Chapter 120

The snow was wet and dirty in the street lights, piled along the street curbs, not like the clean, pure, fresh snow of Spearfish Lake at all. There were crews out picking it up with loaders, piling it into dump trucks to be dumped in the river.

Unlike Spearfish Lake, this town wasn't used to snow. It had been a real snowstorm, and it brought the town to a near halt. It was getting cleaned up now, but it had held attendance down at the meeting. There had been more reporters there than members, since this was Washington D.C., and there were a lot of reporters in town, even on a slow news day.

The president of the Defenders of Gaea had been happy about that. After the reporters wrote their stories, and the news clips got onto the air, a lot of the damage that had been caused in the past two weeks would be on the way to being fixed.

"That wasn't nice," John Pacobel said to Heather Sanford as they got into their rental car, to go back to the hotel.

"What wasn't nice?" the new president of the Defenders said. "Sticking you with the vice-president/treasurer job and a seat on the board? John, if I'm going to get things back on track, I've got to have someone I can trust and depend on."

"You could have warned me," he said. "I'd just figured on casting the proxies, and heading on back to Spearfish Lake."

Heather sighed. "You can't go back to Spearfish Lake, not now," she said. "You've gotten too deep into this, and you've gotten too deep into me." She shook her head. "God, what a miserable town. I'm going to hate to have to move here, after L.A., but this is where the power is. The only reason the Defenders had their office in L.A. was for the money, not the power."

"You're going to move the office to Washington?" he asked. "I'm not so sure that's any better than Los Angeles."

"It won't be for a while, yet," Heather said. "We've got to get this whale project going, to regain some credibility, and that'll be handled better from Los Angeles."

"I've got a job," he protested. "I'm just taking administrative leave."

"You also have gotten yourself qualified for your retirement benefits," she said. "You don't want to go back to Spearfish Lake and face the kids and the softball season again. You said that yourself. You wanted a new challenge. This is it. Besides, I have to have someone I can rely on to run things while I'm out of action."

"What do you mean, while you're out of action?"

Heather smiled. "I said you'd gotten very deep into me. Well, you really did, back at Christmas. There's a little ring at the bottom of a test tube that says that there's another little Pacobel on the way."

"You're pregnant?"

"That's what the test tube says."

"I'm too old for that," he said. "I'm too old to raise another family."

"No, you're not," she said. "You said yourself that you were a good father, and there's no reason to think that you can't do a good job with our child as you did with Linda. A better job, maybe. If it's a girl, you won't have any of those awkward father-daughter discussions."

"God. Pregnant," he said, letting out a sigh. "That really puts the icing on the cake. All right, I guess I haven't got much choice."

"I don't want you to think I'm pushing you into it. I guess it looks like it, and maybe I am," she said, "But things have happened so quickly that there hasn't been time to do things the normal way. John, I want you with me badly. I need you with me badly. But, if you want to go back to Spearfish Lake, then that's your right."

"It's not a problem," he said. "To tell you the truth, I was getting awful tired of Spearfish Lake myself. I was getting awful tired of cruising, looking for ass, and having to come home to an empty house. Along about last summer, it had gotten to the point where it wasn't worth the trouble any longer. It'll be good to be a father again."

"Good," Heather said. "There's no point in staying in D.C. any longer. Let's go to the hotel, get our stuff, and catch the redeye for L.A. We've still got a lot of work to do."

"Not L.A., John said. "Vegas."

"Why Vegas?"

"Jenny Easton is playing there tonight."

Heather shook her head. "You don't want to go to Las Vegas, just to catch a Jenny Easton show, do you?"

"You're the one that said there's a lot to do," he smirked. "That's the quickest place I know of to get married."

"John," she said with a little alarm. "I hadn't thought as far ahead as getting married."

"Hey, Heather," he said. "In for a penny, in for a pound."