Once, he reached over his shoulder and slapped at her head, much as she would have done to a pesky fly that was irritating her.

For a second, she considered sinking her teeth into his neck muscles, but she decided instead to lower her right leg slightly and dig her heel into his crotch.

He let out a yelp of pain . . . and kicked at Dirk.

Dirk grabbed his leg and yanked it out from under him.

All three landed in a kicking, punching, squeezing, grappling free-for-all.

Savannah lost her choke hold and grabbed onto a limb. At first, she thought it was his leg because of the size of it. Then, to her dismay, she realized it was his arm.

With one half-twist, Xeon freed it and smacked Savannah on the side of the head so hard that she saw stars.

Dirk retaliated with a brutal punch to the left side of the guy's face, but it had no effect at all.

For a split second her eyes met Dirk's and she could see he was as confused as she was about what to do next. They had wrestled bigger guys, and some perps under the influence of drugs that had given them extraordinary strength.

She couldn't imagine what Ian Xenos was on.

"Get . . . his . . . legs . . . ," Dirk gasped as he tried to climb onto the upper part of Xeon's body and pin him.

Savannah maneuvered herself downward until she was straddling Xenos's lower body, but she could tell it would only be a matter of seconds until he escaped that hold, too.

Suddenly they had help. She heard Ryan yell, "Help Savannah with his legs!" A second later, John was behind her, sitting across Xenos's calves . . . or trying to, and getting kicked hard in the process.

She could see past Dirk, who was across his shoulders, to Ryan, who was trying to help Dirk get a cuff on one wrist.

It wasn't working. They were both getting badly punched in the process.

"Stop fighting, d.a.m.n it!" Dirk shouted. "We're gonna have to hurt you!"

Yeah, right! Savannah thought as Xenos's foot caught John squarely in the crotch.

John doubled over, face-first, onto the sidewalk, holding himself in a manner most uncharacteristic of the dignified Brit.

In Savannah's peripheral vision, she saw a fuzzy redhead. A moment later, Waycross threw himself down onto Xenos's lower legs, the position just vacated by the incapacitated John.

Savannah did a quick count in her head. Five against one. And as Xenos landed more blows than he received, she realized it was they who were "outnumbered."

Ryan had given up on trying to get a cuff on him, and she was grateful for that. When a guy was fighting like Xenos, the last thing he needed was a metal cuff on one wrist to use as a weapon.

No sooner had the thought crossed her mind that she was grateful Xenos had no weapon, than she saw him jerk his hand free of Ryan's and s.n.a.t.c.h at Dirk's Smith and Wesson strapped to his side.

"Dirk, gun!" she yelled.

She grabbed at Xenos's hand and missed.

He had his hand on Dirk's gun!

A second later, she heard a loud pop. Then a strange, crackling sound.

Xenos let out a scream, like that of a tortured animal! She felt his body beneath her buck wildly.

What the h.e.l.l? she thought. Has he been shot? Is he having some sort of seizure?

Five seconds later, he stopped and lay still, groaning. And, most important, not fighting.

Savannah looked over her right shoulder and saw Granny standing there beside them, looking down the barrel of a gun.

It took Savannah's brain a couple more seconds to register the wires leading from the gun to Xenos's thigh and the metal p.r.o.ngs sticking in his flesh.

"You lay still," Granny roared, "you mangy rattlesnake, or I'll zap you again, I will!"

Standing right behind Granny was Tammy, a deeply satisfied look on her face.

"Don't hit him again, Gran," Dirk said. "Unless he acts up."

Dirk looked down at the stunned Xenos. He slapped him lightly on the cheeks, bringing him around. "Come on, dude," he said. "All we were gonna do is ask you a question. Then you had to go push my lady. What's the matter with you?"

"What do you idiots want?" Xenos asked feebly, coming around.

"Simple," Dirk told him. "To know where you were two mornings ago."

Xenos thought for a moment. "What? Two days ago? You mean Sunday morning?"

"Yeah."

"That's easy. I was in the hospital with my wife, from seven till two in the afternoon. She was having a baby."

A deadly silence descended on the group. Savannah could practically hear her fingernails growing.

She looked from one to the other of the exhausted, bleeding, and bruised Moonlight Magnolia members and saw the same look of horror and shock on their faces that she was feeling.

They had gone through all this for nothing?

She watched as though in slow motion as Tammy suddenly produced her handheld device and began to type on it.

"Um . . . was it a boy or a girl, Mr. Xenos?" Tammy asked, barely squeaking out the words.

"A girl, Antonette Rose, seven pounds two ounces.... Not that it's any of your d.a.m.ned business."

Tammy's thumbs flew over the keyboard. They waited and watched her breathlessly.

As she studied the small screen in front of her, a look of dismay washed over her face. She glanced from one of them to the other; then she nodded.

Dirk turned to Savannah, who looked at Waycross, and John, who had just managed to rise off the sidewalk. They all turned to Ryan, who looked like he'd prefer to be absolutely anywhere but leaning over Ian Xenos, pinning his arms to the ground.

Finally, after about ten years, Dirk reached down and put his hands tightly over Xenos's ears.

To Savannah, he whispered, "Did you tell him your name?"

"No," she whispered back.

In an equally low voice, Ryan said to Dirk, "We didn't hear you announce yourself before you jumped him. Did you?"

"No."

Dirk cleared his throat, looked around to see how many spectators had gathered, but there were few bystanders and none of them nearby.

"Okay," he said. "Here's the plan. I'm gonna count to three. On three, we turn him loose." They all turned to see how far it was to the van. "And we run like h.e.l.l!"

Chapter 18.

"Okay, so that wasn't a shining moment in the history of the Moonlight Magnolia Detective Agency," Savannah said. It wasn't easy to speak while holding a small plastic bag filled with ice cubes against her swollen lip.

Her two honest-to-goodness ice packs had gone to John and Dirk. They needed them worse than she, Ryan, or Waycross did.

Dirk kept moving his from his eye, which was getting blacker by the minute, to his swelling jaw, to the knuckles of his right hand.

Poor John was sitting on his pack, the very picture of abject suffering and humiliation. The other men in the room kept shooting him looks of sympathy.

Watching them, Savannah felt a certain male-bonding thing going on. She suspected that even though she and the other women felt bad for him, you actually had to own a set of the equipment to grasp the full gravity of his situation.

Ryan also had a simple bag of ice, which he was applying to his knee. He'd stumbled and fallen while hightailing it back to the van.

Waycross was smearing antibiotic cream on his skinned shin as Tammy sat on the floor, looking up at him with a woeful expression filled with affection and deep concern.

Gran was lounging in Savannah's easy chair, quietly reading her Bible and ignoring them all.

"Not a 'shining moment'? Is that what you said?" Dirk barked. "That was the absolute pits! We were the frickin' three stooges out there!"

"Five," Ryan said. "Five stooges, and we couldn't even put a dent in that guy."

John nodded. "Something tells me that he isn't sitting on an ice pack, frosting his naughty bits tonight."

Waycross snickered. "Makes me shudder just thinkin' where we'd be if Gran hadn't showed up in the nick o' time with that stun gun."

"That's easy," Gran chimed in. "You'd still be tryin' to hog-tie that ugly yahoo. Lord o' mercy, I've seen Brahman bulls easier to corral than that 'un."

"That's for sure," Dirk agreed.

"And him with them devil horn things tattooed on his head." Gran shook her head. "A boy raised in Dixie oughta know better than that. Nearly makes me ashamed to be Southern. If I'd had a good, long hickory switch with me, he'd be in need of an ice pack, I'll tell ya."

"That's true," Savannah said. "Gran and a green saplin' switch can turn most any evildoer around."

Granny giggled. "Make 'im dance a jig anyway."

"I saw the stun gun there in the van," Tammy said, "but I didn't know how to use it."

"A gun's a gun," Gran said. "You take off the safety, if it's got one. You aim and pull the trigger. But I guess anybody who never had to hunt down their supper might not know that."

"Um, no." Tammy looked down at her hands, which were folded demurely in her lap. "I feel bad," she said. "I always check people's social network pages. I don't know why I didn't with him. If I had, I'd have seen that picture of his wife and baby, and him standing there, next to them, wearing green surgical scrubs. He'd posted every fifteen minutes or so while she was in labor. It was obvious he was right there with her every minute. I'm really sorry, guys."

"Oh, come on, kiddo," Dirk said. "Even a whiz kid like you can't nail everything all the time."

"I'll make it up to you. I promise," she said.

Savannah saw Waycross reach over as though he was going to lay his hand on Tammy's shoulder. Then he withdrew it-a sad look on his face.

Savannah couldn't help wondering what was up with him and that situation.

"Anyway," Dirk said, wriggling one of his front teeth, "if it's all the same to you-all, I'd just as soon never speak of this indignity again."

Everyone nodded solemnly.

"What indignity is that?" Marietta asked as she sashayed down the stairs in skintight, tiger-striped leggings and a sparkling black blouse cut down to the equator.

"Never you mind," Savannah said.

Marietta strolled into the living room, teetering on heels suitable for pole dancing. She glanced around, taking in the various injuries. "Land sakes! Y'all look like you tangled with the business end of a momma bear."

"A papa bear's more like it. You should probably keep your observations to yourself, Miss Mari," Savannah said. "This ain't the time, and we are so not in the mood."

"I ain't got time anyway. I got a date to go on."

It occurred to Savannah to ask Marietta if she had ever met the fellow she was about to go out with. But since she wanted to sleep tonight and not dream about serial killers who murdered dingbat floozies wearing tiger-striped pants, she decided not to inquire.

As soon as Marietta left the room, she had to ask, "Gran, I'm surprised you didn't say anything about the way she was dressed. You're slippin'."

Gran casually licked her finger and turned another page of her Bible. "Nope. I ain't slipped. I just gave up on that sister of yours. The day I caught 'er wearing her bra.s.siere on the outside, over her shirt. Yessiree, Bob. That was the straw that broke the camel's back."

A while later, Savannah went into the kitchen to make a pot of hot coffee. Since they'd used up all the ice cubes, iced tea was out of the question. She found Waycross standing at the sink, washing a mug, but she could tell by the faraway look in his eyes that he was thinking about anything but what he was doing.

She walked up and laid her hand on his back. "Hey, Big Red, whatcha up to?"

" 'Bout six-three" was his standard reply.

Waycross was proud of his height, and Savannah didn't blame him. Poor kids from McGill, Georgia, had a tough time finding things to be proud of.

"I was proud of you today," she said, "jumping in headfirst to help like that."

He gave her a little smile. "Looked like somebody needed to."