McPherson began to turn, but Becky snapped: “I said now! I’m a fine shot and I’ll drop you if you don’t drop the gun.”
McPherson blew out an enormous, angry sigh and set his pistol carefully on the floor. Before he could straighten up all the way, Becky hit him as hard as she could with the butt of Maggie’s pistol and he keeled over with a little groan, out cold.
“Honestly,” said Becky to Liam with more than a little asperity. “You could have waited for me, you know.” She cocked her head thoughtfully for a moment and then she added, “Of course, we might have needed somebody to rescue us, so I suppose it’s all worked out for the best.” She grinned mischievously: “And I did get to hear the story of Maggie’s diary, which sounds to me like a really sensational series for Freedom—we should be able to make Willie even more widely hated and despised than he is now!
She was wearing her working clothes, with a cap pulled down over her hair, and carrying a small valise into which she dumped the packets McPherson had just set on the floor, along with his pistol. Then she bent forward and kissed Liam thoroughly on the lips. Finally he succeeded in raising his other arm and pulled her down closer for a second installment. Then he started to stand up and fell over again so that Becky had to help him to his feet.
“Time!” he croaked. “The time!”
Becky pulled out her little lavalier watch and had a look at it. “Oh my goodness,” she exclaimed, and pulling Liam’s right arm over her shoulder she helped him cross to the window, where they stood and stared across the Square at the DPS building.
“You know about it?” he croaked in a surprised tone.
“Of course I know,” she said, “I had breakfast with Papa and Mike and your grandma, and then the boys after they got back from setting things up. They told me all about about it, plus how to find the passageway into Pilkington’s office, where Mike said I’d be sure to find you. By the way, the boys said you had been way too tough on them, so I told them you had studied the art with the Mollies and they were hard taskmasters.”
Liam grinned delightedly and held up a finger. “Now!” he said. And sure enough there was a sort of premonitory tremor under their feet, then a frenzied shake as the DPS building suddenly developed a network of cracks across its facade, expelled innumerable puffs of smoke from its multitude of windows as the panes shattered, and then slowly, in an indescribably stately yet decrepit collapse, like an ancient elephant breathing its last breath, crumpled in upon itself with a vast roar of falling masonry and a cloud of smoke through which Stanton’s motto glittered, askew: “Per Aspere ad Secu- …”
Liam pulled Becky close and gave her a thorough kiss.
“Happy Fourth of July, Miss Fox,” he said.
She returned the kiss with interest and then pulled away a bit to reply:
“Happy Fourth of July, Mr. McCool.”
One last satisfied look at the view from the office window, then Becky grabbed her bag and trotted back towards the secret passage. Liam took a quick look around and then waved to the gently snoring McPherson.
“Give our best to Junior,” he said with a grin, and a moment later the bookshelf whispered shut behind Becky and Liam as they held hands and headed down the passage stairs towards home.
About the Author
Always impatient, Dennis O’Flaherty decided early on that it wasn’t fair to have to wait a whole lifetime before trying his next life. As a result, he’s been a U.S. Marine (rifleman, radioman, Corporal E-4), a historian of Russia (Harvard, Oxford, State University of Moscow on the U.S. Cultural Exchange), and a Grub Street hack in Hollywood (a shared Edgar Award for the script on Coppola’s Hammett, many Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle scripts, even a handful of cigar ads).
Now, after a lifetime of gypsying, he is happily settled in Arizona with his wife Mel, cats Smokey and Mickey, and legions of anonymous white-winged doves and collared lizards. The anchor has always been his writing, and he still sees no reason to argue with W. B. Yeats’ dictum: “Of all the many changing things … words alone are certain good.”
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