Battleship (Movie Tie-in Edition) Read Online Free PDF

right up to her and extended the burrito. She wasn’t even looking at it. Instead she was staring straight at him, a dozen different emotions warring on her face.
    He tried to catch his breath so he could form words. He was giving no more thought to the cops; as far as he was concerned, the chase was over.
    Unfortunately no one had bothered to tell the police. Hopper had just enough time to feel something jammed into his back before his body was jolted by electricity. He tried to say,
I give up
but the only thing to come out of his mouth was “Urkh.” As he fell, he flipped the burrito to The Girl. It wasn’t so much a toss as it was a spasm, but it was enough to send the burrito angling toward her in an arc. She caught it on the fly, but did so more out of reflex than anything else. If she was still hungry, the feeling was very likely forgotten in the wake of the insanity she was witnessing.
    Hopper fell to his knees. The cops had his hands pinned behind his back and were busily applying cuffs to them.
All right. Old school. Not those stupid twist ties, like I’m a plastic garbage bag. Real-life handcuffs. Makes me proud to be an American
.
    He managed sufficient breath to get out two words, directed to The Girl:
“Bon appétit.”
    One of the cops was busy rattling out Hopper’s “right to an attorney,” and Stone was shouting that this wasn’t necessary, certainly it was just some big misunderstanding, and one of the cops was telling him to step back, this wasn’t his business, and Stone was saying, like hell, this was his kid brother, so it sure as hell was his business …
    And none of it mattered to Hopper. None of it. Only one thing mattered, and that was the reaction of The Girl as she stared down at him being hog-tied like a bull at a rodeo.
    A long moment hung there, stretching out into eternity, and one of the cops was saying with increasing irritation, “Do you understand these rights as I have just read them to you?”
    Then The Girl said two words. Two magic words.
    “Thank you.”
    And she smiled.
    It wasn’t just with her mouth. When she smiled, her whole face lit up. And not merely her face either. She lit up the night, like a beam from a lighthouse showing the way to safety and salvation.
    Totally worth it
.
    “Oh yeah,” he said, which was all the cops needed to hear before they dragged him away. The last thing he saw was her waving to him, still smiling, as she bit into the burrito.
    I can’t wait to tell our kids this story …
    It helped that Stone knew everyone.
    He knew Stan, the desk sergeant. He knew Tony, the local sheriff. He hadn’t known the three arresting officers, but they were new, and within a few hours of encountering him, Howie, Bob, and Mike were pals of his, too. He also knew the cranky Asian woman, whose named turned out to be Maxine, rather than what Hopper’s best guess had been: Medusa.
    Now, sitting in front of the television in the living room of his apartment, sunlight filtering through the blinds, Stone watched a copy of the surveillance tape that had caught every moment of his brother’s stupidity in the convenience store. It was hot as hell, what with the air-conditioning having broken, so he was wearing only his boxer shorts and an undershirt. Sweat dripped off the Navy anchor he had on his right bicep, the one he’d had tattooed when his carrier had been stationed for a week off San Diego. The way the perspiration was rolling off it, the tattoo was doing a nice impression of having just been weighed.
    He winced as he witnessed Hopper crashing through the ceiling a second time. Sometimes he couldn’t determine whether the gods protected Hopper from his own stupidity or just enjoyed using his life as a Hacky Sack for their personal amusement. Hopper had been givennot one, but two opportunities to break his neck and all he’d wound up with were bumps and bruises.
    Slowly Stone looked around the apartment, surveying the visual record of his and Hopper’s