Gateways

Gateways

F. Paul Wilson

for Daniel and Quinn

Author’s Note

Thanks to the usual crew for their editorial help with the manuscript: my wife, Mary; my editor, David Hartwell; his assistant, Moshe Feder; Elizabeth Monteleone; Steven Spruill (who also allowed me to tap into his store of knowledge about the Korean War); and my agent, Albert Zuckerman.

Thanks, too, to the many friendly South Florida folk and air-boat pilots who helped me along the way, especially the rangers at the Royal Palm and Shark Valley Visitor Centers in Everglades National Park who introduced me to the amazing diversity of wildlife in the Glades.

Special thanks to Stuart Schiff for being so generous with his fabulous single malts, and to Blake Dollens for his keen eye.

Finally, thanks to NY Joe (Joe Schmidt) and Angel (Janada Oakley) for advice on the weaponry. I did a little improvising along the way, so any errors in that area are my own.

Tuesday

1

Blessed be the blackmailers, Jack thought as he pawed through the filing cabinet.

He had a penlight clamped in his teeth and kept it trained on the labels of the hanging folders while his latex-gloved fingers fanned through them.

What a trove. If someone could be called a professional blackmailer, Richie Cordova fit the bill. Private investigation was his legitimate line, if such a line could be legit. But apparently he dug up lots of additional dirt during the course of his investigations, and put that to work for him. Never against his clients, Jack had learned. Did his blackmailing anonymously. That kept his professional rep clean, kept that stream of referrals from satisfied clients flowing. But Jack had picked him up on a money drop Cordova had set up for his latest fish and took an instant dislike to the fat slob. Nine days of shadowing him hadn’t mellowed that initial impression. The guy was a jerk.

Cordova’s PI office occupied a second floor space over an Oriental deli on the other side of Bronx Park. But his other line of work, probably the more profitable one, was here on the third floor of his house. Small and stuffy, furnished with the filing cabinet, a computer, a high-end color printer, and a rickety desk, it appeared to be a converted attic.

Where was the letter? Jack was counting on it being in this cabinet. If not—

There… Jank. Could that stand for Jankowski? He pulled out the file and opened it. Yep. This was it. Here was the handwritten letter at the root of Stanley Jankowski’s problems. Cordova had found it and was using it to squeeze the banker for all he was worth.

Jack tucked it in his pocket.

Yes, blessed be those blackmailers, he thought as he began emptying the folders from both drawers of the cabinet and dropping their contents—letters, photos, negatives—onto the floor, for they help keepeth me in business.

Blackmail was the reason a fair percentage of Jack’s customers came to him. Stood to reason: They were being blackmailed because they had something they wanted kept secret; couldn’t go to officialdom because then it would no longer be a secret. So they were left with two options: pay the blackmailer again, and again, and again, or go outside the system and pay Jack once to find the offending photos or documents and either return them or destroy them.

Destroying was better and safer, Jack thought. But untrusting customers feared Jack might simply use the material to start blackmailing them on his own. Jankowski had been burned and wasn’t about to trust no one no how no more. He wanted to see the letter before he paid the second half of Jack’s fee.

Jack spread the two drawers’ worth of photos and documents on the floor. A small, voyeuristic part of him wanted to sit and sift through them, looking for names or faces he recognized, but he resisted. No time. Cordova would be back in an hour.

He pulled a pair of glass Snapple bottles out of his backpack and unwrapped the duct tape from around their tops. He was about to do a big favor for some of the people in that pile. Not all. Cordova had probably scanned all this stuff into a computer and had digital copies stashed away somewhere. But a scan couldn’t sub for a handwritten letter. Cordova needed the original, with its ink and fingerprints and all, to have any real leverage. A copy, no matter how close to the original, was not the real deal and could be dismissed as a clever fake.

He looked down at the pile of damning evidence. Some of these folks were about to get a freebie. Not because Jack particularly cared about them—for all he knew, some of them might deserve to be blackmailed—but because if he took just the Jankowski letter, Cordova would know who was behind this little visit. Jack didn’t want that. With everything destroyed or damaged beyond repair, Cordova could only guess.

Burning the pile would have been best but the guy lived in a tight little Williamsbridge neighborhood in the upper Bronx. Lots of nice, old, post-war middle-class homes stacked cheek by jowl in a neat grid. If Cordova’s place burned, it wouldn’t burn alone. So Jack had come up with another way.

He held one of the Snapple bottles at arm’s length as he unscrewed the cap. Even then the sharp odor stung his nose. Sulfuric acid. Very carefully—this stuff would burn right through his latex gloves—he began to sprinkle it on the pile, watching the glossy surfaces of the photos smoke and bubble, the papers turn brown and shrivel.

He’d used up most of the first bottle and the room was filling with acrid smoke when he heard the front door slam three floors below.

Cordova?

Checked his watch: about a quarter past midnight. In the past week or so that Jack had been shadowing him, Cordova had hit a neighborhood bar over on White Plains Road three times, and on each night he’d hung till 1 A.M. or later. If that was Cordova downstairs, he was home at least an hour early. Damn him.

Dumped the rest of the acid from the first bottle and sloshed the contents of the second over the pile, then left them atop the filing cabinet. Now to get out of here. Wouldn’t be long before Cordova detected the stink.

Opened the window and slid out onto the roof. Looked around. He’d planned on leaving as he’d entered—through the back door. Now he was going to have to improvise.

Jack hated to improvise.

Looked over at the neighboring roof. Pretty close, but close enough to…?

Through the open window behind him he heard Cordova’s heavy feet pounding up the stairs. Another glance at the neighboring roof. Guessed it was going to have to be close enough.

Hauling in a deep breath, Jack took three running steps down the shingled slope and leaped. One sneakered foot, then the other, landed on the opposing roof and found traction. Without pausing to congratulate himself, Jack used his forward momentum to keep going, his rubber soles slipping and scraping up the incline toward the peak.

A loud, whiny “Noooooo!” followed by a bellow of rage and dismay echoed from Cordova’s house, but Jack didn’t turn to look—didn’t want Cordova to see his face. Then he heard a shot and almost simultaneously felt the slug zing past his ear.

Cordova had a gun! Jack had figured he’d have one somewhere, but hadn’t expected him to shoot up his own neighborhood. Two miscalculations tonight. He hoped he hadn’t miscalculated on getting home alive.

Dove over the peak of the roof and slid down toward the gutter, the shingles shredding the palms of his latex gloves and wearing away the front of his nylon windbreaker like an electric sander. Halfway to the gutter he slowed his slide and angled his body ninety degrees. That slowed him a little more. Further angling around allowed him to get his foot in the gutter and stop altogether.

Not home free yet. Still two stories up with Cordova no doubt pelting down his stairs and heading for the street. Plus this house was occupied, probably with two families, since that seemed the rule around here. He could see the glow of lights turning on inside. He was sure the owners were dialing 9-1-1 right now to report the racket on their roof. Probably thought he was a clumsy second-story burglar.

Jack peeked over the gutter and positioned himself over a dark window. Slid off the roof feet first and belly down, easing his weight onto the gutter. It groaned and creaked and sagged as he hung by his fingers. Before it could give way he managed to place his feet on the windowsill and let that take his weight. Eased himself into a crouch to where he could grip the sill with his hands, then dropped again. He clung to the sill only a second or two, poising his feet a mere six feet off the ground, then let go. He twisted in the air and hit the ground running.

His sneakers made no sound as he sprinted along the sidewalk. He bent as low as he could without compromising his speed and waited for a second shot. But none came. Took a left at the first corner and a right at the next and kept running. At least now he was out of the line of fire—if Cordova stayed on foot. But if he got into a car and started cruising…

Plus, cops should be on their way.

What a mess. This was supposed to be a simple in-and-out job with no one the wiser until later.

Kept moving in a crouch, watching the passing cars, on alert for flashing lights. Slipped out of his partially shredded windbreaker—he was wearing a WWE Lance Storm T-shirt beneath—and pulled the Mets cap from the pocket. Jammed the cap on his head and bunched the jacket into a nylon lump the size of a softball. Palmed that and slowed to a speedy walk.

Slowed further when he hit 232nd Street. Stuffed the windbreaker down into a trash receptacle as he walked to the elevated subway station on 233rd. Caught the 2 train and settled down for a long ride back to Manhattan.

He patted the letter folded in his jeans pocket. Another problem fixed. Jankowski would be happy, and Cordova…

Jack smiled. Fat Richie Cordova had to be fuming as much as the sulfuric acid on his photos and papers.

2

A man who was something more than a man crouched among the foundation plantings of a two-story house in a quiet Connecticut community. He moved through the world under different guises, using different names, but never his own, never his True Name. And as he traveled, doing what must be done to prepare the way, he searched out places such as this family home.

He sat with his spine and the back of his head pressed against the house’s concrete foundation. Someone coming upon him might have thought he was an indigent sleeping off a bender. But he hadn’t been sleeping. He required very little rest. He could go for days without closing his eyes.

And even if this had been one of those rare occasions when he needed rest, he would have found sleep impossible while basking in the exhilarating emanations from the basement of this house.

On the other side of the wall…systematic torture, mutilation, and defilement. The victim wasn’t the first so abused by this family of three, and would not be the last. Or so the man who was something more than a man hoped.

What the two adults within had done to the ones they’d captured and imprisoned over the years would have been sustenance enough for this man. But the fact that they had debased their own child and made him a willing participant in the systematic defilement of another human being…this was exquisite.

He flattened his back more firmly against the wall, drinking, feasting…

3

After stopping at Julio’s for a couple, Jack fell into bed when he got home. Jankowski could wait till morning for the good news.

Somewhere around 3 A.M. the ringing of the front-room phone dragged him from slumberland. The answering machine clicked on and out came a voice he hadn’t heard in fifteen years.

“Jackie. This is your brother Tom. Long time no see. I assume you’re still alive, though it’s hard to tell. Well, anyway, Dad was in a car accident earlier tonight. He’s in pretty bad shape, in a coma, they tell me. So give me a call, prontissimo. We need to talk.”

He rattled off a number with a 215 area code.

Jack had been up and moving at the mention of his father’s accident, but didn’t reach the receiver in time to pick up. He stood over the phone in the dark.

Dad? In an accident? In a coma? How the hell—?

Unease trickled through his gut. The past he’d cut himself off from was worming its way back into his life. First he runs into his sister Kate last June, and a week later she’s dead. Now, three months after that, he hears from big brother Tom that his father’s in a coma. Was he detecting a scary symmetry here? A pattern?

Deal with that later, he told himself. First find out what happened to Dad.

Jack replayed the message, writing down the phone number. He used his Tracfone to return the call. That same voice answered.

“Tom? Jack.”

“Well, I’ll be. The long lost brother. The prodigal son. He lives. He returns a call.”

Jack didn’t have time for this. “What’s the story with Dad?”

Jack had never particularly liked his brother. Hadn’t disliked him either. They’d never had any sort of a relationship growing up. Tom—Tom, Jr., officially—was ten years older and seemed to have viewed his little brother as an inconvenient pet, one that belonged to his parents and his sister but had nothing to do with him. He’d always been self-involved to a fault. Kate had said he was on his third wife and hinted that the latest marriage was headed for the same fate as his others. Jack hadn’t been surprised.

Tom had been a Philadelphia lawyer for a couple of decades and was now a Philadelphia judge. Which meant he was an officer of the court, a cog in the wheels of officialdom. All the more reason for Jack to keep his distance. Courts gave him the creeps.

“Pretty much what I told you. I got a call from this nurse at the Novaton Community Hospital that Dad was involved in an MVA and—”

“M-V—?”

“Motor vehicle accident—and that he’s in bad shape.”

“Yeah. A coma, right? Jeez, what do we do?”

“Not we, Jackie. You.”

Jack didn’t like the sound of this. “I don’t get you.”

“One of us has to go down there. I can’t, and since Kate’s not exactly available, that leaves you.”

“What do you mean, you can’t?”

“I—I’m in the middle of a bunch of legal business…judicial matters that have me tied up.”

“You can’t get away to see a comatose father?”

“It’s complicated, Jackie. Too complicated to go into on the phone at this hour of the morning. Suffice it to say that I can’t leave the city now.”

Jack sensed a lot more going on here than Tom was telling.

“Are you in some sort of trouble?”

“Me? Christ, why would you ask something like that?”

“Because you sound funny.”

Tom’s tone took on a sharp edge. “How would you know what I sound like? We haven’t spoken in, what, ten years, and you’re going to tell me how I sound?”

“It’s been fifteen years”—not quite long enough, Jack thought—“and yeah, I’m telling you you sound funny.”

“Yeah, well, don’t worry about me. Worry about Dad. He gave me your number before he moved to Florida. ‘Just in case,’ he said. Well, ‘just in case’ just happened. Tag, you’re it.”

Jack sighed. “All right. I guess I’ll go.”

“Don’t sound so enthusiastic.”

Jack shook his head. First off, he hated to leave New York for any reason, period. Plus, this wasn’t a good time for him to be heading for Florida or anywhere else. He had another fix-it in the early stages of development, but he’d have to let it wait. Worse, an emergency trip like this meant that driving and Amtrak were out. He’d have to take a plane. He didn’t mind flying itself, but all the extra security since 9-11 made an airport a scary place for a guy with no official identity.

But then, it was his father down there.

Tom said, “In a way you’re lucky he’s in a coma.”

Strange thing to say. “How’s that?”

“Because he’s pissed at you for not showing up for Kate’s funeral. Come to think of it, so am I. Where the hell were you?”

As if he’d tell a judge, even if that judge happened to be his big brother.

Big Brother…judge. How Orwellian.

“Suffice it to say,” he said, deciding to give Tom a dose of his own medicine, “that it’s too complicated to go into on the phone at this hour of the morning.”

“Very funny. I tell you, though, I can’t say I was unhappy about him taking a turn on you. All we heard for years from him was how he wanted to reach you and bring you back into the fold. That was how he put it: ‘Bring Jack back into the fold.’ It became his mantra. He obsessed on it. But he’s not obsessing anymore.”

Jack felt he should be glad to hear that—he’d had no intention of ever returning to any fold anywhere—but he wasn’t. Instead he felt a pang of regret, as if he’d lost something.

A decade and a half ago, when Jack had dropped out of college, out of his family, and out of society in general, his father spent years tracking him down. Somehow he found someone who had Jack’s number. He started calling. Eventually he wore Jack down to the point where he agreed to meet him in the city for dinner. After that they got together maybe once a year for a meal or a set of tennis.

A tenuous relationship at best. The get-togethers were always uncomfortable for Jack. Though his father had never said it, Jack knew he was disappointed in his younger son. Thought he was an appliance repairman and was always pushing him to better himself—finish college, get a pension plan, think about the future, retirement will be here before you know it, blah-blah-blah.

Dad didn’t have a clue about what his younger son was about, the crimes he’d committed, the people he’d had to kill while earning his living, and Jack never would tell him. The old guy would be devastated.

“Where’d you say he was?”

“Novaton Community Hospital, and don’t ask me where that is because I don’t know. Someplace in Dade County, I’d imagine. That’s where he had his place.”

“Where’s—?”

“South of Miami. Look, the best thing to do is call the hospital—no, I don’t have the number—and ask for directions from Miami International. That’s where you’ll have to fly into.”

“Swell.”

“If he wakes up, explain to him that I’d be there if I could.”

Sure you would, Jack thought. And then it hit him.

“‘If he wakes up’?”

“Yeah. If. They say he’s banged up pretty bad.”

Jack’s chest ached. “I’ll leave as soon as I tie up a few loose ends here,” he said, suddenly tired.

He hung up. He had nothing more to say to his brother.

4

Semelee awoke alone in the dark. She opened her eyes and lay perfect still, listenin’. She heard the breathin’ sounds of her clansmen around her, some soft, some rough. She heard the creak of the old houseboat timbers as it rocked gentle like, the soft lap of the lagoon water against the hull, the croakin’ of frogs and the chirpin’ of crickets among the night sounds of the other Everglades critters. She jumped as someone nearby—Luke, most likely—made a coughin’ sound that turned into a snore.

The thick hot air lay like a damp sheet on the exposed skin of her arms and legs, but she was used to it. This September was provin’ to be a hot one, but not like August. That had been a hot one, hottest she could remember.

Why was she awake? She usually slept straight through the night. And then she remembered the dream—not the details, for they had vanished into the night like mornin’ mist before a storm, but the overall feel of movement…movement toward her.

“Someone’s comin’,” she whispered aloud.

She didn’t know how she knew, she just did. This weren’t the first time she’d had a second sight. Every so often, without warnin’, she’d get a sense of somethin’ about to happen, and then it did, it always did.

Someone was comin’ her way. A him, a man, was on his way. She didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Didn’t matter. Either way, Semelee would be ready.

5

“Such bounty,” Abe Grossman said, staring down at the half dozen donuts laid out in the box before him. “I’ve done what to deserve this?”

Jack said, “Nothing…everything.”

Abe’s raised eyebrows sent wrinkles like sets of surfing waves up his brow and into the balding bay of his scalp to crash on the receding gray shore of his hairline. “But Krispy Kremes? For me?”

“For us.”

Jack dipped into the box and extracted one of the crustier, sour-cream models, heavy with grease and glazed to within an inch of its life. He took a big bite and closed his eyes. Damn, these were good.

Abe made a face. “But they’re full of fat, those things.” He rubbed his bulging waistline as if he had a belly ache. “Like ladling concrete into the arteries.”

“Probably.”

“And to me you brought them?”

The two of them flanked the scarred rear counter of Abe’s store, the Isher Sports Shop, Jack on the customer side, Abe across from him, perched like Humpty Dumpty on a stool. Jack made a show of looking around at the dusty cans of tennis balls, the racquets, the basketballs and hoops, footballs and Rollerblades along with their attendant padding shoved helter skelter onto sagging shelves lining narrow aisles. Bikes and SCUBA gear hung from the ceiling. If the Collyer brothers had been into sporting goods instead of newspapers, this is what their place might have looked like.

“You see anyone else around?”

“We’re not open yet. I should see no one.”

“There you go.” Jack pointed to the donuts. “Come on. What are you waiting for?”

“This is a trick, right? You’re trying to pull one over on your old friend. You brought them for Parabellum.”

As if in response to his name, Abe’s little blue parakeet peeked out from behind a neon-yellow bicycle safety helmet, spotted the donut box, and hopped across the counter to it.

Jack spoke around a mouthful of donut. “Absolutely not.”

Parabellum cocked his head at the donuts, then looked up at Jack.

“Better not deny him,” Abe warned. “He’s a fierce predator, that Parabellum. A raptor in disguise, even.”

“Oh, right.” Jack tore off a tiny piece and tossed it to the bird, who leaped on it.

“What happened to the fat-free Entenmann’s and the low-fat cream cheese?”

“We’re taking a vacation from all that.”

Abe rubbed his belly again. “Nu ? I shouldn’t be worried about my heart? You want I should die before my time?”

“Jesus, Abe. Can we have one breakfast without you complaining? If I bring in low-cal stuff, you bitch. So here I bring the kind of stuff you always say you wish you were eating instead, and you accuse me of trying to kill you.”

Abe was past sixty and his weight ran in the eighth-of-a-ton range, which wouldn’t have been so bad if he were six-eight; but he missed that by a foot, maybe more. Jack had become concerned last year about his oldest and dearest friend’s potential lack of longevity and had been trying to get him to lose weight. His efforts had not engendered an enthusiastic response.

“Such a crank he is this morning.”

Abe was right. Maybe he was feeling a little short. Well, he had his reasons.

“Sorry,” Jack said. “Look at it this way: Think of them as a going-away present.”

“Going? I’m going somewhere?”

“No, I am. To Florida. Don’t know how long I’ll be there so I figured I’d pre-load you with some calories to tide you over.”

“Florida? You want to go to Florida? In September? In the middle of the worst drought they’ve had in decades?”

“It’s not a pleasure trip.”

“And the humidity. It seeps into your pores, heads for the brain, makes you meshugge. Water on the brain—it’s not healthy.”

“Swell.” Jack drummed his fingers on the counter. “Eat a damn donut, will you.”

“All right,” Abe said. “If you insist. A bisel.”

He picked one, took a bite, and rolled his eyes. “Things should not be allowed to taste this good.”

Jack had a second donut while he told Abe about his brother’s call.

“I’m sorry to hear this,” Abe said. “This is why you’re so cranky? Because you don’t want to see him?”

“I don’t want to see him like that…in a coma.”

Abe shook his head. “First your sister, and now…” He looked up at Jack. “You don’t think…?”

“The Otherness? I hope not. But with the way things have been going lately, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

After hanging up with Tom last night he’d called the hospital and learned that his father was stable but still on the critical list. He got directions from the airport, then tried to watch a movie. He’d started a Val Lewton festival, watching The Cat People Sunday night. He’d been looking forward to seeing I Walked with a Zombie, but after starting it he couldn’t get into it. Thoughts about his father in a coma and getting through airport security proved too distracting. He’d shut if off and lain in the dark, trying to sleep, but thoughts about an indefinable something pulling the strings of his life kept him awake.

So this morning he was tired and irritable. The chance that the accident might not have been so accidental put him on edge.

“You have any details on what happened?”

“Car accident is all I know.”

“That doesn’t sound too sinister. How old is he?”

“Seventy-one. But he’s in great shape. Still plays tennis. Or at least he did.”

Abe nodded. “I remember when he roped you into a father-son doubles match last summer.”

“Right. Just before all hell broke loose up here.”

“Another summer like that I don’t need.” Abe shook himself, as if warding off a chill. “Oh, I may have something for you on that citizenship matter.”

“Yeah? What?”

Since he’d found out last month that he was going to be a father, Jack had been looking for a way to sneak up from underground without having to answer the inevitable questions from various agencies of the government as to where he’d been and what he’d been doing for the last fifteen years, and why he’d never applied for a Social Security Number and never filed a 1040 or paid a cent in taxes in all that time.

He’d thought of simply telling them he’d been ill—disoriented, possibly drug addled—wandering the country, depending on the kindness of strangers, and now he was better and ready to become a productive citizen. That would work, but in these suspicious times it meant he’d be put under extra scrutiny. He didn’t want to live the rest of his life on the Department of Homeland Security’s watch list.

“A contact in Eastern Europe called and said he thought maybe he had a way. Maybe. It’s going to take a little more research.”

This bit of good news felt like a spotlight through the gloom that had descended since Tom’s call.

“Didn’t he give you even a hint?”

Abe frowned. “Over an international phone line? From his country? He should be so foolish. When he works out the details—if he can—he will let me know.”

Well, maybe it wasn’t such good news. But at least it was potentially good news.

Abe was staring at him. “Nu ? You’re leaving for Florida when?”

“Today. Haven’t booked a flight yet though. Want to talk to Gia first, see if I can convince her to come along.”

“Think she’ll go?”

Jack smiled. “I’m going to make her an offer she can’t refuse.”

6

“Sorry, Jack,” Gia said, shaking her head. “It won’t work.”

They sat in the old-fashioned kitchen of number eight Sutton Square, one of the toniest neighborhoods in the city, he nursing a cup of coffee, she sipping green tea. Gia had been letting her corn-silk-colored hair grow out a little; it wasn’t so close to her head anymore, but still short by most standards. She wore low-cut jeans and a white scoop-neck top that clung to her slim torso. Although into her third month of pregnancy, she had yet to show even the slightest bulge.

Gia’s discovery last month that she was pregnant had thrown them both for a loop. It had not been on the radar, and they hadn’t been prepared for it. It meant changes for both of them, most drastically for Jack, but they were dealing with it.

Jack had told her about his father as soon as he stepped through her door this morning. Gia had never met him but had been upset by the news and urged Jack to hurry down to Florida. Jack didn’t share her sense of urgency. All he could do down there was stand next to his unconscious father’s bed and feel helpless; he could think of few things in the world he hated more than feeling helpless. And if and when his father awoke, how long before he started in on why Jack had missed Kate’s funeral.

So Jack had sprung his plan on Gia and she had shot him down.

He tried to hide his disappointment. He’d thought it was a sure thing. He’d offered to fly her and Vicky down to Orlando and put them up in Disney World. He’d shuttle back and forth between his father and Orlando.

“How can you say no?” he said. “Think of Vicky. She’s never been to Disney World.”

“Yes, she has. We went with Nellie and Grace when she was five.”

Jack saw a cloud pass through her sky-blue eyes at the mention of Vicky’s two dead aunts.

“That was three years ago. She needs another trip.”

“Did you forget school?”

“Let her play hooky for a week. She’s a bright kid. How much of a challenge can third grade be for her?”

Gia shook her head. “Uh-uh. New year, new class, new teacher. She just started two weeks ago. I can’t pull her out for a week this early in the year. If it was November, maybe, but then”—she patted her tummy—“I’d be far enough along to where I wouldn’t want to fly.”

“Swell,” Jack said. He took a turn patting her tummy. “How’s Little Jack coming along?”

“She’s doing just fine.”

This had been their tug-of-war since learning she was pregnant. Jack was sure it was a boy—had to be—while Gia insisted it was a girl. So far the fetal doppler had been inconclusive as to sex.

“Hey, I just had an idea. What do you think about hiring Vicky a nanny for a week and…”

Gia’s azure stare stopped him. “You’re kidding, right?”

He sighed. “Yeah, I guess so.”

What had he been thinking? Obviously he hadn’t. Gia going off to Disney World without her daughter? Never. It would crush Vicky. And Jack would be as uncomfortable as Gia about leaving her with anyone else for a week.

He leaned back and watched her take tiny sips of her tea. He loved the way she drank tea, loved the way her whole face crinkled up when she laughed. Loved the way she did everything. They’d met a little over two years ago—twenty-six months, to be exact—but it seemed as if he’d known her all his life. All the women before her, and there’d been more than a few, had faded to shadows the first time he saw her smile. No one had a smile like Gia’s. They’d hit a few speed bumps along the way—her discovery of how he earned his living had almost derailed them—and still didn’t see eye to eye on everything, but the deep regard and trust they’d developed for each other allowed them to live with their differences.

Jack couldn’t remember feeling about anyone as he felt about Gia. Every time he saw her he wanted to touch her—had to touch her, even if only for an instant brush of his fingertips against her arm. The only other person who approached Gia in his affections was her daughter Vicky. Jack and Vicks had bonded from the get-go. He couldn’t think of too many people or things worth dying for, but two of them lived in this house.

“Aww,” Gia said, smiling that smile and patting his knee. “Feeling shot down?”

“In flames. Looks like I’ll be going alone. Usually you’re the one getting on a plane and leaving.” Gia made regular trips back to Iowa to keep Vicky in touch with her grandparents. Those weeks were like holes in his life. This one would be worse. “Now it’s me.”

“I’ve got a cure for those hurt feelings.” She put her cup down, rose, and took his hand. “Come on.”

“Where?”

“Upstairs. It’s going to be a week. Let’s give you a bon voyage party.”

“Do we get to wear dopey hats?”

“No hats allowed. No clothes allowed either.”

“My kind of party.”

7

Jack was feeling a little cross-eyed and weak in the knees when they left Gia’s. She had that effect on him.

On their way to his apartment on the West Side—she’d volunteered to help him pack—he stopped at a mailing service and picked up a couple of FedEx overnight boxes, along with some bubble wrap.

“What are those for?”

“Oh…just have to mail a couple of things before I go.”

He didn’t want to tell her more than that.

When they reached his third-floor apartment in a West-Eighties brown-stone, he opened the windows to let in some air. The breeze carried a tang of carbon monoxide and the throbbing bass of a hip-hop song with the volume turned up to 11.

Gia said, “How are you going to work this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Buying the ticket.”

They stood in the cluttered front room filled with Victorian wavy-grained golden oak furniture laden with gingerbread carving.

“How else? Buy a ticket and go.”

“Who are you going to be this time?”

“John L. Tyleski.”

After careful consideration, Jack had settled on Tyleski as his identity for the trip. Tyleski’s Visa card, secured with a dead kid’s Social Security Number, was barely six months old, and so far he’d made all his payments on time. Tyleski had a New Jersey driver license with his photo on it, courtesy of Ernie’s ID. It was as bogus as everything else Ernie sold, but the quality was Sterling.

“Isn’t that risky?” she said. “You get caught buying a ticket under an assumed identity these days and you’re in trouble. Big, Federal trouble.”

“I know. But the only way I can get caught is if someone checks the number on the driver license with the Jersey state DMV. Then I’m screwed. But they don’t do that at airports.”

“Not yet.”

He looked at her. “You’re not making this any easier, Gia.”

She dropped into a wing-back chair, looking worried. “I just don’t want to turn on the news tonight and hear that they’re investigating some man with no identity who tried to board a plane, and see a picture of you.”

“Neither do I.”

Jack shivered. What a nightmare. The end of his life in the interstices. But even worse would be having his picture in the papers and on TV. He’d made a fair number of people very unhappy during the course of his fix-it career. The only reason he was still alive was because they didn’t know who he was or where to find him. A very public arrest would change all that. Might as well paint a bull’s-eye on his chest.

While Gia checked the Miami weather on the computer in the second bedroom, Jack seated himself at the claw-foot oak table and took out a spare wallet. He removed all traces of other identities, leaving only the Tyleski license and credit card, then added about a thousand in cash.

Gia returned from the other room. “The three-day forecast for Miami is in the nineties, so I’d better pack you light clothes.”

“Fine. Throw in some running shorts while you’re at it.” He was dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt now, but he needed something more for the trip. “While you’re in there, pull me out a long-sleeved shirt, will you?”

She made a face. “Long-sleeved? It’s hot.”

“I have my reasons.”

She shrugged and disappeared into his bedroom.

While she was digging through his drawers, Jack swathed his 9mm Glock 19 in bubble wrap, then wrapped that in aluminum foil, and shoved it into the FedEx box; he did the same with his .38 AMT Backup and its ankle holster, then packed in more wrap to keep them from shifting around in the box. That done he wrapped duct tape around the box wherever the FedEx logo appeared.

“How many days should I pack for?” Gia called from the other room.

“Three or four. If I stay longer I’ll have them washed.”

Gia popped back into the front room holding a lightweight cotton shirt with a tight red-and-blue check.

“You sure you want long sleeves?”

He nodded. “Need them to hide this.”

He held up a plastic dagger. It was dark green, almost black, with a three-inch blade and a four-inch handle, all molded from a single piece of super-hard plastic fiber compound that Abe guaranteed would breeze past any metal detector on earth. The blade had no cutting edge to speak of, but the point was sharp enough to pierce plywood.

No one was hijacking his flight.

Gia’s eyes widened. “Oh, Jack! You’re not really thinking of—”

“I’ll have it taped to the inside of my arm. No one will find it.”

“This is insane! Do you know what will happen to you if you’re caught?”

“I won’t be.” He held up a roll of adhesive tape. “Help me tape it on?”

“Absolutely not! I’ll have no part in this craziness. It’s irresponsible. You have a child on the way! Do you want to be in jail when she’s born?”

“Of course not. But Gia, you should understand by now, this is the way I am, this is the way I have to do it.”

“You’re afraid of giving up control is what it is.”

“Maybe so. Getting on a plane piloted by someone I don’t know puts a crimp in my comfort zone. But I can handle that. What I can’t handle is handing some out-to-lunch airline full responsibility for making sure that all the other passengers are going to behave.”

“You’ve got to learn to trust, Jack.”

“I do. I trust me, I trust you, I trust Abe, I trust Julio. Beyond that…” He shrugged. “Sorry. It’s the way I’m wired.” He held up the tape again. “Please?”

She helped, but he could tell her heart wasn’t in it.

He blunted the point with a small piece of tape, then held it in place against the inside of his left upper arm, the butt of the handle almost in his armpit, while she secured it with three long strips that encircled his arm. Not the most comfortable arrangement, but he’d remove it in the restroom once they were in the air and transfer the knife to the inside of one of his socks for the rest of the flight.

When she finished taping she stepped back and looked at her work.

“That should hold. I…” She shook her head.

“What?”

“I can’t help thinking that if there’d been someone like you on those 9-11 planes, the Trade Towers might still be standing.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I’m not Superman. I can’t take on five alone. But along with guys like the ones on Flight 93, who knows?”

He pulled on the shirt, rolled the cuffs halfway up his forearms, and struck a pose.

“How do I look?”

“Suspicious,” she said.

“Really?”

She sighed. “No. You look like you always look: Mister Everyday People.”

That was what he wanted to hear. “Great. Am I packed?”

“I put it all on the bed. Where’s your suitcase?”

“Suitcase? I don’t have one. I’ve never needed one.”

“That’s right. You don’t travel. How about a gym bag or something along that line?”

“Yeah, but it’s filled with tools.” His kind of tools.

“Well, if it’s not too dirty inside, empty it out and we’ll see if it’ll do the job.”

Jack pulled the bag out of a closet and emptied its contents on the kitchen counter: glass cutter, suction cup, rubber mallet, pry bar, slim jim for car doors, lock picks, an assortment of screwdrivers and clamps in various sizes and configurations.

“What is all this?” Gia asked as she watched the growing pile.

“Tools of the trade, m’dear. Tools of the trade.”

“If you’re a burglar, maybe.”

He wiped out the inside of the bag with a damp paper towel and handed it to her. “Will this do?”

It did. His wardrobe down south would consist of shorts, T-shirts, socks, and boxers. They managed to stuff it all into the bag.

“You’re going to look wrinkled,” she warned.

“I’m going to Florida, remember? Wrinkle City.”

“Touché.”

He hefted the bag. “Do I check this or will they let me carry it on board?”

“That looks plenty small enough for the overhead.”

“Overhead…? Oh, right. I know what you mean.”

She looked up at him. “When was the last time you were on a plane?”

Jack had to think about that. The answer was a little embarrassing. “I think it was sophomore year of college. Spring break in Lauderdale.”

He barely remembered it. Seemed like a lifetime ago. In a way it was. A different life.

“Not once since?”

He shrugged. “No place I want to go.”

She stared at him. “Is that the truth?”

“Of course. Anything I could ever want is right here in this city.”

“You don’t think the fact that flying is so much of a hassle, a risky hassle for you, has anything to do with it?”

“Maybe some.” Where was this going?

Gia slipped her arms around him and squeezed, pressing herself against him.

“Don’t you see?” she said. “Don’t you see? You’ve built this anonymous, autonomous life for yourself, but it’s become a trap. Sure, no one knows you exist and you don’t spend the first four or five months of every year working for the government like the rest of us, and that’s great in its way, but it’s also a trap. Everywhere you go you’ve got to pretend to be someone else and run the risk of being found out. I go anywhere I want without a second thought. If I go to an airport and someone scrutinizes my ID, I’m not worried. But you’ve got the anxiety that someone will spot a flaw.”

She released him and fixed him with her blue stare.

“Who’s freer, Jack? Really.”

She didn’t understand. Jack figured she’d never fully understand. But that was okay. It didn’t make him love her any less, because he knew where she was coming from. She’d been on her own for years, a single mother trying to make a career for herself and a life for her child. She had responsibilities beyond herself. Her days, spent dealing with the nuts and bolts of everyday life, were hectic and exhausting enough without adding multiple layers of complexity.

“It’s not subject to comparison, Gia. I’ve lived the way I felt I had to live. By my rules, my code. My not paying taxes has nothing to do with money, it has to do with life, and who owns mine, or who owns yours, or Vicky’s, or anyone’s.”

“I understand that, and philosophically I’m with you all the way. But in the practical, workaday world, how does that work for a man with a family? ‘Oh, I’m sorry, honey. Daddy’s not traveling with us because he’s using a false identity and doesn’t want us involved if he’s picked up. But don’t worry, he’ll meet us there. I hope.’ That’s no way to bring up a child.”

“We could all have false identities. We could be an under-the-radar family.” He quickly held up his hands. “Only kidding.”

“I hope so. What a nightmare that would be.”

This time he pulled her close. “I’m working on it, Gi. I’ll find a way.”

She kissed him. “I know you will. You’re Repairman Jack. You can fix anything.”

“I’m glad you think so.”

But coming back from underground with his freedom intact…that was a tall order.

You’d better come through for me, Abe, he thought, because I’ve hit a wall.

He didn’t want the hassle of parking at the airport so he called a cab to take him to LaGuardia. Since Gia lived in the shadow of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, a minimal detour would allow him to drop her off at home along the way.

“Be careful,” she whispered after a long goodbye kiss. “Come back to me, and don’t get into any trouble down there.”

“I’m visiting my comatose father. How on earth could I possibly get into any trouble?”

8

Jack reached the OmniShuttle Airways counter an hour before the next scheduled flight.

Before dropping Gia off, he’d had the cab take him over to Abe’s where he left the package to be overnighted to his father’s place. Abe used a small, exclusive, expensive shipping company that didn’t ask questions. The cab ride had been uneventful, but it felt so odd to be moving about the city without a gun either tucked into the small of his back or strapped to his ankle. He didn’t dare risk trying to sneak one onto the plane, though, even in checked luggage, now that they were x-raying every piece.

The ticket purchase went smoothly: A mocha-skinned woman with an indeterminate accent took the Tyleski Visa card and the Tyleski driver license, punched a lot of keys—an awful lot of keys—then handed them back along with a ticket and a boarding pass. Jack had chosen OmniShuttle because he didn’t want any round-trip-ticket hassles. The airline sold one-way tickets without regard to Saturday stayovers or any of that other nonsense: When you want to go, buy a ticket; when you want to come back, buy another.

Jack’s kind of company.

He asked for an aisle seat but they were all already taken. But he did manage to snag an exit row, giving him more leg room.

He had some time so he treated himself to a container of coffee with a trendoid name like mocha-latte-java-kaka-kookoo or something like that; it tasted pretty good. He bought some gum and then, steeling himself, headed for the metal detectors with their attendant body inspectors.

He made sure to get on the end of the longest line, to give him a chance to see how they conducted the screening process. He noticed that a much higher percentage of the people who set off the metal alarm were taken aside for more thorough screening than the ones who didn’t. Jack wanted to be in the latter category.

This is how a terrorist must feel, he realized. Standing on line, sweating, praying that no one sees through his bogus identity. Except I’m not looking to hurt anyone. I’m just looking to get to Florida.

When it came his time, he placed his bag on the belt and watched as it was swallowed by the maw of the fluoroscope. Then it was his turn to step through the metal detector. He put his watch, change, and keys into a little bowl that was passed around the detector, then stepped through.

His heart skipped a beat and jumped into high gear when a loud beep sounded. Damn!

“Sir, have you emptied your pockets?” said a busty bottle-blonde woman in a white shirt with epaulettes, a gold badge, and a name tag that read “Delores.” She was armed with a metal detecting wand. A dozen feet behind her, two security guards stood with carbines slung over their shoulders.

“I thought I did. Let me check again.” He patted his pants pockets front and rear but, except for his wallet, they were empty. He pulled out the wallet. “Could this be the culprit?”

She waved her wand past it without a beep. “No, sir. Step over here, please.”

“What for?”

“I have to wand you.”

When had “wand” become a verb?

“Is something wrong?”

“Probably just your belt buckle or jewelry. Stand here, back to the table. Good. Now spread your legs and raise your arms out from your body.”

Jack assumed the position. The moisture deserting his mouth seemed to be migrating to his palms. She waved the wand up and down the inside and outside of his legs, then across his waist where she got a beep from his belt buckle—no problem—and then she started on his arms. Right one first—inside and outside, okay; then the left—outside okay, but a loud beep as the wand approached his armpit.

Oh shit, oh hell, oh Christ. Abe you promised me, you swore to me the knife would pass the detectors. What’s happening?

Without moving his head, Jack checked out the two security guards from the corner of his right eye. They looked bored, and certainly weren’t paying attention to him. To his left a handful of unarmed security personnel were busy screening—wanding—other travelers. He could barrel past them and dash back out into the terminal, but where to go from there? His chances of escaping were nil, he knew, but he damn well wasn’t simply going to stand here and put his hands out for the cuffs. If they wanted him, they were going to have to catch him.

“Sir?”

“Hmmm? What?” Jack could feel the sweat breaking out on his forehead. Had she noticed?

“I said, do you have anything in your breast pocket?”

“My—?”

He jammed his hand into the pocket and came out with his package of Dentyne Ice. Gum in a blister pack…sealed with foil…

She ran her wand over it and was rewarded with a beep. She took the pack, opened it to make sure it was only gum, then dropped it on the table. The rest of the wanding was beepless.

The future that had been telescoping closed at warp-10 now opened wide again. Feeling as giddy as a man with a reprieve from death row, Jack retrieved his watch, keys, and chain, but he left the damn gum. It had put him on a train to heart attack city. Let Delores have it.

As he hefted his gym bag strap onto his shoulder he fought an urge to ask Delores if she wanted to inspect that too. Inspect anything you want! The mad inspectee strikes again!

But he said nothing, contenting himself with a friendly nod as he started toward his gate. He reached it with just enough time to put in a quick to call Gia.

“I made it,” he said when she answered. “I board the plane in a couple of minutes.”

“Thank God! Now I won’t have to figure out how to bake a cake with a file inside.”

“Well, there’s still the flight home.”

“Let’s not think about that yet. Call me when you’ve seen your father, and let me know how he is.”

“Will do. Love ya.”

“Love you too, Jack. Very much. Just be careful. Don’t talk to strangers or go riding in strange cars, or take candy from—”

“Gotta run.”

He wound up in a window seat in the left emergency row with the perfect traveling companion: The guy fell asleep before takeoff and didn’t wake up until they were on the Miami tarmac. No small talk and Jack got to eat the guy’s complimentary bag of peanuts.

The only glitch in the trip was a slight westward alteration of the usual flight path due to tropical storm Elvis. Elvis…when Jack had heard the name announced on TV the other night he’d done a double take that would have put Lou Costello to shame.

He wondered now if there’d ever been a tropical storm named Eliot. If so, had it been designated on the maps as T. S. Eliot?

Elvis was not expected to graduate to hurricane status, but was presently off the coast near Jacksonville, cruising landward and stirring things up, just as its namesake had in the fifties. Though the plane swung westward to avoid the turbulence, Jack could see the storm churning away to the east. From his high perch he looked out over the rugged terrain of cloud tops broken dramatically here and there by fluffy white buttes from violent updrafts. Elvis was entering the building.

9

“Don’t let her bite me, Semelee!” Corley cried.

Semelee lifted the shells away from her eyes and looked at Corley.

Corley’s good eye, the one he could open, rolled in its socket under his bulging forehead as he looked up at her from where he stood waist deep in the lagoon. Normally at that spot in the lagoon the water’d be up to his neck. But with this drought…

Corley was hard on the eyes, that was for sure, but that made him good for beggin’. They’d take him to town, sit him in a shady spot on the sidewalk, put a beat-up old hat in front of him, and wait. That hat wouldn’t stay empty for long. People’d take one look at that face and empty their pockets of all their spare change, even toss in a few bills now and then.

But Tuesdays weren’t no good for beggin’—not as bad as Mondays, but bad. So Mondays and Tuesdays became fishin’ days.

“Tell her not to bite!” Corley wailed.

“Hesh up and hold the net,” Luke told him.

Semelee smiled as she watched the two clansmen from the deck of the second, smaller houseboat, the Horse-ship. They stood in the water beside the boat, each holdin’ a four-foot pole with a net of half-inch nylon mesh stretched between them. Twisted trees with tortured trunks on the bank leaned over the water.

Luke was Corley’s half brother, and he was special too. Not in ways you could see so plain like Corley’s, and not in ways that was much good on the beggin’ front. So he mostly just ferried the beggin’ folk around. But Luke was special in his own way. Maybe too special. He’d tried the beggin’ thing, takin’ off his shirt to show the little fins runnin’ down his spine and all the big scales that covered his back, but he was a flop. Didn’t collect a dime. People was heard to say it looked fake, that no one could really have a back that ugly, and wouldn’t drop a dime. The cops tried to arrest him for public disgustation or somethin’ like that, but he run off before they could catch him.

Semelee was glad she wasn’t misshapen like Corley or Luke or the other members of the clan. But she was special too. She had a weird look that had been enough to bring her a lot of pain, but not weird enough to bring in loose change. She was special in another way. In her own way. Special on the inside.

“Ain’t like this is the first time you ever done this,” she told Corley.

“I know, but I hate it. If’n I do it a million times I’m still gonna hate it. That thing could take my leg off with one bite if it got a mind to.”

“Not just one leg, Corley,” Luke said with a grin. “When you think about it, she could take both off at once—if she got a mind to, that is.”

“Or if I got tired of your whining and told her to,” Semelee added.

“That ain’t funny!” Corley said, dancing in place like a little boy who had to take a wizz.

“Stand still!” Luke said. “We’re tryin’ to catch fish, not scare ’em away! Just be glad it ain’t Devil doin’ the herdin’.”

Corley’s hands shook. “If’n it was Devil, I wouldn’t be in the water! Hell, I wouldn’t even be on the bank!”

Semelee spotted a dark shape, maybe a foot or two deep, slidin’ through the water toward them, rippling the surface above as it moved.

Dora was comin’, drivin’ the fish before her.

“Get ready,” she told them. “Here we go.”

Corley let out a soft, high-pitched moan of fear but held his ground and his end of the net.

The shape glided closer and closer to Luke and Corley, and then suddenly the net bowed backward and the water between them was alive with fish, frothing the surface as they thrashed against the net. The two men pushed their poles together and lifted the net out of the water. A coupla dozen or more good-size mollies and even a few bass wiggled in the mesh.

“Fish fry tonight!” Luke cried.

“She touched me!” Corley said, looking this way and that. If his neck would’ve allowed it, it’d be swivelin’ round in circles. “She tried to bite me!”

“That was just her flipper,” Luke said.

“I don’t care! Let’s get these things ashore!”

“Don’t forget to leave me some,” Semelee said. “Dora’ll be very unhappy if you don’t.”

“Oh, right! Right!” Corley said. He reached into the net and pulled out a wriggling six-inch molly. “The usual?”

“A couple should do.”

He flipped one and then another onto the deck, then headed for shore.

Semelee picked up one of the flopping, gasping fish and held it by its slick, slippery tail over the water.

“Dora,” she sing-songed. “Dora, dear. Where are you, baby?”

Dora must have been waitin’ on the bottom because she popped to the surface right away. The snapping turtle’s mountainous shell with its algae-and grass-covered peaks and valleys appeared first, runnin’ a good three-four feet stem to stern. Then her heads broke the surface, all four beady little eyes fixed on her, both hooked jaws open and waitin’. Semelee could see the little wormlike growth on each of her tongues that Dora used like fishin’ lures when she sat on the bottom during the daytime and waited for lunch. Finally the long tail broke the surface and floated behind her like a big fat water moccasin.

Semelee was sure scientists would give anything for a look at Dora, the biggest, damnedest, weirdest-looking alligator snapper anyone had ever seen, but she was Semelee’s, and no one else was gettin’ near her.

She tossed a fish at the left head. The sharp, powerful jaws snapped closed across the center, severing the head and tail. The right head snatched those up as they hit the water. A pair of convulsive swallows and the mouths were open again.

Semelee gave the right head first crack at the second fish, with similar results, then she stretched her hands out over the water. Dora reared up so that her heads came in reach.

“Good girl, Dora,” she cooed, stroking the tops of the heads. Dora’s long tail thrashed back and forth with pleasure. “Thanks for your help. Better get outta sight now before the dredgers come.”

Dora gave her one last look before sinkin’ from sight.

As Semelee straightened she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the churned-up water and took another peek. She didn’t hold much with mirror gazin’, but every once in a while she took a look at herself and wondered how different things mighta been for her if she’d had a head of normal hair—black or brown or red or blond, didn’t matter, just so long as it wasn’t what she’d been born with.

The surface of the water showed someone in her mid-twenties with a face that wasn’t no head turner but not ugly neither. If heads did turn, it was cause of her hair, a tangled silver-white mane that trailed after her like a cloud—a very tangled, twisted stormy cloud that no amount of combin’ or brushin’ could straighten. No amount at all. She should know. She’d spent enough hours as a kid workin’ on it.

That hair had been a curse for as long as she could recall. She didn’t remember bein’ born here, right here on the lagoon, and didn’t remember her momma leavin’ the lagoon and takin’ her to Tallahassee. But she did remember grammar school in Tallahassee. Did she ever.

Her earliest memories there was of kids pointin’ to her hair and callin’ her “Old Lady.” Nobody wanted Old Lady Semelee on their team no matter what they was playin’, so she used to spend recesses and after school mostly alone. Mostly. Being left out would have been bad enough, but the other girls couldn’t let it go at that. No, they had to crowd around her and pull off the hat she wore to hide her hair, then they’d yank on that hair and make fun of it. The days she came home from school cryin’ to her momma were beyond countin’. Home was her safe place, the only safe place, and her momma was her only friend.

Semelee remembered how she’d cursed her hair. If not for that hair she wouldn’t be teased, she’d be allowed into the other kids’ games, she’d have friends—more than anything else in the world little Semelee wanted a friend, just one lousy friend. Was that too much to ask? If not for that hair she’d belong . And little Semelee so wanted to belong.

Since hats wasn’t helpin’, she decided one day at age seven to cut it all off. She took out her momma’s sewin’ scissors and started choppin’. Semelee smiled now at the memory of the mess she’d made of it, but it hadn’t been funny then. Her momma’d screamed when she seen it. She was fit to be tied and that scared Semelee, scared her bad. Her only friend was mad.

Momma took the scissors and tried to make somethin’ outta the chopped-up thatch but she couldn’t do much.

And the kids at school only laughed all the harder when they saw it.

But they ain’t laughin’ now, Semelee thought with grim satisfaction as she threaded the holes in the eye-shells through the slim leather thong she wore around her neck. At least some of them ain’t. Some of them’ll never laugh again.

She watched the ripples and eddies that remained behind on the surface in Dora’s wake. Something about their crisscrossing pattern reminded her of her dream last night, the one about someone coming from someplace far away. As she watched the water she had a flash of insight. Suddenly she knew.

“He’s here.”

10

Miami International had been a mob scene, far more hectic and crowded than LaGuardia. Jack wound his way through the horde of arrivees and departees toward the ground transportation area. There he caught a shuttle bus to Rent-a-Car Land. In order to help them out of second place, Jack decided to rent from Avis. He settled on an “intermediate” car and chose the most anonymous looking vehicle they had: a beige Buick Century.

The hospital had given him directions from the Florida Turnpike but Jack chose US 1 instead. He figured it would take longer. The red-vested guy at the Avis desk gave him a map and highlighted the way to Route 1.

He was on his way.

All around him South Florida lay flat as a tabletop under a merciless sun, bright in a cloud-dappled sky, blazing through a haze of humidity that hugged the land. Someone somewhere had called Florida an oversized sandbar hanging off the continent like a vestigial limb. Jack couldn’t see anything to contradict that.

He’d expected more lushness, but the fronds of the palms along the side of the road hung limp and dull atop their trunks, their tips a dirty gray-brown. The grass and brush around them looked burned out. No doubt the result of the drought Abe had mentioned.

He reached Route 1—also known as Dixie Highway according to the signs—and ran into some traffic at the southbound merge. People rubber-necking an accident on the northbound side slowed him for a while. He saw the strobing police and ambulance lights and felt a flash of resentment, wondering if people had rubbernecked his father’s accident like these yokels.

As soon as they passed the crash, the road speeded up again.

For a while the view along US 1 threatened to devolve into Anytown, USA—at least an Anytown warm enough for palm trees—with a parade of Denny’s and Wendy’s and McDonalds, and Blockbusters and Chevrons and Texacos. Further proof of the depressing homogenization of America, its terror of the untried, its angst of the unique.

But then he started noticing taquerias and tapas joints, and billboards in Spanish. The Cubano and Mexican influence. He passed a place offering “fishes.” Okay, this wasn’t Anytown. This had a flavor all its own.

The colors of the buildings struck him between the eyes. Standard granite gray had been banished. The palette here was way heavy on the pastels, especially turquoise and coral. The buildings looked like molded sherbet—orange, raspberry, key lime, lemon, watermelon, casaba, and maybe a few as yet untried flavors. He spotted a mall done up in what might be called rotten-lemon-rind yellow.

Further south he passed one car dealership after another, every make from every nation that exported cars, all interspersed with AutoZones and Midas Mufflers, Goodyear Tire Centers, and dozens of no-name auto parts shops. People must be nuts about cars down here.

He realized he was hungry. He saw a place called Joanie’s Blue Crab Café and pulled off the road. The place was pretty much empty—this was off-season, after all—and decorated with local crafts. Paintings by local artists studded the wall. The other three patrons were glued to the TV where the Weather Channel was showing green, yellow, and orange swirls that were supposed to be tropical storm Elvis. They were asking when the hell they were going to get rain.

An air conditioner or two might have expanded the comfort zone in Joanie’s, but that would have detracted from the funky Florida ambiance. Jack hung in there under the twirling ceiling fans and asked the waitress for a local brew. She brought him something called Ybor Gold and it tasted so damn good he had another along with a crabcake sandwich that was out of this world. This lady could open on the Upper East Side and clean up.

Belly full, Jack stepped outside. Elvis might be dumping tons of water on Jacksonville and the rest of north Florida, but down here, though the sky was speckled with clouds, none of them looked like the raining kind. The forecast was bone dry. Dry at least as far as precipitation went, but the air itself lay thick with humidity and clung to his skin like a sloppy wet kiss from a least-favorite aunt.

Back in the car he searched around the radio dial for some music— rock, preferably—but all he found was country or folks speaking Spanish or sweaty-voiced preachers shouting about Jay-sus.

If you want to believe in Jay-sus, he thought, fine. If you want me to believe in Jay-sus, fine too; you can want anything you wish. But do you have to shout?

He finally found a rock station but it was playing Lou Reed. He quickly hit SCAN. Through the years Jack had come to the conclusion that Lou Reed was a brilliant performance artist whose act was a lifelong portrayal of a singer-songwriter who couldn’t carry a tune or write a melody.

The tuner stopped on a dance station. Jack didn’t dance, the beat was monotonous, and he’d arrived in the middle of a woman doing a double-time version of “Boys of Summer.” He bailed when a cheesy organ attempted to duplicate Kootch Kortchmar’s riffs from the original. What had Don Henley ever done to deserve that?

Next stop, one of the country stations—“Gator Country One-Oh-One Point Nine!” He liked some country, mostly the Hank Williams—Senior, preferably—Buck Owens, Mel Tillis brand of mournful nobody-loves-me-but-my-dog-and-he’s-got-fleas-so-pass-that-whiskey-bottle-over-here-if-you-please ballad. He lasted maybe fifteen minutes on 101.9. Three songs, three singers, and they all sounded exactly the same. Was that the awful truth about modern country music? The one they’d kill to keep? One lead singer performing under a gazillion different names? Jack wasn’t sure about that part, but he had no doubt that the same guy had been singing backup harmony on all three songs.

Okay. Can the radio.

He saw a sign for Novaton and hung a right off US 1 onto a road that ran due west, straight as a latitude line. Looked like someone had given a guy a compass and a paver filled with asphalt and said, “Go west, young man! Go west!” It made sense. No hills or valleys to skirt. The only rises in the road he’d seen since leaving the airport had been overpasses.

He checked out the sickly palms and pines flanking the road. He’d worked with a landscaper as a teen and knew northeast greenery, but even healthy these trees would be a mystery to him. Dead gray fronds lay on the shoulder like roadkill while some skittered onto the pavement when the breeze caught them.

All the houses along the road were squat little ranches in overgrown yards, with carports instead of garages; they hunkered against the earth as if hiding from something. Every once in a while a warehouse would soar to one-and-a-half stories, but that was an aberration. The favored exterior shade seemed to be a sick green like oxidized copper, and here and there a pizza-size DTV dish would poke up from a roof. He’d been expecting lots of red-tile roofs but they seemed a rarity; most were standard asbestos shingles, pretty threadbare in many cases. Oddly, the shabbiest houses seemed to sport the most magnificent palms in their front yards.

Even if he didn’t know much about tropical or subtropical trees, he did know banyans; their distinctive aerial roots gave them away. The road to Novaton was loaded with them. In some stretches banyan phalanxes lined each side of the street and interwove their branches above the pavement, transforming a bumpy secondary road into a wondrous, leafy green tunnel.

He recognized a couple of coconut palms, only because of the yellowing nuts hanging among the fronds. Plants that in New York grew only indoors in carefully watered and fertilized pots flourished like weeds down here.

He passed a tall white water tower emblazoned with the town name and shaped like one of those old WWI potato-masher hand grenades the Germans used to toss at the Allies. At its base lay a dusty soccer field flanked by a high school, a middle school, and a senior center.

He passed a feed store. Feed what? He hadn’t seen any cattle.

Abruptly he was in Novaton and quickly found the center of town—the whole four square blocks of it. The directions from the hospital told him how to find it from there. Two right turns off Main Street and he came to a three-story cantaloupe-colored brick building of reasonable vintage. The sign out front told him he’d reached his destination.

NOVATON COMMUNITY HOSPITAL

A MEMBER OF DADE COUNTY MEDICAL SYSTEMS

He parked in a corner of the visitor lot next to some sad looking cacti and headed through the stifling late-afternoon heat toward the front door. An arthritic old man in the information kiosk gave him his father’s room number on the third floor.

Minutes later Jack was standing outside room 375. The door stood open. He could see the foot of the bed, the twin tents of the patient’s feet under the sheet. The rest was obscured by a privacy curtain. He sensed no movement in the room, no one there besides the patient.

The patient…his father…Dad.

Jack hesitated, advancing one foot across the threshold, then drawing it back.

What am I afraid of?

He knew. He’d been putting this off—not only his arrival, but thinking about this moment as well—since he’d started the trip. He didn’t want to see his father, his only surviving parent, laid out like a corpse. Alive sure, but only in the bodily sense. The man inside, the sharp-though-nerdy-middle-class mind, the lover of gin, sticky-sweet desserts, bad puns, and ugly Hawaiian shirts, was unavailable, walled off, on hold, maybe forever. He didn’t want to see him like that.

Yeah, well that’s just too damn bad for me, isn’t it, he thought as he stepped into the room and marched to the foot of the bed. And stared.

Jeez, what happened to him? Did he shrink?

He’d expected bruises and they were there in abundance: a bandage on the left side of his head, a purple goose egg on his forehead, and a pair of black eyes. What shocked him was how small his father looked in that bed. He’d never been a big man, maintaining a lean and rangy build even through middle age, but now he looked so flat and frail, like a miniature, two-dimensional caricature tucked into a bed-shaped envelope.

Besides the IV bag hanging over the bed, running into him, another bag hung below the mattress, catching the urine coming out of him. Spikes marched in an even progression along the glowing line on the cardiac monitor.

Maybe this wasn’t him. Jack looked for familiar features. He couldn’t see much of the mouth as it hung open behind the transparent green plastic of the oxygen mask. The skin was tanned more deeply than he’d ever remembered, but he recognized the age spots on his forehead, and the retreating gray hairline. His blue eyes were hidden behind closed lids, and his steel-rimmed glasses—the only time his father took off his glasses was to sleep, shower, or trade them for prescription sunglasses—were gone.

But yeah, this was him.

Jack felt acutely uncomfortable standing here, staring at his father. So helpless…

They’d seen very little of each other in the past fifteen years, and when they had, it was all Dad’s doing. His earliest memories of home were ones of playing catch in the backyard when he’d been all of five years old and the mitt was half the size of his torso, standing in a circle with his father and sister Kate and brother Tom, tossing the ball back and forth. Dad and Kate would underhand it to him so he could catch it; Tom always tried to make him miss.

His lasting, growing-up impressions were of a slim, quiet man who rarely raised his voice, but when he did, you listened; who rarely raised his hand, but when he did, a single, quick whack on the butt made you see the error of your ways. He’d worked as a CPA for Arthur Anderson, then moved—decades before the Enron scandal—to Price Waterhouse where he stayed until retirement.

He wasn’t a showy sort, never the life of the party, never had a flashy car—he liked Chevys—and never moved from the west Jersey house he and Mom had bought in the mid-fifties. Then, without warning, he’d up and sold it last fall and moved to Florida. He was a middle-class man with a middle-class income and middle-class mores. He hadn’t changed history and no one but the surviving members of his family and steadily diminishing circle of old friends would note or mourn his passing, yet Jack would remember him as a man who always could, as Joel McCrea had put it in Ride the High Country, enter his house justified.

Jack stepped around to the left side of the bed, the one opposite the IV pole. He pulled up a chair, sat, and took his father’s hand. He listened to his breathing, slow and even. He felt he should say something but didn’t know what. He’d heard that some people in comas can hear what’s going on around them. It didn’t make much sense, but it couldn’t hurt to try.

“Hey, Dad. It’s me. Jack. If you can hear me, squeeze my hand, or move a finger. I—”

His father said something that sounded like “Brashee!” The word startled Jack.

“What’d you say, Dad? What’d you say?”

He caught movement out of the corner of his eye and saw a heavyset young woman in a white coat enter with a clipboard in her hand. She had a squat body, café au lait skin, short dark hair; a stethoscope was draped around her neck.

“Are you a relative?” she said.

“I’m his son. Are you his nurse?”

She smiled briefly—very briefly. “No, I’m his doctor.” She put out her hand. “Dr. Huerta. I was the neurologist on call when your father was brought to the ED last night.”

Jack shook her hand. “Jack. Just call me Jack.” He pointed to his father. “He just spoke!”

“Really? What did he say?”

“Sounded like ‘brashee.’”

“Does that mean anything to you?”

“No.”

And then he thought, Maybe he heard my voice and was trying to say, Black sheep.

“He’s been vocalizing gibberish. It’s not unusual in his state.”

He studied Dr. Huerta for a few seconds. She didn’t look old enough to be in med school, let alone a specialist.

“What is his state? How’s he doing?”

“Not as well as we’d like. His coma score is seven.”

“Out of ten?”

She shook her head. “We use the Glasgow Coma Score here. The lowest, or worst score, is three. That’s deep coma. The best is fifteen. We go by eyes, verbalization, and movement. Your father scores a one on his eyes—they remain closed at all times—and a two on vocalization, which means he makes meaningless sounds like you just heard now and then.”

“That’s a total of three,” Jack said.

This wasn’t sounding too good.

“But his motor response is a four, meaning he withdraws from painful stimuli.”

“What kind of painful stimuli? I won’t be finding cigarette burns on his soles, will I?”

Dr. Huerta’s eyes widened. “Good heavens, no! What on earth do you think—?”

“Sorry, sorry.” Jeez, lady. Chill. “Just kidding.”

“I should hope so,” she said with an annoyed look. “We use a special pin to test motor responses. Your father’s score of four brings his total to seven. Not great, but it could be worse.” She checked her clip board. “His reflexes, however, are intact, his vitals are good, so are his labs. His brain MRI showed no stroke or subdural hemorrhage, and his LP was negative for blood.”

“LP?”

“Lumbar puncture. Spinal tap.”

“No blood. That’s good, right?”

She nodded. “No signs of intracranial bleeding. His heart’s been acting up, though.”

“Whoa,” Jack said, jolted by the remark. “His heart? He’s always had a good heart.”

“Well, he went into atrial fibrillation last night—that’s a chaotically irregular heartbeat—and again this morning. I called for a cardiology consult and Dr. Reston saw him. Both times your father converted back to normal rhythm spontaneously, but it does indicate some level of heart disease.”

“How bad is this atrial fibrillation?”

“The main worry is a clot forming in the left atrium and shooting up to the brain and causing a stroke.”

“Swell,” Jack said. “As if a coma isn’t bad enough.”

“Dr. Reston started him on a blood thinner to prevent that. But tell me about his medical history. I’ve been working in the dark, knowing nothing about him beyond the address and date of birth we got off his license. Has he been treated for any illnesses or heart problems in the past? Does he take any medications?”

“I think he once mentioned taking an aspirin a day, but beyond that…”

“Do you know if he’s been seeing a doctor down here, for checkups and the like?”

Jack was embarrassed. He knew no more about what his father had been doing down here than what he’d been doing in Jersey before the move. He knew his father’s new address but had never seen the place. Truth was, he knew nothing about his father’s life down here or anywhere else, and even less about his health.

But he was getting a crash course this afternoon.

How to put this…

“He wasn’t much for talking to me about his health.”

Dr. Huerta smiled. “That’s a switch. Most people his age talk about nothing but.”

“Is he going to be okay?”

“I wish I could say. If his cardiac rhythm stabilizes, I believe he’ll come out of this with little permanent damage. He won’t remember a thing about the accident, but—”

“What about the accident?” Jack said. “What happened?”

She shrugged. “I have no idea. All I know is that he was brought in unconscious from head trauma. You’ll have to ask the police.”

The police…swell. The last people Jack wanted to talk to.

She fished in her pocket. “I’ll be looking in on him again in the morning. If you learn anything about his medical history, give me a call.” She handed him a card.

Jack slipped it into his pocket.

11

After the doctor bustled out of the room, Jack turned back to his father. As he stepped toward the bed—

“So, you’re one of Thomas’s sons.”

Jack jumped at the sound of the voice, raspy, like someone who’d been gargling with kerosene. Startled because he hadn’t heard anyone come in, he looked around and found the room empty.

“Who—?”

“Over here, honey.”

The voice came from behind the curtain. Jack reached out and pulled it back. A thin, flat-chested old woman sat in a chair in a shadowed corner. Her black hair was pulled back in a tight bun and her skin was dark, made even darker by the sleeveless canary yellow blouse and bright pink Bermuda shorts she wore, but in the shadows he couldn’t tell her race. A large straw shopping bag sat on the floor beside her.

“When did you come in?”

“I’ve been here the whole time.” She pronounced it “Oy’ve been here the whole toym.” The accent was from somewhere on Long Island—Lynn Samuels to the Nth degree. But that cinderblock-dragging-behind-a-truck voice…how many packs of cigarettes had it taken to achieve that tone?

“Since before I came in?”

She nodded.

That bothered Jack. He wasn’t usually so careless. He’d have sworn the room was empty.

“You know my father?”

“Thomas and I are next-door neighbors. We moved in the same time and became friends. He’s never mentioned me?”

“We, um, don’t talk a lot.”

“He’s mentioned you, many times.”

“You must be thinking of Tom.”

She shook her head and spoke at jackhammer speed. “You don’t look old enough to be Tom, Jr. You must be Jack. And he did talk about you. Hell, sometimes I couldn’t get him to shut up about you.” She rose and stepped forward, extending a gnarled hand. “I’m Anya.”

Jack took her hand. He saw now that she was white—or maybe Caucasian was a better term, because she was anything but white. Her skin was deeply tanned and had that leathery quality that only decades of dedicated sunbathing can give. Her skinny arms and legs had the shape and texture of Slim Jims. Her hair was mostly jet black except for a mist of gray roots hugging her scalp.

Jack heard a faint yip from behind her. He looked and saw a tiny dog head with huge dark eyes poking over the edge of the straw shopping bag.

“That’s Oyving,” she said. “Say hello, Oyv.”

The Chihuahua yipped again.

“Oyving? How do you spell that?” Jack said.

She looked at him. “I-R-V-I-N-G. How else would you spell it?”

He released her hand. “Oyving it is. I didn’t know they allowed dogs in hospitals.”

“They don’t. But Oyv’s a good dog. He knows how to behave. What they don’t know won’t hurt them. And if they find out, fuck ’em.”

Jack laughed at the unexpected expletive. This didn’t seem like the kind of woman his father would hang out with—she couldn’t be more unlike his mother—but he liked her.

He told her so.

Her bright dark eyes fixed on him as she smiled, revealing too-bright teeth that were obviously caps.

“Yeah, well, I’ll probably like you too if you hang around long enough for me to get to know you.” She turned back to the bed. “I do like your father. I’ve been sitting with him for most of the day.”

Jack was touched. “That’s very kind of you.”

“That’s what friends are for, hon. The benison of a neighbor like your father you don’t take for granted.”

Benison? He’d have to look that up.

He cleared his throat. “So…he’s mentioned me?”

Jack was curious how his father had depicted him but didn’t want to ask.

He didn’t have to.

“He speaks of all his children. He loves you all. I remember how he cried when he heard about your sister. A terrible thing, to outlive a child. But he speaks of you the most.”

“Really?” That surprised Jack.

She smiled. “Perhaps because you so vex him.”

Vex…another word you don’t hear every day.

“Yeah, I guess I do that.” In spades.

“I don’t think he understands you. He wants to know you but he can’t get near enough to find out who you are.”

“Yeah, well…”

Jack didn’t know what to say. This conversation was sidling into uncomfortable territory.

“But he loves you anyway and worries about you.” Her eyes bored into his. “Sad, isn’t it: The father doesn’t know his son, and the son doesn’t know his father.”

“Oh, I know my father.”

“You may think you do, hon,” she said with a slow shake of her head, “but you don’t.”

Jack opened his mouth to correct her—no way this woman who’d met Dad less than a year ago could know more about the man he’d grown up with—but she held up a hand to cut him off.

“Trust me, kiddo, there’s more to your father than you ever dreamed. While you’re here, maybe you should try to get to know him better. Don’t miss this opportunity.”

Jack glanced at the still form pressed between the hospital sheets. “Maybe I already have.”

She waved a dismissive hand at the bed. “Thomas will be fine. He’s too tough for a little bump on the head to put him down.”

More than a little bump on the head, Jack thought.

“The doctors don’t seem to think so.”

“Doctors.” Another dismissive flip of her hand. “What do they know? Most of them have their heads up their tuchuses. Listen to Anya. Anya knows. And Anya says your father’s going to be fine.”

Foyn? Jack thought, taking on her accent. He’s gonna be foyn because you say so, lady? Let’s hope so.

She looked up at him. “Where are you staying tonight?”

“Not sure. Passed a Motel 6 on the way—”

“Nonsense. You’ll stay at your father’s place.”

“I…I don’t think so.”

“Don’t argue with Anya. He’d want you to. He’d be very upset if you didn’t.”

“I don’t have a key. I don’t even know how to get there.”

“I’ll show you.”

She walked over to the bed and took his father’s hand. “Jack and I are going now, Thomas. You rest. We’ll be back tomorrow.” Then she turned to Jack and said, “Let’s go. Where’s your car?”

“In the lot. Where’s yours?”

“Oh, I don’t drive. Trust me, hon, you wouldn’t want to be on the same road as me. You’re taking me and Oyv home.”

12

As soon as Anya got in the car she placed Oyv on her lap and lit up an unfiltered Pall Mall.

“Mind if I smoke?”

A little late to object now, Jack thought.

“Nah. Go ahead.” He lowered all the windows.

“Want one?”

“Thanks, no. Tried it a few times but never picked up the habit.”

“Too bad,” Anya said, blowing a stream out the window. “And if you’re going to tell me to stop, save your breath.”

“Wouldn’t think of it. It’s your life.”

“Damn right. Over the years I’ve had five doctors tell me to stop. I’ve outlived every one of them.”

“Now I definitely won’t say a word.”

She smiled and nodded and directed Jack onto a road leading west of town.

The sinking sun knifed through his dark glasses and stabbed at his eyes as he drove westward. He watched what passed for civilization in these parts fall away behind them. The land became progressively swampier, yet somehow managed to retain that burnt-out look.

They passed a freshly tilled field of rich brown earth and wondered what had been growing there all summer. Most of the cultivation seemed given over to palm tree nurseries. Odd to pass successive acre plots, each packed with successively larger palms, all of equal height within their own acre.

Anya pointed a crooked finger at a twin-engine outboard motorboat in someone’s front yard.

“‘For Sale By Owner’?” she said. “I should hope so. Who else would be selling it? Do they make ‘For Sale By Thief’ signs?”

A few turns later, past stands of scrub pines, they came to a block of concrete with a blue-and-white-tiled mosaic across its front.

GATEWAYS SOUTH

GATEWAY TO THE FINEST IN MATURE LIFESTYLES

The droopy plants and palms framing the sign looked like they were on their last legs.

“Here we are,” Anya said. “Home sweet home.”

“This is it? This is where he lives?”

“Where I live too. Turn already or you’ll miss it.”

Jack complied and followed a winding path past a muddy pit with a metal pipe standing in its center.

“That used to be a pond with a fountain,” Anya said. “It was beautiful.”

All of Gateways South must have been beautiful when it was green, but it looked like it had been particularly hard hit by the drought. All the grass lining the road had been burned to a uniform beige. Only the pines— which probably pre-dated the community—seemed to be holding their own.

They came to a checkpoint divided into VISITORS and RESIDENT arches, each blocked with a red-and-white-striped crossarm. Jack began to angle left toward the visitor gate where a guard sat in an air-conditioned kiosk.

“No,” Anya said, handing him a plastic card. “Use this at the other gate. Just wave it in front of the whatchamacall it.”

The whatchamacall it turned out to be a little metal box atop a curved pole. Jack waved the card before the sensor and the striped crossarm went up.

“I feel like I’m entering some sort of CIA installation,” he said. “Or crossing a border.”

“Welcome to one of the retirement Balkans. Seriously though, as we all get on in our years, and become more frail than we like to admit, sometimes this is what it takes to let us feel secure when we turn out the lights.”

“Well, as the song says, whatever gets you through the night. But I can’t see this place as much of a crime risk. It’s in the middle of nowhere.”

“Which is exactly why we like a security force guarding the gate and patrolling the grounds.” She pointed straight ahead. “Just take this road to its end.”

Jack shook his head as he followed the asphalt path that wound past what looked like a par-three golf course. The grass was sparse and brown and the ground looked rock hard. That wasn’t deterring the hardcore hackers; he spotted half a dozen golf carts bouncing along the fairways.

“Can’t they even water the greens?”

Anya shook her head. “Drought emergency restrictions. No watering at all in South Florida now, even if you have your own well.”

He drove on, passing tennis courts—at least their Har-Tru surfaces were still green—and shuffleboard areas, all busy.

“There’s the assisted living facility,” she said, pointing to a three-story building done up in coral shades. Then she pointed to a one-story structure. “That’s the nursing home.”

“I don’t get it.”

“The drought?”

“No. Why my father moved down here.”

“Warmth is a factor. You get old, you feel the cold. But the main reason people come to Gateways and other places like it is so they’ll never be a burden on their children.”

“You talk like you’re not one of them.”

“I don’t have anybody to burden, hon. I’m here for the sun.” She held up an arm to show off her wafer-thin, beef-jerky skin. “As you can tell, I love to sit and soak up the rays. I used to sunbathe in the nude when I was younger. If I didn’t know how the community board would squawk, I’d do it now.”

Jack tried not to picture that.

“But I can’t see my father being a burden on anyone.”

“Maybe you don’t, kiddo, but he can. That’s why he’s here instead of in some West Palm condo.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Gateways South—and North and East, for that matter—is a graduated care community that provides for us through the final stages of our lives. We start off in our own little bungalows; when we become more frail we move to assisted living where we have a suite and they provide meals and housekeeping services; and when we can no longer care for ourselves, we move into the nursing home.”

“All it takes is money, I suppose.”

She snorted a puff of smoke out her nose. “It’s not cheap, I can tell you that. You buy your house, you buy a bond, you pay monthly maintenance fees, but your future care is assured. That’s important.”

“Important enough to hide yourself away down here?”

She shrugged and lit another cigarette—her third since leaving the hospital. “I’m just telling you what I’ve heard my neighbors say. Me, I’m here because I’ve got no one to care for me when I start losing it. But the rest, they’re all terrified of ending up in diapers in a son or daughter’s home.”

“Some children might not see that as a burden.”

“But what of the parents? They don’t want to be remembered like that. Would you?”

“No, I guess not. I know not.”

He didn’t even want to remember his father as that flattened man pressed between the hospital sheets today. He wanted even less to remember him as an empty-eyed drooler in diapers, a lifetime’s store of dignity vanishing like a gambler’s paycheck.

He said, “Getting old sucks, doesn’t it.”

“For some, yes, but not all. The body begins to remind you in ways big and small that you ain’t the maidel or boychick you used to be, but you find ways to adjust. It’s largely a matter of acceptance.” She pointed to the right. “Turn here.”

Jack saw a sign for White Ibis Lane as he made the turn. At the end of the short road stood two small, identical houses. The four parking spots in the little cul-de-sac were empty. Jack pulled into one and stepped out of the car. Anya opened her door and let Oyv hop to the ground. The Chihuahua immediately trotted to the nearest palm and let loose a tiny yellow stream against its trunk.

Jack smiled. “That tree looks so dry, I bet it’s grateful even for that.”

Anya laughed as she straightened slowly from the passenger seat to a standing position. “You’d win. Take a look around while I go in and get the key to your father’s place.”

Jack felt his eyebrows jump. “He gave you a key?”

She waved a hand at him and laughed. “Nothing like that, kiddo. We traded keys as a precaution. In case of, you know, an emergency.”

Jack couldn’t resist. He winked at her. “You’re sure that’s all?”

“What? Thomas with an old skinny-assed crone like me when he has all those other women chasing him? Don’t be silly.”

Jack held up a hand. “Whoa. Rewind that. My father’s got women chasing him?”

“Like vultures, they circle. Let me tell you, Thomas could have his pick of scores—scores.”

Jack had to laugh. “I don’t believe this. My father, the stud.”

“It’s not that. It’s just that there’s four widows for every widower down here. Thomas is an able-bodied man with a good mind and a nice personality. And best of all, he can drive himself. Such a catch, you wouldn’t believe.”

She reminded him a little of Abe. “Speaking of catches, Anya, if you ever decide to move back north, have I got a guy for you.”

She waved her cigarette at him. “Forget about it. My balling days are over.”

Jack shook his head. “My father, the catch. Wow.” He smiled at her. “So if you’re not one of the circling vultures you mentioned, can I ask how you two spend your time together?”

“It’s none of your beeswax, hon, but I’ll tell you anyway: Mostly we play mahjongg.”

Another shock. “My father plays mahjongg?”

“See? I told you there were things you didn’t know about him. I’m teaching him and he’s getting very good.” She tapped her temple. “That accountant’s mind, you know.”

“My father, the mahjongg maven. I think I need a drink.”

“So do I. Come over after you’ve settled in. We’ll knock back a few and I’ll give you your first mahjongg lesson.”

“I don’t know…”

“You have to give it a try. And once you learn, it’ll give you and your father something to do together.”

When there’s frost on hell’s pumpkins, Jack thought.

“Anyway,” Anya said, pointing to the house on the right, “this one’s your father’s. Look around. I’ll be back in a minute.”

She headed toward the house on the left with Oyv trotting behind. Her place was painted…what would they call that color? He’d never heard of white zinfandel pink as a paint shade, but if there were such a thing, that would be the color of Anya’s house. Dad’s was a more masculine sky blue.

Jack realized he was facing the rear of the house. He tried the door to the jalousied back porch but it was locked. It would have taken all of twenty seconds for him to open it but why bother if Anya had a key.

He strolled the slate walk between the houses. The grass around the stones was as dead and brown as the rest of Gateways South; the foundation plantings along the base of the smooth stucco exterior of his father’s place looked thirsty but not as wilted as what he’d seen along the way. Jack suspected him of sneaking them a little water during the night.

Then again, maybe not. His father was such a stickler for rules that he just might watch all his plants die before breaking one.

Jack tried to peek through the windows but the shades were drawn. As he backed away from a window he glanced over at Anya’s and stopped dead in his tracks.

Her place looked like a rain forest. Lush greens and reds and yellows of every imaginable tropical plant concealed most of the side of her house, not merely surviving, but thriving. A grapefruit tree, heavy with fruit, stood at a corner. And her grass…a rich, thick, pool-table green.

A little surreptitious sprinkling was one thing, but Anya seemed to be thumbing her nose at the water restrictions.

He noticed a small forest of ornaments dotting her lawn: the usual elves and pink flamingos and pinwheels of various models, but in among them were strange little things that looked homemade, like painted tin cans and bits of cloth on slim tree branches that had been stuck into the ground.

He spotted a name plaque on the side of the house. He stepped closer until he could read it. MUNDY.

He walked on to the front of his father’s place. The front yards of the two bungalows sloped down to a pond, roughly round, maybe fifty feet in diameter. As he approached for a look he heard a number of splashes as frogs leaped off the bank for the safety of the water. A black bird stood on the far bank, its chevroned wings spread and held toward the sun as if storing up solar power. The pond stood full and clear, its perimeter rimmed with healthy looking grass and reeds. Beyond it lay a grassy marsh that seemed to stretch forever north and south, but ended at a stand of tall cypresses about a mile due west. Jack knew it was west because the sun was dipping behind the treetops.

He turned and checked out the front of his dad’s place. A front porch, covered but open, held a small round table and a pair of chairs, all white. Some sort of flowering vine was trying to crawl up the supporting columns. The floor of the front porch was bluestone slate. A picture window dominated the wall to the left of the door, but vertical blinds hid the interior. He pulled open the screen and tried the front door. Locked, just like the rear.

“Here’s the key,” Anya said.

Jack turned to find her bustling from her green lawn across his father’s brown one, a key held up in her left hand, a cigarette in her right. Oyv paced her.

“Your last name’s Mundy?” Jack said. “Any relation to Talbot?”

“The author? Possibly.”

“King of the Khyber Rifles was one of my favorite books as a kid.”

“Never read it. Here’s the key.” She pressed it into his palm.

He waved his arm at the vista. “Looks like you two landed prime locations.”

“Yes, quite a view. Of course, I was one of the earliest residents so I had my pick. I’m such a part of the scenery they hire me for temp work when they need help. Mostly it’s just stuffing envelopes or applying address stickers to advertising brochures. At minimum wage, I won’t get rich, but it gets me out of the house. It lets me pull a few strings, too. I helped Tom get this place when it went up for sale.”

“Really?” He wanted to ask her why she’d do that for a stranger but didn’t know quite how to put it. “I guess he owes you for that.”

“He owes me more than he knows.” She pointed to the jeweled watch on her wrist. “Don’t forget, hon: drinks at my place in an hour.”

“I’ll have to take a rain check on that,” Jack said.

“So, you don’t want to drink with an old lady? I understand.”

“Hey, come on. That’s not it at all. I just want to check with the police on my dad’s accident. You know, find out how it happened, if it was his fault, that sort of thing.”

She frowned. “Why?”

“Because I want to know.”

“Go tomorrow.”

He shook his head. “I want to know now.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s the way I am.”

She shrugged and began to turn away. “Suit yourself.”

“Can I ask you a question?” Jack said. “Two questions, actually.”

“Ask away, hon. Doesn’t mean I’ll answer.”

“Okay. First thing is, how come that pond’s full and all the rest are empty?”

“That one’s fed by an underground channel from the Everglades.”

“The Everglades?”

She gestured to the grassy marsh and the distant cypresses. “There it is. Thomas’s place and mine are just about as close as you can legally build to the Everglades. Next question? I don’t mean to hurry you, hon, but there’s a bottle of wine chilling on my kitchen counter and it’s calling my name.”

“Sorry. I just want to know how you keep your grass so green in this drought.”

“Just a knack, I guess. You could say I’ve got what they call a green thumb.”

“Sure it’s not just a wet thumb?”

She frowned and jabbed an index finger at him. “And if I do, so what?”

“Nothing, nothing.” Jack held up his hands in a defensive gesture. “I just don’t want to see a good friend of my dad’s getting in trouble.”

She relaxed and puffed her cigarette. “Well, okay. I guess it’s natural to think I’m watering. I’m not, but no one’ll believe me. Would you believe a couple of members of the board came by and threatened to turn me in if I didn’t stop watering.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Honey, I said if they catch me with a hose in my hand, they can slap the cuffs on. But until then, they can kiss my wrinkled tuchus!”

Oyv yipped in seeming agreement as Anya turned and marched off.

My kind of gal, Jack thought as he watched her go.

13

Jack unlocked his father’s front door and stepped into the cool, dark interior. The shades were pulled, probably to keep it cooler during the day and cut down on the electric bill. His father had never been cheap, but he hated waste.

He closed the door behind him and stood in the darkness, listening, feeling the house. Somewhere ahead and to the left a refrigerator kicked on. He sniffed. Onions…a hint of sautéed onions lingered in the air. Dad’s doing? He’d always been something of a chef, probably more so out of necessity after Mom’s death, and had this thing for onions; liked them on just about everything. Jack remembered one Sunday morning as a kid when he’d sautéed a bunch and put them on pancakes. Everyone had started out complaining but they turned out to taste pretty good.

Jack stepped over to the picture window and pulled the blinds, letting in the fading sunlight. Dust motes gleamed in the air. He pulled up the rest of the shades and started exploring.

The front area was a large multipurpose living room/dining room angling into a small kitchen. That was what Jack wanted. He opened the fridge and found a six-pack and a half of Havana Red Ale. He checked the label: brewed in Key West. Another local brand. Why not? He popped the top and took a pull. A little bitter, not as good as Ybor Gold, but it would do.

He spotted a bottle of Rose’s lime juice on a door shelf. On a hunch he opened the freezer and there it was: a frosty bottle of Bombay Sapphire. Looked like Dad still liked a gimlet now and then.

He wandered through the front room and recognized some of the paintings from the family home in Jersey. He noticed a trophy shelf on the south wall and moved in for a closer look. First place in the men’s doubles in tennis—no surprise there—but what was this? A plaque for second place in the men’s bocce tournament?

My father, the bocce champ. Jeez.

He called Gia to give her the medical report on his father. She said how sorry she was that the news wasn’t better. Jack said hello to Vicks, then told them he’d call back later.

After he hung up he stepped into one of the bedrooms. This looked like a guest room/office: a bed, a dresser, and a desk with a computer and a printer. Jack saw a list of buy-sell confirmations in the printer tray. Looked like Dad was still day trading. He’d started it way before it became the rage in the nineties and had made enough to retire on. He’d tried to get Jack into it once, saying that if you were vigilant and knew the ropes, it didn’t matter if the market was up or down, you could make money every day.

Not if you don’t have a real Social Security Number, Dad.

He moved on to the other bedroom, more cluttered and obviously Dad’s. He stopped in the doorway, taken aback by the photos filling the walls. Mostly Mom, Tom, and Kate at various ages, salted with a few of Jack as a kid. Here were the five of them as they embarked on their one and only family camp-out…what a disaster that had been.

Memories flooded back, especially of Kate—as his teenaged big sister, looking out for him…as an adult, dying in front of him.

He quickly turned away and checked the closet. There they were: Dad’s ugly Hawaiian shirts. He pulled one out and looked at it: huge bulge-eyed goldfish swimming in a green fluid that could only be bile. Jack tried to imagine himself wearing this and failed. People would…notice him.

As he replaced the shirt he noticed a gray metal box on the shelf above the rod. He reached for it, hesitated, then took it down. He thumbed the latch but it was locked. He shook it. Papers and other things shuffled and rattled inside.

Locked…that piqued his curiosity. But this was his father’s, not his, and probably locked for a good reason. He should put it back, he knew he should, but…

What would his father keep locked up when he was the only one in the house?

Jack looked at the little keyhole. Eminently pickable. All it would take was—

No. Mind your own business.

He put it back on the shelf and returned to the main room. He repressed a shudder. Time to visit the cops.

Jack found the phone book and looked up the address of the local police station. He’d planned to call them for directions, but why not see if he could learn what he wanted over the phone. Anything to avoid setting foot in a police station.

He dialed the number and was shuffled around until he wound up with Anita Nesbitt, a pleasant-sounding secretary who said she’d see what she could do for him.

“I’m assuming I’ll need a copy of the accident report for the insurance,” he told her. “You know, to get the car fixed.”

“Okay. Here it is. I’ll put a copy aside and you can pick it up.”

“Any way you can mail it?”

“I suppose. We have his address on the report. How is your father, by the way? I heard he was pretty banged up.”

“Still in a coma.” A thought struck him. “Was anyone else injured?”

“Not that we know of,” she said. “It was hit and run.”

Jack swallowed. Those last three words sent a wave of unease through his gut.

“Hit and run?”

“Yes. It’s under investigation.”

“Save your stamp and envelope,” Jack told her. “I’m coming down to pick up that report.”

14

Dusk had arrived and the air was cooling enough to bring out the mosquitoes as Jack reached the mustard-yellow building with a two-story center flanked by single-story wings that served as Novaton City Hall. A skeletal clock tower, too modern for the rest of the building, loomed over the high-columned entrance. A green roof, front portico, and awnings completed the picture. A sign said the police station was toward the rear on the left side.

Steeling himself, he stepped inside and asked for Ms. Nesbitt. The desk sergeant directed him to her office. Walking down the hall, passing cops moving this way and that, he felt like Pee Wee Herman at a Klan rally. If anyone peeked under the sheet…

He hoped no one asked for ID to prove his relationship. His father’s last name was not Tyleski.

Ms. Nesbitt turned out to be a plump and pleasant little woman with glossy black skin, short curly hair tight against her scalp, and a radiant smile.

“Here’s the accident report,” she said, handing him a sheet of paper.

Jack took a quick look at it; he meant to read it later but his eyes were drawn to the diagram of the accident site.

“Where’s this intersection?” he said, pointing to the sheet. “Pemberton Road and South Road?”

She frowned. “They cross in the swamps on the fringe of the Everglades, way out in the middle of nowhere.”

“What was my father doing out in the middle of nowhere?”

“That’s what we’re hoping you could tell us,” said a voice behind him.

Jack turned to see a young, beefy cop with buzz-cut hair. His massive biceps stretched the seams of the short sleeves of his uniform shirt. His expression was neutral.

“This is Officer Hernandez,” Anita said. “He took the call and found your father.”

Jack stuck out a hand he hoped wasn’t too sweaty. “Thanks. I guess you saved my father’s life.”

He shrugged. “If I did, great. But I hear he’s not out of the woods yet.”

“You’ve been keeping track?”

“We’d like to talk to him, get some details on the accident. Any idea what he was doing out there at that hour?”

Jack glanced down at the report. “What hour?”

“Around midnight.”

Jack shook his head. “I can’t imagine.”

“Could your father have been mixed up in something he shouldn’t have been?”

“My dad? Into something shady? He’s like…”

Like who? Jack tried to think of a public figure who was a true straight shooter, whose integrity was beyond reproach, but came up blank. There had to be somebody. But no one came to mind. He almost said Mr. Deeds but Adam Sandler had screwed up that reference.

“He’s like Casper Milquetoast.” Jack saw no hint of recognition in Hernandez’s face. “He’s a regular everyday Joe who minds his own business and doesn’t take chances. My dad is not a risk taker.” Jack didn’t want to call him timid, because he wasn’t. Once he took a position he could be a bulldog about defending it. “He lived in Jersey most of his life, not fifty miles from Atlantic City, and in all that time I don’t think he once visited the casinos. So the idea of him being involved in something even remotely criminal is, well, crazy.”

Hernandez shrugged. “Doesn’t have to be criminal. He could have been fooling around with the wrong guy’s wife or—”

Jack held up his hands. “Wait. Stop. Not him. I promise you. No way.”

Hernandez was studying him.

Uh-oh. Here it comes.

“Do you live around here?”

“No. I’m still in Jersey.” Where did Tyleski live? All these identities…after a while they ran together in his head. “In Hoboken.”

“How often do you see your father? How many times a year do you visit him?”

“He hasn’t been here that long. Less than a year.”

“And?”

“And this is my first visit.”

“Do you talk often?”

“Uh, no.”

“Then you really don’t know that much about your father’s life down here.”

Jack sighed. There it was again. “I guess not. But I know what kind of man he is, and he’s not a sneak or a liar, and people who are have no place in his life.”

But how much more do I know? he wondered. What do you know about anyone, even someone who raised you, beyond how they act and what they’ve told you about themselves?

Anya’s comment from this afternoon stole back to him: Trust me, kiddo, there’s more to your father than you ever dreamed.

He hadn’t paid much attention to it then, but now with Dad the victim of a hit-and-run accident in the middle…

“Say, if he got hit in the middle of nowhere…” He turned to Anita. “Didn’t you say a call came in?”

She nodded. “It’s in the report.”

“But that means someone must have witnessed it.”

“That’s the obvious conclusion but…” Hernandez’s macho cop persona wavered. Just a little.

“But what?”

“Well, it took me about twenty minutes to reach the intersection, and when I got there, your father’s car was the only vehicle at the scene and it looked like the accident had just happened. The car was sitting across Pemberton Road. From the debris spray I reckoned your father had been proceeding west on Pemberton. He had a stop sign at South. Looked like he was almost halfway across when he got hit. Maybe he hadn’t been paying attention, maybe he ran the stop sign, maybe he was having a little stroke. All I know is that something hit him hard enough to spin the car ninety degrees, and there was no one else in sight when I got there.”

“Then who called in?” Jack said. “Man or woman?”

“Tony, the desk sergeant took it. I asked him but he couldn’t tell. Said the person was whispering, real quick like. Said, ‘Bad accident at Pemberton and South. Hurry.’ That was it.”

“Did they ID the number?”

Hernandez glanced at Anita. “That’s another thing we can’t figure out. The call came from a pay phone outside the Publix.”

“Publix? What’s a Publix?”

“Like a Winn-Dixie.”

“I’m sorry.” Was this another language they were speaking? “I’m from up north and I still don’t—”

“Publix is a chain of grocery stores down here,” Anita said. “It’s like…” She snapped her fingers. “I’ve been up your way. What’s it called…? A&P. That’s right. Like an A&P.”

“Okay. And where’s this Publix?”

“About three blocks from here.”

“What? But how? That’s…”

“Impossible?” Hernandez said. “Not really. The hit-and-run driver might have been into something illegal and that’s why he didn’t stop. But he might have had an attack of conscience and called a friend and told him to call it in from a public phone so we couldn’t ID him.”

“Thank God for attacks of conscience,” Anita said.

Hernandez nodded. “Amen to that. All I can say is it’s a good thing we got the call when we did, otherwise your father might have been DOA.”

15

Jack’s mind raced as he drove toward the south end of Novaton.

After telling Hernandez where he was staying and promising not to leave without checking in with him—in case the cops had more questions—he’d left the police station in something of a daze. But not before getting directions to the impound lot where his dad’s car had been towed.

A hit-and-run driver damn near kills his father but has enough Good Samaritan in him to arrange for the cops to be notified. A mixture of bad luck and good.

But the big question still remained: What the hell was Dad doing out there in the swamp at that hour?

The light had pretty well faded by the time Jack reached the south end of town. As Hernandez had told him, he passed an old limestone quarry, then a trailer park, then came to the impound lot.

It turned out to be a combination junkyard/used-car lot called Jason’s. The place was closed. Jack could have climbed the chain-link fence but didn’t want to risk an encounter with a guard dog, so he wandered the perimeter, squinting at the wrecked cars within.

The accident report said the make was—what else?—a silver Mercury Grand Marquis, the unofficial state car of Florida, and gave the plate number. Jack found it near the gate. He clutched the fence and gaped at the front end. The bumper was gone, the right front fender was a memory, the windshield was a caved-in, spider-webbed mess, the engine block was tilted and canted and twisted to the left.

Had he run into a tank?

Jack’s fingers squeezed the chain-linked wire, making it squeak. Who’d done this and run off? Maybe Dad had been thinking of something else and hadn’t seen the stop sign. Okay. His bad, not the other driver’s. But still…what the hell had the other guy been driving?

16

Jack’s stomach started to growl as he left Jason’s. He realized he hadn’t eaten anything since the crabcake sandwich at Joanie’s. He’d seen a Taco Bell on the way in and couldn’t help thinking of little Oyv. He stopped for a couple of burritos and a Mountain Dew to go.

As he ate and drove, he decided to swing by the hospital on his way back to Gateways South and have another look at his dad.

On the third floor, Jack met Dr. Huerta coming out of the room, followed by a red-haired nurse. Her picture ID badge read C. MORTENSON, RN.

“How is he? Any change?”

Dr. Huerta shook her head and brushed back a vagrant strand of hair. She looked tired.

“The same. Still a score of seven. No better but, thankfully, no worse.”

Jack supposed that was good. But he hadn’t come here tonight just to see his father.

“Where are his personal effects?”

“Effects?”

“You know, his clothes, his wallet, any papers he had on him.”

Dr. Huerta glanced at Nurse Mortenson who said, “They’re in a locker by the nurses’ station. I’ll get them for you.”

Dr. Huerta moved on and Jack stepped into his father’s room. He stood by the bed, watching him breathe, feeling helpless and confused. This wasn’t right. His father should be at Anya’s place, drinking gimlets and playing mahjongg instead of lying here unconscious with tubes running in and out of him.

Mortenson came in with a clipboard and clear plastic bag.

“You’ll have to sign for this,” she said. As Jack made an illegible scrawl across the sheet, she added, “We couldn’t keep his clothes. The blood, you know.”

“But you emptied his pockets first, right?”

“I assume so. That’s done in the ER, long before he gets to us.”

Jack handed back the clipboard and took the bag. Not much in it: a wallet, a watch, some keys, and maybe a buck’s worth of change.

When the nurse was gone, Jack checked the wallet: an AmEx and a MasterCard, AARP and AAA cards, a Costco card, seventy-some dollars in cash, and a couple of restaurant receipts.

Jack dropped it back into the bag. What had he been hoping for? A note with a cryptic message? A scrap of paper with a hastily scribbled address he could check out?

Watching too many mystery movies, he told himself.

Maybe there is no mystery. Maybe it was just an accident. Maybe Dad was simply out for a drive and wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time…got clocked by accident by someone who wasn’t quite legit and couldn’t hang around to explain himself to the police.

Jack understood that. Perfectly.

Just an accident…a random collision…

But his gut wasn’t buying. Not yet at least.

Jack looked down at his father.

“Have you been holding out on me, Dad?”

No response, of course. He patted his father’s knee through the sheet.

“See you tomorrow.”

17

Fortunately Anya had left her gate passcard in Jack’s car. He used it to breeze through the resident’s arch. The old lady’s lights were out by the time Jack reached the house. Her lawn ornaments clinked and clanked and whirred in the dark.

Once inside, he went straight to his father’s room and took out the metal lockbox.

“Sorry, Dad,” he muttered as he carried it to the kitchen.

He hated invading his father’s privacy, but this box might hold an explanation as to why he’d been out in the swamps after midnight instead of home in bed.

First, a beer. He grabbed another Havana Red from the fridge, then searched the bathroom for a pair of tweezers. He found one, and twenty seconds later the lid popped open. Jack hesitated. Maybe there were things in here his father didn’t want anyone to know about. And maybe Jack wouldn’t want to know about them once he saw them. Maybe parents should be able to keep their secrets.

All fine and good when they weren’t the comatose victim of a hit and run.

Jack lifted the lid.

Not much there. A handful of black-and-white photos, now sepiaed with age, and something that looked like a small jewelry case. He checked the photos first. Mostly soldiers. He recognized his dad in a few of them—he didn’t recall him ever having that much hair—but most were of other uniformed guys in their late teens or early twenties posing awkwardly for the camera against unfamiliar landscapes. Jack spotted a pagoda-like building in the background of one.

Korea. Had to be. He knew his dad had been in the war, in the Army, but he’d never wanted to talk about it. Jack remembered pressing him for war stories but getting nowhere. “It’s not something I care to remember,” he’d always say.

The last photo was a posed shot of eight men in fatigues, four kneeling in front, four standing behind, grinning at the camera. His father was second from the left, standing. It looked like a plaque had been set up in the right foreground but that corner of the photo was missing. It appeared to have been torn off.

Jack studied the other seven men, looking for a connection to his father. Who were they? They all looked so young. Like a high school varsity basketball team. It looked like a graduation photo. But from what?

Maybe he’d never know.

He put down the photos and picked up the jewelry case. Something rattled within. He snapped it open and found two medals. He didn’t know much about military decorations but one he immediately recognized.

A Purple Heart.

His father’s? That meant he’d been wounded. But where? The only scar he’d ever seen on his father was from his appendectomy. Maybe this belonged to someone else…a dead war buddy that his father wanted to remember?

Nah. Purple Hearts tended to be kept by the loved one’s family.

Which meant this was probably his father’s.

He checked the other medal: a gold star hanging on a red-white-and-blue ribbon; a smaller silver star was set at its center. This could be a Silver Star. Wasn’t that for extraordinary bravery in battle?

Trust me, kiddo, there’s more to your father than you ever dreamed.

I guess you got that right, lady. Maybe I should have stayed in touch more.

Funny…just a few months ago he wouldn’t have felt this way. But after reconnecting with Kate…

With frustration wriggling under his skin like an itch he couldn’t scratch, Jack replaced the contents to the box in roughly the same order that he’d found them. He’d wanted answers, but all this damn box had provided was more questions.

He returned it to the closet shelf, then headed back to the kitchen for another beer. Along the way he spotted his father’s watch on the table. He hadn’t noticed the cracked crystal when he’d brought it home from the hospital. He checked it out. An old Timex. No, not old—ancient. The wind-up type. Typical of him: If the old one still works, why get a new one? This Timex had taken a licking but hadn’t kept on ticking. It had stopped at 12:08.

Wait a sec…

Jack pulled the accident report out of his pocket and unfolded it. He’d scanned through Officer Hernandez’s report. He’d mentioned a call coming in to the station at…where was it? Here.

11:49 P.M.

But that would mean the accident had been reported before it happened. No way. His father’s watch must have been set ahead. Some people did that. Or maybe he’d forgotten to wind it.

But not his father. He’d always been a stickler for the correct time, down to the minute. And he’d always wound his watch at breakfast. Jack had seen him do it a million times.

Hernandez was mistaken about the time of the call. Had to be. But for all his brawn the cop had seemed like a pretty tight, spit-shine type. And hadn’t he said that even though it took him twenty minutes to reach the accident, it looked like it had just happened?

Shaking his head, Jack went to the fridge. He decided against another beer. Right now he needed a gimlet.

Wednesday

1

Jack awoke with a buzzing in his ears. At first he thought it was a mosquito, but this was lower pitched. Then he thought it might be gimlet-related, but he’d had only two. Finally he realized it was coming from outside the window. He lifted his head and looked around, momentarily disoriented by the unfamiliar room.

Oh, yeah. He was at Dad’s place. In the front room. Must have fallen asleep on the couch. He’d found Rio Bravo playing on TNT or some such station and had watched it for about the thirtieth time—not for John Wayne or Dean Martin, and certainly not for Ricky Nelson, but for Walter Brennan. Hands down, Stumpy was his best part, best job, ever—except maybe for his Old Man Clanton in My Darling Clementine. Old Walt made the movie for Jack.

But where was that buzzing coming from?

He rolled off the couch, padded to the kitchen, and squinted through the window.

A groundskeeper was running a weed whacker along the edge of the dead grass bordering the foundation plantings. Was that a long-sleeved flannel shirt he was wearing? In this weather? Where Jack came from a long-sleeved shirt in the summer meant one thing: junkie.

But the weed whacker…he blinked and shook his head…it looked like it was coming out of the guy’s right sleeve.

The rest of Jack’s clothes were still in the car so he had to go out anyway. Maybe he could get a closer look along the way.

The heat and humidity hit him like a wave as he stepped outside. Barely 8:30 and already it was cooking. As he rounded the corner, the groundsman stopped working and stared at him, then turned off his weed whacker.

“You ain’t Tom. Whatta you doin’ here?”

“I’m his son.”

And yes, that was a flannel shirt he had on. He wore green work pants and a tattered olive drab boonie cap. His eyes were a piercing blue, but the left angled to the outside—the kind of eye known on the street as a bent lamp. Yet even this close Jack couldn’t see his right hand. The weed whacker seemed to be growing out of the sleeve. Jack thrust out his own right hand in hopes of getting a look.

“My name’s Jack.”

The groundsman used his left hand to give Jack’s a squeeze. “Carl.”

So much for that strategy.

“How come you’re out here so early?” Jack said. “You can’t have much to do with this drought.”

“Be surprised,” Carl said. “Grass won’t grow, tropical plants get all curly and dried up, but the weeds…the weeds do just fine. Never able to figure that out.”

“Maybe they should all cultivate weeds,” Jack said.

Carl nodded. “Fine with me. Green is green.” He glanced at Jack. “Miss Mundy told me about your daddy. How’s the old guy doin’?”

“Still in a coma.”

Jack fought the urge to sidle to his right to put himself in line with Carl’s left eye.

“Yeah?” He shook his head. “Too bad, too bad. Nice guy, your daddy. He was one of the good uns.”

“‘Was’? Hey, he’s not gone yet.”

“Oh, yeah. Right, right. Well, let’s hope he pulls through. But bein’ so close to the Glades and all…”

“The Everglades? What’s wrong with that?”

Carl looked away. “Nothin’. Forget I said it.”

“Hey, don’t leave me hanging. If you’re going to start a thought, finish it.”

He kept his gaze averted. “You’ll think I’m loco.”

You don’t know loco like I know loco, Jack thought.

“Try me.”

“Well, all right. Gateways here is too close to the Glades. It’s been mistreated for years and years now. All the freshwater runoff it’s upposed to get from upstate, you know, from Lake Okeechobee, it’s mostly been channeled away to farms and funeral-parlor waitin’ rooms like Gateways. Everywhere you look someone’s filling in acres of lowlands and paving it over to build a bunch of houses or condos. The Glades been hurtin’ for years and years, but this year’s the worst because of the drought. Summer’s upposed to be our rainy season but we ain’t had barely a lick.”

“There’s still water out there, though, isn’t there?”

“Yep, there’s water, but it’s low. Lower than it’s ever been in anyone’s memory. And that could be bad. Bad for all of us.”

“Bad how?”

“Well, maybe things that always used to be underwater ain’t under no more.”

Where was this going? Was it going anywhere?

“Carl—”

He stared toward the Everglades. “The good thing bout your daddy’s and Miss Anya’s places here on the pond is you never have to look into someone else’s backyard…”

Jack glanced out at the endless expanse of grass. “Yeah. A panoramic view.”

“Pan-o-ramic?” Carl said carefully. “What’s that?”

Jack wondered how to explain it. He spread his arms. “It means wide angle…a wide view.”

“Pan-o-ramic…I like that.”

“Fine. The panoramic view is the good thing, but I’ve got a feeling you were about to tell me a down side.”

“I was. The bad part is…they’s real close to the Glades and the Glades ain’t happy these days. You might even say it’s kinda pissed. And if it is, we’d all better watch out.”

Jack stared across the mile or so of grass at the line of trees. He’d seen a bunch of weird things lately, but an angry swamp…?

You were right, Carl, he thought. I do think you’re loco.

2

Semelee stood on the lagoon bank with Luke and watched the small dredgin’ barge suck wet sand out of the sinkhole and deposit it into one of the even smaller, flat-bottomed boats it had towed along behind it. Excess water ran out the gunwales and into the lagoon. The clan had moved the houseboats aside to give the barge access to the hole.

“I still can’t believe you done this, Semelee,” Luke said. “You of all people.”

Semelee had been surprised herself. She didn’t like outsiders gettin’ anywheres near the clan’s lagoon, and especially near the sinkhole, but these folks had offered too much money to turn down.

“You been sayin’ that for two weeks now, Luke. Every time the barge shows up you say the same thing. And every time I give you the same answer: We can use the money. People’re pretty tight with their spare change these days, in case you ain’t noticed.”

“Oh, I noticed, all right. Probably cause they ain’t got all that much to spare. But I still don’t like it, specially this time of year.”

“Don’t worry. They’ll be outta here before the lights come. The deal I made with them was they had to finish up their business before this weekend. The lights’ll start comin’ Friday night. Told them Friday was a stone-solid deadline. Didn’t care how much they offered me, by sundown on Friday, they’re gone.”

“Still don’t like it. This is our home. This is where we was born.”

“I know, Luke,” she said, rubbing his back and feeling the sharp tips of the fins through the cloth. “But just think. The top of the sinkhole is above water for the first time anyone remembers. Maybe for the first time ever. When the lights come this time, they won’t have to shine through the water. They’ll shine straight out into the night. That’s never happened before, at least not in anyone’s memory.”

“I ain’t so crazy about that neither.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “My daddy said them lights made us the way we is, twisted us up, just like it’s twisted the trees and the fish and the bugs around here. And that’s from when they was just shining up through the water. What happens this year when there ain’t no water?”

Semelee felt a thrill at the prospect. “That’s what I want to see.”

The lights had been comin’ twice a year—at the spring and fall equinoxes—for as long as anyone could remember. Her momma had told her they’d kept that schedule every year since she’d been born, and her momma had told her the same thing.

But Semelee’s momma’d said that years back the lights started gettin’ stronger and brighter. And it wasn’t long after that, maybe a few years, that the people livin’ around the lagoon started noticin’ changes in the plants and the fish and things around the sinkhole. It started with the frogs missin’ legs or growin’ extra ones. Then the fish started lookin’ weird and the plants started gettin’ twisted up.

All that was bad enough, but when the lagooners’ kids started bein’ born dead or strange lookin’, the lagooners moved out. Not as a group to the same place, but piecemeal like, in all different directions. Some stayed as close as Homestead, some as far as Louisiana and Texas. After they moved away, they stopped havin’ strange kids and they was happy about that.

But the strange kids they already had wasn’t happy. Not one bit. Not because they was all mistreated by people as they was growin’ up—Semelee hadn’t been alone in that—but because when they all finally growed up they felt like somethin’ was missin’ in their lives.

One by one they all—all the misshapen ones—found their way back here to the lagoon and learned that this was where the itch stopped, this was where they felt whole, where they belonged. This was home.

And home was where your family lived. They came to call themselves a clan, and all decided to stay here on the lagoon.

Yet even with this big family-type gang around her, Semelee still felt a yearning emptiness within. She wanted more, needed more.

“Why do they hafta take our sand? There’s plenty of sand around. Why they want ours?”

“Don’t rightly know,” Semelee said.

“Who is they, anyway?”

“Blagden and Sons. You know that.”

“Yeah, I know the name, but that’s all it is: a name. Who are they? Where do they come from?”

“Don’t know, Luke, but their money’s good. Cash up front. That’s bout as good as it gets.”

“Do they know about the lights?”

“That one I can answer: Yeah, they know about the lights.”

Some guy named William somethin’ from this company called Blagden and Sons come around in a canoe a few weeks ago askin’ if anyone’d been seein’ funny lights about this time of the year. The clan folk he talked to sent him to Semelee since she was sorta the leader round here. Not that she’d ever looked to be the leader, but it seemed whenever somethin’ needed decidin’, she wound up the one who did it.

Semelee played it cagey with this William fellow until she was pretty sure he wasn’t no tour-guide type or scientist or anything like that, and wouldn’t be bringing boatloads of strangers or teams of pointy heads to peek or poke at the clan and the sinkhole. Nope, all William wanted was to haul off the dirt and sand from around where they’d seen the lights.

When Semelee had told him they’d been comin’ up through this sinkhole that used to be underwater but was now gettin’ dry, he got all excited and wanted to know where it was. Semelee pretended she wasn’t gonna tell him, and held off even when he offered money. So he offered more money and more money until Semelee had to say yes. Maybe she could’ve held out for even more, but there weren’t no sense in gettin’ all greedy about it.

When she’d took him to the sinkhole she thought he was gonna pee his pants. He danced around it, callin’ it a senn-oaty or somethin’ like that. When she asked him what he was talkin’ about he spelled it for her: C-E-N-O-T-E. Told her it was a Mex word and you said it like coyote. Semelee liked sinkhole better.

The dredgin’ was all hush-hush, of course. The clan wasn’t upposed to be livin’ here on the lagoon, this bein’ a National Park and all, and Blagden and Sons wasn’t upposed to be takin’ the sand.

“Matter off act,” she told Luke, “I’m pretty sure they want the sand because of the lights.”

“That’s kinda scary, dontcha think? Them lights ain’t natural. They changed us and everythin’ around them. Probably even changed the sand in that hole.”

“Probably did.”

Luke looked uneasy. “What on earth could they want it for? I mean, what’re they gonna do with it?”

“Can’t rightly say, Luke. And I don’t rightly care. That ain’t our worry. What I do know is that our little sinkhole is gonna be a lot deeper without all that sand. And that just may mean that the lights’ll be brighter than ever. When the time comes maybe someone can even look down into that hole and see where they’re comin’ from.”

“Who’s gonna do that?” Luke said.

Semelee kept her eyes on the rim of the deepening hole. “Me.”

Luke grabbed her arm. “Uh-uh! You ain’t! That’s crazy! I won’t let you!”

She let Luke have sex with her once in a while when she felt the need, and that probably was a mistake. She’d told him flat out from the git-go that it didn’t mean nothin’, that they was just now-and-again fuck buddies and that was all there was to it, but she’d probably made a mistake lettin’ it get started. Still, every so often she needed to get laid and Luke was the least ugly of anyone else in the clan. Trouble was, it let him feel like he owed her, like he had to protect her or somethin’.

If anyone needed protectin’, it wasn’t her.

“You got nothin’ to say about it, Luke,” Semelee told him as she wrenched her arm free of his grasp. “Now lemme be. I gotta get to town.”

“What for?”

She flashed him a sly smile. “I’m joinin’ the nursin’ profession.”

He shook his head. “What? Why?”

Semelee felt the smile melt away in a blaze of anger. “To finish your half-assed job from the other night!”

3

As Jack stepped out of the elevator on the hospital’s third floor, he spied Dr. Huerta waiting to get in.

“Any change in my father?”

She shook her head. “Stable, but still level seven.”

“How long can this go on?” he said. “I mean, before we start thinking about feeding tubes and all that?”

She stepped into the elevator. “That’s a bit premature. I know it must seem like a long time to you, but it’s been less than seventy-two hours. The IVs are perfectly adequate for now.”

“But—”

The elevator doors slid shut.

Jack walked down the hall to his father’s room, wondering if Anya would be there. He’d stopped by her place before leaving this morning, threading his way through the gizmos crowding her lawn, to offer her a ride to the hospital if she needed it. But she hadn’t answered his knocks.

Normally that wouldn’t have bothered him, but with old folks…well, you never knew. She could have had a stroke or something. Jack had peered through the front door glass but hadn’t seen anyone on the floor or slumped in a chair. Then he’d remembered Oyv. The little dog would have been barking up a storm by then if he’d been around.

But Anya wasn’t in his father’s room either—he checked the corners and behind the curtains, just to be sure. Empty except for the patient.

He stepped to the side of the bed and gripped the limp right hand. “I’m back, Dad. Are you in there? Can you hear me? Give a squeeze, just a little one, if you can. Or move just one finger so I know.”

Nothing. Just like yesterday.

Jack pulled up a chair and sat at the bedside, talking to his father as if the old guy could hear him. He kept his voice low—pausing when the nurses buzzed in and out—and discussed what he’d learned about the accident and the conflicting information, dwelling on the time discrepancies between the report and his father’s watch. He’d hoped talking it out would clarify the incident for him, but he was as confused afterward as before.

“If only you could tell me what you were doing out there at that hour, it would clear up a whole lot of questions.”

Once off the subject of the accident, he thought he’d run out of things to say. Then he remembered the pictures in his father’s room and decided to use them as launch pads.

“Remember the family camping trip? How it never stopped raining…?”

4

After an hour or so of talking, Jack’s mouth was dry and his vocal cords felt on fire. He stepped into the bathroom to get a drink of water. As he was finishing his second cupful his peripheral vision caught a flash of white. He turned to see a nurse approaching his dad’s bed. She hadn’t been around before; he was sure he would have noticed her if she had. She was pretty in an odd way. Very slim, almost to the point of boyishness, and with her dark skin—made all the darker by the contrast of her white uniform—prominent nose, and glossy black hair trailing most of the way down her back in a single braid, Jack thought she might be part Indian—not the Bombay kind, the American kind.

She had her hand in the pocket of her uniform—little more than a white shift, really—and seemed to be gripping something.

Jack was about to step out of the bathroom and say hello when he noticed something strange about her. Her movements were odd, jerky. She’d slowed her progress toward the bed and seemed to be straining to move forward, as if the air was holding her back. He saw sweat break out on her forehead, watched her face flush and then go pale as she forced herself forward another step. He watched her throat working, as if she was trying to keep from vomiting.

Jack stepped out and approached her.

“Miss, are you all—?”

She jumped, twisted toward him, staring with wide, confused, onyx eyes. Her hand darted from her pocket to a thong tied around her neck, and Jack thought he saw something move in the pocket.

She shook her head, pulling on the slim leather thong around her neck. It snapped but she barely seemed to notice. She was drenched in sweat.

“Who—?”

Before Jack could reply she turned and staggered out of the room. He started to go after her but heard a groan from the bed.

“Dad?” He rushed over to the bed and grabbed his father’s hand again. “Dad, was that you?”

He squeezed the fingers—gently at first, then harder. His father winced, but Dr. Huerta had said he was responsive to pain. After shaking his father’s shoulder and calling to him, all with no response, he backed off. Nothing happening here.

He went out to check on that nurse. Something wrong about her…besides looking sick.

At the nursing station he found a big, brawny, gray-haired nurse who seemed to be in charge. Her photo ID badge read R SCHOCH, RN.

“Excuse me,” he said. “A nurse just came into my father’s room, then turned and ran out. She looked kind of sick and I was wondering if she was okay.”

Nurse Schoch frowned—or rather, her frown deepened. It seemed to be her only expression. “Sick? No one said anything.” She looked around at the assignment board. “Three-seventy-five, right? What was her name?”

“I didn’t get a look at her badge. Come to think of it, I don’t think she was wearing one.”

“Oh, she had to be. What did she look like?”

“Slim, dark, maybe five-three or so.”

Schoch shook her head. “No one like that here. Not on my shift, anyway. You sure she was a nurse?”

“I’m not sure of a lot of things,” Jack muttered, “and that’s just been added to my list.”

“She could have been from housecleaning, but then she would have been in gray instead of white—and she’d still have to have a badge.” She picked up a phone. “I’ll call security.”

Jack wished she wouldn’t—he didn’t want rent-a-cops messing into this—but couldn’t think of a reason he could tell Schoch.

“Yeah, okay. I’ll be back in my father’s room.”

He’d been keeping an eye on the door, making sure no one else went in there. When he returned, he checked his father to see if he’d moved—he hadn’t—then went to the window and looked out at the parking lot. He saw a slim woman in white walking away through the lot. Heat from the late-morning sun made her shimmer like a mirage.

It was her. Couldn’t mistake that long braid. And now she was climbing into the passenger side of a battered old red pickup.

Jack dashed into the hall in time to see the elevator doors closing. Too slow anyway. He found the stairs and raced down to the first floor. By the time he hit the parking lot, the pickup was gone. But he kept moving, running to his Buick and gunning out to the street. He flipped a mental coin and turned right, telling himself he’d give this ten minutes and then call it quits.

He’d traveled about half a mile when he spotted the truck, stopped at a red light two blocks ahead.

“Gotcha,” he said.

When the light changed he followed the truck out of town and into the swamps. Somewhere along the way the pavement ended, replaced by a couple of sandy ruts flanked by tall, waving reeds. He lost sight of the truck for a while but wasn’t going to worry about that unless he came to a fork. Better to stay out of sight. Luckily there were no forks, and before too long he was pulling into a clearing at the edge of a small, slow-moving stream.

The red pickup sat there, idling, while the woman in white rode downstream in a small, flat-bottomed motor boat piloted by a hulking man in a red, long-sleeved shirt. Jack jumped out of his car and ran to the bank, waving his arms, calling after them.

“Hey! Come back! I want to ask you something!”

The woman and the man turned and stared at him, surprise evident on their faces. The woman said something to the man, who nodded, then they both turned away and kept moving. He saw the name on the stern: Chicken-ship.

“Hey!” Jack shouted.

“Whatchoo wanner for?” said a voice from behind.

Jack turned and saw a man with a misshapen head leaning out the driver window of the pickup. With his bulbous forehead, off-center eyes, and almost non-existent nose he reminded Jack of Leo G. Carroll from the opening scenes of Tarantula. This guy made Rondo Hatton look handsome.

“I want to talk to her, ask her a few questions.”

“Looks to me like she don’t wanna talk to you.” His voice was high and nasal.

“Where does she live?”

“In the Glades.”

“How do I find her?”

“You don’t. Whatever it is, mister, leave it be.”

Suddenly another guy, thinner and only marginally better looking, jumped into the pickup’s passenger seat.

Where’d he come from?

The new guy slapped the driver on the shoulder and nodded. Neither looked too bright. If someone suggested playing Russian roulette with a semiautomatic, they’d probably say, “Cool!”

The driver gave Jack a little two-finger salute. “Welp, nice talkin’ to ya. Gotta go now.”

Before Jack could say anything the guy threw the truck into gear and roared off. Jack raced back to his car. If he couldn’t follow the girl, then he’d tail these two. Sooner or later they had to—

He skidded to a halt when he saw the Buick’s flat front tire, and the gash in its side wall.

“Swell,” he muttered. “Just swell.”

5

“I don’t get it,” Luke said as he piloted the Chicken-ship deeper into the swamp. “Who was that guy?”

Semelee pulled off the black wig and shook out her silver white hair. She didn’t feel like talkin’. Her stomach still wasn’t right.

“He saw me in the room. I think he might be the old guy’s kin.”

“That why he was trailin’ you?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. All I know is I felt so strange in that room. It started as soon as I stepped through the door and got worse and worse the closer I got to the old man’s bed. I started feeling sick and weak, and the air got so thick I could barely breathe. I tell you, Luke, all I wanted to do was get out of there and get far, far away as fast I could.”

“Think it was the guy?”

“Could’ve been, but I don’t think so.”

This man wasn’t just a guy, wasn’t just one of the old man’s kin. This man was the one she’d sensed coming for the past two days, and he was special. She sensed something about him…a destiny, maybe. She didn’t know exactly what, she just knew he was special.

So am I, she thought. But in a different way.

Maybe she and this new man was destined to be together. That would be wonderful. She liked the way he looked, liked his hair, his build—not too beefy, not too slight—liked his brown eyes and hair. She especially liked his face, his regular, normal face. Hangin’ round the clan like she did, she didn’t see too many of those.

Maybe he’d been sent to her. Maybe he was here for her. Maybe they was meant to share their destinies. She sure hoped so. She needed someone.

“Well, if you don’t think it’s him made you sick,” Luke said, “what was it?”

Semelee pulled the white dress off over her head, leaving her wearing nothin’ but a pair of white panties. She looked down at her small, dark-nippled breasts. Losers in the size sweepstakes, maybe, but at least they didn’t sag. One of the guys she’d screwed in high school had called them “perky.” They were that, she guessed.

Keepin’ her back to Luke—she didn’t want him gettin’ all hot and bothered out here on the water—she slipped into her cutoffs and a green T-shirt.

“I don’t know. It was like…” She shuddered as she remembered that awful sick feelin’ runnin’ through her body, like she was being turned inside out…“like nothin’ I ever felt before. And I hope I don’t never feel it again.”

She turned and whacked Luke on the leg as hard as she could.

He jumped. “Hey, what—?”

“And I wouldna had to feel it in the first place if you and Corley had done the job you was upposed to!”

“Hey, we did just what we was upposed to. You was there.”

“I wasn’t there.”

“Well, you was watchin’. You saw what happened. The sacrifice was goin’ exactly accordin’ to plan when that cop showed up outta nowhere. I said all along we shoulda just flattened the old guy inside his car and have done with it.”

She hit him again. “Don’t you never learn? The old man had to be done in by somethin’ from the swamp or else it ain’t a sacrifice, it’s just a killin’. And we ain’t about just killin’. We got a purpose to what we’re doin’, a duty. You know that.”

“Awright, awright. I know that. But I still can’t figure why that cop had to come along just then. We never seen him out there before.”

“Maybe he was sent,” Semelee said as the thought struck her.

“Whatchoo mean?”

“I mean maybe whoever was protectin’ the old man today was protectin’ him the other night as well.”

“How can that be? We was the only ones who knew we’d be out there.”

“I don’t know how and I don’t know why, but someone’s protectin’ that old man.”

“You mean like with magic?”

“Maybe.”

Lotsa people’d see what Semelee could do as magic, so why couldn’t there be someone else out there who could do somethin’ different but just as magical? Might be all sorts of magical people out there no one ever dreamed of.

“I ain’t got no idea who right now, but I’m gonna find out. And when I do…”

She reached down and removed a palm-sized toad from the pocket of the discarded white dress. She held it up and stroked its back. This little feller was a relative to the big African marine toads some fool had brought into Florida sometime in the last century. It had only three legs—its left arm was nothing but a nubbin—but it had these swollen glands startin’ behind each eye and runnin’ down its back in a pair of lines. Those glands was full of poison. Every so often a dog would lick or bite one of its bigger cousins and die. This little guy came from the clan’s lagoon where his family had bathed in the glow of the lights for generations, and he was even more poisonous. Just a little drop on a tongue was enough to stop a grown man’s heart.

That had been Semelee’s plan: sneak into the room, press the toad’s back against the old man’s lips, then get out. A minute or so later he’d be on his way to his maker and the job would be done.

She’d have to think of another plan now.

After she set the toad on the front seat of the boat, where it squatted and watched her with its big black eyes, her hand instinctively went to her breastbone to touch—

She stiffened. What? Where is it?

Then she remembered—the thong had broken in the hospital room. As she’d fled the terrible feelin’, she recalled stuffin’ it into a pocket.

She rummaged in the uniform’s other pocket and heaved a sigh of relief when she felt the slim thong. She pulled it out, expecting to see the pair of black freshwater clam shells she wore around her neck. She gasped when she saw only one.

“What’s wrong?” Luke said.

Semelee didn’t answer him. Instead she lifted the uniform and pawed through one pocket then the other.

“Oh, no! It’s gone!”

“What’s gone?”

“One of my eye-shells is missin’!”

“Check around your feet. Maybe it fell out when you was gettin’ changed.”

She checked, running her fingers along the slimy bottom through the inch or so of water.

“It’s gone!” she cried, feeling panic rising like a tide. “Oh, Luke, what am I gonna do? I need them!”

She’d had the eye-shells ever since she was twelve. She’d never forget that moment. Her mother’d taken her to her daddy’s funeral. That was the first time she’d ever seen him…or at least remembered seein’ him. He’d up and left Momma when Semelee was just a baby, soon after they moved to Tallahassee. He was Miccosukee Indian, banished from the tribe for somethin’ Momma never knew. She’d hooked up with him at the lagoon—lots a people livin’ round the lagoon back then was on the run from somethin’ or other—and the three of them moved outta there along with everyone else shortly after Semelee was born.

Her daddy—or rather the man who’d knocked up her momma—had been killed in a bar fight. Some of his Miccosukee kin had decided to give him a proper Indian send-off and his wife and child was invited.

She’d been scared of the whole idea of lookin’ at a dead man, so she’d hung back, as far away from the body as she could. Just getting her first period the day before and feelin’ sick and tired didn’t help none. That was when she spotted the old Indian woman in a beaded one-piece dress starin’ at her from across the room. She had eyes black as a bird’s and hair like Semelee’s, but also the wrinkles to go with it. She remembered how the old lady’d come close and sniffed her. Semelee’d shrunk back, scared, embarrassed. Did her period smell?

The old woman’d nodded and showed her gums in a toothless smile. “You wait right here, child,” she’d whispered. “I’ve got something for you.”

And then she’d gone away. Semelee’d hoped she wouldn’t come back but she did. And when she did she came carryin’ two black freshwater clam shells. They’d been drilled through near their hinges and was strung on a leather thong.

She took Semelee’s hand, pried open her tight-clenched fingers, and pressed the shells into her palms. “You got the sight, child. But it’s no good without these. You take them and keep them close. Always keep them close. You’ll need them when you’re ready, and you’ll be ready soon.”

Then she’d walked away.

Semelee’s first thought had been to throw them away, but she changed her mind. Nobody hardly ever gave her anything, so she kept them. She didn’t know what the old lady had been talkin’ about—“You got the sight,” and all that—but it made her feel special. Till that time in her life she’d never run into nothin’ that had made her feel special. As for “the sight”…maybe someday she’d find out what that meant.

And one day she did find out. And it had changed her life.

“Now just relax, Semelee,” Luke was sayin’. “It’s got to be somewheres. Probably fell out while you was sittin’ in the truck. We’ll find it.”

“We got to!”

She needed those eye-shells to do her magic. She’d kept them slung around her neck so’s they’d never be away from her. But now…

Those eye-shells’d saved her life…or rather, stopped her from killing herself.

It had been a day, a Tuesday in May in her sixteenth year, when everything that could go wrong did. She’d tried new hair dye the night before. Every other one she’d ever tried in the past—and she’d tried them all—didn’t take. The dye just ran off her hair like water off wax. This one was touted as different, and promised to turn her hair a luxurious chestnut brown. And it looked like it might work. It didn’t run off like the others.

But when Semelee looked in the bathroom mirror that morning she saw that instead of chestnut brown her hair had turned fire-engine red. Worse, it wouldn’t wash out.

Maybe the color woulda been okay for the dopers and weirdoes who just wanted attention or wanted to show how they were rejecting their parents or society or whatever, but it was awful for Semelee. She’d spent her whole life bein’ rejected. She wanted to belong.

After crying for a few minutes—she would have liked to scream but Momma and her new boyfriend Freddy were in the bedroom down the other end of the trailer—she tried to figure what to do. She would’ve liked to call out sick and spend the day washin’ her hair, but that would leave her alone with Freddy, and the way she kept catchin’ him lookin’ at her gave her the creeps. Not that she was a virgin or nothin’—she was havin’ plenty of sex—but Freddy…yuck.

So she dried her bright red hair, jammed a cap over it, and headed for school. Not a good start to the day but it got worse as soon as Suzie Lefferts spotted her. She’d had it in for Semelee since grammar school and never passed up a chance to torment her. She yanked off Semelee’s cap just for sport, but when she saw the color of her hair she raised a holler and called all the other girls over, sayin’ look who’s here: Lucy Ricardo!

Their laughter and cries of “Luuuuceeeeee!” chased her down the hall, right into the arms of Jesse Buckler. She was Jesse’s latest squeeze—or rather, he was hers. Depended on how you looked at it. Semelee had discovered that the way to a boy’s heart was through his fly. Dates for her had been as few as turtle teeth until she turned fifteen and started puttin’ out. After that it was a different story. She knew she had a rep but so what? She liked screwin’, and durin’ sex was the only time she was sure she had a boy’s undivided attention.

Jesse pulled her into the boy’s room and for a minute she thought they was gonna have sex there—screw in school, how cool. But when she saw Joey Santos and Lee Rivers standin’ there with their flies open and their peckers at attention, she got scared. She tried to run but Lee grabbed her and said Jesse told them how she gave the best blow job in school and they wanted a sample. She said no and how she’d report them and they laughed and said who’d believe the school slut? They called her “Granny” and Jesse said how he got off doin’ it to an old lady.

The words shocked Semelee. She’d thought of herself as somethin’ of a goodtime gal, of easy virtue maybe, but not the school slut. And it wasn’t like Semelee loved Jesse or nothin’, or ever even entertained the idea that he loved her, but…he’d been talkin’ about her like she was a pull of chewin’ tobacco that he was gonna pass around between his friends.

With some kickin’ and clawin’ she broke free and ran out—not just out of the boys room, but out of the school as well. She could’ve gone to the principal, but it would be the word of three of the football stars against the school slut, and besides, nothin’ had happened.

So she’d run home. And there was Freddy. Alone. Drinkin a beer. And horny. He offered her a brew, then started touchin’ her. Semelee just snapped. She started screamin’ and throwin’ things and the next thing she knew Freddy was out the door and headin’ for his car.

He must’a called Momma because half an hour later she came stormin’ in, started slappin’ at Semelee, callin’ her a little whore for playin’ hooky so she could come on to Freddy. Now look what she’d done! Freddy was gone, sayin’ he wasn’t stayin’ in no house with a freaky piece of jailbait tryin’ to get him in trouble.

Momma wouldn’t listen to her, and Semelee’d been hurt that her own momma was takin’ Freddy’s side over hers. But then Momma crushed her, sayin’ she wished Semelee’d never been born, wished she’d died like all the other girls been born to the lagoon folk round that time, that she’d been a weight around her neck ever since, draggin’ her down, her white hair scarin’ off the men interested in Momma.

That did it. Semelee busted out through the door with no direction in mind and kept goin’. She wound up on the beach where she collapsed on the sand. Her momma, who she’d thought of as her best friend, her only true friend, hated her, had always hated her. She wanted to die.

She thought about drowning herself but didn’t have the energy to jump in the water. The tide was out so she decided to just lie here on the sand and let the water come to her, wash her out to sea, and that would be the end of it. No more hassles, no more names like “Granny,” no more heartbreak, no nothin’.

She lay there on her back in the sand with her eyes closed. The sun was so bright it blazed through her lids, botherin’ her. She didn’t have her sunglasses on her but she did have those two shells around her neck. They was just the right size to go over her eyes. It’d be like layin’ in a tannin’ booth.

As she sat up to untie the thong, she saw the gulls glidin’ overhead and wished she had wings like them so she could fly away.

She lay back on the sand and fitted a shell over each eye—

What?

She snatched the shells away from her eyes and levered back up to sittin’.

What just happened?

She’d put the shells over her eyes expectin’ to see black. But she’d seen white instead…white sand…and she’d been above it, lookin’ down on a girl lyin’ in the sand…a girl with shells over her eyes.

Semelee put those shells over her eyes again and suddenly she was lookin’ down on a girl sitting in the stand—a girl with fire-engine hair.

That’s me!

She pulled off the shells again and looked up. A seagull hovered above, looking down at her, probably wondering if she had a sandwich and might throw it a crust or two.

She started experimentin’ and found she could look through the eyes of any bird on the beach. She could soar, she could hover, she could spot a fish near the surface of the water and dive for it. Then she discovered she could see through fishes’ eyes, swim around the rocks and coral and stay underwater as long as she pleased without comin’ up for air.

It was wonderful. She spent the rest of the day testin’ her powers. Finally, after the sun had set, she headed home. She didn’t want to go there, didn’t want to see her momma’s face, but she had no place else to go.

When Semelee opened the door to the trailer Momma was all tears and apologies, sayin’ she hadn’t really meant what she’d said, that she was just upset and talkin’ crazy. But Semelee knew the truth when she heard it. Momma had said what was deep in her heart and meant every word of it.

But Semelee didn’t care now. She’d thought her world had ended but now she knew it was just beginnin’. She knew she was special. She could do somethin’ no one else could do. They could make fun of her, call her names, but no one could hurt her now.

She was special.

But now she’d lost one of her shells. She’d lose all her specialness without them. She’d be a nobody again.

Semelee gripped the edges of the canoe in white-knuckled panic. “I just had a terrible thought, Luke. What if I dropped it back in that hospital room?”

6

When Jack returned to his father’s room, almost an hour after he’d left, he was in a foul mood. He could have called the rental agency to come and change the tire, but had canned that course of action. He’d had no idea where he was, so how could he tell them where to find him?

So he’d changed the tire himself. No biggee. He’d changed a lot of tires in his day, but usually on pavement. Today the jack had kept slipping in the sand, fraying his patience. Then the clouds wandered off to let the sun out so it could cook him. But all that wouldn’t have been so bad if the mosquitoes hadn’t declared his skin a picnic ground. Never in all his life had he seen so many mosquitoes. Now his forearms looked like pink bubble wrap and the itching was driving him nuts.

Felt like a jerk for letting those yokels sandbag him like that.

The TV was on and some news head was talking about Tropical Storm Elvis. It had lost a lot of steam crossing northern Florida but was now in the Gulf where it was gaining strength again, stoking itself over the warm waters. Elvis had not entirely left the building.

He went to the bed and checked his father. No change that he could see. He stepped to the window and looked out again at the parking lot. Who were they, the girl and those odd-looking people? From the way the girl had approached the bed—or at least started to—she’d come here with a purpose. But what?

As he turned back to the bed he spotted something on the floor, something glossy black and oblong. He squatted beside it, wondering if it was some sort of Florida bug, a roach maybe. But no, it looked like a shell. He bent closer. It was curved like a mussel but flatter. Some kind of clam, maybe.

As he reached to pick it up, something under the bed caught his eye. Not under the bed exactly—more like behind the headboard. Looked like a slim tree branch standing on its end.

Jack picked up the shell and stepped to the head of the bed. He peeked behind the headboard and found a tin can painted with odd little squiggles sitting atop the branch. He’d seen something like this before, then remembered Anya’s yard—it was full of them.

He smiled. The old lady must think they’re good luck or something. Probably put it here for him when she visited the other day. Might as well leave it. Sure as hell wasn’t doing Dad any harm. And who knew? Maybe it would help him. Jack had seen a lot stranger things these past few months.

As he straightened he noticed a glistening design on the back of the headboard. He slid the bed a few inches away from the wall for a better look. Someone had painted a pattern of black squiggles and circles there. No question as to who, because they were very similar to the squiggles on the can. But how had that skinny old lady moved the bed? It was damn heavy.

Jack decided to ask her later. He pushed the bed back, then placed the shell on the nightstand. Maybe one of the staff had dropped it. If so, they could reclaim it here. At least this way no one would step on it.

Scratching his arms, Jack said goodbye to his father and headed back to the car. He hoped his father had some calamine lotion at home.

7

Back at Gateways Jack found another car parked in the cul-de-sac. Maybe Anya had company. But when he went around to the front of his father’s place he found the front door open and heard voices inside.

He stepped into the front room and found a young woman in a jacket and skirt showing an elderly couple through the house.

“Who the hell are you?” Jack said.

The old folks jumped and the young woman clutched her looseleaf notebook defensively against her chest. Jack figured he might have had a little too much edge on his voice, but that was the kind of mood he was in.

“I-I’m with Gateways,” the woman said. “I’m showing this couple the house.” She squared her shoulders defiantly. “And just who are you?”

“The owner’s son. What are you doing here?”

The woman blinked. “Oh. I’m so sorry for your loss, but—”

“Loss? What loss? You talk as if my father’s dead.”

Another blink—a double this time. “You mean he’s not?”

“Damn right, he’s not. I just came from the hospital. He’s not too healthy at the moment, but he’s not dead.”

The old couple were looking uncomfortable now. They stared at the ceiling, at the rug, anywhere but at Jack.

“Oh, dear,” the younger woman said. “I was told he was.”

“Even if he was, so what? What are you doing here?”

“I was showing it to these—”

Fury hit him like a kick in the gut. Vultures!

“Showing it? Where do you get off showing this place to anyone? It’s his until he sells it.”

Another squaring of the shoulders, this time with a defiant lift of the chin. “Apparently you don’t know the arrangement in Gateway communities.”

“Apparently I don’t. But I’m going to find out. As for now”—he jerked a thumb over his shoulder—“out.”

“But—”

“Out!”

She strode out the door with her head high. The old couple shuffled out behind her.

“I’m sorry,” the old woman said, pausing as she passed.

“Not your fault,” Jack told her.

She put a wrinkled hand on his arm. “I hope your father gets well soon.”

“Thank you,” he said, feeling suddenly deflated.

He closed the door after them and leaned against it. He’d overreacted. He told himself it was the frustration of all these questions with no answers. Not one goddamn answer.

Bad day. And it was only noon.

He was just turning away from the door when he heard a knock. He counted to three, promised he’d be more genteel this time about telling the sales lady where she could stick her commission, and pulled open the door.

But Anya stood there instead. She held out a familiar taped-over FedEx box.

“This came while you were out,” she said. “I signed for it.”

Ah. His Glock and his backup. Now he could feel whole again.

“Thanks.”

“Heavy,” she said. “What’ve you got in there? Lead?”

“You might say. Come on in where it’s cool.”

“I can’t stay. You were by the hospital already?”

Jack nodded. “No change.” He debated whether or not to ask her about the can on the stick behind his father’s headboard but decided to save it for later. “Are you going over?”

She nodded. “I thought I’d sit with him for a while.”

What a grand old lady. “I’ll give you a lift.”

She waved him off. “I’ve already called a cab.” She turned to go. “I’ll be back later. Cocktails at five, if you’re available.”

He couldn’t turn her down twice. “It’s a date.” Jack thought of something. “By the way, who’s the head honcho around here?”

“You mean Gateways?”

“Yeah. The general manager or acting director or chairman of the board of whatever you call him. Who runs the show?”

“That would be Ramsey Weldon. You can find him at the administration building. You can’t miss it. It’s mostly glass and right on the golf course. Why?”

“We need to have a little tête-à-tête,” Jack said.

8

The administration building was pretty much as Anya had described it: a small, cubical structure sheathed in mirrored glass. As Jack got out of his car he saw a tall, distinguished-looking man unlocking the door to a classic-looking four-door sedan. He looked fiftyish, had longish black hair, graying at the temples, and wore a milk-chocolate brown lightweight silk suit that perfectly matched the color of his beautifully restored car: two-tone—white over brown—with wide whitewall tires.

“Am I dreaming,” Jack said, “or is that a 1956 Chrysler Crown Imperial?”

The man’s smile was tolerant, and his tone carried a hint of impatience.

“It’s a Crown Imperial, all right, but not a Chrysler. Everyone makes that mistake. Chrysler spun off the Imperial into its own division in 1954. This baby came out two years later.”

“It’s beautiful,” Jack said, meaning it.

He ran a hand along the crest of the rear fender to one of the stand-alone taillights, sticking up like a miniature red searchlight. The chrome of the split grille gleamed like a gap-toothed grin; the flawless finish threw back his reflection.

God, he wished he could use something like this for his wheels. But it was too conspicuous. The last thing he wanted was people to notice him as he drove around. That was why he’d finally given up Ralph, his old ’63 Corvair convertible. People kept stopping him and asking about it.

“You restore this yourself?”

“Yes, it’s a hobby of mine. Took me two years. Fewer than eleven thousand Imperials were made in ’56 and only a hundred and seventy were Crowns. This one has the original engine, by the way—a 354-cubic-inch Hemi V-8.”

“So it cranks.”

“Yes, indeed. It cranks.” He looked at Jack. “Visiting, I assume?”

“Yeah, in a way. My father’s in the hospital in a coma and—”

“You’re Tom’s son? Poor man. How is he?”

Jack was surprised at the instant recognition. “Not great. You know him?”

He stuck out his hand. “Ramsey Weldon. I’m director of Gateways South.”

“Isn’t that something,” Jack said, shaking his hand. “I came here looking for you.”

“I bet I know why, too. I got a call from one of our sales team. It seems she was given false information about your father. The initial word from the hospital was that he was DOA. I’m terribly sorry about the misunderstanding.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “I can see somebody getting the wrong information, but where did she get off showing the place to prospective buyers?”

“Because she thought—erroneously—that the place belonged to Gateways.”

“Where would she get an idea like that?”

Weldon’s eyebrows rose. “Upon the death of the owner—or owners—the house reverts to Gateways.”

“You’re kidding.”

He shook his head. “That’s the arrangement. It’s not unique. Plenty of graduated-care senior communities have similar arrangements.”

“I can’t believe my father signed on for that.”

“Why not? His purchase of the home and the bond guarantees him not only a place to live, but quality care from the moment he signs to the moment he goes to meet his maker, no matter how long it takes. Members of a Gateways community will never be a burden on their families. ‘What do we do with Papa?’ or ‘Who’s going to take care of Mom?’ are questions that will never arise in their families.”

A smooth pitch, delivered with the timing and conviction of a lifelong salesman. Jack could see how powerful that pitch could be to someone like his father who had a lot of pride and had always been an independent sort.

“At no point,” Weldon went on, “will your father be a burden on his children. And at no point will you have to feel guilty about him, because you can rest assured that he’s being well cared for.”

“Maybe it’s not so much guilt I’m feeling as—pardon me if I sound paranoid, but it seems to be to your advantage to have a quick turnover in housing.”

Weldon laughed. “Please, please, we’re asked that all the time. But you have to remember, this isn’t a Robin Cook novel. This is real life. Trust me, it’s all been amortized and insured and reinsured. You can check our financials. Gateways is a public company that posts an excellent bottom line every year.”

He noticed that Weldon was starting to sweat. But then, so was Jack. It was like a steam bath out here on the macadam.

“Then I’m not the first to raise the question.”

“Of course not. Our society is conspiracy crazy, seeing dark plots wherever it looks. I assure you, Gateways takes excellent care of its citizens. We do care. And our caring is what makes our citizens recommend Gateways to their friends and relatives. That’s why we have waiting lists all over the country and can’t build these communities fast enough. Just one example is the availability of free annual exams I instituted last year to catch medical problems early when they’re most treatable.”

“Really? Where are they done?”

“Right there in the clinic.” He pointed to a one-story structure a hundred yards away across a dead lawn. “It’s attached to the skilled nursing facility.”

Jack guessed that was Gateways-speak for nursing home.

“Do you think I could speak to the doctor about my father?”

“Please. Go right ahead.” He glanced at his watch. “Oops. Going to be late for my meeting.” He thrust out his hand again. “Nice meeting you, and good luck to your father. We’re all pulling for him.”

He slipped into his car and started it up. Jack listened to the throaty roar of its V-8 and, again, wanted one.

He watched him drive away. During all that talk he’d tried to get a bead on Ramsey Weldon but couldn’t get past the smooth all-business, all-for-the-company exterior. If his father’s accident hadn’t been hit and run, he wouldn’t have bothered. But since it was…

He shook his head. Maybe he was just looking for something that wasn’t there. He knew there was plenty going on out there where no one could see. He didn’t need to be inventing a conspiracy around here.

9

The doctor working the clinic today was named Charles Harris. He wasn’t too busy at the moment so Jack got to see him after only a short wait.

A nurse led him into a walnut-paneled consultation room with a cherry wood desk and lots of framed diplomas on the walls. Harris wasn’t the only name Jack saw, so he assumed other doctors rotated through the clinic. Dr. Harris turned out to be a young, dark, curly-haired fellow with bright blue eyes. Jack introduced himself by his real surname—a name he hadn’t used in so long it tasted foreign on his lips—and then added: “Tom’s son.”

Dr. Harris hadn’t heard about the accident but offered his wishes for a speedy recovery. Then he wanted to know what he could do for Jack.

“First off I’d like to know if my father had a physical here recently.”

Dr. Harris nodded. “Yes, just a couple of months ago.”

“Great. Dr. Huerta is his neurologist at the hospital—”

“I know Inez. Your father’s in good hands.”

“That’s comforting. But I’m wondering about his medical condition before the accident.”

Jack thought he sensed Dr. Harris recede about half a dozen feet. “Such as?”

“Well, anything that might have contributed to the accident, or might explain what he was doing driving around at that hour.”

Dr. Harris leaned forward and thrust his hand across the desk, palm up.

“Could I see some ID?”

“What?” Jack hadn’t seen this coming. “What for?”

“To prove you’re who you say you are.”

Jack knew he couldn’t. All his ID was in the name of John Tyleski. He owned nothing with his own surname.

“I’ve got to prove I’m my father’s son? Why on earth—?”

“Patient privilege. Normally I wouldn’t under any circumstances discuss a medical file without the patient’s permission, even with a spouse. But since this particular patient is incapable of giving permission, I’m willing to make an exception for a close relative—if that’s what you are.”

Since Jack couldn’t show ID, maybe he could talk his way around this.

“If I wasn’t his son, why would I care?”

“You could be a lawyer or someone hired by a lawyer looking for an angle to sue.”

“Sue? What the hell for?”

“On behalf of someone injured in the accident.”

“But my father was the only one injured.”

Dr. Harris shrugged. “I don’t know that. I know nothing about the accident. I do know that people in these parts sue at the drop of a hat. They’re caught up in some sort of lottery mentality. Malpractice insurance is through the roof. People may not be able to figure out a presidential ballot but they damn sure know what lawyer to call if they stub a toe.”

He could see Dr. Harris was getting steamed just talking about it.

“Look, I assure you I’m not a lawyer. I can’t even remember the last time I spoke to one—that is, if you don’t count my brother who’s a judge in Philadelphia.”

Maybe that’ll mollify him, Jack thought.

It didn’t.

“On the other hand,” Dr. Harris said, “you could be a con man looking to pull some kind of slimy scam.”

“Like what?” Jack was interested in hearing this.

He shrugged. “I don’t know, but Florida’s got more con men per square mile than any other state in the union.”

“I’m not a con man”—at least not today—“and I’m concerned about my father. In fact, you’ve got me worried now. What’s wrong with him that you won’t tell me? What are you hiding?”

“Not a thing.” Dr. Harris wiggled the fingers on his still outstretched hand. “We’re wasting time. Just show me some ID and I’ll tell you what I know.”

Shit.

“I don’t have it with me. I left it at my father’s place.”

Dr. Harris’s features hardened. He shook his head and stood up. “Then I’m afraid I can’t do anything for you.” He hit a buzzer. “I’ll have the nurse show you out.” “All right,” Jack said, rising. “But will you at least call Dr. Huerta and tell her what you know?”

Dr. Harris obviously hadn’t expected that one.

“I…well, of course. I can do that. I’ll call her this afternoon.”

As frustrated and worried as he was, Jack had to respect this guy’s ethics. He forced a smile and thrust out his hand.

“Thanks. Nice to meet you, doc. You could be classified as a real pain in the ass, but I’m glad my dad has someone like you looking after his privacy. My doc at home is the same way.”

Of course, Doc Hargus was a different case. His license to practice had been pulled, so no one was supposed to know he even had patients.

Jack didn’t wait for the nurse. He left the thoroughly befuddled Charles Harris, MD behind and headed for the clinic exit.

Along the way he paid close attention to the windows and the walls—especially the upper corners near the ceiling—and the door frame as he stepped through it. No alarm contacts or release buttons, no motion detectors.

Good.

10

“Is it workin’?” Luke said. “Can you see?”

Semelee sat on a bench in the galley of the Bull-ship. Some of the clan was in town, beggin’, while others was ashore, dozin’ in the shade. She and Luke were the only ones aboard. She wished he’d get away and stop hangin’ over her shoulder and leave her be. But his heart was in the right place and so she bit her lip and kept her voice low.

“Just give me a minute here, Luke,” she said as she adjusted her one remaining shell over her right eye. “Just give me a little space so’s I can see if I can get this to work.”

It was so different with only one shell. With two she could focus right in. With one…

With only one eye-shell she could still get into the heads of higher forms like Dora, but the lower forms…they were hard even with two. They didn’t have much goin’ for them brainwise, and that meant she had to concentrate all the harder. If only she had that other shell.

“I could take a few of the guys and hop the fence and watch him ourselfs. We—”

“Just hesh up, will you? I think I’m gettin’ it.”

“Yeah?”

She could hear the hope, the excitement in his voice.

She didn’t see any way she or one of her clansmen could sneak into the hospital to hunt down that other eye-shell, but if she could keep an eye on the old guy’s son, the special one who’d been sent to her, maybe she’d find out if he had it.

But she had to get control here.

Control…back in her teens she’d thought her power was limited to only seein’ through a critter’s eyes, but she soon learned that was just part of the story. She found out in her junior year when Suzie Lefferts paid her a visit on the beach.

Semelee had been comin’ down to the ocean almost every day, except for the rainy ones, to put on her eye-shells and fly, soar, and dive with the flocks, or swim and dart through the depths with the schools. She could even get into a crab and crawl along the sandy bottom. These was the only times she felt truly alive…truly free…like she belonged.

The sudden sound of a too-familiar voice behind her jarred her back to the beach.

“So this is where you spend all your time.”

Suzie must have realized that she was no longer getting to Semelee, that her taunts and tiny tortures weren’t having their usual effect. So she’d followed her to see why.

“I thought you might’ve had a new boyfriend or something,” Suzie said, “but all you do is sit here with those stupid shells over your eyes. You were always a loser, Semelee, but now you’ve totally lost it.”

When Semelee didn’t even remove the shells from her eyes or bother to reply, Suzie flew into a rage. She grabbed the shells and put them over her own eyes.

“What is it with these things anyway?”

Oh, no! She’d see! She’d know!

But Suzie mustn’t’ve seen anything. She called them junk and tossed them toward the surf.

Terrified they might wash out to sea, Semelee screamed and ran down to the tide’s edge. She found what she thought was them—they were freshwater clamshells after all—but wasn’t sure. As Suzie walked up the dune laughing, Semelee wanted to choke her, but she couldn’t go after her, not until she made sure she had the right shells…to see if they still worked…

They did. She put them on and there she was, glidin’ high over the beach, watching Suzie strutting toward her car. The bitch!

Suddenly she was divin’ toward Suzie, beak open, screechin’. She plowed into the back of her neck, staggerin’ the bitch. And then she was peckin’ at her head, cuttin’ her scalp and tearin’ out her teased blond hair in chunks.

Semelee was so surprised she dropped her shells. She watched the squawkin’ gull leave Suzie’s head and flap away while Suzie ran screamin’ for her car. The truth smacked Semelee right between the eyes then: She couldn’t just get inside things and look through their eyes, she could control them, make them do what she wanted.

This cool feelin’ of power surged through her. She wasn’t just a tiny bit special, she was really special.

But was she all that special with only one shell?

She clapped a hand over her left eye and focused all her will, all her concentration through her right. Something was coming into focus. A blade of grass, dry and brown, loomed huge in her vision, like the trunk of a tree.

“I’m there!” she cried. “I got one. Now I got to get another.”

And another after that, and another, and another…

This was going to take time and effort. Lots of effort.

“I got to spread myself around the old guy’s house and get in if I can.”

“You really think he has it?”

“Don’t know. But I’m gonna do my damnedest to find out.”

“And if he got it, then what?”

“We ain’t come to that bridge yet, Luke. When we do, we’ll figure somethin’ out.”

And maybe in the meantime I’ll just test this guy’s inner stuff, she thought. See if he’s worthy of me.

11

Jack’s head was spinning. Not from the wine he’d been drinking but from this damn game he was trying to learn.

He’d spent the latter part of the afternoon in his father’s hospital room with Anya—and Oyv, of course. No change in Dad’s condition—still the same random, involuntary movements and incomprehensible sounds. He’d been hoping to see Dr. Huerta and find out if Dr. Harris had contacted her. He figured he might be able to get her to tell him what the doc was hiding about his father’s pre-accident condition.

But she didn’t show, and finally he drove Anya and Oyv back to Gateways. She didn’t let up on his joining her for a drink, so after a shower and a call to Gia to reassure himself that she, Vicky, and the baby were fine, he ambled next door.

He found Anya outside on her front lawn, cigarette in one hand, wineglass in the other, reclining face up on a chaise lounge next to a big liter-and-a-half bottle of red wine chilling in an ice bucket. She wore huge sunglasses with turquoise frames. Her flat breasts were encased in a pink halter top over skimpy black shorts. She’d coated the exposed areas of her wrinkled, leathery brown skin with some sort of sun-tanning oil and lay marinating in the sun.

Oyv was curled up next to her. He barked once when Jack stepped across the line of dry brown grass onto Anya’s lush green lawn, then settled down again.