Henry Spencer’s head was about to split in two. Part of it was due to the horrible high-pitched whine coming from the backyard. But mostly it was caused by the even more horrible low-pitched whining from the woman on the other end of the phone line. She’d started complaining the second he picked up, and she hadn’t stopped to take a breath in five minutes.

Finally there was a pause in her tirade. Maybe she needed air. Maybe she’d keeled over from a stroke. Henry didn’t care. He saw his opportunity and he seized it.

“You want to sue, I’ll see you in court, lady!”

He slammed down the phone receiver, then picked it up and slammed it down again. It didn’t help. His head still throbbed.

This wasn’t the first time Henry had been threatened with a lawsuit. Half the creeps he’d arrested in all his years on the Santa Barbara police force had screamed police brutality and vowed to take him to court.

But it was the first time he’d been threatened with a lawsuit because of something his son had done. Or, rather, not done.

Henry massaged his pounding skull, then shouted, “Shawn!” There was no answer, of course. And the whining kept getting louder.

Henry stalked through the kitchen and and flung open the screen door. Shawn was standing in the middle of the lawn, a radio-control box in his hand.

“Watch out!” Shawn said.

“I’m not the one who-” Henry’s sentence was cut off as a model airplane crashed into his stomach, knocking the wind out of him.

“Well, that’s just great,” Shawn said, flipping a switch on the control box. “You killed it.”

“Then half my work is done.” Henry pulled air into his lungs, then picked up the airplane and looked it over. It was a nice model, finely detailed. These things weren’t cheap. “Where did you get this?”