me.”
    I sat down at the kitchen table, leafed through the first section of
The Metropolitan
, and my eyes landed on a car ad. “Oh. Nearly forgot.” I told her Lawrence and I still intended to attend a government auction later in the day where it might be possible to pick up a car for a song. He was going to pick me up from the house before lunch.
    “We had this discussion yesterday,” Sarah said, putting in some toast. “We don’t have money for a new car. And I don’t want us to throw money away on some old clunker. That doesn’t make any sense.”
    “If we absolutely had to get one, what could we afford?”
    “I don’t know. Seven, eight thousand, maybe? But there’s no point in even having this conversation.”
    Paul, strolling into the kitchen, had evidently heard at least some of what we’d been talking about. “A government auction?” he said. “I’ve heard