Gateways

“I started without you, hon,” she said. “Pull up a chair and pour yourself a glass.”

“Chilled red wine,” Jack said. “I don’t think I’ve ever had that.”

“Don’t tell me you’re a wine snob.”

Jack shook his head. “A bit of a beer snob, maybe, but I wouldn’t know a cabernet from a merlot without the label.”

“Glad to hear it. You’ve probably had people tell you that the only wine you should drink cold is white or blush or rosé. Trust me, kiddo, they’re talking out their tuchuses. This is a Côtes du Rhone. That’s French, by the way.”

“Really?”

“You probably expect an old broad like me to be a whiskey sour or Manhattan drinker, but as far as I’m concerned, on a hot summer day like this, a glass of chilled Côtes du Rhone or Beaujolais hits the spot. Try it and see if you like it. If you don’t, sorry, but that’s what we serve at Casa Mundy. You want beer, you’ll have to bring your own. I’m not into that fizzy hops-and-malt drek.”

So Jack poured himself a glass and damn if it didn’t, as Anya had said, hit the spot.

“Not bad.”

He pulled up a chaise lounge on the other side of the table with the ice bucket.

“How come you’re the only one visiting my father? Doesn’t he have any other friends?”

“He has lots. But they probably don’t know. I think I’m the only one who knows, and I don’t talk to many people.”

“How did you find out?”

“When I saw his car was missing Tuesday morning, I called the police and asked if there’d been any serious accidents. They sounded pretty suspicious until I told them why I was calling. They told me about your father so I went right over to the hospital to see.”

“Shouldn’t you let people know?”

“Why? So they can send dead flowers and come in and stare at him? Tom wouldn’t want that.”

No, he wouldn’t. Jack guessed she did know his father after all.

Together they sat and sipped and watched the sun settle in the west.

“Maybe we’d better go in,” Jack said as it sank below the distant treetops. He checked his watch. 7:10. “The Wehrmacht mosquito squadrons will be launching soon.” “So?”

“You like mosquito bites?”

“You like to deny those poor females their sustenance?”

“Females?”

“Only the female mosquito bites. The males suck nectar.”

“Male or female, I’m not keen on being a mosquito buffet.”

She waved a hand at him. “Not to worry. They won’t bother you here.”

“Why not?”

“Because I won’t let them.”

Ooookay, lady, Jack thought. If that’s what you want to believe.

But damn if they didn’t sit there well into the dusk without a single mosquito bite.

When the magnum of Côtes du Rhone was done, Anya draped a fuchsia blouse over her shoulders, rose, and faced him.

“Come on inside, hon. I’ll fix you dinner.”

Not having a better offer, Jack accepted.

He stopped short as he crossed the threshold. He’d thought the outside was lush, but inside was a mini jungle of potted plants and trees lining the perimeter and clustered here and there on the floor, with vines growing among them and climbing the walls. He could identify a ficus here, a bird of paradise and a rubber plant there, but the rest were a mystery: potted palms of all sorts—were those baby bananas on the big one in the corner?—and smaller plants with leaves mixing reds and yellows and even silver on a couple. Reminded Jack of one of the plant shops on Sixth Avenue.

Anya turned to him and said, “I’m going to change into something more appropriate for dinner.”

“What’s wrong with what you’re wearing?”

“I want something more haute couture,” she said with a wink.

“Not necessary, but this is your party…”

As she threaded her way through the plants toward the master bedroom, Jack decided to take a look around. Oyv, curled like a cat on a worn yellow easy chair, watched him with his big dark eyes as he wandered the front room.

He realized that her layout was the mirror image of his father’s—whatever was on the right here, was on the left there. But where his father’s walls sported some artwork—mostly south Florida beachscapes—and some photos, Anya’s walls were bare except for the vines. Not a shell, not a fishnet, not a knick knack. Nada.

She’d said she had no family. Jack guessed she was right. But how about a painting of something ? Even Elvis or a tiger on black velvet would say something about her.

And the furniture…a nondescript mishmash. Jack knew his talents for interior décor were on a par with his ability to fly a 747, but this stuff looked like secondhand junk. Fine if Any a didn’t care, but he was struck by the lack of personality. He’d been in motel rooms with more personal touches than this. It was as if she lived in a vacuum.

Except for the plants. Maybe they were her personal statement. Her family. Her children.

Anya reentered and struck a pose with one arm held aloft. “What do you think?”

She’d wrapped herself in some sort of psychedelic kimono which made her skinny figure seem even thinner. She looked like a Rainbow Pop that had been left out in the sun too long.

“Woo-woo,” Jack said.

It was the best he could do on such short notice.

Dinner turned out to be as idiosyncratic as the chef. She mixed up a wok of walnuts, peanuts, peas, jalapeño peppers, and corn seasoned with, among other things, ashes falling from her ever-present cigarette, all rolled up in big flour tortillas. Despite Jack’s initial reservations, the mélange proved very tasty.

“Can I hazard a guess that you’re a vegetarian?” he said.

They were into their second magnum of Côtes du Rhone. Anya kept refilling his glass, and Jack noticed that she was putting away two or three glasses to every one he had, but showing no effects.

Anya shook her head. “Heavens, no. I don’t eat vegetables at all. Only fruits and seeds.”

“There’s corn in this,” Jack said around a mouthful. “Corn’s a vegetable.”

“Sorry, no. It’s a fruit, just like the tomato.”

“Oh. Right.” He remembered hearing that somewhere. “Well, how about the peas?”

“Peas are seeds—legumes. Nuts are seeds too.”

“No lettuce, no broccoli—?”

“No. Those require killing the plant. I don’t approve of killing. I eat only what a plant intends to discard.”

“What about Oyv?” He glanced at the little Chihuahua chowing down on something in his bowl. “He needs meat.”

“He does perfectly well on soy burgers. Loves them, in fact.”

Poor puppy.

“So I guess if I stop by with a craving for a bacon cheeseburger—”

“You can just keep on going, hon. There’s a Wendy’s not too far down the road toward town.”

Gia would be right at home here, Jack thought. She wasn’t a vegan or anything, but she’d stopped eating meat.

Whatever. This dish was delicious. Jack wound up having four burritofuls.

He helped clear the dishes, then Anya brought out the mahjongg tiles, saying, “Come, I’ll teach you.”

“Oh, I don’t know…”

“Don’t be afraid. It’s easy.”

She lied.

Mahjongg was a four-person game played with illustrated tiles, but Anya was teaching him a two-player variant. The images on the tiles swam before his eyes—circles, bamboo stalks, ideograms that were supposed to represent dragons or the four winds—while terms such as chow and pong and chong searched for purchase in his brain. He didn’t have any references for this stuff. Why couldn’t the tiles have spades and hearts or jacks and queens and kings?

The constant stream of smoke from the chimney that was Anya didn’t help. Neither did her plants. They seemed to be watching the game, like a gaggle of curious spectators crowding around a high-stakes poker table in Las Vegas. One strand of vine with broad green and yellow leaves kept falling off a palm frond and draping across his shoulder. Jack would put it back, but it wouldn’t stay up.

“That’s Esmeralda,” Anya said.

“Who?” Jack replied, thinking she was referring to some new tile or rule in the game.

“The gold-net honeysuckle behind you.” She smiled. “I think she likes you.”

“I’m not fond of clingy women,” he said, reaching once again to remove the vine from his shoulder. But when he saw Anya’s frown he changed his mind and let it stay where it was. “But in this case I’ll make an exception.”

She smiled and Jack thought, Sweet lady, but nut so, nut so, nut so.

In addition to the green, leafy distractions, all the wine he’d consumed wasn’t exactly helping his learning curve. Anya lifted the bottle—she’d opened a third magnum—to give him a refill. Jack put his hand over his glass.

“I’m flagging myself.”

“Don’t be silly, hon. It’s not as if you have to drive home.”

“I have something I want to do tonight.”

“Oh? And that would be…?”

“Just getting some answers to a few questions.”

“Answers are a good thing,” she said. Her voice was clear, her hand steady as she refilled her glass almost to the rim. No doubt about it: The woman had a hollow leg. “Just make sure you’re asking the right questions.”

12

Even in his slightly inebriated state, Jack had no trouble entering the clinic. All it took was a flat-head screwdriver from his father’s toolbox to pop the window lock and he was in.

He’d managed to extricate himself gracefully from the mahjongg lesson with a promise to return for another real soon. He wasn’t big into board games, although he’d played Risk a lot as a kid. He liked video games, though. Not so much the first-person shooters that were mostly reflexes; he did well in those but preferred role-playing games that involved strategy. He liked trying to outwit the designers.

After leaving Anya’s he’d gone back to his father’s place and doused himself with a mosquito repellent spray he’d found on a shelf with the tennis racquets and balls. Then he’d walked around some to clear his head and get the lay of the land. Here it was 9:30 and no one was out. This was good. An occasional car drove by but he’d duck into the bushes as soon as he saw its lights. One set of lights had turned out to be a cruising security patrol jeep.

A couple of times he’d stayed in the bushes longer than he had to because of the faint feeling that he was being watched. He couldn’t find a trace of anyone following him, though, and wrote it off to his being on unfamiliar ground.

He’d approached the clinic building from the rear, where there was less light, and held his breath as he lifted the window, ready to run in case it was armed with an alarm system he hadn’t spotted. But nothing sounded.

Made sense when he thought about it. Why spring for the extra expense of alarming all the buildings when you had a real live security force manning the gates and patrolling the streets?

He crawled through, closed the window behind him, and began searching about. He used the penlight he’d found in his father’s top drawer, flicking it on and off as he moved. He found the small file room to the right of the receptionist area. He’d been hoping it would be windowless, but it wasn’t, so he had to search the files with his penlight.

Again that feeling of being watched, but he was the only one here. He sneaked to the window but saw no one outside.

A few minutes later he found his father’s slim chart. Holding it in his hand, he hesitated before opening it. What was the bad news Dr. Harris had been hiding? He knew the question—did he want the answer?

Again, the matter of his father’s privacy. The information inside could be pretty intimate. Did he have a right to peek this far into the man’s life?

Probably not. But the guy was in a coma, and Jack needed answers.

Taking a breath, he opened the file and flipped through it. He found two pages of lab test results. He didn’t know what all these numbers meant but noted that the “Abnormal” column was blank on both sheets. Good enough. An EKG had a typewritten reading at its top: “Normal resting EKG.” Even better.

But hadn’t Dr. Huerta said something about his father developing an abnormal rhythm in the hospital? Maybe from the stress of the injuries. Everyone had heard of the patient with the normal EKG who has a heart attack on the way out of the doctor’s office.

He checked the handwritten notes but couldn’t read much of Dr. Harris’s scribbling. The last entry was fairly legible though.

Reviewed labs w pt. All WNL. Final assess: excellent health.

Excellent health. Well, that was a relief.

But damn it, doc, why couldn’t you have just said so in the first place? Would have saved me a whole lot of trouble.

13

Jack fished the house key out of his pocket as he walked down the slope toward his father’s place. The good news was that the man was in excellent health. The bad news was that Jack didn’t know one damn thing more than he had when he woke up this morning.

Nearing the house, he passed a beat-up old rustbucket Honda Civic parked in the deep shadows on the grass adjacent to the cul-de-sac. Hadn’t been there when he passed by before.

On alert now, Jack slowed his pace. Before rounding the rear corner of the house, he peeked first. He froze when he saw the silhouette of someone squatting beside one of the trees between his house and Anya’s. Was this who’d been watching him?

Dropping into a crouch he hugged the jalousied back porch and crept toward the figure. The wash of light from the parking area of the cul-de-sac cast long shadows across the space, but not enough light for Jack to make out his features. Could be one of those weird-looking characters from the pickup truck this morning.

Then the figure flicked a flashlight off and on—only for a second, but that was enough for Jack to identify him.

He straightened and walked up behind him.

“What’s up, Carl?”

The man jumped and let out a little yelp. He wore a lightweight, long-sleeved camouflage suit—if nothing else, it protected him from mosquitoes—but a screwdriver instead of a hand protruded from the right cuff. He looked up at Jack and held his left hand over his heart.

“Oh, it’s you. Tom’s son…” He seemed to be fumbling for the name.

“Jack.”

“Right. Jack. Boy, I gotta tell you, Jack, you shouldn’t come up on a body like that. You just bout scared the life outta me.”

Jack noticed something metallic with a silver finish on the grass before Carl. He couldn’t tell what it was, but he knew it was too bulky to be a gun.

“I’ve found that people tend to get jumpy when they’re doing something they shouldn’t. You doing something you shouldn’t, Carl?”

Still in a squat, Carl looked away. “Well, yeah, I guess so. Sorta. But not really.”

Now there’s a clear-cut answer, Jack thought.

“And what would that be?” When Carl hesitated Jack said, “Share, Carl. It’s good to share.”

“Oh, all right. Might as well tell you since you caught me in the act.” He looked up at Jack. “I’m doin’ a job for Dr. Dengrove.”

“Who’s he? Your therapist?”

“Naw. He lives three houses back, near the beginnin’ of the cul-de-sac. He wants me to catch Miss Mundy in the act of waterin’ her stuff and all.”

“Why would he want to do that?”

“Because it’s makin’ him crazy that his grass and his flowers is all dead and wilty while Miss Mundy’s is all green and growin’ like a jungle.”

“So you’re supposed to hang out here all night and catch her in the act?”

Carl nodded. “Sorta. He’s been after me for weeks, offering me money to do it, but I keep tellin’ him no.”

“Because you don’t want to get Miss Mundy in any trouble, right?”

“Well, yeah, there’s that, but also on account of how I gotta be up bright an early ever mornin’ for my job. That don’t stop him from offerin’ me more money, though. But I just kept on tellin’ him no.”

“‘Kept’?” Jack said. “I guess your being here tonight means he made you an offer you couldn’t refuse.”

“In a way, yeah.” He motioned Jack down. “Here. Take a look at this.”

Jack glanced around to see If anyone else was lurking about. He sensed Carl was exactly what he seemed to be: just a cracker working as a groundsman. But still…after having one of his tires slashed by another cracker this morning, he wasn’t taking any chances.

It looked like they were alone out here, so Jack squatted beside Carl.

“What’ve you got?”

“Somethin’ really cool.” He picked up the metal object and held it toward Jack. “Dr. Dengrove lent it to me. Ain’t it somethin’?”

Jack took it and turned it over in his hands. A digital minicam. He noticed two slim wires trailing from the casing.

“What do you think you’re going to do with this?”

“Get pictures. Dr. Dengrove wants me to get a movie of Miss Mundy water in her stuff.”

Jack shook his head. “In this light, Carl, I’m afraid all you’re going to get is a dark screen.”

“Nuh-uh. Nuh-uh.” Jack detected a certain note of nyah-nyah glee in Carl’s tone as he reached over and pressed a button above the camera’s pistol-grip handle. “Take a look.”

Jack raised the viewfinder to his eye and blinked as the walls of Anya’s house and the grass and plants surrounding it leaped into view.

“Whoa,” he said. “A night-vision camera.”

He could make out the palms and the larger flowers—not the colors, of course, because everything was either green or black, just the shapes—along with her array of crazy lawn ornaments. As he swung the view past a lighted window the image flared, losing all detail. As he kept moving, the light from the window left a wavering smear across the tiny screen that quickly faded, allowing him to make out details again.

“Yeah,” Carl said. “Almost like I’m runnin’ a Big Brother show, dontcha think?”

“I suppose.”

Jack had never watched a single episode. His own life was more interesting than any reality-TV show. He couldn’t resist tuning into The Anna Nicole Show now and again, but that couldn’t be classified as reality. At least he hoped not.

“These don’t come cheap,” he said as he lowered the camera and turned it over in his hands. “What’s this Dr. Dengrove doing with it?”

“Ask me, I think he bought it just so’s he can catch Miss Mundy in the act. He don’t seem to be hurtin’ none for bucks, but he’s sure hurtin’ bad for a green lawn.” He snorted a laugh at this little turn of phrase. “Hurtin’ so bad he’s near about crazy.”

“Crazy enough to drop a bundle on a night-vision video camera and hire you to run it?”

Carl grinned. “You betcha.”

Jack shook his head. Some people. “I think Dr. Dengrove should get a life.”

“Mostly I think he eats. You should see the gut and butt on him—real pan-o-ramic.”

“Pano—?”

“You know.” He spread his arms. “Like you told me: wide.”

A panoramic butt…Jack opened his mouth, then shut it again. Let it ride.

“He’s like most of the folks here, I guess. They got too much time on their hands so they worry about all the wrong things. That’s why I liked your daddy so much—”

“Like, Carl. He’s still alive, so you can still like him.”

“Oh, yeah. Right. Well, anyway, he didn’t just sit around and complain. He kept busy. Always seemed to have somethin’ to do, someplace to go.”

“Speaking of going place s…the accident happened out on a swamp road in the dead of night. You have any idea what he was doing out there?”

Jack couldn’t make out Carl’s expression but saw him shake his head.

“Nope. I go home at night and I stay there.”

“Where’s home?”

“Got me a real nice little trailer in a park just south of town. Me and the guy next door share a satellite dish. For bout thirty bucks a month each we got us a zillion channels. No reason to go out. And even if there was, you wouldn’t catch me out in the Glades at night. I told you: It’s angry these days.”

“Right. You did. But you’re out tonight—nice camo suit, by the way.”

“These here are my jammies.”

“They’re you, Carl. So the plan is, you’re going to sit out here all night and wait for Miss Mundy to show?”

“Nup. Don’t hafta. At first I figured I’d just set the camera up and let her run, but that wasn’t going to work. Even if the battery would last, the memory wouldn’t. But then I came up with this real smart idea to solve all my problems. Look it here.”

He held up a little circuit board.

“What’s that do?”

“It’s a motion detector.”

This Carl was full of surprises. “Did Dr. Dengrove give you that too?”

“Nup. Got it myself. Took it out of a singin’ fish.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack said, poking a finger in his right ear. “I thought you just said you took it out of a singing fish.”

“That’s right. That’s what I did. Actually, I took it out of the board the fish sits on.”

“You’re losing me.”

“Big Mouth Billy Bass…the singin’ fish. He bends out from the board and sings ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy,’ and some other song I never heard before.”

“Oh, right. I know what you’re talking about.”

Jack had seen one in a store once and couldn’t imagine why anyone would want one. But a clerk had told him he couldn’t keep them in stock.

“Course you do. I bought mine years ago. Was one of the first around here to get one. Hung it by my front door and anytime someone came in it started singin’. Pretty soon everyone in the trailer park had one, but I was first.” He shook his head. “Haven’t used it much lately, though. Got pretty tired of havin’ to listen to those same two songs every time I walked by. So I let the batteries run out. But just the other night I remembered that it had a motion detector inside that set it off every time you passed.” He waved the circuit board. “And here it is.”

“I get it,” Jack said. “You’re going to attach the motion detector to the camera, and when Anya comes out to water, you’ll catch her.”

“That’s the plan. I made sure I popped off the speaker, though.” He chuckled. “Wouldn’t do to have that fish voice start singin’ ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ in the middle of the night, now would it.”

“I guess not. You think this’ll work?”

“Oh, it works. I checked it out at home.”

“You really think you’ll catch her?” Jack didn’t like the idea of Anya getting in trouble.

“Nup. But don’t tell Dr. Dengrove that, and don’t you go tellin’ her I’m doin’ this. I don’t want her mad at me.”

“And you also don’t want her tipped off that she’s being watched.” He nudged Carl with his elbow. “Won’t you feel bad if you get her in trouble?”

“I would, cept that’s not gonna happen. Like I told Dr. Dengrove, all this work’s gonna be for nothin’. We ain’t never gonna catch Miss Mundy waterin’.”

“Why not?”

“Because she don’t. All she does is sit and watch TV all night. Just like everbody else. Reruns of either Matlock or Golden Girls. That and the Weather Channel’s all anybody round here ever seems to watch.” He licked his lips. “But there’s somethin’ else.”

“What?”

“She looks dead when she’s watchin’ TV.”

“How do you know?”

“I peeked in last night while I was settin’ up, and I thought she was dead. I seen my share of dead folks—I’m the one found Mr. Bass dead in a chair on his front porch awhile back, and Miss Mundy looked just like him. Boy, was I glad to see her up and about this mornin’.”

“Didn’t you call anyone?”

“Hey, I wasn’t supposed to be there. And if she was as gone as she looked, there wasn’t nothin’ nobody could do anyhow. Tonight I looked in again, just a few minutes ago, and it was the same thing. Gwon. Look for yourself.”

Jack shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“Gwon. See if I ain’t lyin’. It’s creepy, I tell you.”

The last thing Jack needed was to get caught acting like a Peeping Tom, but his curiosity was piqued. He crept up to the lighted window that looked in on the front room and peeked through the lower right corner.

Still in her kimono, Anya lay back in her recliner, mouth slack, eyes half open and staring straight ahead. A Law and Order episode was playing—Jack recognized the music—but Anya wasn’t watching it. Her gaze was fixed on a spot somewhere above the TV. Oyv was stretched across her lap, looking equally dead.

Jack watched her for signs of breathing but she was still as, well, death. His comatose father showed more signs of life. Jack straightened and was about to head around front to knock on her door, when he saw her chest move. She took a breath. Oyv took a breath too, at exactly the same time. Just one each. Then they went dead still again.

Okay. So she was alive. Maybe it was all that wine—she must have put away three liters—that put her into such a deep sleep.

Shaking his head, he returned to where Carl waited.

“You weren’t kidding,” he said. “But I saw her breathe. She’s okay.” He put a hand on Carl’s shoulder. “But you haven’t explained how she can have such a healthy lawn without watering.”

“Magic,” Carl said, looking around as if someone besides Jack might be close enough to hear. “You may think I’m loco, but that’s the only explanation.”

Jack remembered Abe telling him about Occam’s razor earlier in the year. It went something like: the simplest, most direct explanation—the one that requires the fewest assumptions—is usually the right one. Magic required a lot of assumptions. Water didn’t.

“I like water better as an explanation.”

“Nuh-uh. Not when you look at where her green grass ends and the brown begins. It runs in a perfect line twenty feet from her house all the way around in a big circle. And when I say line, I mean it’s got sharp edges. I know, cause I cut it. I may not know much about lots a things, but I know you can’t water like that.”

Jack couldn’t see the line in the low light. He figured Carl was exaggerating. Had to be.

“I think it’s them doohickies she’s got all over her yard,” Carl said. “And that writin’ on her walls.”

“Writing?” Jack didn’t remember seeing anything on Anya’s walls.

“Yup. You can’t see it lookin’ at it reglar, but—here.” He handed Jack the camera again. “You look through that while I put my flashlight on. Now I’m only goin’ to put it on for a second so you look real hard.”

Jack peered through the viewfinder at the blank wall, avoiding the glare of the lighted window. A section of the wall lit as Carl’s flash beam hit it. And there, flaring to life, a collection of arcs and angles and squiggles, very much like the symbols on the homemade ornaments dotting her lawn.

And like the symbols he’d found behind his father’s headboard.

“Y’see ’em? Didja see ’em?”

“Yeah, Carl. I saw them.” But what did they mean? He’d never seen anything like them. On a hunch, Jack did a one-eighty turn. “Flash that on my father’s place, will you?”

When Carl complied, the same symbols appeared.

Dumfounded, Jack lowered the camera. “He’s got them too.”

“Hmmm,” Carl said. “They sure ain’t doin’ nothin’ for his lawn. Wonder what they’s for?”

“Let’s do a little research,” Jack said.

With Carl in tow, Jack used the same procedure to check out three other nearby houses, but their walls were blank.

Returning to Carl’s original spot, he handed back the camera. That feeling of being watched was back and stronger than ever. He scanned the area and spotted a bunch of dead leaves scattered across the remains of his father’s lawn. Hadn’t noticed them before. Not unexpected, though. He’d seen trees drop leaves in a hot dry spell.

While Carl attached the motion detector to the camera—still no sign of a right hand, just a screwdriver poking from the cuff—Jack turned toward Anya’s house.

He had to admit he was baffled. That strange old lady was the common factor here: She lived next door to his father…visited him in the hospital…the symbols on her house were also on his dad’s place. Jack knew his father hadn’t painted them on his hospital bed. Not while comatose. So that left Anya.

She must have painted them with some sort of clear lacquer so they’d be invisible. But what did they mean? And what did she think she was accomplishing with them?

Maybe he should just ask her. But then he’d have to explain how he knew.

He glanced around again and noticed even more leaves on the lawn. Their number had doubled or tripled since his last look. Where the hell were they coming from? They were small, maybe three inches long; light from the parking area glinted off their shiny, reddish brown surfaces. Odd…dead leaves usually lost their gloss.

Jack looked around for the source but couldn’t see any trees in the vicinity with that kind of leaf.

“There,” Carl said. Jack turned and saw him on his feet, dusting off his knees. He’d duct taped the camera to the slender trunk of a young palm. “All set.”

“Tell me something, Carl,” Jack said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “Where’d all those leaves come from?”

Carl was facing the light when he glanced past Jack. Jack saw his expression change from curiosity, to puzzlement, to shock. He turned and looked and knew his expression must be mirroring Carl’s.

No grass was visible. The leaves had multiplied till they now covered every square inch of the lawn.

“Those ain’t leaves,” Carl said in a hushed, awed tone. “Them’s palmettos!”

“What’s a palmetto?”

“A bug! A Florida roach!”

“You mean like a cockroach?”

“Yeah. But I can’t remember ever seein’ more’n half a dozen palmettos in one spot at the same time.”

Jack had encountered his share of cockroaches—couldn’t live in New York without seeing them—but never this size. These were cockroaches on steroids. His skin crawled. He wasn’t the squeamish type, but these were big, and there had to be thousands of them, all just a few feet away. If they started scuttling his way…

“What’re they doing here?” Jack said.

“Dunno. There ain’t nothin’ for them to eat on that lawn, that’s for sure.” He looked over his shoulder. “Tell you what I’m gonna do. My car’s parked in the shadows on the other side of your daddy’s place. I’m gonna head around the front of the house and get to it that way.”

“Why don’t you just shine your flashlight at them. Cockroaches hate light. Turn one on and they disappear.”

“Not Palmettos. Light don’t bother them ay-tall. They actually like the light.” He turned and took a step away. “Be back tomorrow.”

That step seemed to trigger the bugs. With a chittering whir of wings they took to the air in a cloud.

“They fly ?” Jack shouted as he started backing away. “Cockroaches don’t fly!”

“Palmettos do!” Carl broke into a run.

Jack felt a surge of fear and didn’t know why. They were just roaches; not as if they were going to eat him alive or anything. But his adrenaline was kicking in, pushing his heart rate up a few notches. He quickened his backpedal.

At that instant the churning mass of bugs turned as one and swept toward him in a swirling cloud. Jack whirled and dashed after Carl.

“Here they come!” he shouted.

Carl didn’t even turn his head; instead he put it down and upped his speed.

But neither stood a chance of outrunning the bugs. The palmettos were too fast. They swirled around Jack, engulfing him, clinging to his face, his arms, his hair, buzzing in his ears, scratching at his eyelids, wiggling their antennaed heads into his nostrils, digging at his lips. The clatter of their wings sounded like a million tiny hands applauding. He felt countless little nips all over his exposed skin. Were they biting him? Did they have teeth?

He swept a mass of them from his face but they poured back in on him. He couldn’t see and he was afraid to open his mouth to breathe—they might crawl down his throat. He tore them again from his face and stole a quick look ahead. The last thing he needed now was to run into a wall or tree trunk and knock himself silly.

He saw that he’d reached the corner of the house. Carl was still ahead, waving his arms wildly about, all but unrecognizable under a swarming mass of palmettos, but still maintaining a stumbling run. Jack cupped a hand over his mouth, took a quick, bug-free breath, and shouted.

“Carl! Forget the car! Go into the house!”

But Carl either didn’t hear the muffled advice or chose to ignore it. Jack had to close his eyes again against the storm of palmettos. He angled to his right—the front door was somewhere in that direction—and hoped he wouldn’t trip over one of the front porch chairs.

He slammed into a wall and heard some of the bugs crunch against the siding. He felt to his left, found the handle to the screen door, and pulled it open.

The front door—had he locked it? He hoped to hell not. This being a gated community and all, why would he bother? But he was a New Yorker, and New Yorkers never—

He fumbled around, found the knob, turned it, pushed it open, and leaped inside. As he moved he was trying to think of ways to kill the bugs that made it through the door with him, but then he realized that wouldn’t be necessary. They were peeling off of him at the threshold line, like vacuum wrap being stripped from a piece of meat. Jack stopped two feet inside the door and looked down at his arms, his clothes—not a single bug had made it in with him.

He turned and stared through the door as the screen banged shut. The palmettos were buzzing off in all directions, scattering like…like the leaves he’d first mistaken them for.

What the hell was going on here?

14

“Semelee! Semelee, answer me! Are you all right?”

Semelee opened her eyes and saw Luke’s big face and hulking form hangin’ before her. No…hangin’ above her. She shook her head, propped herself up on her elbows, and looked around.

“What happened?”

“You was us in the shell, had it over your eye, and you was smilin’ and laughin’ and then all of a sudden you yelled and fell back on the floor. What happened?”

Good question. Real good question. But it was startin’ to come back to her now.

She’d spotted the old man’s kid, the special one, outside his daddy’s house and followed him through palmetto eyes to one of the buildings in the old folks’ village. She’d been hopin’ he’d show her that he had her other eye-shell but he surprised her by breakin’ into the building. She tried to follow him inside but he closed the window too quick. She peeked through the windows and saw him lookin’ at some papers. She had no idea what they were and didn’t care. She was lookin’ for her eye-shell.

Pretty soon he was out again. She followed him back to the house where he met someone outside. She thought there was somethin’ familiar about the stranger but couldn’t place him.

It was about then that she’d started feelin’ the strain of controllin’ mindless little creatures like palmettos with just one eye-shell. She had to make somethin’ happen, get the special one into the house where she could have a look around for her eye-shell.

So she’d gathered as many as she could and attacked. She’d been havin’ a good time chasin’ him and seein’ what he was made of, and was gonna follow him into the house and give him a good scare—maybe have the bugs gather in the air and spell out somethin’ spooky—so he’d leave and let her search the place. But as she approached the front door she started feelin’ strange, a little sick even. And then when she tried to follow him inside it was like runnin’ into a wall. She was slammed back and things got a little fuzzy after that.

“It’s him,” she told Luke. “It’s him made me sick in the hospital room this mornin’.”

“How you know that?”

“Cause I felt the same way just now tryin’ to follow him into his daddy’s house.”

She’d sensed he was special, but she hadn’t known just how special.

“You think he’s got your other eye-shell then?”

“I’m willin’ to bet on it.”

“What’re we gonna do?”

“I don’t know.” She rolled over and buried her face in her arms. “Let me think on it.”

She had no experience in this sort of thing. Sometimes she wished she didn’t have to make all the decisions. She was only twenty-three. Wasn’t being special and having a destiny enough? Did she have to lead too?

And worse was realizing that the man, the special one, might not be here for her…the way she’d been stopped dead at his doorstep tonight made her suspect he might be against her.

People against her paid a price, a high one, for treatin her bad.

Suzie Lefferts found that out. In spades.

After Semelee had experimented with her control powers for a while, she decided to put them to the test. She chose prom night. No one had asked her to go, of course. Like, big surprise. And guess who Jesse Buckler asked: big-haired Suzie Lefferts.

So Semelee had sat in her bedroom—another thing she’d discovered was she didn’t have to be on the beach to fly with her birds—and got together a flock of big fat seagulls and followed Jesse’s car from Suzie’s house to the prom. When they was both out of the car, she arranged the gulls into a low circle. As each one got near them it let loose with a big load of bird shit. Suzie started screamin’ as the big white globs landed in her hair, on her dress. Same with Jesse. They both jumped back in the car and drove away. Toward home, most likely. Semelee was sure Suzie wasn’t goin’ into the prom lookin’ like that.

Semelee lay on her bed and near split her sides laughing. But she realized how a few of her gulls hadn’t done their thing yet, so she chased after the car, droppin’ big white splotches all over Jesse’s nice new wax job. He kept goin’ faster, trying to outrun them, but that wasn’t gonna happen. Then a particularly big glob landed on his windshield. She saw the wipers come on but they just smeared it all over the glass. That was when Jesse missed the curve and smashed into the utility pole. The two of them’d been in such a rush to get away from the bombardment that they never buckled up. Jesse wound up dead; Suzie survived but with a broke neck. Doctors said she’d never walk again.

Semelee had been shook up somethin’ terrible. She put her shells away, but only for a little while…she couldn’t stay away from them too long. But she used them only for flyin’ and swimmin’. She didn’t try to control no more critters.

Leastways not while she was still in Jacksonville.

But that was then. The now Semelee thought the then Semelee was a dork. Don’t make no sense to waste a special power. You don’t use it, you ain’t special no more. You’re just like everybody else.

Besides, people tend to get what they deserve.

Semelee lay on the deck a moment longer, till the stink of the floorboards—the spilled drink and bits of old food rubbed into them over the years—became too much. She climbed to her feet.

“Well?” Luke said. “You gotta plan?”

She told him the truth. “No. Not yet, anyways. I’ll figure something out.” She turned to him. “There was somebody with him tonight. Somebody I think I seen before.”

“Who?”

“If I knew that, I’d tell you his name. But I know I seen him. It’ll come to me.”

“Well, in the meantime we got unfinished business. That old man—”

“Yeah. We’re gonna have to finish him. That’s number one on the list.”

But how? She wished she knew.

“If his kid is standin’ in the way, I can take care of that. Me and Corley can go out and catch him alone and—”

“No! Don’t you touch him!”

“Why the hell not? He’s in the way, and he’s even makin’ you sick. He…” Luke squinted at her. “Hey. You ain’t sweet on him, are you?”

“Course not.” She couldn’t let on about the connection she felt between her and the special one. Luke might go off and do somethin’ really stupid. “But like I told you before, we ain’t killers. We do what needs to be done but we don’t go past that. This guy’s only protectin’ his kin. Can’t blame a body for that.”

…protectin’ his kin…

Of course. It wasn’t a matter of him fightin’ against her, he was simply doin’ a son’s duty. That thought gave Semelee a surge of hope. Suddenly she felt better.

“I can too blame him if he’s gettin’ in our way and makin’ you sick and knockin’ you to the floor!”

“Just don’t do anything unless I tell you, okay? Are you listenin’ to me, Luke? Nothin’ until I say so.”

Luke looked away. “Awright.”

Semelee didn’t know whether she could believe him or not. She knew Luke would do anything to protect her, whether she needed protectin’ or not. And that worried her.

15

After watching the cloud of palmettos disperse into the night, Jack slammed the door and ducked into the rear bedroom. He peered through the window in time to see a bug-free Carl getting into his old Honda and roaring off. Obviously the bugs had lost interest in Carl as well.

Jack rubbed his arms and face as he returned to the front room. He could still feel them crawling on him. What had made them attack like that? And what had made them quit just as suddenly?

What was happening around here? Odd ornaments on lawns and behind beds, invisible symbols painted on walls, flying killer cockroaches…what had he stepped into? It didn’t smell of the Otherness, but that didn’t mean the Otherness wasn’t lurking behind these weird goings on.

Bigger question: Where did Anya fit in? She was involved, no way around it. Whether peripherally or centrally, he couldn’t say. But she seemed to be on his father’s side, and that gave him a little comfort. Very little. If She weren’t dead to the world in her recliner, he might go over and ask her for an explanation.

And say what? I was just attacked by palmetto bugs. Know anything about that?

Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. He was pretty sure she didn’t cause it. But at the very least she could explain the symbols on her house and his father’s, and how they’d got there.

Jack decided to let it go until tomorrow.

He paced the front room a couple of times. He was still feeling the after-buzz of the bug-induced adrenaline surge. It had burned away the alcohol from the wine and he was thirsty. Right now he needed a beer.

He grabbed a couple from the fridge—getting low; he’d have to pick up some tomorrow—and settled himself in front of the TV. After listening to the latest on T. S. Elvis, now drifting south in the Gulf and threatening to become a hurricane, he surfed around until he chanced upon his favorite Woody Allen film, Zelig, playing on TCM. He always envied Zelig’s talent for blending in with any group; it would be so handy in Jack’s fix-it business back home.

He sat and watched with the lights on. He wasn’t about to let any bugs sneak up on him.

Thursday

1

A soft clattering noise woke Jack. He lifted his head from the pillow on the guest room bed and squinted at the clock. The red LED numbers swam for a second, then came into sharp focus: 8:02.

He rolled out of bed and went to the window for a peek outside. There he was: Carl, dressed in the same shirt and work pants as yesterday, but this morning a set of electric hedge clippers protruded from his right sleeve as he trimmed away at dry-looking bushes that didn’t need it.

Jack pulled on a pair of shorts from his open gym bag on the floor and went outside.

Carl Scissor hands looked up and jumped at Jack’s approach. He shook his head and stopped the clippers.

“Mornin’,” he said. “Man, that gang of palmettos was somethin’ last night, wasn’t it. Never seen nothin’ like that in all my born days. Never heard of it neither. How’d you finally do with them?”

“Soon as I got inside the house they just flew off. How about you?”

“Same. I was halfway to my car when they suddenly lost interest. Pretty weird, huh?”

“Very weird.”

“I had trouble sleepin’. I kept feelin’ like they was still on me.” He shivered inside his flannel shirt. “Gives me the willies just thinkin’ about it. And then my car wouldn’t start this mornin’. My luck’s runnin’ pretty bad and pan-o-ramic these days.”

Jack glanced over to where Carl had set up his camera last night. The spot was empty now.

“How did the video surveillance go?”

Carl shook his head. “Nada. I come by real early this mornin’ to pick it up, you know, before anyone else found it.” He winked and jerked his thumb at a tattered backpack sitting among his gardening tools. “I quick-checked the playback but the only thing on it was me bendin’ over it and picking it up. Least ways I know the motion detector’s workin’. Told Dr. Dengrove and he wasn’t too happy, but wants me to try again tonight.”

“You going to?”

“Sure.” He grinned. “He wants to keep payin’ me, I’ll keep settin’ up the camera. It’s his money, and I could sure use some of it.”

“Fine, as long as you don’t catch Miss Mundy doing anything that’ll cause her trouble.”

“Told you: no worry bout that.”

“Speaking of Miss Mundy…” Jack turned and looked at Anya’s place. No signs of life there. Considering how she looked last night…“maybe I should go over and see how she’s doing.”

“Oh, she’s doin’ fine. She was up bright and early this mornin’, waitin’ for a cab. It picked her up a little before seven.”

“Oh? Well, it’s good to know she’s all right.”

Jack wondered where she’d be going at that hour. Hardly anything open then except the convenience stores.

The idea of a convenience store got him thinking about coffee. He needed a couple of cups, but he didn’t feature the idea of winding all through Gateways twice, then back and forth through the security gates, and hunting down a store in between. Oh, for the Upper West Side where he could walk around the corner and have his choice of coffee spots.

He remembered his father had always been a big coffee drinker. He’d seen a can in the refrigerator.

“I’m going to make some coffee,” he told Carl. “Want some?”

Carl shook his head. “Had some at home. Besides, I gotta keep lookin’ busy otherwise they’ll lay me off. Not a lotta gardenin’ to do when nothin’s growin’.”

As Jack turned away he glanced again at the clippers protruding from Carl’s right sleeve. What was holding them? Maybe he didn’t want to know.

2

Back inside Jack pulled the can of coffee from the fridge. Brown Gold—“100% Colombian Coffee.” Sounded good. But he couldn’t find a coffee pot. Just a miniature French press. Jack remembered seeing a big version of this in a restaurant where he once waited tables, but had never worked one.

And he needed coffee. Now.

He flipped on his father’s computer, did a Google search for “French press,” sifted through sites about French newspapers and other sites wanting to sell him a press until he found one telling how to use one: two scoops of coffee into a small press, followed by near-boiling water at about 195—200 degrees—were they kidding? Stir after one minute. After a total of three minutes, put on the cap and push the plunger to the bottom.

Jack followed the directions using boiling water—like he was going to check the temperature, right?—and finally had his coffee. A damn good cup of coffee, he admitted, but who had time for all this rigamarole every time you wanted some?

Retired people, that’s who. And his father was one of them.

He flipped on the Weather Channel while he was waiting the required three minutes and learned that Elvis was still drifting south in the Gulf. Its sustained winds had reached seventy-eight miles per hour. That meant it had graduated from a tropical storm to a Category I hurricane. Whoopee.

Coffee in hand, he searched through the front-room desk until he found a couple of Florida maps. One was a roadmap of the state, but the other was Dade County only. That was the one he needed.

He found Pemberton Road and followed it till it intersected with South Road…the site of the accident. Out in the boonies. Way out.

Time for a road trip.

He was halfway through refolding the map—these things never wanted to go back to their original state—when a knock on the front door interrupted him. He found Anya, dressed in a bright red-and-yellow house dress, standing outside with Oyv cradled in her arms.

“Good morning,” she said. Hot, steamy air flowed around her.

Jack motioned her inside. “Come on in where it’s cool. If you’ve got half an hour, I can make you a cup of coffee.”

She shook her head as she stepped in. “No thanks, hon.”

“Sure? It’s made from beans.” He winked at her. “And on the label it says that no plants were killed during the making of Brown Gold coffee.”

She winked back. “I’ll have to try some another time.” She gestured to the map in Jack’s hand. “Planning a trip?”

“Yeah. Out to where my father got hurt.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“That’s not necessary.” Jack had planned to do a little aimless reconnoitering after checking out the intersection and didn’t know if he wanted an old lady and a yip-yip dog along.

“No trouble at all,” she told him. “Besides, you’re a newcomer and I’ve lived around here awhile. I can keep you from getting lost.”

Well…on that score, maybe she’d be more of a help than a hindrance.

“Okay. Thanks. But I want to stop at the hospital and check up on my father before we head out to the swamps.”

“That can wait till you get back,” she told him. “I was just there.”

“You were?” He was touched by her devotion. “That’s awfully nice of you. How was he?”

“When I left he was just the same as yesterday and the day before.”

“No progress?” Bummer. “How long can this go on?”

“Not much longer, hon,” Anya said with a smile. “I have a feeling he’ll be taking a turn for the better soon. Just give it a little time. But as for exploring the hinterlands, we should get started before it gets too hot.”

She had a point. “Okay. Just let me throw a few things together and I’ll be right out.”

“Oyv and I will meet you at the car.”

Jack figured he’d bring his backup .38 along—just in case. And mosquito repellent. Lots of mosquito repellent.

3

A voice had called him from his long dream of the war and he’d responded. He was glad to leave the dream…so many dead men, with pierced skulls and ruptured chests…staring at him with mournful eyes…

And then he was out of the dream and awake. He sat up. He was in a bed, in a barrack. But where were the other beds, the other soldiers? No one here but him.

Then he saw a little woman, a thin bird of a woman in some sort of uniform, mopping the floor. He spoke to her. Not volitionally. The words seemed to pop out of his mouth. He didn’t even hear them. But the woman did. Her head snapped up. Her eyes widened. Then she hurried from the room.

Where am I? he wondered.

Was this still part of the dream? If not, how did he get here?

4

Jack tried to draw Anya out during the trip but she wasn’t very responsive. He told her about the palmetto attack last night but she didn’t seem horrified or even concerned. Her only remark was that it was “very unusual.”

“How about you?” he said, shifting the subject from him to her. He wanted to know more about her. “Where are you from?”

“I moved here from Queens,” she said.

“I’d have thought you came from Long Island.”

“Well, I’ve lived there too.”

“What about your childhood? Where’d you grow up?”

“Just about everywhere, it seems.” She sighed. “It was so long ago it seems like a dream.”

This was getting nowhere. “Where haven’t you lived?”

“On the moon.” She smiled at him. “So what’s with all the questions?”

“Just curious. You seem to know a lot about me and my father, and you two seem close, so don’t you think it’s natural for me to want to know a little about you?”

“Not to worry. We’re not involved. We never will be. We’re just friends. Isn’t that enough?”

“I suppose it is,” Jack said.

He supposed it would have to be.

He took Pemberton Road southwest with Anya following on the map and acting as navigator. Oyv lay stretched out in the sun on the deck under the rear window. A drainage ditch paralleled the road, sometimes on the left, other times on the right. Probably served as a canal of some sort in normal times, but now it was mostly a succession of intermittent pools of stagnant water.

“They’re called borrow pits,” Anya said, as if reading his mind. “They’re where the dirt and limestone came from when they were building up these roads. This time of year they should be filled with water, with turtles and little alligators and jumping fish. Now…”

He could see what filled them now: beer cans, Snapple bottles, old tires, and hunks of algae-encrusted Styrofoam.

Coarse brown grass stretched away to either side. He spotted three white-tailed deer—a doe and two fawns—grazing near a stand of trees. As the car approached they leaped over a bush and disappeared.

He saw a sign that read PANTHER CROSSING.

“Panthers?”

Anya nodded. “They still have some around here.”

The idea of wild panthers about was a little unsettling even when in a car. Imagine seeing that sign while on foot.

“I’ve driven through here with your father a couple of times. Every time we pass that sign he says some rhyme about a ‘panther’ and ‘anther.’”

Jack had to laugh. “Ogden Nash!”

“Who?”

“He was a very clever, down-to-earth poet. No airs about his stuff. Wrote a lot for kids. Dad loved him.”

Jack remembered his father’s nightly ritual of doling out a few of Nash’s animal poems at bedtime.

He’d forgotten about those times. He made a mental note to check the bookstores when he got home and see what was still in print. Vicky would love Nash’s wordplay.

He was jarred back to the present as they passed a burnt-out area where some asshole probably had flicked a cigarette out the window. Up ahead, a sign displaying a goofy-looking alligator informed them that this was a “South Florida Water Management District.”

“Not much water to manage at the moment,” Jack said as the pavement ran out and became a dusty, rutted dirt road bed.

“Even when there is they mis manage it. All the development north of here, it’s screwed up the Everglades—screwed it royally.”

Jack sensed anger in Anya’s voice. And something else…

“You sound as if you’re taking it personally.”

“I am, kiddo. I am. No decent person can feel otherwise.”

“Pardon my saying so, but isn’t it really just a big swamp?”

“Not a swamp at all. Swamps are stagnant; there’s constant flow through the Everglades. It’s a prairie—a wet, saw grass prairie. This whole part of the state runs downhill from Lake Okeechobee to the sea. The overflow from the lake travels all those miles in sloughs—”

“Whose?”

“Slough. It’s spelled S-L-O-U-G-H but pronounced like it’s S-L-E-W. The sloughs are flows of water through these prairies that keep things wet. We’re near the Taylor Slough here. The Miccosukee Indians call the Everglades Pa-hay-okee: river of grass or grassy waters. But look what’s been done in the past fifty years: Canals have been cut and farms have been put in the way, leaking all their chemicals into the water—or should I say, whatever water reaches here. What the farms don’t take is ‘managed’ by so many canals and dikes and dams and levies and flood gates that you’ve got to wonder how any of it gets where it naturally wants to go. It’s amazing anything at all has survived here. Just pure dumb luck that the whole area’s not a complete wasteland.” She glanced at him. “Sorry, kiddo. End of lecture.”

“Hey, no. I learned something. But I’d think that since Florida is just an overgrown sandbar, all of the water in the sloughs would just seep into the ground.”

“Sandbar? Where’d you get that idea?”

“I heard somebody describe it that way, so—”

She wagged a finger at him. “He was talking out his tuchus. Florida is mostly limestone. It’s not an overgrown sandbar; if anything, it’s a huge reef. There’s sand, sure, but dig down and you hit the calcified corpses of countless little organisms who built up this mound back in the days when all this was under water. That’s why the water runs downhill to the Everglades: Because it must.”

“How’d you manage to learn so much about these problems?”

“It’s no secret. You just have to read the papers. Supposedly the government is going to spend billions to correct the mess. We’ll see. Shouldn’t have let it happen in the first place.” She glanced down at the map. “We should be coming up on it soon.”

“On what?”

“The intersection.” She pointed through the windshield. “There. That must be it.”

Jack saw a stop sign ahead. He slowed the car to a stop a dozen feet before the intersection. The crossing road was unmarked. Jack took the map from Anya and stared at the intersection he’d circled.

“How do we know this is the place?”

“It is,” Anya said.

“But nothing says that’s South Road.”

“Trust me, kiddo. It is.”

Jack looked at the map again. Not too many crossroads out here. This had to be it.

Leaving the engine running to keep the AC going, he got out and walked to the stop sign. It sported a couple of bullet holes—.45 caliber, maybe—but the rime of rust along their ragged edges said they were old. A sour breeze limped from the west. He stepped into the intersection and looked left and right. He checked the ground. Little pieces of glass glittered in the dust. This was where it had happened.

“What are you hoping to find?”

He turned and found Anya approaching. Oyv trotted behind her, weaving back and forth as he sniffed the ground.

“Don’t know,” he said. “It’s just that a lot of things don’t add up, especially with the timing and the assumption that my father ran a stop sign.”

“I imagine a lot of people do that out here. Look around. Here we are, midmorning on a Thursday and not a car in sight. You think maybe there were more in the early A.M. Tuesday?”

“No. I guess not. But he was—is—such a by-the-book guy, and not a risk taker, that I can’t see him doing it. And I can’t see what he was doing out here in the first place.”

“Oh, I can tell you that: He was driving.”

Jack tried not to show his irritation. “I know he was driving. But where to?” “To nowhere. Many nights he had trouble sleeping, so he’d go out for a drive.”

“How do you know?”

“He told me. Asked me if I wanted to come along some night. I said he should include me out. I don’t know from insomnia. Like the dead I sleep.”

So I noticed, Jack thought.

“Where did he go?”

“Out here. He said he always took the same route. He’d drive with his windows open. He said he liked the silence, liked to stop and look at the stars—you can see so many out here—or watch an approaching storm. That would have been back when we had storms, of course.” She sighed. “Such a long while since we’ve heard thunder around here.”

“All right. So he’s out here on his nightly drive and—”

“Not nightly. Two, maybe three times a week.”

“Okay, so Monday night or early Tuesday morning, he’s out here and somehow he winds up in the middle of an intersection when something else is coming along. Something big enough to total his car and keep on rolling.”

“A truck then. Sounds as if he pulled out in front of a truck.”

Jack looked up and down the road. His father’s Marquis had been hit on the right front fender. That meant…

“A truck? It would have to have been coming from the west…from the Everglades. Maybe he had a little stroke or something.”

“Dr. Huerta said his brain scans showed no damage.”

“Then it’s a mystery.”

“I don’t like mysteries, especially when they involve someone I know. And speaking of mysteries, I’m still trying to find out how someone reported the accident from downtown Novaton—”

Anya shook her head. “You call that a downtown?”

“Okay, from the local supermarket—before it happened.”

Anya peered at him through her huge sunglasses. “How do you know when it happened?”

“From my father’s watch. It’s cracked and broken, and the time on the face is something like twenty minutes after the accident call. How is that possible?”

“Clocks,” Anya said with a shrug. “Who can trust them? One’s set too fast, one’s set too slow—”

“My father was always a tightass about having the right time.”

“‘Was,’” Anya said. She tsked and pointed a gnarled finger at him. “What do you know about his watch lately?”

Jack looked away. She had him there.

“Not much.”

“Right. And—”

Oyv started barking. He was standing at the edge of the ditch with his head down and his ears drawn back flat against his head.

“What is it, my sweet doggie?” Anya said. “What have you found?”

Jack followed Anya over to where Oyv was still making his racket.

“Oh, my!” she said.

Jack came up beside her. “What?”

“Look at these tracks.”

Jack saw five-toed impressions in the damp mud at the bottom of the ditch. They spanned about a foot across. Whatever had made them was big. And pigeon-toed.

“Got to be a crocodile.”

Anya looked at him and made a face. “Crocodile? The Florida crocodile likes brackish water. These are alligator tracks. See that wavy line running between them? That was left by his tail. Look at the size of those feet. This is a big alligator.”

Jack did a slow turn. With all the reeds and saw grass around, it could be hiding anywhere.

Now he knew how Captain Hook felt.

“How big?”

“Judging from the size of these prints, I’d say twenty feet long, maybe more.”

Jack couldn’t imagine how she’d know that, but wasn’t going to call her on it. This lady knew an awful lot about Florida.

“Twenty-plus, huh? Why don’t we get back in the car.”

“Not to worry. These look old. See how the mud is dry? They were probably made days ago.”

“That doesn’t mean the maker isn’t still nearby.”

The tiny Chihuahua was down in the canal sniffing at the tracks. He showed no fear. Jack half expected him to start cooing, Heeere, leezard, leezard, leezard…

His right hand drifted to the small of his back where his little AMT backup rested in its holster under his T-shirt. He wondered if a .38 caliber frangible would stop a gator that size. Probably break up on its head. But he alternated them with FMJs in the magazine. They might do some damage.

“Anyway, I’ve seen what I came to see.”

“Which was?”

“Nothing in particular. I just thought I should come out and see where it happened.”

What had he been hoping for? A mystery-solving clue, like in the movies? It hadn’t happened. Wasn’t going to happen. The whole thing was just a stupid accident.

But still…he wished he knew who’d been barreling along South Road out of the swamp in something big and heavy early Tuesday morning.

Back at the car, Jack played the gentleman and held the door for Anya—and Oyv—as she settled herself in the passenger seat, then he walked around to the other side. Physically he was heading for the driver seat; mentally he was miles away, thinking about giant gators and heavy rolling equipment. He was reaching for the door handle when Oyv started barking again. He looked up and saw a red truck racing toward him—for him.

No time to get in the car so he back-rolled onto the hood and got his feet up and out of the way just as the truck sideswiped the Buick.

Jack’s heart pounded. That son of a bitch almost—

The truck…an old red pickup he’d seen before. Jack couldn’t make out who was driving but he’d bet he wasn’t pretty. Coughing in the trailing dust cloud, he slid off the hood, pulled open the door, and jumped inside.

“What was that?” Anya said as Oyv kept barking.

Thanks little guy, Jack thought. Bark all you want.

“That was an attempted hit and run.”

He slammed the car into gear and spun the tires as he started pursuit.

Anya looked worried. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Going after them.”

“And if you catch them, then what?”

“As the saying goes, I’m going to kick ass and take names—in a very literal sense.”

The bogus nurse in his father’s room yesterday had driven away from the hospital in that truck, and now that truck had tried to drive into him. It wasn’t big enough to cause the damage that had befallen his father’s Grand Marquis without totaling itself, but it was connected. Oh, yes. Definitely connected.

Jack followed the pickup’s dust cloud along Pemberton. He was gaining on it when it suddenly braked and hung a hard right. Jack skidded to a halt, almost missing the turn. He nosed onto a pair of sandy ruts that curved to the right. He accelerated but the dust was so thick that he missed the path and slid off into the brush. It took a few back-and-forth maneuvers to get moving again, and by the time he made it back to the road—that pair of ruts was nothing more than an arc that curved back to South Road—the truck was nowhere to be seen.

Jack drove to the intersection and got out. He scanned the roads up and down in search of a tell-tale dust cloud, but saw nothing. The truck had either slowed or pulled off the road to hide in the brush.

Frustration set his teeth on edge as he swung back into the driver seat. He pounded once on the steering wheel.

“Not to worry,” Anya said. “I have a feeling you’ll be seeing that truck again.”

“So do I,” Jack said. “That’s the problem.”

5

Jack needed to pick up some beer and a few munchies. Anya said she needed to do some food shopping as well. So, following her directions, he drove them to the Publix in downtown Novaton. On the way he saw a number of homeless types begging on the sidewalks. He hadn’t noticed them on past trips through.

A fellow with a cauliflower nose and a lumpy face that looked like he’d stuffed his cheeks with marbles stood near the door. He held a Styrofoam cup and shook the change within, looking for more.

As Jack slowed, trying not to stare but wondering if this guy was related to the two in the pickup, Anya grabbed his arm and pulled him through the automatic door.

“Give him nothing. His type are up to no good.”

Inside, he and Anya split, she rolling her cart toward the produce section while he headed for the snack aisle. There he found more varieties of fried pork rinds and pork cracklins than he’d ever imagined possible. He’d heard of them but never tried any. He passed them by and stocked up on healthier fare—tubes of cheese Pringles, one of his household staples. On his way back past the pork rinds he gave in to an impulse and picked up a bag. He’d try anything once. Couldn’t tell Gia, though. She’d be grossed out.

He found the beer section on the left side of the store where it took up the whole wall. But nowhere on that wall could he find Ybor Gold. He saw a stock boy who didn’t look old enough to drink stacking twelve-packs of Bud Light in the cooler; he had late acne and an early goatee. His brown hair was gelled into shiny spikes. Jack asked him where they hid the Ybor Gold.

“I don’t think we carry that one anymore,” he said.

Damn. He’d enjoyed those two he’d had on the way down.

“Why not? It’s a local beer.”

“That’s not local. It’s made in Tampa.”

Exasperated, Jack started waving his arms. “If you can stock Sapporo Draft from the other side of the world, how come you can’t stock something from the other side of the state?”

“Wait a minute,” the kid said. “Come to think of it…”

He went over to the imported section, shuffled some stock around, and pulled out a six pack of Ybor Gold. He held it up, grinning.

“Knew I’d seen this somewhere.”

“My hero,” Jack said.

“There’s one more back there. Do you—?”

“Sold!”

As the kid put the two six packs in the cart, Jack handed him a five-dollar bill.

“Naw, that’s okay,” he said. “Just doing my job.”

Jack shoved it into the breast pocket of the kid’s shirt. “Yeah, but you deserve a raise.”

He hunted up Anya and followed her around as she picked out what she wanted. This involved playing touchy-feely with almost every piece of fruit in the store. Finally she was done and they checked out. Jack qualified for an Express Lane and cooled his heels by the door as her order was rung up.

Out in the parking lot, he was loading everything into the trunk when he spotted a battered red pickup parked against the far curb half a block down. Anya and Oyv were already in the car; it was running with the AC on. Jack leaned in the driver door.

“Can you spare a few minutes?” he said. “I want to check something out.”

She glanced at her watch. “Don’t be too long. I’d like to stop in on your father before we head home.”

That was on Jack’s to-do list as well. But first…

He angled across the parking lot, then crossed the street. As he approached the truck—no question now that it was the same one—he noticed a slim young woman with a dark complexion and wild hair a startling silver white. She leaned against a nearby wall. She wore white Levis and a tight black vest over a long-sleeved white shirt buttoned up to the collar.

He stared at her. Something familiar about her. Not the hair, but that face, those black eyes…

And then he knew. Stuff that hair under a black wig, put her in a nurse’s uniform, and she’d be the mystery woman who’d fled his father’s room yesterday.

First she’s a brunette in the hospital, now she’s white haired and hanging out on the street. What the hell?

Next to her stood a hulking man Jack recognized as the one who’d ferried the mystery nurse away yesterday.

The woman’s eyes met his and he saw an instant of recognition there. She hid it immediately and slid her gaze off him, but he’d caught it.

Jack stepped back and edged toward the truck. The guy with the bulging forehead was leaning against it. Couldn’t forget him. He’d been driving when Jack’s tire was slashed. Had he been driving an hour ago?

Time to find out. Time to see if he could provoke a little something out of this clown.

Jack lidded his anger and sidled up to him. The man’s misaligned eyes were fixed on the crowd. Jack got his attention by giving his right shoulder a none-too-gentle shove. The guy bumped against the truck’s passenger door and whirled on Jack.

“Hey! What—?”

Whatever he was going to say never got out. Jack saw his eyes widen with recognition and knew he had his man.

“Almost nailed me out there, didn’t you,” Jack said, stepping closer and getting in his face.

“Luke?” the guy said in a high, quavering voice.

Jack gave him another shove. “Whose bright idea was that? Yours? Or somebody else’s?”

“Luke?” he said again, louder this time, his eyes darting back and forth. “Luke!”

Jack was about to give him another shove when the big burly guy who’d been next to the woman came up. His little pig eyes fixed on Jack.

“What’s goin on?”

“This your truck?”

“What if it is?”

“It sideswiped me out in the boonies a little while ago.”

Luke shook his head. “No way. It’s been sittin’ here all day. Ain’t that right, Corley?”

Corley missed a beat, then nodded his misshapen head. “Yeah. That’s right. Here all day.”

“Really?” Jack stepped over to the right front fender and ran his hand along the beige-streaked dent there. “I bet if the police compare the paint on these scrapes to the paint on my car they’ll come up with a perfect match.”

He had no intention of getting the cops involved, but they didn’t know that.

Luke’s eyes shifted from the scrapes, to Corley, to Jack. “What if it does? Don’t prove nothin’.”

“I think the cops will see it differently, and then I won’t be the only one wanting to know why you tried to run me down.”

“Somebody tried to run you down?” said a woman’s voice behind him.

It was the girl.

“Do I know you?” Jack said.

She stuck out her hand. “My name’s Semelee. What’s yours?” Her dark eyes were alive with interest as she looked at him.

“Jack,” he said as he shook her hand. Her skin was soft, like a baby’s. He nodded his head toward Luke and Corley. “You connected to them?” He knew the answer but wanted to see how she’d respond.

“They’re kin. You think they tried to run you down?”

“I don’t know who was driving, but I know it was that truck.”

Her expression darkened. “Oh, it was, was it?” She turned and glared at her “kin.” “Get in the truck.”

Luke spread his hands. “But Semelee…”

“In the truck,” she said through her teeth. “Now!”

The two of them moved off like whipped dogs. If nothing else, Jack had learned who ruled the roost.

She was all smiles when she turned back to him. A nice smile. The first he’d seen. It lit up her face and made her almost pretty.

“I’m sure it was just an accident. Those boys drive a little crazy sometimes. Why don’t I buy you a drink and we can talk it over. Maybe—”

“What were you doing in my father’s room?”

“Your father?” Her brow furrowed. “I don’t think I—”

“His hospital room. You were in it yesterday, wearing a wig and dressed like a nurse.”

She snapped her fingers. “I knew I seen you before.”

Yeah, right. She’d known him the instant she saw him.

“What were you doing there?”

“Oh, that. I been thinkin’ bout becomin’ a nurse, so I dressed up like one and went to the hospital to see what it was like. It didn’t work out. Made me feel kinda sickish. I guess nursin’ ain’t for me.”

“I guess it ain’t.”

Good story. It fit nicely with what he’d seen, but Jack wasn’t buying a word.

She smiled again. “Now, about that drink…?”

He hesitated. A little face time with her and he might get a handle on what was going on between his father and Semelee and her “kin.” But he had Anya back in the car and he hadn’t seen his father yet today. But maybe he could catch her later.

“Have to take a rain check,” he told her. “Got to get to the hospital.”

“Oh, yeah. Your daddy. Is he bad sick?”

“He’s been better.”

Another battered pickup, this one blue, pulled up beside the first. For a moment he thought it was filled with migrant workers, but then Jack saw their misshapen heads and bodies. If they were any sort of workers, they looked like they might be extras for Wes Craven if he was doing a new sequel to The Hills Have Eyes. He recognized the marble-cheeked guy from the Publix. All the funny-looking street people he’d seen begging on his trip through town were gathered in these two trucks.

“Well,” Semelee said, “we’ll try for that drink some other time.”

Jack tore his eyes away from the blue truck. “We sure will. When?”

“Whenever you want.”

“How do I reach you?”

“Don’t worry.” Her smile broadened as she opened the passenger door of the pickup and climbed in. “Just say the word and I’ll know.”

Something in her tone sent an icy trickle down Jack’s spine.

6

Jack walked into the hospital room and froze just inside the door. His father, dressed in an open-back hospital gown with little booties on his feet, was sitting up on the edge of the bed eating a plate of green Jell-O.

“Christ! Dad…you’re awake!”

His father looked up. He looked fresh and rested. He might have been sitting on his front porch having a gimlet.

“Jack? You’re here? You?”

His blue eyes were clear and bright through his steel-rimmed glasses. His hair was damp and combed, his face looked freshly scrubbed. If not for the facial bruises and the bandage on the side of his head, there was no evidence that he’d been seriously hurt.

“Yeah. Me.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe this. Last night you were still level-seven coma and today…”

“They told me one of my sons had been visiting. I assumed it was Tom. But come to think of it, I seem to remember hearing your voice.”

“I was talking to you a lot.”

“You were? Maybe that’s what brought me out. I couldn’t believe you were here so I had to see for myself.” He sighed and looked at Jack. “Is this what I have to do to get you to visit?”

“Such a thing to say!” Anya said, bustling around Jack and heading for the bed. She’d hung back at the doorway, making Oyv comfortable, she’d said, and had waved Jack ahead. “Be nice, Thomas.”

“Anya!” his father said, eyes lighting at the sight of her. “What are you doing here?”

“Jack brought me. We’ve become fast friends.” She took his right hand in both of hers. “How are you?”

“I’m fine. Better every minute, especially since they took that catheter out of me.” He shuddered. “That’s not something—”

“There she is!” said a heavily accented woman’s voice. Jack turned and saw a thin little Hispanic woman, dressed like a nurse’s aide, standing next to the hulking form of Nurse Schoch, pointing at Anya. “She’s the one I told you about.”

Nurse Schoch, looking as stern as ever, glanced down at the aide and spoke in a rumbling voice. “You want to tell me again what you saw?”

“I was in the bathroom, washing the sink, when she come in and hold his hand and say, ‘Okay, Tom. You’ve been asleep long enough. Today’s the day you get up.’ That’s what she say.”

Anya laughed and waved a hand at her. “How do you know I don’t say that to him every day?”

The little woman shook her head. “Right after she leave, he sit up in bed and ask me if he miss breakfast.”

“Did I?” his father said, smiling. “I don’t remember. I was a little groggy after I first woke up, but I’m fine now.” The smile faded. “So many things I don’t remember. They tell me I had an accident but I don’t remember a thing about it.”

The aide was still pointing at Anya. “Bruja!”

Jack knew enough Spanish to know she was calling Anya a witch.

“Enough of that,” Schoch said. “Go clean something. Git.”

After one last fearful look at Anya, the little woman scurried off. Nurse Schoch stepped over to his father’s side and took his blood pressure. She nodded and wrote on a clipboard.

“How am I doing?” he said.

“Fine.” Schoch smiled and, surprisingly, it didn’t break her face. “Amazingly fine. Dr. Huerta’s coming up to see you.”

“Who’s he?”

“She. She’s been taking care of you since you were brought in to the ED.”

“Well, she’d better get here fast, because as soon as I finish this Jell-O, I’m going home.”

Jack and Schoch began talking at the same time, telling him he couldn’t, that he’d just had a serious injury, and so on and so on. Didn’t faze him.

“I don’t like hospitals. I feel fine. I’m going home.”

Jack recognized the note of finality in his father’s voice. He’d heard it as a kid. It meant Dad had made up his mind and that was that.

“You can’t,” Schoch told him.

He peered at her through his glasses. “I guess I’m a little confused. When did I become the hospital’s property?”

Schoch blinked and Jack guessed no one had ever asked her that.

“You’re certainly not the hospital’s property, but you became its responsibility when you were wheeled through the doors.”

“I appreciate that,” he said. “Really, I do. And from the way I feel right now, you’ve all done a wonderful job. But I no longer need a hospital, so I’m going home. Where’s the problem?”

“The problem, Dad…,” Jack said, feeling his patience slipping. His father was acting dumb. “The problem is that you had a serious accident—”

“So I’m told. Can’t remember a thing about it so I guess I’ll have to take people’s word for it.”

“It happened,” Jack told him. “I’ve seen the car. Totaled.”

He winced. “Not even a year old.” He shook his head. “I wish I could remember.”

Jack watched his father’s expression. Was that fear in his eyes? Was he afraid? Of what?

“That’s not the point,” he told him. “The point is you’ve been in a coma for three days and how do we know you won’t lapse back into one in the next minute or hour or day?”

His smile was thin. “We don’t. But if I do, you can bring me back here.” He held out his arm—the one with the IV running into it—to Schoch. “Would you remove that, please?”

She shook her head. “Not without doctor’s orders.”

“Okay, then. I’ll do it myself.”

“Christ, Dad,” Jack said as his father began peeling off the tape that held the line in place.

“All right, all right,” Schoch said. “I’ll take it out for you. Just let me get a tray.”

As she lumbered out, Jack looked at Anya. She hadn’t said a word through all this. He looked at his father who had lowered the top of his hospital gown and was peeling off the cardiac monitor leads.

“Can’t you convince him?” he said to her. “I obviously can’t.”

Oyv popped his head out of her big straw bag as Anya shook hers. “I should be making his decisions? He’s not crazy.”

“He’s acting crazy.”

“He wants to leave the hospital because he feels fine. What’s so crazy about that?”

Thanks for the help, he thought. He’d feel a lot better if his father would stay just one more day, to make sure his condition was stable. He had to find a way around his reckless stubbornness.

Anya was staring at him. “Switch places. What would you do in his situation?”

I’d get the hell out of here and go home, he thought. But he couldn’t say that.

“I’m lots younger and—”

Oyv dropped back down into the bag as an anxious looking Nurse Schoch came charging into the room, carrying a tray. She stopped at the foot of the bed and shook her head as she stared at the cardiac leads scattered across the sheet.

“I figured that was what you were doing when the monitor flatlined, but I had to be sure.”

A few minutes later, Dad had a gauze patch taped over the spot where the IV had been. He stood and looked around.

“All I need now are my clothes.”

“They had to throw them out.” Here was the angle Jack had been looking for. “They were too bloody to keep. You know what? Why don’t you hang out here one more night and I’ll come back first thing in the morning with some of your clothes. How does that sound?”

“Terrible. I’ll wear this if I have to.”

Jack thought of refusing to drive him home, but what would that accomplish? All he had to do was call a cab.

He caught a glimpse of his father’s skinny white buttocks through the back of the hospital gown as he walked to the tiny closet.

“Well, will you look at this!” he said as he opened the door. He held up a white golf shirt and tan Bermuda shorts. “Just what the doctor ordered.”

“Somehow I doubt that,” Jack said. He looked at Anya. “Where’d they come from? You were here this morning. Did you—?”

“You think I go snooping in closets?”

His father headed for the bathroom. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

“Dad, those aren’t your clothes.”

“I’m claiming them for the moment. I’ll bring them back tomorrow.”

I give up, Jack thought. I’m licked. He’s going home.

While he was changing, Anya puttered around the room, opening and closing drawers, filling a little plastic bag with the soaps, mouthwash, toothpaste, and other necessities the hospital had supplied.

“No sense in letting any of this go to waste,” she said. “He’s paid for it, after all—probably through the nose, if I know hospitals.”

Jack watched as her hand darted behind the headboard. She pulled something out and quickly shoved it into the plastic bag. He didn’t see it, but he could guess what it was. She was taking back her painted tin can totem.

Dad, still wearing his hospital booties, stepped out of the bathroom and spread his arms to show off his new duds.

“Would you believe it? A perfect fit.”

“Imagine that.”

Jack looked at Anya but she wouldn’t make eye contact. What was her part in all this? Was that nurse’s aide right? Could Anya have had something to do with his father’s miraculous recovery? That would be strange, but he was becoming used to strange.

“Are we ready?” his father said. “Then let’s go!”

7

On the ride back to Gateways—Jack driving, his father in the passenger seat, Anya and Oyv in the back—he told his father what he knew about the accident, including the anonymous call to the police that appeared to have been made before the crash.

“I wish I could remember,” he said. “The last thing I recall is leaving the house and driving out the front gate. And that’s it. What happened during the drive? Why can’t I remember?”

“It’s called retrograde amnesia,” Jack told him. “You can’t retrieve memories of events right before you got hit. There’s a good chance over time your brain will sort them out, but then again, it may never.”

His father stared at him. “How do you know so much about it?”

Oops. “A sort of lecture I listened to once. Very interesting.”

The speaker had been Doc Hargus. Jack had been knocked cold in a fall from a fire escape. After coming to he’d known enough to get to Hargus to have his scalp sewn up, but couldn’t remember why he’d been on the fire escape in the first place. The doc had explained about post-traumatic memory loss, both antegrade and retrograde. It had taken a few days, but Jack finally remembered how he’d got there. And who’d shoved him off.

“Well, I hope mine comes back soon. As for the accident being reported before it happened…” He shook his head. “Impossible. So we can forget that. Somebody’s watch was way off. That’s the only explanation. Wasn’t it Sherlock Holmes who said, ‘When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’?”

Jack was sure he’d heard Basil Rathbone state that a hundred times.

“Yeah, I think so.”

Except, considering the course of Jack’s life these past months, the impossible was not as easy to eliminate as he’d once assumed.

After Jack parked the car in the cul-de-sac, his father insisted—over his son’s protests—on helping carry Anya’s groceries into her house. They left her there with a promise to return for cocktail hour.

As he preceded Jack into the front room of his house, he said, “I guess I should be saying, Boy, it’s great to be home. But I can’t. I may have been in that hospital bed for days, but I feel as if I left here only a few hours ago.”

He lowered himself into the recliner and stared into space. Jack watched him and realized he was scared. He’d never seen his father scared, or imagined he could be. He knew he couldn’t leave him like this.

“I’m going to stay a few days,” he told him. “If that’s all right with you.”

His father looked up at him. “You? Acting like you’re a member of a family? What gives?”

The remark stung, and that must have shown in Jack’s face because his father’s voice abruptly softened.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m glad you’re here. You don’t know how glad. It’s just…”

“Just what?”

“Kate’s funeral. Why weren’t you there? I still can’t believe you didn’t show up.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Like hell. A hundred, maybe two hundred people showed up. Mothers bringing the children she’d treated, people she’d treated as kids bringing their own children. All those strangers made it to her funeral, but not her own brother. She touched a lot of lives in her life, Jack, but yours most of all. She practically raised you. You brought out the nurturer in her. When you needed changing or needed to be sung to sleep, she’d take over, she’d say she’d do it. She’d all but fight with your mother to take care of you.”

“I know,” Jack whispered through a constricting throat. “Don’t you think I’d have been there if it had been possible—any way possible?”

“Then why weren’t you?”

How could he tell him it was because BATF and FBI people were there too? Taking pictures. Because of the way Kate died, and the events leading up to and connected to her death, they’d camped outside the funeral home and cemetery with their telefoto lenses. Jack had spotted them just as he was about to turn into the funeral home parking lot. He’d driven on. He couldn’t let them take his picture and have it end up pinned to a corkboard wall with a question mark beneath it. Who he was was a question he didn’t want them even asking, let alone answering.

“It wasn’t…it just wasn’t possible.”

“Why not? Were you in jail? In a hospital in a coma? Those reasons I’ll accept. Anything less…”

“I was there. I couldn’t make it to the ceremonies, but I visited her grave after the funeral.”

“If you could show up then, why couldn’t you show up before?”

Jack remembered the anger he’d felt at spotting the feds outside the funeral home. But it had been an anger tinged with guilty relief. Their presence meant he wouldn’t have to face Kate’s kids, her ex-husband, and his father. Because there’d be too many questions about Kate’s last days and he couldn’t tell them anything because there was so much she hadn’t wanted them to know. But most of all because he felt in some ways responsible for her death. In her last moments he’d soothed her while she bled, held her cooling hand after she died.

“Through the whole ordeal,” his father said, “everyone kept asking if the long-lost Jack would show, and I said of course you would, especially since she’d just been taking care of you while you were sick.”

“You know about that?”

“She called Ron the night she died…told him. She was still looking after you, even after you’d grown up.” Tears filled his eyes. “She brought Kevin and Lizzie down for Easter week last spring. I didn’t know it would be the last time I’d see her alive. I was supposed to go up and stay with her awhile in July. Instead I went up for her funeral.” His voice hovered on the edge of a sob. “I miss her, Jack. Even though I moved down here we still talked. We phoned each other two or three times a week.”

Jack took a step closer. He reached out a hand to put on the old man’s shoulder, hesitated halfway there—would he shrug it off?—then pushed past the doubt. He gave his father’s bony shoulder a gentle squeeze.

“Kate was a wonderful person, Dad. You can always be proud of her. You and Mom deserve a lot of credit for that.”

He looked up at Jack. “I wonder. Kate turned out great, but you and Tom…where is he, anyway?”

That reminded him: He should call Tom and let him know Dad was out of the coma. Not that he seemed too worried. He’d yet to call for an update.

“He couldn’t make it. He told me he’s tied up with some legal thing in Philly.”

He shook his head. “Figures. Tom’s always got something else to do; we all know who’s number one in his life. And then there’s you…the vanished son. I suppose your mom and I deserve credit for the two of you as well as Kate, don’t we.”

He sounded so bitter. Maybe he had a right to be. Jack started to slide his hand off the shoulder but his father grabbed it and squeezed.

“I’m sorry, Jack. I had to let this out. It’s been eating at me since the funeral. And since you never returned my calls…”

“Yeah, sorry about that.” Again, he hadn’t known what he could say.

“…I never had a chance to get this off my chest. I still don’t understand, and I guess I never will. You’re holding back on me. I don’t know why but I hope someday you’ll tell me the real story.” He released Jack’s hand and slapped his palms against his thighs. “Until then, I’m through with this kind of talk. It’s putting me in a funk.”

He sat in silence for a moment, Jack standing beside the chair, trying to come up with something to say. But he didn’t have to. His father broke the silence by rising from the chair and heading for the kitchen.

“I’m going to have a beer. Want one?”

“Do you think you should? I mean, you were in a coma this morning and—”

“Do you want one or not?” he snapped.

If you can’t beat him, Jack thought, join him.

“Yeah, okay. Pop me one.”

His father opened the refrigerator door and pulled out an amber bottle. “What’s this?”

“Oh, that’s an Ybor. It’s a Florida brew I discovered.”

His father gave him a hard look. “What did you do? Move in while I was out cold?”

“Well, Anya said you’d want it that way.”

“She did, did she?”

These mood swings between friendly and hostile were getting to be a bit too much. “Look, if you want me to move out—”

“I wouldn’t hear of it.”

He popped the caps off a pair and handed one to Jack. They clinked the bottles.

Jack said, “To letting bygones be bygones?” At least for now.

“Not always as easy as it sounds, but I’ll drink to that.” His father took a sip and then studied the label. “Ybor Gold, ay? I like it.”

Jack took a long pull. “Yeah. But they should have named it Ygor Gold. Then they could have had this sneaky-looking hunchback on the label. Would have been very cool.”

His father stared at him. “Now why on earth would you think of that? Why would anyone think of that? You know, I used to worry that all those monster movies you watched as a kid would warp you. Now I can see they did. I swear they did.”

“Hey, I’ve watched lots of romantic films too, Dad, but they didn’t make me romantic. And I know I must have seen hundreds, maybe a thousand comedies, but they didn’t make me funny. I haven’t committed stand-up yet and, trust me, I’m not the life of the party.”

His father laughed for the first time since he’d come out of the coma. That was a good thing.

8

They hung around the front room for about twenty minutes or so, sipping their brews and making small talk, then his father dozed off in his recliner. At first Jack worried that he’d lapsed back into coma, but he responded when Jack shook his shoulder. He left him sleeping in his chair and went outside.

Through the late afternoon haze he spotted Carl working three houses down. When he saw Jack he hurried toward him across the dry grass. A small garden spade protruded from his right sleeve.

“I heard about your daddy,” he said, flashing a yellow grin. “Real glad he’s okay. That’s pan-o-ramic!”

“Sorry?”

He shrugged. “I just like the word. Anyways, I’m glad he’s back.”

“Thanks, Carl. He’s napping now.”

“Good. Real good. Looks like the list don’t get more pan-o-ramic.”

Wishing he’d never uttered that word, Jack said, “What list?”

“The list of Gateways folks who’ve gone before their time—not that ‘before their time’ means a whole helluva lot round a place like this. Funeral home waiting rooms is what they is.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Had a bunch of strange deaths real recent like.”

Jack felt a crawly sensation in his gut. “Like what? Hit and runs?”

“Nup. Nothin’ like that. I mean strange. Like Mrs. Borger bein’ attacked by about a dozen pelicans last year—right before Christmas, it was. Pecked her to death. I hear tell one of them bit into her neck and there was blood shootin’ everwhere. Been in Florida all my life and I ain’t never heard of no one bein’ attacked by no pelicans. Then back in March there was Mr. Leo, all bitten up by a bunch of spiders. Brown recluses, they say.” He shuddered. “If I was ever on Fear Factor, that’s what would set me to runnin’. Anyways, Doc Harris said he’s never heard of someone gettin’ bit more’n once, but there you go. Poor old guy died in the hospital.”

“Jeez.”

“Then just last June, Mr. Neusner trips and falls into a whole nest of coral snakes. He was DOA like the others. Come to think of it, your daddy was the only accident that made it to the hospital alive. I guess that’s a good sign.”

“Let’s hope so.”

“Funny thing about Mr. Neusner and the coral snakes. We got a sayin’ down here: ‘red touch yellow—kill a fellow.’”

“What’s that mean?”

“Well, there’s coral snakes, which got red, yellow, and black stripes, and they’s poisonous as all get out. And then there’s the scarlet snake and the scarlet king snake which got similar stripes but they’re harmless. The way you tell ’em apart is by the order of their stripes.”

“You mean people hang around long enough to check out the stripe order?”

“Sure. If it’s got a red stripe next to a yellow stripe, it’s a coral snake. If it don’t, then you’re okay. You may get bit, but you won’t get poisoned.” He pronounced it “pie-zund.”

Jack said, “I’m a city boy. I see any snake, striped or plaid, I’m gone.”

He much preferred dealing with human snakes than the legless kind.

“But the thing is,” Carl added, “I seen one of them snakes, the one Mr. Neusner stomped on before he keeled over. Don’t know bout the other ones that bit him, but this one didn’t have no red touchin’ yellow. It shouldn’t have been poisonous, but it was.” He shook his head. “Kinda scary when somethin’ you always depended on turns out not to be true anymore.”

Tell me about it, Jack thought. He’d seen the pins kicked from under more than one Cherished Truth lately.

“You said there was a nest of them? Right here at Gateways? How? The place looks so…manicured.”

“I can’t figure that one neither. I run the mower over that spot every week and I ain’t never seen no snake nest. I think a buncha them just coiled theirselfs all together durin’ the night and was still there when Mr. Neusner come by like he did every mornin’.” Carl looked away, toward the Everglades. “Almost like…”

“Almost like what?”

“Like they was waitin’ for him.”

Jack’s gut crawled again. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

A shrug. “Just a thought.”

“I’m having a thought too,” Jack said as the crawling sensation increased. “December, March, June…every three months someone buys it. And three months from June is—”

“September,” Carl said. “You’re thinkin’ of your daddy, right? But the others was done in right here at Gateways by things like birds and spiders and snakes—all natural like. Your daddy had a car accident and he wasn’t here at Gateways like the others.”

But the regularity of the fatal mishaps to Gateways residents, the steady three-month intervals between them, bothered Jack. Especially since his father had almost bought it at the end of another three-month cycle.

Something might be going on, but it sure as hell wasn’t the Everglades seeking revenge.

Jack feared something less substantial but far more real might be behind it.

9

Tom awoke from his nap and looked around. Where was Jack? Or had he only dreamed he was here? That might mean that the whole coma thing was a dream too.

Then Jack walked in the front door and he felt a strange mix of emotions: up that his prodigal son had come home, even if only for a few days, and down because it meant the accident and coma were all real.

“Oh,” Jack said. “You’re awake. Short nap.”

“The short ones are the best. They don’t leave you groggy.”

Jack headed toward the kitchen. “I’m going to have another beer. Want one?”

“No, thanks. But you go ahead.”

Tom watched him twist off the top of an Ybor Gold and thought how much he looked like his mother. He had Jane’s brown hair and brown eyes. And he moved with her grace, her economy of motion.

Tom hadn’t seen his younger son in over a year, not since that father-son tennis match he’d roped him into last summer. He’d changed in that time. He didn’t look older, but his eyes held a different look. He couldn’t call it a hunted look. Maybe haunted? Haunted by Kate’s death? Or was it something else? Guilt, maybe. Well, he should feel guilty about missing Kate’s funeral. Damn guilty.

He didn’t know what to make of his younger son. He’d thought they’d been close. He’d made a special effort to spend time with Jack while he was growing up. An unplanned baby. He and Jane had their boy and their girl and were content with that. But Jack showed up eight years after Kate, and neither Tom nor Jane had quite the energy they’d had with the first two. But Tom hadn’t wanted to shortchange the little guy, thus the special effort.

But then Jane was killed; and less than a year later Jack disappeared. He’d called home once to say he was okay and not to worry, but wouldn’t say any more. In the space of less than a year Tom lost his wife and one of his sons. He’d never imagined he could hurt so much. He thought his world had come apart.

He blamed himself at first—what had he done, where had he gone wrong? But then he came to realize that disappearing was in keeping with Jack’s character as he’d come to know it.

He’d realized early on how bright Jack was, brighter than either Tommy or Kate, but he was also something of a loner. Okay, more than something of a loner. He did well enough gradewise, but all his teachers said he’d do better if he applied himself. That and “Does not play well with others” were constants during his early schooling.

Although a natural athlete, he never seemed to care for sports. At least not team sports. It was his father’s urging rather than any desire to compete that drove him to sign up for a couple of the high school teams. He joined the track team, but as a cross-country runner where he was competing with the terrain and himself as much as the opposing school’s team. He also spent two years on the swim team. Both loner sports.

Even his first summer job—cutting lawns in the neighborhood—was a solitary enterprise. He borrowed the family lawnmower and went into business for himself. As a college student he needed more cash so he went to work for one of the local landscapers.

But what he really seemed to enjoy most was reading far-out fiction—if it had a monster or a spaceship on the cover he bought it—and watching old sci-fi and monster movies.

He’d worried about Jack, urging him into more social activities. It’s a beautiful Saturday. Go down to the park and get into one of the ball games! Jack would reluctantly get on his bike and pedal off. Later, as Tom was riding through town, he’d spot Jack’s bike chained to a standpipe outside the local theater that was showing a Saturday afternoon monster double feature.

He’d worried then, he worried now. Jack earned his living, at least as far as Tom could tell, as an appliance repairman. In the few times during the past fifteen years that he’d seen his son—times he could number on the fingers of one hand—and had a chance to ask him about it, he’d always seemed evasive. Maybe because he sensed his father’s disappointment. Nothing wrong in being a repairman in and of itself; the world needed people who could fix the mechanical and electronic conveniences of modern life. Fine. But he wanted more for his son. Jack had three and a half years of college behind him that he wasn’t using. What was he going to do when his eyes got bad and his fingers got arthritic? Did he think he was going to get by on that Ponzi scheme called Social Security? Tom hoped not.

But what bothered him more was that Jack seemed rootless, disconnected, adrift. Not exactly a ne’er-do-well, but…

But what? Why was he so secretive about his life? Tom was a believer in everyone’s right to privacy, but really…it was almost as if Jack were hiding something.

Earlier this year Tom had gathered the courage to ask if he was gay. Jack had denied it, and his easy laugh as he’d assured him that he was attracted only to women had convinced him he was telling the truth. Tom wouldn’t deny that that had been a relief. But if Jack had said yes, well, Tom would have tried to find a way to accept it. He was glad that wouldn’t be necessary.

So if it wasn’t that, what? Was he using drugs? Or worse, dealing them? He prayed not. And for some reason, thought not.

He supposed Jack’s unused education rankled him the most. Education wasn’t something Tom took lightly. He’d fought and killed to get his.

He slid back along the lines of his life to his childhood. He’d been born during the Great Depression, the son of a truck farmer outside Camden who’d been scraping by before the economy crashed, and continued to scrape by after. At least they always had food on the table, even if it was only vegetables they picked or pulled from the ground themselves.

Tom’s father had been just old enough to see a little action in the First World War, and just a little bit too old to fight in the Second, although that hadn’t stopped him from trying to enlist after hearing news of what the Japs did to Pearl Harbor. Tom remembered being afraid that they’d soon see hordes of yellow men running wild through the streets of America. He’d read numerous scenarios describing just that during the late thirties in the pages of the Operator 5 magazines he borrowed from a kid in school.

But his father was rejected and the Japs never set foot one on North America. So much for that worry.

But when Tom hit eighteen there was no money for college. He’d done well in high school but not well enough for a scholarship. So he enlisted in the Army. It was peacetime so it seemed a safe place to be: earn a little money, save what he could, and maybe see some of the world in the bargain. But most importantly, it offered a chance to get off that farm.

A year after he enlisted he was seeing the world, all right. Shipped to Japan and then to South Korea to fight in a UN “police action.” Even now, he ground his teeth every time he heard that phrase. It had been a full-blown war. He’d fought from sunny Seoul to the frozen hills of North Korea where he witnessed firsthand the Red Chinese human-wave assaults. For years after, he awoke sweating and shaking with the memory. At least he was alive to have nightmares, unlike too many in his unit who came back in boxes.

When he returned to the States he found a day job and used the GI Bill to put himself through night school. He graduated with an accounting degree and soon qualified as a CPA. He joined Price Waterhouse and spent the rest of his working life with the firm. He was able to provide his wife and children with all the things his own father had been unable to give him. To Tom, the most important of those was a higher education. Tom Jr. had made good use of it, so had dear Kate. The result was a lawyer and a doctor in the family.

And then there was Jack…

The man in question dropped into a chair opposite Tom.

“Can I ask you something, Dad?”

“Sure.”

“What were you doing out on those back roads at that hour?”

Tom almost told him it was none of his business but bit it back. He had to put this anger behind him, forget what happened before and be glad for the now.

Could he do that? He had to try.

“Just driving. I have trouble sleeping lately. I lie there in bed and I close my eyes but it won’t come. They tell you not to stay in bed if you can’t get to sleep, so I go out for a drive.”

“And do what?”

“Not much. Lots of times I stop the car and sit on the hood and watch the sky. Jack, you wouldn’t believe it. You can cruise those back roads at night and not see another soul. You stop the car and turn off the headlights and get out and above you are stars like you’ve never seen, stars like I haven’t seen since I was a kid in the Jersey sticks, when the air was still clean enough to see the Milky Way smeared across the top of the sky. It’s breathtaking.”

“You always drive the same route?”

“Pretty much. There aren’t many roads to choose from out there.”

“So you have a pretty set pattern?”

“I guess so. Why are you asking?”

Jack took a sip from his bottle. “Just trying to put some pieces together. Since there’s no one out there, do you bother to stop at stop signs?”

“Well, yes. Of course I do. It may not make sense but…I guess it’s just habit. And it’s not as if I’m going anywhere, or in a hurry to get there.”

“The cops think you might have blown through a stop sign and got tagged by something speeding along South Road. Something big.”

Tom shook his head. “I wish I could remember.”

It disturbed him no end that a piece of his life was missing—an important piece, one that had put him in a coma for days. It scared him a little…no, it scared him a lot not knowing any of the details. That was why he couldn’t stay in the hospital. If he had to be in the dark as to what had happened to him, he’d rather be in the dark here, in familiar surroundings…where he felt he was in control. Or felt he had at least some modicum of control, even if illusory.

“Do you remember a woman attacked by pelicans last year?”

“Sure. Adele Borger. Terrible thing. I heard she was walking with two other women whom the pelicans ignored. They attacked just her. They say she was a terrible mess.”

“And the guy bitten by the snakes?”

“Ed Neusner. Where’d you hear about him and Adele?”

“From Carl.”

Tom had to smile. “Telephone, telegraph, tell Carl. He’s the Gateways gossipmonger. Not the brightest bulb in the box, but a good man. Hard worker. He’s got some wild ideas, though. Has he told you his theory about the angry Everglades yet?”

Jack nodded. “Yeah. Maybe it’s not so far-out. What about the guy killed by spiders?”

“Joe Leo? What about him?”

“Hasn’t anyone noticed a pattern to these deaths—like every three months?”

“No.” Was he right? Every three months? “No one’s ever mentioned it. But why would they? It can’t be anything other than coincidence.”

“Do you realize your accident falls right into the pattern?”

Good Lord, Jack was right. The muscles along the back of his neck tightened, but only for a second. Coincidence. That was all it was, all it could be.

Tom forced a smile. “Is this what you do in your spare time—invent conspiracies?”

Jack looked at him. “As a matter of fact, yes.”

“Don’t tell me you believe in UFOs. Please don’t.”

“The kind with aliens inside? Hardly. But I’ve had to stop believing in coincidences.”

Tom wondered at the bleakness in his son’s tone. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing.” Jack shook his head. “Maybe I’m reading too much into this. For a minute I had this wild idea that the Gateways honchos might be offing some of their healthier residents in order to have their houses revert to them.”

“That is a wild idea.”

He sighed. “I know. Especially when I realized that the houses would stay with the spouses. So there goes the motive for that scenario.”

“Except…,” Tom said as that tightening sensation crept again into the back of his neck, stronger this time. “Except that Adele was a widow and Joe and Ed were widowers.”

“Oh, Jeez,” Jack said as they stared at each other.

10

In Semelee’s vision, at least in the eye covered by the shell, she moved at a height varyin from one foot to almost two foot above the ground. Clumps of saw grass whipped past at eye level. Then she was splashin’ through a shallow pond, and now back up into the grass again. The goin’ was tougher than it shoulda been. In September of any other year, she—or rather, Devil—woulda been able to stay in the wet for the whole trip. This year, though, was different. Still, the drought wasn’t gonna keep Devil from goin’ where she wanted him to.

The goin’ was rougher for another reason: She had to stay on course and find her landmarks with only one eye.

At last she came to the pond she’d been searchin’ for. The level was down, but not as much as most others. She slid into the water and dove deep. Devil’s underwater vision was good, better than any human could claim, and soon enough she found the mouth of the tunnel.

She entered a dark place, so dark that even Devil’s eyes was no good here. Sometime long ago, when all this land was formed, something happened hereabouts that left a channel through the limestone. Its width was enough to allow Devil to swim through, but just barely. She had to go mostly by feel.

The channel branched and Semelee guided Devil to the left. It seemed to go on forever, but eventually she saw a glimmer of light ahead. Devil surged forward. She could feel his hunger, but she held him back, slowin’ him to a stop a few feet below the surface. She made him hover there for a few heartbeats, then started a slow float toward the surface. She let only his eyes and the top of his snout break the surface. An egret wading at the pond edge saw him and took flight. Smart bird. As Devil took a breath through the nostrils atop his snout, Semelee focused on the old man’s house.

She’d been watchin’ the place through a frog’s eyes, waitin’ for the son to come home. After bein’ so close to him in town this afternoon, she had to see him again. She’d felt somethin’ click between them. Like magic. She sensed destiny there. No doubt about it.

But as she’d been watchin’ she saw him arrive with that old crone from next door and his daddy! Semelee was so shocked she almost dropped her eye-shell. She thought this was bad at first, but then changed her mind. She realized that somethin’ must be helpin’ her, somethin’ big and powerful, maybe even the Glades itself must be guidin’ events. Because now that the old man was out of the hospital, he was closer to her. Comin’ home put him within’ strikin’ distance.

And strikin’ was just why she’d guided Devil here. She had to get this finished. And it had to be this old man. He’d been offered, and had to go before the time of the lights.

As a bonus, after the old man was gone, there’d be nothin’ standin’ between her and the son. They could get together, just like they was meant to.

She watched the front door. She wondered when the old man would come out…or if he’d come out. Might be a long wait.

She heard voices. Good thing a gator’s ears was atop his head, just behind the eyes, otherwise she woulda missed it. A swish of Devil’s tail angled him around so she could see who was talkin’ and…

Semelee blinked—her own eyes, not Devil’s—and stared. There he was: the old man—wearing one of the ugliest Hawaiian shirts she’d ever seen—and his son sittin’ in the neighbor lady’s front yard. This was too good to be true.

She made Devil sink toward the bottom of the pond, and then had him back up to the far end. When she and Devil made their strike, he had to be movin’ fast. He had to come out of the water at full speed and charge right at the old man. The big gator was hungry so she couldn’t let him get distracted and go for anyone else—not that skinny old lady and especially not the son. She had to keep him on course. Not such an easy thing because when a gator opened his mouth, it blocked his straight-ahead vision. To make up for that, nature made it so that if anything touches the lower jaw, the upper snaps down like a bear trap. That meant she had to aim just right so that nothin’—not furniture and not the wrong people—got in Devil’s way.

Once he got his teeth set in the old man, nothin’ was gonna break his hold. Semelee would have Devil drag him into the pond and take him to the bottom. The tunnel was too narrow to fit both gator and prey, so once the old man was drowned, she’d let Devil chow down a little before high-tail in it back to the lagoon.

Back at the far end of the pond now, she surfaced for another look. Yes…there he was, talkin’ and drinkin’…if she angled herself just right, she’d have a clear shot at the old buzzard. She’d sink, use Devil’s powerful tail to propel them through the water, then hit the land a-runnin’. The old man wouldn’t know what hit him. And finally she’d finish off what she, Luke, and Devil had begun the other night.

11

Tom watched the sunset. He and Anya did this a lot. Not every afternoon, but often enough to approach the status of a tradition. He was wearing one of his favorite shirts, the one with Mauna Loa in full eruption on the back with bright orange lava flows trailing around to the front. As usual, Anya was sipping her wine. He’d brought over a few beers. Often he’d supply a stainless-steel shaker of gimlets that he put in the ice bucket, but the Sapphire supply seemed lower than he remembered. Had Jack been nipping at it?

Jack had called his brother to tell him their father was up and about, then handed him the phone. His older son had made a stab at sounding overjoyed, but what he really sounded was distracted. He said everything was fine but Tom sensed that something was bothering him.

Did this mean he now had two secretive sons?

Jack had come along for the sunset tonight, and Tom learned that he and Anya had done the watch last night.

They really seemed to have hit it off, those two. He felt a twinge of…what? Jealousy? No, that was ridiculous. He liked Anya—loved her, in fact—but in a brotherly way. He felt no sexual attraction to her. She was a friend, a confidante, a drinking buddy. He could talk to her, confide in her. She’d lent him an ear when he’d talked about his self doubts and his wayward children, she’d held him when he’d cried after receiving word about Kate’s death. What sexual urges he had—and they seemed to be diminishing—were more than satisfied by a couple of the horny widows populating Gateways South. They weren’t looking for long-term relationships—what an alien concept in this environment—and neither was he. The couplings were Viagra fueled, but a lot of the pleasure was in the snuggling and cuddling and having someone else in bed with you.

He turned on the battery-powered CD-player-radio he always brought along. But instead of the usual gentle music from the AM station he kept it tuned to, rap burst from the speakers.

“What the hell?” He checked the dial and, sure enough, it was tuned to the right band. “What’s going on here?”

“They changed the format while you were in the hospital, hon,” Anya said.

“No!”

“Afraid so. Sorry.”

He jabbed at the off switch. “What’s happening to the world? Used to be I’d drive behind women and they’d be doing eye makeup and fixing their hair in the rearview mirror. Now it’s men who can’t take their eyes off themselves—staring at themselves and primping. Christ, everything’s going to hell in a hand basket.”

“Yeah,” Jack said, “and you can bet it’s got a Fendi or Gucci logo on it.”

“Very funny.” He pointed at his son’s T-shirt. “Look at that. ‘Hilfiger’ all across the front of your shirt. They sell you the shirt, then turn you into a free walking advertisement for their product. You should be charging them to wear it.”

“It’s the way of the world, Dad,” Jack said. “Everybody does it.”

“And that makes it right? Since when do you of all people want to look like everybody else?”

“Long story, Dad.”

“I’ll bet.”

What’s the matter with me? he thought. Why am I so cross? I sound like a crotchety old man.

He smiled to himself. Hell, I am a crotchety old man. But not without reason, not—

Anya’s dog started yipping. The little Chihuahua was standing at the edge of the pond barking at the water. Crazy little dog. Tom had noticed a snowy egret there a few moments ago but it was gone now. Probably scared off by the pooch. Nothing in sight but placid water.

He noticed another sound. A chorus of clanking rattles from all around him. The homemade ornaments—the painted cans on sticks salted in among the leprechauns, bunnies, turtles, and flamingoes—were shaking and rattling on their sticks. Funny…he didn’t feel a breeze.

The dog increased the pitch and volume of his yipping.

Tom turned to Anya. “What’s wrong with him? He hardly ever barks.”

“He must sense something out of the ordinary,” she said. “Oyv! Get away from there and stop that racket. A migraine I’m getting already. Go back to—”

Suddenly the water erupted and something huge and bellowing exploded from the pond. Tom dropped his beer and his mind blanked in shock for an instant. What the hell was it? All he saw at first was a wide-open set of jaws bordered with dagger like teeth, the delicate pink membranes lining the maw, and the long, tapered, slightly darker tongue waggling within. Then he saw the dark green scaly legs and the thick undulating tail behind.

An alligator, bigger than any he’d ever seen in all the gator parks he’d visited. And it was racing right for him.

The only thing between Tom and those jaws was Anya’s Chihuahua. The little dog held its ground for a second, then charged the gator, leaping at it with a high-pitched growl. The onrushing jaws scooped up the dog and snapped closed.

“Oyv!” Anya cried.

“Holy shit!” Jack was out of his chair and reaching for the small of his back.

Without breaking stride, the alligator made one convulsive swallow and the dog was gone, devoured like a canapé.

The monster gator was still lunging forward. Tom started to leap up but his foot slipped on the grass and suddenly he was falling backward in his chair. Before the gator opened its jaws again, Tom got a look at its head. He caught a flash of two scaly protrusions, gray-green like the rest of its hide, each about six inches long, on either side just behind and below the large brown eyes with their vertical-slit pupils. They looked like horns.

Something twisted in his chest…something familiar about this alligator. But what? How could he ever forget a creature like this?

As he and his chair hit the ground, Tom rolled to the side and started to scramble to his feet. He heard Jack mutter a curse and saw his hand coming out from under his shirt at the small of his back. Jack moved quickly, like a pouncing cat, grabbing the back of his chair and holding it out legs first, like a shield. To Tom’s shock, he leaped between him and the gator.

“Dad! Get back!”

Tom regained his feet and backed away, but Jack hung in there, facing the big gator down.

“Jack! Anya!” Tom cried. “Into the house!”

“Not to worry,” Anya said.

Tom looked her way and saw that she was still on her recliner. She’d straightened so that she was off the back rest, but she still held her wineglass.

“Anya!” he said. “Get up! It’s—”

She glanced at him. Her eyes and expression were unreadable, but her voice was calm, almost serene.

“No creature on earth will harm you here.”

“Tell that to Oyv!” Jack said, backing away from the onrushing gator, but keeping himself between it and Tom and Anya.

His son’s courage and protective stance amazed Tom. He’d known guys like that in the service—most of them long gone, sadly—but had seen little of it in today’s every-man-for-himself world.

And then, incredibly, the gator halted its charge. One second it was roaring toward them, the next it stopped as if it had run into a wall. It stood on the border of Anya’s emerald sward and the brown grass that typified the rest of Gateways. It closed its jaws and shook its head as if confused. It tried again to cross the line but then quickly retreated.

It turned left and stalked along the margin of green, thrashing its huge tail as it looked for a way in, and that was when Tom saw something dangling from its right flank. He squinted in the failing light and saw that it was an extra leg. But it looked vestigial. It didn’t move and didn’t touch the ground. It simply hung there.

The gator then turned and stalked the other way. Tom saw another vestigial limb on its left flank. But far more puzzling was its inability to cross onto Anya’s lawn. It made no sense.

And then it occurred to him that the situation might be only temporary. If only he had a gun!

“Call the cops!” he cried. “Call security! Get someone here to either drive this thing off or kill it before it kills someone!”

“No need,” Anya said from her recliner. “It will be leaving soon.”

The alligator stopped its stalking and bellowed. It shook its head and whipped its tail back and forth. It seemed confused. It bellowed again, and this time it sounded as if it was in pain. Then it rolled onto its side, and from there onto its back, swinging its head back and forth, thrashing its tail and clawing at the air with its taloned feet.

With another throaty bellow it rolled back onto its feet but didn’t charge. Instead it made a slow turn and began a limping retreat toward the pond. As it moved away Tom noticed a fist-sized bulge in its left flank, just ahead of the vestigial limb. Not so much a bulge as a pulsation.

The gator roared again as the bulge ruptured, spewing blood along the hide, a crimson splash along the gray-green scales. Something moved within that opening, something red and snouted. The hide split further and—

“Holy shit!” Jack shouted. “It’s Oyv!”

Dear God, he was right! The little Chihuahua was chewing its way out of the gator. It squeezed through the ragged opening like a baby being born. Once the upper half of his body was clear, the rest of him slid out. He landed on all fours and shook himself, then started barking at the retreating gator, chasing after it, nipping at its tail until it slid into the water and disappeared below the surface.

The dog dove into the water, repeatedly dipping its head under as it paddled in a small circle, then emerged with the blood washed away. He shook off the water with an almost epileptic shudder, then trotted back toward Anya with his tail wagging, his little head held high, and his black eyes shining. Proud, and very pleased with himself.

“Good boy,” Anya said, patting her lap. “Come to Momma.”

“What?” Jack started to laugh and Tom thought he heard an hysterical edge to his voice. “What the—? This is impossible! Just plain…” his voice trailed off to a whisper “…impossible.”

Jack turned and stared at Anya and she stared right back. Tom would have asked what was going on between them, but he couldn’t speak. He had to sit down. He quickly righted his chair and dropped into it, panting for air as his chest tightened.

He remembered now where he’d seen that horned alligator before.

12

Semelee dropped the eye-shell and fell to the floor, clutchin’ her left side. She felt as if someone had shoved a spear halfway through her. Never in her life had she felt pain like this.

“It hurts, Luke. Oh, God, it hurts!”

He hovered over her, hands reachin’ toward her, then pull in back. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

“Not sure.” The pain was easin’ off now. “Don’t know how, but Devil got hurt. Hurt bad.”

“Did you finish the old man?”

“No. I couldn’t get to him.”

“That old guy?” Luke’s tone said he didn’t believe a word of it. “He hurt Devil?”

“No-no. It was the same like in the hospital, only ten times worse. There was this line I couldn’t cross without feelin’ like I was gonna be sick or explode or both. I couldn’t push Devil past it.” Truth was, she couldn’t push herself past it. “And then this pain in Devil’s side that I felt too. Like he was bein’ stabbed, but from the inside.”

“The old guy’s kid?”

“I don’t think so. This wasn’t even at the old man’s house. It was at the old lady’s next door. It’s her. Gotta be her. She’s the one that’s been messin’ us up.”

“Whatta we do?”

“I don’t know. I’ll worry about that later. First thing I gotta do is get Devil home. He’s hurt bad, and he won’t know where he is. I gotta bring him in.”

She looked down at her eye-shell. She knew that if she put it on she’d feel that pain again. But she had to. She couldn’t leave Devil hangin’. Had to bring him back to his gator hole where he could wallow and heal up.

How’d that skinny old hag do it? How’d she hurt Devil whose hide was like armor plate?

Semelee didn’t know but she was gonna find out. And when she did, that old lady was gonna pay for what she’d done to Devil. That bitch was gonna hurt like Devil. Maybe even worse.

13

“Dad? Are you okay?”

Tom looked up from his chair and found Jack staring at him, a worried look on his face.

I must look like hell, he thought. He tried to respond but all he could do was shake his head and sweat.

“Is it your heart?”

“No.” Finally he could speak. “Not my heart. It’s my head. I remember what happened Monday night.”

“You mean, Tuesday morning?”

“Whenever I had the accident. That…that alligator was there.”

“That same one?” Jack said.

“You think I could forget those horns and those extra legs?”

Anya was watching him from her recliner. “Don’t go out at night like you do—how many times did I tell you that?”

“Countless times.” He shook his head. “I should have listened.”

Jack dropped into his own chair, opposite. “But how does that alligator figure into your accident? Or doesn’t it?”

“Oh, it does. I remember it now. I was driving south along Pemberton, taking my time…”

No hurry, no place to go, no timetable to hew to on that warm yet unseasonably cool night. Cool enough to drive with the windows open, not worrying about the mosquitoes because even that easy pace was too fast for them. He remembered the hum of his tires on the pavement, the soft feel of the wind swirling through the car and the mix of fragrances riding it: the sour smell of the saw grass yearning for water, the sweetness of the flowering roadside bushes.

“…and as I came to the stop sign on South Road, I slowed to a stop—well, maybe not a complete stop, but a sort of rolling stop. I was taking my foot off the brake as the car eased into the intersection, but before I could give it gas again I saw something crawl onto the road ahead of me. I hit the brakes hard and came to a dead stop maybe three-quarters of the way through the intersection.”

“An alligator?” Jack said. “The one we just saw?”

Tom nodded. “No question. I couldn’t keep going. Something that size—I mean it must be twenty feet long—doesn’t leave you any room to go around it. And truth be known, I didn’t want to go around it. I felt safe in the car—especially after I put the windows up. It wasn’t threatening me, just staring at me. I put on the high beams for a better look at it, and I must have been so fascinated by the sight of this horned gator that I didn’t hear the truck until it was practically on top of me. My closed windows and its off headlights didn’t help either.”

“Wait,” Jack said. “The guy was driving out there in the dark with no lights? Not even running lights?”

“Nothing. I heard a rumble to my right and looked and saw this dark shape roaring down at me from the west. It was practically on top of me. I didn’t have time to react—or maybe I froze in shock. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t move out of its way and it rammed me hard. I saw a big bumper smash into my right front fender and then the car was jerked around like…like I don’t know…like it had been punched by God. My head hit something and everything went dark for a while, I don’t know how long, and then I was back again, but the world was blurry and full of steam. My ruptured radiator, maybe.”

“Did you see any part of the truck? I mean, was it an old red pickup, by chance?”

Tom shook his head. “No. This was a big rig, and seemed to be in good shape. At least its bumper was. I remember seeing what looked like a wall of shiny chrome slamming into me. Why did you think it was a pickup?”

“Just a thought.” Somehow Jack looked disappointed.

“Getting hit wasn’t the worst part. The really frightening part came after the impact. I was lying there, feeling sick, hurt, bleeding, barely able to move, but alive and so thankful I’d worn my seat belt, when I heard these voices, growing louder as they got closer. I remember hearing someone sounding mad, cursing, saying something about hitting me too hard and what if they’d killed me. And then the door was pulled open and I almost fell out of the car. That was when I heard someone say, ‘Look! He’s moving! You damn well better thank your lucky stars he’s still alive!’”

“That sounds like they meant to hit your car.”

“They did.” Tom repressed a shudder. He glanced at Anya who was watching him impassively, her expression neutral. “It didn’t click then, but now I’m sure they did.”

“Sure?” Jack said. “What makes—?”

“By what came next. They unbuckled my seat belt and pulled me out and laid me on the road. I thought they were being awful rough with a man who might have a spine injury. As I was lying there I saw the big truck pulled over down along the side of South Road.”

“Wait,” Jack said. “The truck pulled over? But the police said it was a hit and run.”

“In a very real way, it was. It’s just that the run part was delayed a bit. Let me finish, will you?”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Just trying to keep all this straight in my head.”

“Forget about the truck for now. I know I did as soon as I saw that big alligator start to waddle toward me. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought the men who’d pulled me from the car were waving it forward. Like they wanted it to maul me…kill me…eat me.” This time he couldn’t repress the shudder. “It was within ten feet of me when I heard a siren. I couldn’t see any flashing lights but I could hear the two men start cursing about a cop car and what was he doing out here. That sort of thing.”

“Officer Hernandez,” Jack said.

“You know him?”

“Met him. Remember I told you that a call about your accident came in twenty minutes before it happened?” He glanced at Anya but she didn’t react. “He’s the one who went out to investigate. Sounds like that call saved your life.”

But that didn’t make sense, Tom thought. How could anyone have known about the accident before it happened? Yet something with a siren had been coming down the road.

“I don’t know who or what was heading my way. All I know is that it scared off the two men who’d pulled me from the car, because they started calling to the alligator as if it was human, as if it could understand. I heard one yell, ‘There’s a cop on the way! Get out of sight. We’ll meet you back at the lagoon!’ And then they started running back toward the truck.”

“Did you notice anything about them?” Jack said. “Like did one have a funny-shaped head?”

“Funny-shaped head? Why—?”

“Anything distinguishing,” Jack added quickly.

“No. Not that I could tell. I didn’t take my eyes off that alligator until it slithered off the road and into the grass, and by then they were almost to the truck.”

“Do you remember anything at all about the truck? Like what kind? Was it a semi or a big van or what?”

“A semi, maybe, but it didn’t have the usual big rectangular trailer. This had an odd shape, like those trucks that carry gravel or something.”

“What about a name or a sign?”

“None that I could see. I had only moonlight and starlight to go by and…” Something flashed in his memory.

Jack leaned closer. “What?”

“On its rear panel…I think I saw something that looked like a flower, but all black. At least it looked black in the moonlight. After that, I remember flashing lights and then I didn’t see anything until I woke up this morning.”

A sudden realization hit him like…like an onrushing truck. He looked at Jack and then at Anya.

“Someone tried to kill me.”

“Not necessarily,” Jack said. “From what you heard them say…‘thank your lucky stars he’s still alive…that sounds like they didn’t want to kill you.”

He sensed that Jack didn’t believe a word of it, that he was just trying to make him feel better. But it wasn’t working.

“They wanted to hit my car. And I have a feeling they were going to feed me to that alligator.”

“Maybe you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

No…that didn’t wash. No question in Tom’s mind: Someone wanted him dead.

The thought sickened him. When he’d been in Korea, the NKs and the Chinese Reds had wanted him dead, but that was war, that was to be expected. This was Florida. He’d been here just a little over a year. He’d made a number of new friends but couldn’t imagine how he could have made an enemy.

Yet someone had tried to kill him.

Suddenly Tom felt exposed out here on Anya’s lawn. He wanted walls around him. He rose unsteadily from the chair.

“I think I’ll head home.”

“You okay?” Jack said.

“Yeah. Sure. I’ll just go inside and lie down. Excuse me, Anya.”

“Go, Tom,” she said. She was still in her recliner, the wet dog curled up on her lap. “You should rest.”

“I’ll come with you,” Jack said.

“That’s okay. I can find my own way.”

“That’s not the point,” his son said, rising and gripping his arm. “Come on. I’ll walk you back. I know how you feel.”

No, you don’t, Tom thought. And I hope you never do.

A good kid, Jack. No, not a kid. A man, and a pretty gutsy one at that, placing himself between a ferocious gator and the old folks with only a lightweight resin chair as a weapon. But Jack couldn’t know what it was like to fear for his life, to have someone wanting him dead. That took a war. It had been Tom’s great hope for his sons that neither would have to go to war as he did and know that kind of fear. And it had worked out. Both boys had been too young for Vietnam, and a volunteer army had been in place by the time the Gulf Wars rolled around.

“Wait,” he said, turning. “We should call the cops or the wildlife control or something, shouldn’t we?”

“Why?” Anya said.

“To let them know there’s a monster gator in our pond.”

“Not to worry,” Anya said with a wave of her hand. “He’s gone. And after such a reception as he got here today, I doubt he’ll be back.”

“Where’d he go?” Jack said.

“There’s an underground tunnel that leads from the pond back into the Everglades.”

“Really?” Tom said. “I didn’t know that.”

Jack stared at her. “How do you know, Anya?”

She shrugged. “I’ve been around here a long time. I shouldn’t know things?”

He saw Jack stare at her again for a moment, then point a finger her way. “We need to talk.”

She raised her wineglass. “I’ll be here.”

Tom wondered at that exchange. As soon as they were in the house he turned to Jack. “Why did you say that to Anya?”

“What?”

“‘We need to talk.’ About what? What does that mean?”

“I’ve got some questions for her.”

“About what?”

“Things. Tell you about it later.”

Why didn’t Tom believe that? What was going on between those two? He was about to press him when Jack grabbed the pen and notepad from the counter by the phone.

“Just thought of something. Give me the names again of those three people who were killed.”

“Why?” And then he knew. “Oh, no. You don’t think—”

“I don’t know what to think, Dad. When Carl told me about the others he said you didn’t fit the pattern because the others were killed by birds and spiders and snakes. You were different because you were hurt in a car accident. But if what you remember is correct, you weren’t going to be the victim of a hit-and-run accident, you were going to be a meal for that alligator. And that does fit the pattern.”

Tom shook his head. “A few hours ago you were implicating Gateways in a scheme to get properties reverted. Now you think it’s…what? How, just how, do you get birds and snakes to attack someone?”

Jack stared at him. “How do you get an alligator to attack someone? Twice. Because, Dad, that gator was coming for you. He was aimed at you like an arrow shot from a bow.”

Tom wanted to deny it—tried to deny it—but couldn’t. Jack was right. Those open jaws had been coming straight at him.

“But it’s crazy,” he said. Even crazier was how the gator had stopped at the edge of Anya’s lawn. He was suddenly too tired to think about that now. Another question was far more pressing. “Why me?”

“That’s what I intend to find out,” Jack said.

Tom noticed a fierce look in his eyes. There was fire in Jack, a heat and a resolve he’d never expected in his appliance-repairman son.

And something else. He had a sense that Jack already knew the answer, or at least where to look. But how was that possible? He’d been here barely two days.

“Give me those three names,” Jack said with the pencil poised over the pad.

14

His father had said good night and retreated to his bedroom. Jack heard the shower run, then the mutter of the TV through the closed door. Maybe Dad was watching it, maybe just zoned out in front of it.

Jack was grateful for the solitude. It gave him time to think. He grabbed a beer from the fridge and paced the front room, mulling what had happened, and what had almost happened. He’d been unarmed. Well, why not? Just visiting a neighbor lady for some conversation and a few sundown drinks. Who needs to be armed?

He’d know better next time. If there was going to be a next time. A few rounds into that gator’s eyes or its open mouth…that would have stopped it. Or at least he was pretty sure it would have.

But a gun would have been superfluous because the gator hadn’t been able to cross the line into Anya’s yard.

Jack was getting used to the surreal, but still…

Could someone or—worse—some thing be controlling the wildlife around here? This whole situation had Otherness written all over it. He was convinced the Otherness had taken Kate from him, then it had made an attempt at Gia and Vicky and the unborn baby. Was it after his father now?

Gia and Vicky…

He pulled out his Tracfone and punched in Gia’s number. She was delighted to hear that his father was out of his coma. Jack left out the other details, like attempted murder by alligator—twice—and told her he’d be hanging around a few days more, just to make sure he was okay.

Then Vickie got on the phone. She wanted him to bring her back a pet alligator. Jack shuddered at the thought but told her he’d see if he could catch one for her. A little one. Right.

Then Gia again. She was feeling good; she thought she’d felt the baby move but wasn’t sure. All quiet on Sutton Square.

After I-love-yous and goodnights, he hung up and made another call to Manhattan. This time to Abe.

When Abe picked up, Jack said, “Hey. It’s me.”

Jack’s Tracfone was untraceable, but he could never rule out that the BATF had taken an interest in Abe—linked him to an illegal weapon, perhaps—and were eavesdropping. So for his own sake and for Abe’s, he never mentioned his name or anyone else’s, even Abe’s.

“Good evening, Me. How’s the vacation going?”

“Could be better. You know how I thought I’d have an easy time at the tournament? It’s not turning out that way. The competition is a lot stiffer than I dreamed possible.”

“Is that so? As I recall, you weren’t expecting any competition.”

“Turned out I was wrong. Imagine that. But here’s the thing. I need bigger and better equipment. Some new tennis clothes, for sure. Large size.”

“How large? X? Double-X? Triple-X?”

“Big as you’ve got. Think elephant when you pick it out.”

“Elephant?”

“Mastodon. Oh, and maybe some new racquets.”

“Any particular model?”

“You pick them out. I need something with a nice sweet spot and lots more power than what I’ve got.”

“So it’s a power player you’re up against?”

“Yeah. Back court all the way until today’s round. That was when he started coming to the net. I don’t think I’ve seen his best stuff yet, so I want to be prepared.”

“I should say so. I’ll send you a nice selection of racquets that you should be able to adjust to your needs. You want I should include extra strings in case you break some?”

“Definitely. The more the better. You know how I break strings.”

“Do I. Anything else?”

“Some tennis balls.”

“Balls? I’m not following you here. Surely they have tennis balls where you are?”

“Not like the brand you carry. Yours always seem fresher. And make sure they’re yellow. A pale yellow.”

“Pale yellow…”

Jack detected a note of uncertainty in Abe’s voice. “Yeah, pale yellow. Like the color of my favorite fruit.”

“A lemon?”

“No! Pineapple, my man. Pineapple. You know how I love pineapple.”

“Oy, of course. How could I have forgotten? Yes, well, I’ll check to see if I have any of that shade in stock. I should send you how many?”

“Let’s see…I don’t want to run short. How about a dozen?”

“A dozen. Sounds to me like you’ll be playing a lot of tennis.”

“I hope not. The longer you play, the greater the chance of injury. As you know, I like to rip right through the matches without much wear and tear, but you never know. Best to be prepared, don’t you think?”

“Definitely. You want I should send them to that address you left with me?”

“That’s the place. And make it quick, okay? Who knows what I’ll be facing tomorrow.”

“I’ll pack it up right away and get it out tonight. I’ll use my special carrier. If all goes well you should have them by tomorrow afternoon.”

“Swell. Put it on my tab and we’ll settle up when I get back. I owe you one.”

“I’ll add this to the ‘owe’ list.”

“Do that. Oh, and by the way. Have I got a girl for you. She’s an older woman, but she could be a soul mate.”

“Now you’re a matchmaker?”

“Just trying to enrich your life, my friend.”

“Okay. I’ll humor you. First question: Is she on the thin side or the heavy side?”

“She makes Olive Oyl look like a sumo wrestler.”

“Sorry. Not interested. I need a woman with some meat on her, enough bulk so that we don’t look like Mr. and Mrs. Sprat when we go out together. Someone who won’t frown when I put extra cream cheese on my bagel. Someone, in fact, who’ll ask me if I want seconds, or even thirds. An anorexic woman is the last thing I need.”

“Okay. Just thought I’d ask.”

“Find a Sophie Tucker for me and then we’ll talk. But back to the tennis matches: Listen, be careful. Watch your footwork. Sounds like even a minor misstep could take you out of the game.”

“Ain’t that the truth. Talk to you later.”

“Stay in touch. Let me know the scores.”

“Will do.”

Jack smiled as he cut the connection, but it faded as he turned toward his father’s bedroom. He knocked softly on the door. When he received no answer, he pushed it open and peeked in. His father lay in bed, snoring softly, the remote in his hand, the Weather Channel playing on the TV.

Jack turned and headed for the front door. Time to visit Ms. Mundy. He had a few questions he wanted answered. Hell, he had lots of questions, and he knew she had answers to some of them.

15

Anya’s front yard was deserted. The furniture was as he’d left it but she and Oyv were gone. So were the glasses, the wine, and the beer Jack and his father had brought over.

Jack knocked on the door. Anya, wearing another garish kimono with bright red sampans sailing across her flat chest, answered almost immediately.

“You’re back. That must mean your father’s okay.”

“Shaken up but he’s all right, I think. We need to talk.”

“As you wish,” she said, moving away from the door. “Come in.”

Jack stepped into the greenhouse interior.

“I put your beer in the refrigerator so it wouldn’t get warm,” she said on her way to the kitchen. “Do you want one?”

“Thanks, no. I’m not here to drink.”

She stopped at the kitchen counter where the wine bottle waited. An empty glass stood next to one half filled. Not dainty little claret glasses but big glass balloons that held eight to ten ounces if they held a drop. She topped off both and held out the fresh one to Jack.

“Here. Try this. It’s Italian. Valpolicella.”

“No, really. I—”

She locked eyes with him. “I don’t like to talk to people who won’t share a glass with me.”

Jack shrugged and took the glass. He’d done worse things to get someone to talk. He took a sip.

“It’s good.” There. Was she happy? “Now, can I ask you a few questions?”

“If you wish.” She seated herself on the sofa overhung with plants and vines. She lit a cigarette and began shuffling a deck of cards. She pointed him toward the recliner. “Sit. You want to ask me about a Russian woman with a malamute, don’t you.”

Jack felt his jaw drop. “I—I—”

“And an Indian woman with a German shepherd. The one who told you to stay away from that house in Astoria. The one you foolishly ignored.”

“How did you know?” Jack said, finding his voice.

She blew smoke and shrugged as she began laying out the cards in a classic solitaire tableau. “Lucky guess.”

“Since June I’ve been running into women who know too much—women with dogs. You’re the third. Two isn’t a trend. But three…”

“Not to worry. You have nothing to fear from them. Or me.”

Jack took a deep breath and let it out. He’d expected denials or, at the very least, evasions. To have her come right out and confirm his suspicions…it knocked him off balance.

He took a gulp of his wine. Maybe this was why she’d insisted he take a glass.

“Who are you people?”

She finished laying out the cards and began to play, flipping them over with sharp little snaps. “No one in particular.”

“I don’t buy that. You know too much. Back in June, when I was sick, the Russian lady came to my room”—he saw her in his mind, salt-and-pepper hair, gray jogging suit, big white malamute—“and told me things about a war I’d been drafted into. ‘Is war and you are warrior,’ she said. I don’t know if she mentioned it directly or not, but I’m pretty sure she was going on about something called the Otherness and—”

Anya stopped her card play and looked up at him. “You’d already heard of the Otherness by then.”

“Yeah.”

Although he wished he hadn’t. The first mention had been earlier in the year, in the spring at a—surprise—conspiracy convention. Since then his life hadn’t seemed quite his own.

According to what he’d been told, two vast, unimaginably complex cosmic forces have been at war forever. The prize in the war is all existence—all the dimensions, all the realities, all the parallel dimensions up for grabs. Earth and humanity’s corner of reality is a minor piece on the game board, of no special importance. But if one is going to declare itself winner, one has to take all the pieces. Even the inconsequential ones.

One side—a force, a state of being, whatever—is inimical to humankind. It has no name but through the ages came to be called the Otherness by people aware of its existence. If the Otherness takes over, it will transform Earth’s reality into a place toxic to all known life. Fortunately, Earth and its attendant reality are currently in the portfolio of the other side, the force known only as the Ally. From what Jack had learned, “Ally” was a misnomer. This force was not a friend, merely an enemy of humanity’s enemy. The most Earth could expect from it was benign neglect.

“At the time I thought the Russian lady was some sort of fever dream, but then she showed up again and told me…”

“That there would be no more coincidences in your life.”

Jack nodded. The words still chilled him. The implications were devastating.

“Was she right?”

Anya went back to her game, flipping and arranging the cards in the tableau, moving some aces and deuces up to the foundation.

“I’m afraid so, hon.”

“Then it means that my life is being manipulated. Why?”

“Because you are involved.”

“Not by choice.”

“Choice means nothing in these matters.”

“Well, if someone or something thinks I’m its standard bearer, it had better think again.”

“You are not the standard bearer. Not yet.”

If true, that was a relief. A small one.

“Then who is?”

Anya was dealing to herself from the stock now, and Jack couldn’t help but notice that the cards were falling her way, more and more finding places in the tableau or the foundation.

“One who preceded you,” she said. “He preceded the twins as well. You remember the twins, don’t you.”

Jack had a flash of two men in identical black suits and dark glasses, with identical pale, expressionless faces.

“How could I forget?”

“They were meant to replace their predecessor. But when you dispatched them—”

“They didn’t leave me much choice. It was them or me. And I tried to help them at the end, but they refused.”

“They did what they had to do, but their passing left a void. One that you were tapped to fill.”

“But you said there’s someone else.”

Anya nodded as she laid the final card from her stock on the solitaire tableau. All the cards were face up. She’d won. Without bothering to shift all the tableau cards to the foundation, she gathered them up and began shuffling.

“There is. A mensch of mensches, that one. But he’s old now, and may die before he’s needed again.”

“‘Again’?”

“He was the Ally’s champion for a long time.”

“How long?”

“Very long. So long you wouldn’t believe. But now his days are numbered. After ages in the Ally’s service—too long, I think, but who listens to an old woman—he was freed. But it seems his liberation was premature. Even though he has aged, he may be needed again. But if he doesn’t live till that day…” Her eyes met Jack’s.

“Then it’ll be me?”

“You.”

Against all reason, Jack believed her. With an effort, he shelved his dismay. Maybe that day would never come. Or maybe he’d have died of old age when it did.

But he hadn’t come here about himself. He’d come about his father.

“Is the Otherness involved in what’s been happening to my father?”

She nodded as she finished shuffling and began to lay out another solitaire tableau.

“The Ally is involved here as well, though tenuously.”

“But I can assume, at least from what I’ve seen, that you and your ladies are on the Ally’s side, right?”

She shook her head. “No. I oppose the Otherness, but I’ve no connection to the Ally.”

“Then whose side are you on?”

“Yours.”

“But I’m stuck with the Ally, so that means—”

Anya grimaced with irritation and stopped her card play.

“I didn’t say the Ally’s side, did I? No. I said, yours. That means you, separate and distinct from the Ally.”

“But why?”

“Because the Ally can be as ruthless as the Otherness. It opposes the Otherness for its own reasons, none of which involves our health and happiness. It will use you and anyone else it can to fend off the Otherness, and not care a whit what happens to you. Humanity’s well-being is not on its agenda. It is, however, on mine.”

“Why? What’s your stake in this?”

She began rearranging the cards in the tableau.

“My stake is your stake. Everyone here on this planet is in the same boat—Earth is a boat, when you think of it—and we all deserve to be free of both these meddling powers. This planet, in this subdivision of reality, is inhabited by sentient beings, which makes it all the more valuable in the struggle. But it’s more than mere property that can be won or lost or traded at will. If it must belong to one of them, then I’d far prefer the Ally over the Otherness. But why belong to either? Why not be shut of both of them?”

“Sounds good to me,” Jack said. He leaned back, trying to get a handle on what she was saying, and what it meant. “But what I’m getting here…what you’re telling me…is that there’s a third force involved in all this.”

“I suppose you could put it that way.”

“And you…you and those other women…you’re part of that?”

“So it would appear.”

“But how can you hope to compete with the other two players?”

“Because I must.”

“But who are you? What are you? Where do you come from?”

“We come from everywhere. We’re all around you. You simply never see us.”

Jack shook his head to clear it. He didn’t want to deal with this now. He’d had trouble enough buying into the cosmic tug-of-war scenario. But now Anya was telling him that a third party had entered the fray—or maybe had always been in the fray but no one had told him. Whatever the case, he’d get to that later. Right now he had to stay focused on his father.

“Why my father? Why would—?”

And then he had a chilling thought. What had she said to him that first day in the hospital room?

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

“Oh, no! You’re not telling me that this ‘predecessor champion’ you’ve been telling me about is my father!”

“Tom?” Anya laughed. “Oy! Such a thought! You think you’re living in a fairy tale? How can you even consider such a thing!”

“That’s not a exactly a ‘no.’”

“All right then. You want a ‘no’? Here’s a ‘no.’ Your father has no direct connection to the Ally or the Otherness. Never did, never will.”

She laughed again and continued her card play.

Jack too had to smile. All right, yeah, it was a ridiculous thought. The pen might be mightier than the sword, but an accountant as defender of humanity against the Otherness? Crazy.

Yet…for a moment there…

“Wait. You said no direct connection. Does he have an indirect connection?”

“Of course. Isn’t it obvious?”

“Because he’s my father?”

Anya nodded. “A blood relative.”

Jack closed his eyes. This was what he’d suspected, what he’d feared.

“That alligator, then…it was sent by the Otherness.”

“Sent? No, that was someone else’s idea. I can tell you that the creature was created by the Otherness, but whether intentionally or accidentally is hard to say.”

“Why? You seem to know everything else. Why don’t you know that?”

“I don’t know everything, kiddo. If I did, maybe the two of us could send the Otherness and the Ally packing.”

“Why do I get this feeling you’re holding back? You don’t know everything? Fine. Nobody does. But why don’t you just come out and tell everything you do know?”

“Because sometimes it’s best that you learn things on your own. But I can tell you about the connection between the Otherness and that alligator.”

Jack leaned back and took another slug of wine. “I’m all ears.”

“It was born near a nexus point.”

“And that is…?”

“A place. A very special place. In various locales around the globe there are spots where the veil between our world and the Otherness is thin. Occasionally the veil attenuates to the point where a little of the Otherness can enter our sphere. But only briefly. Rarely do beings from the other side pass through. But influence…ah, that’s another matter.”

“Let me guess a location,” Jack said. “Washington, DC, maybe? Say, near the Capitol Hill or the White House?”

Anya smiled as she gathered up her cards. She’d won again.

“I’m afraid those gonifs have no such excuses for their behavior, hon. But one is near here, and another near where you live.”

“Where?” Somehow Jack wasn’t surprised.

“In the New Jersey Pine Barrens. At a place called Razorback Hill.”

Jack had gone into the Barrens last spring, and almost hadn’t come out. “It must be pretty well hidden. I mean, don’t you think someone would have stumbled across it by now?”

“There are places in the Pine Barrens that no human eyes have seen. But even so, the nexus points manifest themselves directly only twice a year—at the equinoxes. But their indirect effects can be viewed every day.”

“Like what?”

“Mutations. Something leaks through from the other side around the time of the equinox; whatever it is changes the cells of the living things around it—plants, animals, trees…and people.”

“You’d think someone would have noticed that by now.”

Anya shook her head. “The nexus points are located in unpopulated areas.”

“How convenient.”

“Not so. When you consider that these leaks have been occurring for ages, and that most people experience a sense of uneasiness when they near a nexus point, it makes sense. Nexus points don’t occur in places that people avoid. Just the opposite: People—most people, that is—instinctively avoid nexus points.”

Jack was thinking, nexus point…mutations…a humongous horned alligator…

“There’s a nexus point out there in the swamp, isn’t there.”

“I told you, it’s not a swamp, it’s—”

“A river of grass. Right. Okay. But am I right that there’s a nexus point nearby in the Everglades?”

Anya nodded. “In a lagoon within one of the hardwood hummocks.”

“How do you know all this?”

Anya shrugged. “Like I said before, hon, I’ve been around here longer than you.”

“How long?”

“Long enough.”

“All right, then.” He sensed a certain timelessness about Anya, and was convinced she was more than she pretended to be. He took a chance and asked her flat out: “How long have you and these other women been around?”

“I should tell you my age?”

She lit another cigarette and gathered up her cards. She’d won another game. That made three in a row. More than luck there. Had to be. She was either cheating or…

Let it go.

“All right, don’t tell me. Maybe if I see that Indian woman again”—he remembered her orange sari and long braid, and her German shepherd—“maybe I’ll ask her. She looked young.”

Anya laughed. “Never ask a woman her age!”

Thinking of the other women with dogs reminded Jack of something one of them had said.

“The Russian woman mentioned someone called the Adversary. Who’s that? She said I’d met him.”

Anya leaned back and stared at him.

“You have. Remember my telling you about the aging one who once spearheaded the Ally’s cause? Well, the Otherness has its own champion. He’s very dangerous. He’s ancient. He’s been killed more than once but each time he’s been reborn.”

“And I’ve met him? I—”

And then Jack knew. The strange, strange man who’d first explained the Otherness to him, the man he suspected of being ultimately responsible for Kate’s death…

“Roma,” he whispered. “Sal Roma. At least that was what he told me his name was. I later learned that was a lie.”

“Always you must expect lies where he is concerned—unless the truth will hurt you. He feeds on pain.”

“Yeah. That was what your Russian friend told me: human misery, discord, and chaos. But who is he, really?”

“More like what is he. He used to be a man just like you, but now he is more. He is destined to become something else, but he hasn’t reached that state yet. He can do things that humans can only dream of, but he is still in the process of becoming. He’s known as ‘the Adversary’ to those who oppose the Otherness, and ‘the One’ to those aligned with it.”

“Why would people work for the Otherness when they know it means the end of everything?”

Anya shrugged. “Who can explain people? Some are so filled with hate that they want to see everything destroyed, some believe their efforts toward bringing the Otherness apocalypse will be rewarded afterward, some believe packages of lies they’ve been fed, and some are simply mad. The Adversary orchestrates their movements from afar.”

“But what’s his name ?”

“He uses many. He has many identities, many different looks, but he never uses his True Name.”

“Do you know it?”

Anya nodded. “But I will not tell you.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because he would hear you. And you do not want to attract his attention.”

“Says who?” Jack said, feeling the heat of the rage he’d been carrying around for months now. “I’ve got a score to settle with him and—”

“No!” Anya was leaning forward in her seat, eyes ablaze. “You stay away from him! Whatever you do, you must not antagonize him. He will snuff you out like a match if it suits him.”

“We’ll see about that. Just tell me his name and let me worry about the rest.”

Anya shook her head. “Speaking his name would lead him here—and he’s looking for me.”

“You? Why?”

“To kill me.”

Her words shocked Jack. And the matter-of-fact way she said it, as if she’d been dealing with this threat for so long she’d grown used to it, made it all the more believable.

But could it be true? If so, he’d lay off pressing her for Roma’s real name.

“Because you oppose the Otherness?”

“More than that. I stand in its way—in his way.”

Jack wanted to say, You’re a little old lady…how can you stand in anyone’s way? But he hadn’t forgotten how that alligator had been unable to enter her yard. Perhaps she and the others were keeping out the Otherness just as she’d kept out the gator, but on a far greater scale.

This little old lady was a lot more than she seemed. She had power…but from where?

Jack wasn’t going to waste his time asking. She’d already made it damn clear there were things about her and her friends she didn’t want known.

“You stand in his way to…what?”

“To opening the gates to the Otherness. The Adversary will remain in a state of becoming until he succeeds. If he does, he will be transformed and life, reality, existence as we know it will end. He thought he’d found a shortcut earlier this year. You were there and—”

“How do you know this stuff? Or was one of your ladies watching?”

“You might say that.”

Jack remembered gazing down into a bottomless hole…into an abyss glowing with strange lights…a steadily enlarging hole that he feared might devour him and the rest of the world.

Anya said, “The Adversary failed then because he acted prematurely. That shows me he’s anxious to finish his becoming. Since then he and those he has manipulated have doubled and redoubled their efforts to open those gates. But to achieve final success he must kill me or hurt me so severely that I can no longer oppose them.”

Apprehension tightened his shoulders. If the Adversary or the One or Roma or whatever the hell he was called was as dangerous as Anya said, she could be in big trouble. Jack hadn’t known her long, but he’d taken a real liking to this old broad.

“But if he doesn’t know where you are, he can’t hurt you, right?”

She shook her head. “No. He can hurt me. He hurts me all the time.”

“But how—?”

Anya stiffened and grimaced with pain as she sucked air through her teeth with a hiss. She arched her back and reached around to touch her right shoulder blade. Oyv jumped up and started barking.

“See?” she gasped. “Even now he does it! He’s hurting me again!”

Jack was up and around the chair, looking at her back.

“What? What’s happening?”

“Oh!” She was taking quick, shallow, panting breaths. “He stabs me! It hurts!”

“What can I do?”

“Nothing. It will pass.”

Jack thought he saw a small spot of red—blood red—appear on the back of her kimono, but couldn’t be sure because it was within the hull of one of the bright red sampans.

“Are you bleeding?”

She leaned back against the chair, hiding her back from view.

“I’ll be all right.”

Her color was better and her breathing, though not normal yet, was easing in the right direction.

“Should I get a doctor?”

She shook her head. “No doctor can help with this. I’ll be fine. This isn’t the first time he’s hurt me, and it won’t be the last. He’s moving closer and closer to his goal. A strange season is upon us, and it will grow stranger.”

“Damn it, Anya, tell me his name. I’ll put an end to this.”

She shook her head. “No, Jack. He’s immune to your methods. He’s more than you can handle.”

“Then how do we stop him?”

Anya looked up at him and Jack saw fear in her eyes. “I don’t know. We can only hope that he makes a fatal mistake—he’s not perfect you know—or that the Ally steps in on our side. Otherwise, I don’t know if he can be stopped.”

16

After Anya’s pain had subsided, she shooed Jack out of the house. He felt he should stay but he could see that she wanted to be alone.

He stood in her front yard among the ornaments, staring at the rising moon, and wondering at how his life had changed since a year ago last summer when he’d accepted the seemingly simple, straightforward job of finding a stolen necklace. Now it seemed that every time he turned around, a new revelation leaped at him, tearing a jagged rent in the fabric of the snug, familiar worldview he’d been wrapped in for the first thirty-five years of his life.

A year ago he’d have written Anya off as a loon. But no more.

He popped into his father’s house and peeked again into his bedroom. The old guy was still sleeping peacefully with the TV going. Jack found the screwdriver and flashlight he’d used last night, then stepped outside and headed for the clinic.

Although he’d broken in once before, he didn’t take for granted that it would be as easy the second time. He was just as careful about approaching the building, keeping to the bushes and watching for the security patrols. About halfway there he realized he’d forgotten the mosquito repellent. They’d declared his arms and neck an all-night deli and were ordering take out.

Slapping and scratching, he picked up his pace and made it to the clinic faster than last night. He popped the window latch again and slid inside. After reclosing the window, he killed a couple of mosquitoes that were still drilling into his skin, then got to work.

Straight to the record room where he began flipping through the charts. He had the list of names his father had given him and though it was a long shot that they’d all had recent physicals, he had to check.

He started at the top of the alphabet and worked his way down, pulling the charts as he came across them: Adele Borger…Joseph Leo…Edward Neusner…

All here.

No second guessing the ethics of invading privacy this time. These folks weren’t his father, and they were dead.

Inside the charts, Jack knew where to look. He went to the bottom of the final page of the complete physical. Each one read the same: Final assess: excellent health.

A prickling sensation ran along the back of his neck. Seemed like being single at Gateways South and passing your free physical with flying colors was not a good thing. In their cases, it appeared to be a death sentence.

The pattern was obvious: The healthiest single members of Gateways South were dying by mishap. An early demise meant that, instead of having to wait many years for these healthy folk to go, the management was able to resell their homes immediately.

Jack had a pretty good idea as to the why and the who, and a wild idea as to the how.

He wondered if the doc was in on it. Probably not. He seemed like too much of a straight shooter.

Besides, you didn’t need the doc to get a look at the files. Jack’s presence here proved that. But there was an even easier way. If you were someone with an official position at Gateways South, and if you had a key to the clinic, you could stroll in here at night, check out the names of those who’d had a complete physical lately, and peruse their files to your heart’s content.

Jack decided that he and Gateways South director Ramsey Weldon were going to have a little heart-to-heart chat tomorrow.

Friday

1

Jack jogged along the asphalt walking/bicycle path that wound through the pines lining the eastern limits of Gateways South. A thin morning mist wound between the trunks; brown needles, shedding early due to the drought, littered the path. The scent of pine lay thick in the air.

He’d awakened to silence for a change. Carl must have been trimming someone else’s hedges this morning. His father was just starting to stir, so Jack had come out for a run. He’d been too sedentary the past few days. Needed to get the blood flowing. He’d thought about checking on Anya but it was too early. He’d swing by on the way back.

He chugged along in a Boneless T-shirt and gym shorts, building a sweat; he wore his leather belt under the loose shirt to hold the small-of the-back holster for his Glock 19; the way it bounced against the base of his spine as he ran was annoying, but no way he was going unarmed around this place.

An eight-foot chain-link fence ran along the Gateways border to his right. The links of the par-3 golf course lay to his left. He noticed a lone, vaguely familiar figure hunched over a putter on a rise ahead. As he neared he recognized him: Carl.

Jack veered to his left and found Carl on a putting green, working with a club that protruded from his right sleeve. Jack had thought he was a righty, but he was using a lefty stance.

He waited until Carl had hit the ball—he just missed, rimming the cup—before speaking.

“When did you join the community?”

Carl jumped and spun. “Oh, it’s you! You scared me again! You gotta learn to make more noise when you come up on people.”

“Sorry,” Jack said. “I’ll work on it. Say, did your video camera catch any signs of Ms. Mundy watering her lawn?”

“Zilch again.” He grinned. “And I hope it don’t. Wouldn’t mind keepin’ this up the rest of the year, long as old Doc Dengrove keeps payin’ me.”

Jack glanced down at the balls Carl had arranged on the grass before him, sitting in a line, waiting for the putter. “Is a golfing membership one of the perks of your job?”

He shook his head. “Only on weekdays, and only on my day off, and only if I stay out of everbody’s way. I ain’t much with the drivers—I mean, my scores for eighteen holes are pretty pan-o-ramic—but I like to putt. I ain’t a bad miniature golf player.”

“No kidding.” This was fascinating, simply fascinating. Jack waved and turned away. “Got to keep moving. Good luck. Sink those putts. Make those birdies.”

But he never got restarted. The sight of a beat-up red pickup cruising the dirt road on the far side of the fence stopped him cold. It slowed as a pair of mismatched eyes peered at him from under the brim of a dirty John Deere cap, then picked up speed again.

A thought struck Jack. He turned back to Carl, intending to ask him if he knew them, but the half-sick look on his face as he watched the pickup bounce away into the trees said it all.

“You know those guys, don’t you.”

Carl swallowed. His left eye was already looking away; the right followed. “Why you say something like that?”

“Because I think you do. Who are they?”

“Nobody to mess with. You don’t want to know ’em.”

“Yeah, I do.” Especially after what his father had told him last night about the accident. Jack gave him a hard stare. “Who are they, Carl?”

Carl looked like he was going to try to float some bullshit, then his shoulders sagged and he shook his head.

“They live out in the Glades. On a lagoon in one of the hardwood hummocks.”

“I thought no one was supposed to live out there except maybe some local Indians.”

“Well, I think you know that what’s upposed to be and what is ain’t necessarily the same thing.”

Yeah. Jack knew that.

“You know where this lagoon is?”

Carl nodded. “I guess so.”

“How do I get there?”

“You don’t, not unless you know the way.”

“Can you show me on a map?”

Another shake of his head. “It ain’t marked on no maps. It’s pretty well hid.”

“Then how come you know where it is?”

Carl looked away. “I was born there.”

This didn’t surprise Jack. He’d seen what the folks connected to the red pickup looked like, and figured there had to be something wicked strange about Carl’s right arm. Add that to what Anya had said about the mutating effects of the Otherness leak at the nexus point in the Glades, and the connection looked obvious.

He remembered other misshapen people he’d met earlier in the year…Melanie Ehler and Frayne Canfield…both had attributed their deformities to “a burst of Otherness” during their gestations. Carl’s story was most likely the same.

“All right then,” Jack said, “take me there.”

Carl backed away a step, holding up his hand. “Nuh-uh. No way. I left there years ago and I ain’t goin’ back.”

“Well, if it’s not on a map, and you can’t tell me how to get there, and you won’t take me there, how am I supposed to find it?”

“You ain’t. That’s the whole point.”

As if to say he was through talking, Carl bent over his putter and lined up a shot. He tapped the ball and it went wide.

“I’ve good reason to believe they caused my father’s accident and were setting him up to be eaten by an alligator when the police interrupted them.”

Carl straightened and looked at him. “Alligator? That woulda meant your daddy’d go the same way as the others, killed by a swamp critter.”

“Well, this wasn’t no ordinary swamp critter.” Jeez, Jack thought. A couple of conversations with this guy and I’m starting to talk like him. “This gator was huge, with what looked like horns sticking out of its head.”

Carl visibly shuddered. “Devil. That could only be Devil.”

“Who’s Devil?”

“Big freaky bull gator that hangs around the lagoon. But how on earth did they get him out of the swamp?”

“Couldn’t say. But it seems Devil gets around. He visited Gateways last night.”

“No way!”

“Way.”

Jack gave him a Reader’s Digest version of the attack, leaving out Oyv’s amazing feat and the gator’s inability to cross into Anya’s yard. He remembered what his father had said about Carl being the community gossip.

“I want to get a look at this lagoon, Carl. I’ve already met the people, now I want to see where they live.”

“You met them?”

“In town yesterday. Met that woman, too. The one with the white hair.”

“Semelee.”

“Right. What do you know about her? Is she as spooky as she looks?”

“Can’t rightly say. I left the clan about—”

“Whoa! Are we talking Kluxers here?”

“Naw. That’s just what we call ourselfs. We’re all kinda related in a way.”

“Yeah? How?”

Carl’s good eye shifted away again. “Not by blood or anything like that. More like we was all in the same situation. Anyway, it was just us guys, maybe twenty of us, when she showed up a couple years ago. I’d been kinda plannin’ on leavin’ anyway, but when she showed up I took it as a sign and skeedaddled outta there.”

“A sign of what?”

“That things in the clan was gonna head south real soon. I mean, you got eighteen-twenty guys and one woman, that’s trouble.”

“They seemed pretty tight when I saw them in town yesterday.”

“Yeah, well, maybe. I seen ’em from a distance a couple times. We always done some panhandlin’, but now they’s become like professionals. I stay away from ’em cause we ain’t exactly on good terms.”

“Why not?”

“They was kinda pissed I left. Luke—he was sorta kinda like the leader—he called me a traitor and all sortsa stuff like that. But that don’t matter to me. I’m glad I got out. I didn’t wanta live like them no more. Y’know, like gypsies. They live on the boats or in what’s left of a bunch of old Indian huts on the shore. No runnin’ water, no lectricity, no TV.” He shook his head. “Man, I sure do love TV. Anyways, I wanted my own place where I didn’t have to sleep next to nobody cept myself.”

“A room of one’s own,” Jack murmured. He knew the feeling.

Carl grinned. “Hell, I got more than just a room, I got me a whole trailer.”

“But do you have any money in the bank?” Jack said as an idea hit him.

“Naw. Pretty much everthing gets spent just for livin’.”

“Okay, then. What say I pay you a thousand bucks to take me to this lagoon?”

“A thousand?” Carl laughed. “You’re shittin’ me, right?”

“Nope. Five hundred when we leave, and another five when we get back. That sound fair to you?”

Carl licked his lips. “Yeah, but…”

“But what?”

“But they’s gonna be awful mad if they find I brung an outsider to the lagoon.”

“Don’t worry about that.” Jack flipped up the back of his shirt to show Carl the Glock. “I’ll get you back home. I promise. And anyway, if we go in the afternoon, won’t they all be in town, begging?”

“Come to think of it, yeah. Specially this bein’ Friday.”

“What’s so special about Friday?”

He shrugged. “Lotsa people round here get paid on Thursdays, and on Fridays they’re happy the work week’s over, so they’re looser with their change. Saturday’s pretty much the same. But Sunday’s usually a bust.”

“Spent too much on Saturday night, right?”

“Yeah. Or they just come from church and did some givin’ there. Monday’s even worse.” He scratched his jaw. “So yeah. We should have the lagoon pretty much to ourselfs this afternoon.”

“Then that’s when we’ll go. A quick trip for a quick look-see. In and out. Easiest thousand you ever made.”

Carl took a breath. “Okay. But since my car ain’t workin’, you gotta drive me down to the waterside.” He began picking up his golf balls. “Guess I better get movin’. Gotta get home, gotta find us a boat.”

“How’d you get here without a car?”

“Bike. How else?”

More power to you, pal, Jack thought. Maybe the thousand would let Carl repair his junker Honda.

He got directions to Carl’s trailer park—it was the one Jack had seen between the auto body place and the limestone quarry—and continued his jog.

2

Semelee stood with Luke a couple dozen feet from Devil’s gator hole and watched. The big gator lay half sunk in the water at the shady end, his eyes closed. The water around his left flank wound was tinged red. At first she thought he was dead, but then she saw his sides pull in a little as he took a breath.

“He’s still bleeding,” Luke said.

“I know,” she said through her clenched teeth. “I got eyes.”

She felt so on edge this morning she wanted to take a bite out of somebody.

Devil was the biggest gator anybody’d ever seen, so it made sense he’d have the biggest gator hole in the Glades. Like all gators, as the winter dry season began, he’d scrape out all the vegetation from this low spot in the limestone floor and create a big wallowing hole. Fish would work their way into it, turtles and frogs too, and even some birds would come around to see if they could snag a quick meal. Sometimes those birds and turtles became gator snacks.

In the wet summers gators left their holes and spread out through the Glades, but not this year. The dry spell made gator holes more important than ever.

The edges of Devil’s hole were piled high with muck he’d scraped out. This provided rootin’ soil for things like cattails, swamp lilies, ferns and arrowleaf. Yellow-flowered spatterdock lilies floated on the surface of the blood-tinged water.

Devil lifted his head and let out a hoarse, rumbling bellow, then let it flop back down into the water as if it was too heavy to hold up.

“He’s hurtin’, Luke. Hurtin’ bad.”

Because of me, she thought.

Guilt scalded her. She’d considered Devil indestructible, invincible, almost supernatural. But he wasn’t. He was just a big, misshapen gator who would have been happy spendin’ his days doin’ what gators do: lolling in his hole, eatin’ this and that, waitin’ for the rains.

But no. Semelee couldn’t let him be. She had to roust him out of his comfy hole and lead him out of the Glades into the outer world where he didn’t belong. The result was he got hurt. Hurt bad.

“He can’t die,” she said. “He just can’t.”

She had this terrible feeling that if Devil died, part of the spirit of the Glades would die with him. And it would be all her fault.

“It was that guy,” Luke said. “That city guy you been takin’ a shine to. He done this.”

“No, he didn’t. I already told you that. He didn’t have nothin’ to do with hurtin’ Devil. It was the old lady. She’s the one. She’s some sorta witch. So’s her dog.”

In a way Semelee was secretly glad that the old witch’s spell, or whatever it was, had kept Devil out of her yard. Because she’d seen her man, the special one, place himself between Devil and his father. She’d’ve had to go through him to get to the old man, and that would’ve meant hurtin’ him, maybe even killin’ him, somethin’ she definitely didn’t want to do. But it had showed her that he was made of good stuff. That was important.