and out of the blasted wall. There was a fine white smoke layering the room and a smell like burning swimming-pool chemicals.
Slowly, DeLeon got to her feet. A single yellow pothos leaf was stuck in her hair. She pulled Mitchell up by the elbow.
Neither of them looked hurt. DeLeon examined the room coolly, then looked at me, focusing on the side of my face.
"You're bleeding," she announced.
It sounded like she was talking through a can and string, but I was relieved to register any sound at all. Then I heard other things - voices in the plaza below, people yelling. A low, hot sizzle from the remnants of the blasted garbage can. I staggered to my feet, brushed the plant and the dirt off my lap, took a step toward the window. No more pigeons on the ledge. The bottom of the garbage can, the only part that wasn't shredded, had propelled itself backward with such force that an inch of the base was embedded in the side of the oak desk. Distressed voices were coming down the hall now. Insistent knocks on neighboring doors.
Mitchell's eyelids stuck together when he blinked. He shook his head and focused on me with great effort. "I don't - I don't..."
DeLeon patted the old professor's shoulder, telling him she thought he was going to be okay. Then she looked at me. "A doctor for that cheek. What do you think?" I looked out the hole somebody had just blasted in a perfect spring day. I said, "I think I'll take the job."
Chapter 2
The bomb-squad guys were a laugh a minute.
After barking orders to the campus uniforms and kicking through the rubble in their storm trooper outfits, sniffing the trash can and measuring lug nuts and screws and other metal fragments that had embedded themselves several inches into the concrete window frame, the squad decided it was safe to stand down. They threw Gregory the mail boy into an office down the hall for questioning by the FBI folks, though it was clear the poor kid knew nothing about the bomb and was already rattled to tears at the thought of his werewolf essay being blown to Valhalla. Then the squad relaxed in the hallway with their Dr Peppers and let lesser individuals take over the investigation.
"Same as that'n last year," one of the storm troopers said. "You remember that kid?"
A blond guy with a sergeant's badge clipped to his belt took a noisy pull on his soda. "Blew off three of his fingers, didn't it?"
"Four, Sarge. Remember? We found one of them later, under the bed."
They all laughed.
Another guy mentioned the lunatic they'd caught last month trying to drop TNT-filled Ping-Pong balls off the Tower of the Americas. He reminisced about how the perp would've blown a hole in the sergeant's crotch except Sarge was such a good catch. Hilarious.
I was sitting in a student desk about thirty feet down the hallway. I would've been happy to move farther away and leave the squad to their fun, but there was a paramedic patching up my face.
The narrow mustard-colored corridors of the Humanities Building were overflowing with SAPD, campus police, ATF, UTSA administrators. With everybody bustling around and the bomb-squad guys hanging out in their flack suits, I had the distinct feeling that I'd been dropped into the Beatles' yellow submarine during a Blue Meenie invasion.
One of the bomb-squad guys glanced down the hall to where Ana DeLeon stood talking with Lieutenant Jimmy Hernandez, the SAPD homicide commander. "Always thought DeLeon'd be a blast."
Another said, "Dyke. Forget it, man."
The sergeant cupped his crotch. "Just hasn't met the right kind of pipe bomb yet."
That got a few more guffaws.
DeLeon was a lot closer to them than I was, but she gave no indication that she'd heard. Neither did the lieutenant.
An evidence tech came out of the blown-up office. He went over to the bomb-squad sergeant and compared notes. I.E.D. Improvised explosive device. A metal pipe joint packed with solid oxygen compound and a few common household baking ingredients, some nuts and bolts thrown in for extra nastiness, a nine-volt battery wired to the package's flap - designed to break circuit when the package was opened. Instead it had broken prematurely on impact with the desk. The whole thing had probably cost thirty bucks to make.
"Gang-bangers," the sergeant told the evidence tech. "Solidox - real popular with the homies. Simple and cheap. Half the time they blow themselves up