Primal Scream by Michael Slade Page B

right?"
    "How do you know Bink's a he !"
    "Fifty percent chance. And a lucky guess," Robert replied.
    "Careful, Gill," Gabby warned. "He's trying to get into your pants."
    "I doubt the chief superintendent is out to seduce me," soothed Gill, her head cocked to one side like the jealous bird's.
    "As I recall, an African gray is so intelligent it speaks with the ability of a seven-year-old child. Your guardian proves Freud right. Childhood is obsessed with sex."
    "Is Gabby causing trouble?"
    A voice behind.
    "Bad to worse," Gabby said. "The stud arrives."
    The stud was Corporal Nick Craven of Special X. He stopped next to Gill to wrap a possessive arm about her shoulders.
    "You should hear the noise they make in bed," said Gabby, bouncing on his perch as if to imitate the act. "All night long. How's a bird to sleep?"
    "Gab!" Gill scolded.
    Did she teach him that?
    DeClercq found himself cocking his head at Macbeth like the parrot.
    "Ruffle my feathers, baby," mocked the cocky bird.
    DeClercq left the trois and the interloper to sort out libidos, and snaked his way through the crowd until he bumped into a wall of books and CDs. Shakespeare, Austen, Wordsworth, Dickens, Conrad, Proust, Faulkner, Woolf, Joyce, Maugham, Greene . . . The same authors lined shelves in his library at home, joined by those Katt had added when she usurped the space as a bedroom: King, Koontz, Rice, Linda Lael Miller ... As he scanned titles— The Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman, In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust—a vision formed in his mind's eye of Gill and him reading by a fire in what Katt called the Holmes and Watson chairs, discussing literature in a true meeting of equal minds. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms ... Similar CDs made up his collection— the "Emperor" piano concerto his all-tune favorite piece—so fantasy was further enhanced with music, roses, and wine, until it was Gill and him romancing all night which kept grumpy Gabby awake.
    If smart is sexy, Gill was as sexy as could be.
    He glanced at her.
    But saw Nick.
    And there was the problem.
    Gill was hi her forties. Nick was in his thirties. Had she worked out this relationship with a younger man to enjoy lustful sex without ties that bind? One eye on her biological clock, Gill had been pregnant with Nick's kid when the ship went down, but lost the fetus from stress and exposure to a winter sea. Was the ruckus which kept poor Gabby awake their labor of love to replace it? And if so, what moral right had he to obstruct her maternal instinct when he considered his fifty-odd years too old to start fathering babies, abandoning them too early to fend for themselves among cannibals if he passed on according to actuarial tables.
    In Search of Lost Time.
    Is that my Gordian knot?
    Replacing Jane has me yearning to replace my wives with Gill?
    And then there was the issue of him being Craven's boss. Move on a subordinate's love and there'd be doubt about his fitness to command, apart from undermining of morale. The moral man knew all was not fair in love and war. To this day he couldn't shake the feeling that his second wife had cuckolded him, for when she died in the aftermath of the Headhunter case, she was secretly with Al Flood at his West End apartment, Flood the Vancouver Police liaison with the Headhunter squad, and a student in the psychology class Genny taught. Had they been lovers? All he had was suspicion. But like Othello's Desdemona, the whiff of betrayal was there. Flood had hoped to cut in and "dance" with Robert's wife, and wasn't that what he'd do to Nick if he fell for Gill?
    The Gordian knot of desire.
    Too late to untie, and too damn moral to cut.
    Is Gill flirting with me?
    Better not to find out.
    "So," he said, "where's this shrunken head sent to me?"
    Rising from the minion chair in front of Robert's desk, Gill revealed the box in the shadow she cast over the surface. A strange sense of deja vu beckoned within his mind as the Mountie stared transfixed at