For a second, I thought he meant Asher and Jean-Claude, then I realized he meant the two yahoos in the Impala. The fact that even for a second I thought he meant something else said just how bad my concentration was. Concentration like that will get you killed in a fire fight.
I took a deep breath, another, let them out slowly, trying to clear my head. I needed to be here, now, not worrying about my increasingly complex personal life. Here and now with men and women with guns, about to risk their lives because I asked them to do it. Maybe the two men in the car weren't dangerous at all, but we couldn't count on that. We had to treat them like they were. If we were wrong, no harm done. If we were right, well, we'd be as prepared as we could be.
I couldn't shake the feeling of impending disaster. I looked up at Bobby Lee's tall frame. "I don't want to get any of you guys killed."
"We'd kind of like to avoid that ourselves."
I shook my head. "No, that's not what I mean."
He looked at me, face suddenly very serious. "What's wrong, Anita?"
I sighed. "I think I'm losing my nerve for this shit. Not for my own safety, but for everyone else's. The last time the wererats helped me I got one of you killed, and another one cut up pretty badly."
"I healed up pretty good." Claudia walked towards us all six feet six and serious muscle. Her long black hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail leaving her face clean and unadorned. I'd never seen her wear makeup, and maybe because I'd never seen her in any, she didn't need it.
She wore a navy blue sports bra and a pair of dark blue jeans. She usually wore sports bras, I think because she had trouble finding shirts that fit over the spectacular spread of her shoulders and chest. She was a serious weight lifter, but not to that point where you'd ever mistake her for masculine. No, Claudia was definitely all girl.
The last time I'd seen her she'd had her arm damn near shot off. There was a faint tracery of scars on her right shoulder, pale pink and white. Silver shot will scar even a shape-shifter. There'd even been a faint possibility that the silver could have lost her the use of her arm. But the right arm looked as whole and muscular as the left.
"You look great, how's the arm?" I asked, smiling. One of my favorite things about hanging with the monsters is the healing. Straight humans seemed to get killed on me a lot, monsters survived. Let's hear it for the monsters.
Claudia flexed the arm, and muscles rippled under her skin. It was downright impressive. I lift weights, but not like that. "Not all the way back to full strength. I still can't curl more than one hundred and forty pounds with it."
I could bench-press my own body weight, plus a few pounds, and until now I'd been pretty impressed with doing reps with forty pounds for curls. Suddenly I felt inadequate.
I wanted to ask her if she was okay with putting her life, and that impressive body, on the line for me again, but I didn't. Some questions you just don't ask. Not out loud.
I stood there pressed against the black-mirrored glass that, from the outside, looked like part of the wall. I'd always wondered how someone was usually there to meet me at the back door. Now I knew-they had a lookout. We could have watched the bad guys all day, and they'd never have seen us.
It was part of a narrow loft area up above the main part of the Circus of the Damned, but this one small nook was equipped with binocs, comfortable chairs, and a little table. The rest of the loft area was mostly cables, wires, stored equipment, like the backstage areas at a theater. Most of the ceiling of the Circus was open to girders and beams like the warehouse it originally was, but now that I knew the loft was here, I realized that there was a narrow band of enclosed space that went around the entire top of the building. I'd asked if there were other hidden lookouts, and gotten the answer of course. Ask an obvious question, and you get the obvious answer.
"Claudia's going to drive one of the cars for our little plan," Bobby Lee said.
"I thought the plan was for someone who looked harmless and normal to drive both cars."
Claudia gave me a flat unfriendly look.
"No offense, but you look anything but ordinary."
"She'll throw a shirt on over the muscles, take out the ponytail, and look like a girl," Bobby Lee said.
I looked at him and her. She was taller than he was, hell she was as broad through the shoulders as he was, and she had more bulk. "You know Bobby-boy if I had to choose between arm-wrestling you, or Claudia, I'd pick you."
He blinked at me, totally not getting it.
Claudia got it. "You're wasting your breath, Anita. No matter how much I work out, I'm still a girl to even the best of them."
Bobby Lee was looking from one to the other of us. "What are you two talking about?"