“He’s charging you. His wife is anyhow. Lewd and obscene exhibition—”
“ What?”
Lacey nodded. “That store dummy was pretty realistic, wasn’t it?”
“Was,” Henry said. “And is. The interns went to some trouble to make it more so. Hair, and like that. Point is, if you’re going to have personnel trained to stand the shock of human beings burned and hurt, you gotta train them with something that looks human.”
“I suppose you do.” Lacey gazed at the ceiling. “Point is, there’s a city ordinance about lewd exhibition. That dummy was female—and naked—”
“Dam’ right! So would bomb casualties be! Clothes burned off ’em, and naked as the day they were born, and bumed—like Minnie.”
“Guess I can let you go, Hank. I’ll talk to your kid—scare him good—and let him go, too. But I think you may have to answer in court, someday soon—if Higgley’s collarbone is really broken—for this ‘lewd’ business.”
In alternations of rage and laughter, Henry told Beth. When he finished, like most excited persons, he went back to the beginning. ‘‘There I was, tooling along to CD headquarters to drill the rescue gang! Wham! There they came, sirens yowling. ‘Pull over!’ they hollered, and so help me God, when I got out, they had drawn their guns!”
He slapped his thigh and chortled.
His wife smiled, but not with his hilarity.