Alice in Jeopardy

5

The Tamiami Trail may once have been a dirt road hacked out through the palmettos and palms, but that was long before Alice moved down here.

Today, U.S. 41 is a four- (and sometimes six-) lane concrete thoroughfare lined for miles and miles with fast food emporiums, gift shops, car washes, gasoline stations, pizzerias, furniture stores, nurseries, carpet salesrooms, automobile dealers, shopping malls, movie theater complexes, and a variety of one-story cinder-block shops selling plaster figurines, citrus fruit, discount clothing, rattan pool and garden furniture, cigarettes and beer (free ice if you buy a case), stereo equipment, lamps, vacuum cleaners, typewriters, burglar alarms, swimming pools, and (the only such shop in all Cape October) adult marital aids, games, and related reading material.

Alice is familiar with the Shell station on Lewiston Point Road because the road itself dead-ends at the ferry landing where you catch the boat to Crescent Island, not a thousand yards off the southern end of Tall Grass. Crescent is the least developed of the Cape’s offshore keys. Accessible only by water, the island has on it a small, eccentric boater’s paradise known as Marina Blue, some thirty minutes away and 10,000 miles distant from U.S. 41. Some four or five years ago, the family spent a long, cherished weekend on Crescent, and the memories of that happy time are still with her.

She parks the black Mercedes truck in a space for about five or six cars, near the air hoses, gets out — and hesitates.

For a fleeting instant, she wishes she’d taken with her the snubnosed.32-caliber pistol Eddie gave her as a birthday present the year they moved down here. Instead, it is resting under her lingerie in the top drawer of the bedroom dresser back home.

But they have the children, she thinks.

The children will die, she thinks.

She shakes her head, pulls back her shoulders, walks briskly into the convenience area. The guy behind the counter there gives her a look as she limps past toward the rear of the building, following the sign that indicates RESTROOMS. He does not appreciate cripples limping in here to use the toilets without buying either gas or food. Alice is carrying the small Louis Vuitton bag, decorated with its repeated LV monogram, and stuffed at the moment with 2,500 fake hundred-dollar bills “so good nobody can tell them from the real thing” — she hopes.

A black woman is at the coffee machine, filling a cardboard container. She is some five feet seven inches tall, Alice guesses, as tall and as slim as a proud Masai woman. Wearing a very short green mini and a white T-shirt. Good firm thighs and shapely calves tapering to slender ankles in strappy flat sandals. Oversized sunglasses and a wide-brimmed straw hat that hides half her face. Wide gold bracelet on the biceps of one dark, rounded arm. Alice wonders if this is the woman she’s been talking to on the phone.

“Morning,” the woman says, and smiles.

Alice does not recognize the voice.

“Morning,” she answers, and goes to the door marked WOMEN, and tries the knob.

“Occupied,” the woman says.

Alice still does not recognize the voice.

“Are you waiting?” she asks.

“Nope,” the woman says.

The door to the ladies’ room opens. A fat woman in a flowered dress comes out, smiles at both of them, and then goes toward the front of the building. The black woman is now putting sugar into her coffee. Alice goes into the ladies’ room.

The room is an entirely gray entity. Gray tile floors, gray Formica countertop, gray porcelain sink, gray door on the single stall in the room.

She throws the bolt on the entrance door. The click sounds like a minor explosion in the small confines of the room.

She approaches the gray door. She enters the stall — the fat woman has forgotten to flush — puts the bag down alongside the toilet bowl.

For a moment, she stands alone and silent in the small cubicle. Then she leaves the stall, and leaves the ladies’ room. The black woman is still there at the coffee machines, sipping from the cardboard container.

Alice walks over to her.

“Are you the one?” she asks.

The woman appears startled.

“Are you the one who has my children?”

The woman says nothing.

“If you are, then listen to me,” Alice says. “If you don’t let my kids go, I’ll find you and kill you.”

“Gee,” the black woman says, and goes immediately to the ladies’ room door. She grabs the doorknob, turns to face Alice, looks her dead in the eye. “Be gone when I come out,” she says. “Do anything foolish, and they die. We’ll call you.” She nods. “You understand what I’m saying?” she says, and stares at Alice a moment longer before opening the door and entering the ladies’ room.

Alice hears the click of the bolt.

“I hope you understood me!” she shouts to the closed door.

But her threat is an empty one.

They have the children.

There is nothing she can do.

Nothing at all.

The three detectives have positioned themselves outside the Shell station in a classic triangular surveillance pattern, ready to pick up on the perp the moment she comes out of the convenience area, if indeed she’s in there. They have to assume she’s in there. They haven’t spotted a blue Impala in the station area itself or parked on any of the surrounding side streets, so they can only think she walked from wherever she parked the car, if in fact she drove the blue Impala and not some other vehicle here to the station. But she has to be inside there. Nobody in her right mind would leave a satchelful of hundred-dollar bills in a public ladies’ room for longer than five minutes.

The detectives know they are not quite as Mickey Mouse as Alice Glendenning believes. They have already ordered backup from Captain Steele, and four unmarked CID cars are waiting to pick up the perp’s trail the minute she steps into a car, if she steps into a car. One of them is parked facing the distant Gulf, its nose pointed toward the Crescent Island ferry, in case she decides to head out that way. The other is parked facing east on Lewiston, in case she decides to go for I-75. The other cars are facing north and south, on either side of 41, should she decide to go either north to downtown Cape October, or south to Fort Myers. All four cars are within reach of easy radiophone contact if/when Sloate, Di Luca, or Cooper, on foot, have any information to relay.

From all three vantage points, they each and separately see Alice Glendenning come out of the convenience area and walk rapidly to her black Mercedes. She is no longer carrying the Louis Vuitton bag. Good. That means the perp now has the evidence money in her possession, which further means they can arrest her without a warrant. Arresting her is not what they wish to do, however. What they wish to do is follow her to wherever she and her blond accomplice are holding the kids. That is their hope and their plan.

Mrs. Glendenning is in the car now.

The Mercedes engine kicks into life.

Sloate figures she will now be heading home.

Good, he thinks. Just stay out of our hair.

We’ve got the situation under control here.

From where Christine is crouched beside the small window in the ladies’ room, she can see the black Mercedes backing out of its space, and then circling past the gas pumps, and making a left turn on the corner, heading north on 41, toward downtown Cape October.

She looks into the Louis Vuitton bag.

All that money in there looks so sweet and beautiful.

She comes out of the ladies’ room, walks past the coffee machines and the counters bearing fast food junk food, and then stops at the counter to pay for her coffee. In a moment, she is out the front door, walking across the asphalt pavement past the gas pumps.

Almost jauntily, she steps out into the balmy morning.

The three detectives are right behind her.

The girl is very definitely black.

Some five-seven or — eight, Sloate imagines, sporting a short green skirt and a busty white T-shirt. Good-looking girl. Splendid legs, sweet ass. Gold bracelet on her right arm, the one carrying the Louis Vuitton bag.

She struts off 41 and begins walking west toward Citrus, a cell phone to her ear now, supremely sure of herself, the bag full of bogus bills bouncing on her right hip. She knows that as long as she’s got those two kids tucked away someplace, no one’s going to touch her.

Sloate is on point.

Cooper is across the street from him, and several yards behind, in case she decides to turn right.

Marcia Di Luca is on the other side of the street, should the girl decide to hang a Louie.

She is approaching Citrus now, will she go right or left? Cooper wins. She makes the right turn, and he assumes point at the A position, picking up at once, allowing Sloate and Di Luca to fall back into new locations at the B and C corners of the triangle. They have done this sort of surveillance many times before, but never when the lives of two children were at stake.

They are far enough back from the girl to avoid suspicion. Moreover, Di Luca is wearing rayon tailored slacks and a floral-patterned, short-sleeved blouse, whereas Cooper is wearing jeans and a striped T-shirt, and Sloate is wearing a wrinkled linen suit with an open throat sports shirt. They hardly look related by class, status, or profession. They are merely three disparate citizens out for a morning stroll, nothing more on their minds than enjoying the brisk breezes that suddenly sweep the streets, presaging rain.

The girl seems to be enjoying her stroll as well. Her step is brisk. Sloate cannot see her face, but he’s willing to bet she’s smiling. He’d be smiling, too, a bag full of hundred-dollars bills in the kip, he’d be laughing all the way to the bank. They are quite some distance from the Shell station now, still heading north on Citrus, and still no Impala or any other kind of pickup vehicle. By radiophone, Sloate has already informed the unmarked mobile units of the detectives’ present location, and has advised two of the cars to move into position at the eastern end of Citrus, where it rejoins 41. He has asked the remaining two cars to stay far behind the ABC team on Citrus, ready to move in to pick them up should the blue Impala surface. He is hoping that will be soon.

It is Di Luca who first spots the car.

It is parked in a side street a block ahead of where the girl now steps out with a longer stride. She knows she’s almost home free, Di Luca thinks, and quickens her own step. “Suspect vehicle on Citrus and Graham,” she says into her radiophone. “Nose pointing east.”

“Adam and Boy, stand by to pick up,” Sloate says into his radio.

The girl has almost reached the corner now.

Sloate looks over his shoulder to see one of the unmarked cars approaching, either Adam or Boy, he can’t tell which just yet. The other car is just behind it. In less than a minute, the black girl will enter the Impala, and the following detectives will split up into the two cars, one maroon, one green, hoping she’ll lead them straight to where the kids are stashed.

She is turning the corner now.

A flash of lightning illuminates the western sky.

Big one coming in off the Gulf.

In that instant, an orange-colored garbage truck makes a left turn onto Graham, braking when the driver spots the Impala. Sloate can no longer see the girl as she gets into the car. A maroon Buick pulls up to the curb alongside him. Through the windshield, Sloate recognizes Danny Ryan at the wheel. Adam car then. He pops open the front door, climbs in.

“Don’t lose her,” he warns. “She’s just ahead of that garbage truck.”

Behind him, Di Luca and Cooper climb into Boy car, the green Olds. The Cape October PD favors GM products.

The blue Impala is moving away from the curb.

As Ryan makes his right turn from Citrus onto Graham, Sloate catches a quick glimpse of the slender woman driving the car, long blond hair trailing almost to her shoulders.

The garbage truck is in motion again.

It blocks the street completely, parked cars on either side of it.

Ryan leans on the horn.

But by the time they pull around the truck, the street ahead is empty.

The blue Impala has vanished from sight.

And so have the black girl and the blonde who picked her up.

Reginald Webster is sitting on the front-stoop steps when Alice gets back to the house at eleven-thirty. He is wearing white slacks and white leather loafers without socks. A blue blazer with brass buttons is open over a white linen shirt. The house behind him is still and dark. Rafe’s rig is nowhere in sight. Webb’s own rented Mercury convertible is parked out front, the top down. The hasty rain has come and gone. The late morning is still. She pulls the Mercedes truck into the driveway, and gets out. Webb rises the moment he sees her.

“Thought I’d missed you,” he says.

She merely nods.

She does not need Reginald Webster here this morning. Or any morning, for that matter. An hour and a half ago, she turned over a bag full of hundred-dollar bills to the woman who has her children. The cops seem to have deserted her after promising they’d do all they could to get her kids back, and now the money is gone, and her kids are still gone, and apparently those jackasses from the FBI are gone, too, and so is Rafe. So Alice is all alone here, except for Mr. Reginald Webster, standing here on her doorstep and looking as if he’s dressed for a regatta at the local yacht club.

“Want to have lunch with me?” he asks.

“How’d you find me here?” she asks.

“Looked up your name in the phone book. You’re listed, you know.”

“I don’t usually…”

“I’m sorry…”

“…mix business with…”

“I just thought.”

“…pleasure.”

“Yes, I’m sorry. Really. I just thought… your accident and all… your foot… you might be feeling down… you might want to go out for a quiet lunch in…”

“No.”

“…a good restaurant…”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay,” he says.

“I have other things to do today.”

“Sure. Just thought I’d…”

“And in any event…”

“…drive by, see if you were free or not.”

“…I don’t date.”

He looks at her.

“Not since my husband died. I haven’t dated anyone. I doubt if I’ll ever date anyone ever again, as long as I live.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“That’s the way it is.”

“Although this wouldn’t be a date, you see.”

“Then what would it be?”

“Not in that sense.”

“In what sense would it be what?”

“I guess in a sense it would just be two lonely people talking and perhaps enjoying each other’s company. Is what I thought it might be.”

“I’m not lonely,” she says.

“In that case, I was mistaken, and I sincerely apologize,” he says. “Good day, Alice, I’m sorry if I disturbed you.”

He turns, and is starting toward where he parked the Mercury at the curb when she says, “Wait.”

The street is still and silent.

Webb stops, turns to face her again.

“I’ll find some other houses for you to look at,” she says.

“Please do.”

“When… this is resolved.”

He looks into her face.

“When what’s resolved, Alice?”

“This… this thing I’m going through.”

“What is it?” he asks.

She almost tells him.

But her children are still in danger out there.

“Nothing,” she says.

He nods.

“Okay,” he says. “Call me when you have some houses to show.”

“I will,” she promises.

Alice doesn’t know anyone who was a stockbroker during the eighties who is not now a millionaire. The eighties were when you could make a killing on the Street. Eddie got into the game a little too late. After he earned his master’s, he worked too long in the business office of a Madison Avenue advertising agency, missing out on all those big downtown opportunities. He didn’t join the esteemed brokerage firm of Lowell, Hastings, Finch and Ulrich until after Jamie was born. That was eight years ago. By then the ship had sailed, and though Eddie made a very good living, and the family never wanted for anything, his chances of striking it rich on the Street were gone. He told her once that he regretted ever having gone to business school at all.

“What would you rather have done?” she asked.

“Be a pirate,” he said, and laughed.

Some pirate; he was thirty years old when they moved down here to the Cape, still wearing a crew cut, still looking like a fresh-faced bumpkin from Kansas — which impression was false, even back then when she’d first met him. Eddie was originally from Greenwich, Connecticut, son of a judge in the lower circuit court, now deceased. His mother was gone, too, both the victims of a terrible automobile accident some seven years ago. This was the main reason Eddie insisted on changing his death benefit policy to one with a double-indemnity clause, even though the yearly premiums would cost more.

“You never know what might happen,” he said.

You never know, she thinks now.

You never know that your husband will sail out into the Gulf alone like a pirate, you never know there’ll be ten-foot seas that night, and a wind blowing out of the east. You never know that your husband, an expert sailor, will drown in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, you never once in your life imagine something like this can ever happen to you.

Until it does.

She has often imagined him alone on that sloop, battling the waves that eventually washed him overboard. She has often thought if only she’d been there with him, the two of them together might have conquered whatever seas came at them, together they might have brought that boat back to shore, back to safety.

You never know what might happen.

When he left the house that night, he was wearing jeans and a paler blue shirt, a yellow windbreaker, a peaked white captain’s hat. He was wearing his hair longer. A loose shock hung boyishly on his forehead.

Had they remembered to say they loved each other? Before he left forever, had they remembered…?

Yes.

Love ya, babe.

Love ya, too.

Yes, they had not forgotten.

The phone begins ringing almost the instant she enters the house; she rushes to it, out of breath when she gropes for the receiver. Outside, she can hear Webb starting the Mercury and pulling away from the curb.

“Hello?” she says.

“Alice, it’s Charlie. I’ve been trying you for the past fifteen minutes. What happened? Have you got the kids?”

She tells him what happened. Tells him the cops left here the same time she did this morning, tells him she saw the woman who—

“You saw her?”

“Yes. She’s black, Charlie.”

“She let you see her?”

“They have the kids, Charlie.”

And that says it all.

“She told me to go home. Said they’d call me.”

“Anybody there with you now?” he asks.

“No one. I’m alone.”

“Where the hell are the cops?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can come over this afternoon,” he says. “Shall I do that?”

“Do you want to?”

“Yes. You shouldn’t be there alone, Al.”

“All right, come,” she says.

“I’ll see you later,” he says, and hangs up.

She replaces the receiver on its cradle, and goes into the kitchen to prepare a pot of coffee for when Charlie gets here. There is a note on the refrigerator door, held there with a magnet in the shape of an ear of corn:

Alice—

Sorry I have to run. The open road calls.

Thanks for your hospitality. I spoke to Carol. She will be calling you.

Rafe

She looks at her watch. The coffee is taking forever to perk. It suddenly begins bubbling, and in that instant she hears a car pulling into her driveway. She goes to the drapes, parts them. A red convertible is there, the top down, a blonde at the wheel.

Jennifer Redding is here again.

This time, she lets her into the house.

All the wiretap and tracing equipment is still sitting on the long table in the living room. Alice wonders if the police will be coming back for it. Jennifer looks at the black boxes, the dials, the switches, the trailing wires, the earphones.

“I’m having a new phone system installed,” Alice says.

“I hate new phones,” Jennifer says, peering around the room appraisingly now. “Cute,” she says at last.

“Thanks.”

“How’s the foot?”

“Beginning to itch. And throb a little.”

“Have you been driving?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t.”

“The doctor said I could drive.”

“Doctors don’t know,” Jennifer says. “I once had poison ivy all over, they said I could drive.”

Alice wonders what poison ivy has to do with driving a car.

“I called the police,” Jennifer says. “I told them what happened. They said I should have reported the accident at the scene.”

“Yes, you should have. I told you.”

“I told them I had to rush you to the hospital. They said next time I should be more careful. They thought I was a ditz. Everyone thinks I’m a ditz.”

Alice says nothing.

“It’s because I’m a blonde. Do you still have any of that fudge left?” she asks.

“I think so,” Alice says, and opens the fridge door, and looks inside for the white box she put in there earlier today. When she opens it, half the fudge is gone. Good old Rafe, she thinks.

“And you do have coffee this time, I see,” Jennifer says, and helps herself to a mug on the drain board. Sipping at the coffee, nibbling on a piece of fudge, she says, “Something’s going on here, right?”

“No. What do you mean? No.”

“Big truck outside when I came here the other day. What was that?”

“My brother-in-law drives a truck.”

“Was he the company you said you had?”

“Yes.”

“And that’s why you wouldn’t invite me in? So I wouldn’t meet your brother-in-law?”

“We had a lot to talk about.”

“Was it a lover instead?”

“What?”

“Was he your lover? Instead of your brother-in-law? Your truck-driver lover?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

“It just seemed funny, your not letting me in the house when the only person here was your brother-in-law.”

“Look,” Alice says, “I hardly know you. You run me over the other day…”

“Run you over, come on!”

“Well, what would you call it? You come barreling around the corner…”

“What is it, Alice?” she asks suddenly. “Tell me. What’s happening here you’re trying to hide?”

Her blue eyes hold Alice fixed in a steady gaze.

Alice is remembering that the woman who was seen picking up her children was a blonde. Hair down to here, just about the length Jennifer Redding wears it.

“I want to help you,” Jennifer says. “I’m very smart about some things.”

“You’re not being smart now,” Alice tells her. “Look, I’m sorry I have to rush you out of here…”

“There is something, I know it,” Jennifer says, narrowing her eyes, and Alice realizes that she is involved here with one of those people who watch too much television and who think they are world-class snoops on the order of Miss Marple or Jessica Fletcher. Either that or she is the blonde accomplice who drove that car on Wednesday.

Alice does not for a moment believe this is even remotely possible. A blonde exists; Alice is sure of that. The woman in that Shell station was definitely black and no one has yet described the driver of the Impala as a black woman. So there is a blonde, yes, but Alice doesn’t believe Jennifer Redding is that blonde. She believes Jennifer Redding is just a meddling pain in the ass, and she wants her out of here before that phone rings again, whenever it rings, if it rings, with instructions on when and where she can pick up her kids.

“I’ll find out, you know,” Jennifer says, and nods sagely, like a woman who is accustomed to solving all sorts of heinous crimes when she is not out in her red T-bird knocking down real estate brokers. She swallows what’s left of her coffee, sets the mug in the sink as if she lives here, says, “I can help you if you’d let me,” gives Alice an unexpected hug, and then marches out of the house like a model on a runway.

Alice shakes her head in amazement.

The phone rings.

She looks at the clock.

It is now almost ten past twelve. It can’t be the black woman calling, can it? Not so soon. Or can it? She yanks the receiver from its cradle.

“Hello?”

“Al? It’s Carol. Rafe just called me. Are the kids back?”

“No.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Wait. Hope they call me. She told me to go home. She said they’d call. I’m hoping—”

“Who, Alice? Who said that?”

“The woman who has them.”

“Is it some kind of crazed person who doesn’t have kids of her own?”

“I don’t think so. She didn’t look crazy.”

“You saw her?”

“Yes.”

“She let you see her?”

Same thing Charlie asked. And she gives the same answer now.

“They have the kids, Carol.”

And again, this says it all. They have the kids. If I do or say anything that will compromise their position, they will kill my children. That is the simple truth of the matter.

“They?” Carol asks. “Who’s they?”

“These two women.”

“There are two of them?”

“Apparently.”

“Did you give them money?”

“Yes.”

She doesn’t wish to discuss with her sister the strategy the Cape October Police used, or are using, if in fact they’re doing a damn thing now. She can only hope that the $250,000 in false currency is truly so good nobody can tell it from the real thing. Otherwise, she has signed her own children’s death warrant.

“Are the police there now?” Carol asks.

“I don’t know where they are.”

“Well… what are you doing, Alice?”

“Waiting,” Alice says. “Just waiting.”

“Who’s helping you there?”

She does not know who’s helping her here. She has never felt so completely alone in her life.

“Have you called the FBI?” Carol asks.

“They’ve been and gone.”

“I’m coming down there,” Carol says. “Right this minute.”

“No, that’s not—”

“I’m getting in my car and driving down.”

“Carol…”

“Look for me, honey,” she says, “I’m on the way.”

And she, too, is gone.

They do not want to get the Tampa PD involved in this because in Captain Steele’s view, there are enough law enforcement people on the scene already. He didn’t like the FBI sticking its nose in this uninvited and unannounced, and he certainly doesn’t want any fresh representatives of the law marching in now.

The computer kicks up an Ernesto de Diego recently released from prison and regularly visiting a parole officer in Tampa, but he’s forty-three years old, and Maria told the detectives that her former boyfriend was only eighteen. So that rules him out, unless Mr. de Diego has a namesake son, which would make him Ernesto de Diego, Jr., but the computer has nothing at all on such an offspring.

In the Tampa phone directory, they find listings for a Dalia de Diego, a Godofredo de Diego, a Rafael de Diego, and a Ramon de Diego, but alas, no Ernesto. On the off chance that one of these de Diegos might be a relative of the Ernesto they’re looking for, they go down the list and hit pay dirt on the second call they make. A woman named Catalina de Diego tells Detective Saltzman that she is Godofredo’s wife, and that his brother Ernesto is presently living with them until he can find a place of his own. Belatedly, she asks, “What’s this about, Officer?”

At a quarter to one that afternoon, Detectives Saltzman and Andrews are on the de Diego doorstep, talking to Catalina again, in person this time. She tells them her husband and her brother will be home for lunch around one o’clock, and invites them in to wait. She serves them strong coffee and these tasty little cookies sprinkled with sugar. She tells them that both her husband and her brother-in-law work at an auto repair shop not far from here. “My husband got the job for Ernesto,” she says. She introduces them to her three-year-old son, Horacio, who immediately tells the detectives he knows how to “go potty.” Detective Andrews tells him, “That’s nice, son.”

So far, this does not look like a bunch of desperados who’ve kidnapped the Glendenning kids, but who knows? The quietest guy on the block is always the one who turns out to have killed his whole family and the goldfish, too, isn’t that so? Besides, Ernesto can’t be such a sweetheart, can he? Leaving a pregnant girlfriend back on the Cape?

The brothers get home at a little before one.

The detectives can hear them laughing up the front walk to the small house. They are both light-skinned, with brown eyes and curly black hair. Ernesto is a little taller than Godofredo. They look like a pair of hardworking guys who’ve just put in a long morning, and are ready now to wash up for lunch, but who knows?

The detectives tell them they’d like to talk to Ernesto privately, if that’s okay. They go out together into the yard behind the small house. There is a coconut palm in the yard, and several bird-of-paradise plants. There is a shell walkway and wooden lawn furniture painted pink. A nice cool breeze is blowing. Inside, they can hear Godofredo and his wife talking in Spanish.

“So what is this?” Ernesto asks. “Is she claiming the kid’s mine?”

“You mean Maria?” Andrews asks.

“Is that why you’re here?”

“You tell us,” Saltzman says.

“What’s there to tell? She fucked everybody in that high school, not only me. So now she says the baby’s mine. That’s a crock of shit, man.”

“She says you have a new girlfriend now, is that right?”

“What’s that her business?”

“It’s just what she told us.”

“It’s none of her business, what I have or I don’t have.”

“Do you have a new girlfriend?”

Ernesto gives them a long hard look.

He is suddenly suspicious. Suddenly tipping to the fact that this has nothing to do with Maria’s baby.

“You come all the way up from the Cape to ask me do I have a new girlfriend?” he says.

“Do you?”

“Yes. Why?”

“She doesn’t happen to be a blonde, does she?”

“What?” he says.

“Your girlfriend. Is she a blonde?”

“Is that what Maria told you?”

“That’s what she told us.”

“She should learn to keep her mouth shut.”

“Well, you knock her up, you disappear…”

“I didn’t knock her up! And I didn’t disappear, either! My brother got me a job here, so I moved up. I even called Maria to tell her where I was.”

“Nice of you.”

“I don’t owe her a fuckin thing!”

“Does she drive a blue Impala? Your blonde girlfriend?”

“What?”

“Your new girlfriend. Does she happen to drive a blue Impala?”

“No, she drives a white Jag.”

“What’s her name?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“What’s her name?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’s married.”

“Oh?” Saltzman says.

“Well, well,” Andrews says.

“Anyway, what is this? Is she in some kind of trouble?”

“Tell us her name, Ernesto.”

“Jesus, what did she do?”

“Tell us where she lives, Ernesto.”

“She’s married, I can’t—”

“You want to take a ride to the Cape, or you want to give us your little married girlfriend’s name and address? Which, Ernesto?”

“Judy Lang,” he says at once.

Charlie Hobbs pulls into the driveway at twenty minutes past one that afternoon. Alice greets him at the front door, taking both his hands in hers and leading him into the house.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“I’m glad you came.”

“She call yet?”

“Not yet. Charlie, I’m scared silly.”

“Don’t be. She’ll call.”

“You think?”

“I know she will.”

Charlie looks around the living room, takes in all the police equipment.

“So where are the masterminds?” he asks.

Alice shakes her head.

“Tell me everything that happened,” he says.

“Here’s what we’ve got,” Sally Ballew is telling her boss.

The agent in command of the regional FBI office is a man named Tully Stone, bald and rangy and mean as dog shit. It is rumored that shortly after the disputed Gore-Bush presidential election, Stone single-handedly rounded up a ring of anti-government protestors right here in the sunny state of Florida. Broke a few heads and cracked even more ribs, or so the story went, before all those bleeding-heart liberals decided it wasn’t right to go against the Supreme Court decision that made Bush president of these United States.

Sally Ballew feels that black people — her people — in the state of Florida were disenfranchised in that election, but she has never mentioned this to her boss, whose role model is John Ashcroft. She is reporting to him now on the number of blue Chevrolet Impalas that were rented from Avis at the Fort Myers airport during the past two—

“I don’t understand,” Stone says. “Is this our case?”

“That depends,” Sally says.

“On what?”

“On do we want it.”

“Why would we?”

“Might become high-profile.”

“How?”

“Woman’s a widow. Pretty woman, two good-looking kids — the ones who got kidnapped, sir. Eight and ten years old, little boy and girl.”

Stone does not seem impressed.

He is pacing his office. In one corner of the room, an American flag rests furled in an ornate wrought-iron stand. The wall behind him is adorned with a big replica of the FBI seal with its thirteen stars and its laurel leaves, and its red-and-white-striped shield. On the upper rim of the predominately blue seal, the words DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE are lettered in white. On the lower rim, FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, again in white. Just below the striped little shield with its engraved blue scales, there is a flowing white ribbon upon which the words Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity are lettered.

There was a time, Stone reflects, when those words meant something.

Now he’s standing here with a woman who can’t contain her tits, and they’re debating whether or not they should step into a case merely because it might become high-profile, in which event the Bureau will be able to bask in the cleansing light of some much-needed glory, if/when they ever arrest the sons of bitches who took two little kids from their mama.

“What’d be our justification for butting in here?” he asks.

“Reasonable presumption that the perps crossed a state line.”

“They’re already out of Florida?”

“We don’t know that, sir.”

“Then how’s a state line been crossed?”

“We think they may have come down from New York.”

“Oh dear, we’re dealing with big-city sharpies, eh?” Stone says, and almost grins in anticipation. There is nothing he likes better than to bust the ass of a city slicker. That ring of liberal rabble-rousing ruffians was based in Chicago. Came down here to raise a fuss and cause six kinds of trouble. He has not mentioned to Sally Balloons here that the leader of that little band was black as the ace of spades. Some of these people can get touchy, even if they work on the side of the law.

“You got proof of that?” he asks.

“No, sir. Not quite proof.”

“There’s no such thing as not quite proof,” Stone says. “There’s evidence, or there’s lack of evidence. Nobody can be just a little bit pregnant.”

“Well, sir, we think we may have found whoever rented the Impala described by the school guard,” Sally says. “And she’s from New York City. Which means a state line may have been crossed in anticipation of committing a future crime. At least, her driver’s license gives an address in New York City.”

“Anticipation of a future crime? What the hell is this, a Tom Cruise movie? Do you know for certain that this woman has in fact committed the crime of kidnapping?”

“No, sir, we do not. But, as I was about to say—”

“She the only person rented an Impala like the one this school guard described?”

“No, sir. Twenty-six blue Impalas were rented at the Fort Myers airport within the past two weeks, sir. Twenty of them have already been returned, and the renters long departed. Six of the cars are still out, we’ve got the license plate numbers for all of them, and in some instances local addresses for the renters.”

“Isn’t that obligatory? Giving a local address?”

“Some people just don’t know where they’ll be staying. They drive around the state, they stop here, they stop there…”

“Have you got a local address for this woman you say crossed a state line in anticipation of committing a future crime?”

“No, sir. She’s one of them who didn’t know where she’d be staying.”

“If I was about to kidnap some kids, I’d make damn sure I didn’t tell Avis where I’d be staying, either.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s her name, this woman?”

“Clara Washington.”

Stone almost asks, “Black?”

He doesn’t.

But a name like Washington?

Has to be black, doesn’t it?

“Avis rep who rented the car to her says she was black,” Sally says, beating him to the punch. “Woman in her thirties, about five-eight, five-nine, good-looking according to the Avis person. Showed a New York driver’s license as ID. Charged the lease to an American Express credit card.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“We checked with American Express; they do not have any card holder named Clara Washington in the city of New York. We checked with the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles; they did not issue a driver’s license to anyone named Clara Washington in the city of New York. It would appear that both pieces of ID are false, sir.”

“Dime a dozen nowadays.”

“Dime a dozen, sir.”

“So you don’t really know if a state line has been crossed. If that driver’s license came in a Cracker Jack box…”

“That’s what I meant by ‘not quite proof,’ sir.”

“If the driver’s license is queer, the woman could have come from anywhere. Could’ve got off a bus from Jacksonville or Tallahassee, could’ve walked over to the airport from downtown Fort Myers, no state line crossed, no reason for the FBI to come into the case, end of story.”

“Except, sir—”

“Except what?”

“Except if we find her, and she really is from New York, and we nail her for the kidnapping, then we had good reason all along to assume the case fell within federal jurisdiction. And we become the heroes, sir.”

“Heroes,” Stone says.

“Yes, sir. And not the Cape October PD.”

“Heroes,” Stone repeats.

There was a time when a hero was someone who single-handedly charged a Vietcong machine-gun nest with a hand grenade in each hand and a bayonet clenched between his teeth. Now you were a hero if you tracked down a little colored girl — well, not so little, five-eight, five-nine — who may or may not have crossed a state line in anticipation of committing a crime that would get your name and your face all over television if you caught her.

“So what do you suggest, Ballew?”

He almost called her “Balloons.”

“We have the license plate number, sir. I suggest we do a sweep of all the area motels, hotels, B & B’s, what-have-you, see if we can’t find that car and that woman.”

“Declare ourselves officially in this thing?”

“Not until we’re sure we’ll be making an arrest, sir. Otherwise, we let the local cops take the heat.”

Stone is wondering how many of his people he will need for a sweep of all these area dwellings. But if he doesn’t grant Special Agent Ballew’s simple request, will she then file a report to division headquarters later on, claiming she went to her superior with information about a kidnapping, and he swept it under the carpet the way certain flight-school information was swept under the carpet prior to the 9/11 attacks?

Stone is tempted to tell Special Agent Sally Ballew here to take a walk, they have no jurisdiction.

But the entire nation is ready to reward whistle-blowers of every stripe and persuasion nowadays, a far cry from the scorn heaped upon one of the country’s true heroes, Linda Tripp.

“Set up the sweep,” he says. “Full team, twenty-four-seven, the whole nine yards. But find this woman fast, or back off.”

Sally can almost see herself on television already.

“I’ll find her, sir,” she says.

The little digital clock on Stone’s desk reads 1:47:03.

The phone call comes at two o’clock sharp.

By then, Charlie has figured out the wiretap equipment and is sitting with the earphones on his head. He flicks a switch and nods for Alice to pick up.

“Hello?” she says.

“We’ve got a problem here,” the woman says. Alice’s heart leaps into her throat. Charlie is suddenly attentive, as if he’s listening for incoming mail at Khe Sanh.

“Somebody followed me,” the woman says.

“Let me talk to Ashley.”

“No, your daughter’s got a big mouth, you don’t have to talk to her again,” the woman says. “My partner spotted them behind us. Two men in a maroon Buick. It wasn’t for a garbage truck, we’d be in serious trouble here.”

Alice says nothing.

My partner, she is thinking. Does this mean her partner in this ambitious little enterprise of theirs? Or does it mean her sexual partner? Is this a pair of lesbians she’s dealing with?

“Were they cops?” the woman asks.

“I don’t know who they might have been,” Alice says. “I don’t know anything about it.”

“Are they there with you now?”

“No one’s here with me,” Alice says.

“I’ll call you back, anyway,” the woman says, and hangs up.

“That’s her pattern,” Alice explains. “She’s afraid we’ll be tracing the call.”

“Is she right about that Buick?”

“I have no idea.”

“How damn stupid can these people be?”

“I told you, Charlie. They deserted me this morning…”

“Putting a clumsy tail on—”

The telephone rings.

“There she is,” Charlie says.

Alice picks up.

“Hello?” she says.

“Why’d you call the police?”

“I didn’t.”

“Then who were those men in the Buick?”

“I don’t know. I came there alone. I don’t know anything about anyone following you. Let me talk to my daughter.”

“Forget it.”

“You said—”

“Never mind what I said. You went back on your word.”

“I did not call the police!” Alice screams into the phone.

Even Charlie almost believes her.

The woman is silent for a moment.

Then there’s another click on the line.

“Damn her,” Alice says, “I could kill her!”

“When she calls back, get right to the point. Tell her she’s got the money, ask her when and where you can pick up the kids.”

Alice nods.

“Okay?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t let her rattle you. If the kids have been harmed already—”

“Oh Jesus, Charlie, don’t even—”

“—they wouldn’t be calling you, don’t you see, Alice? The kids are still all right.”

The phone rings.

“Remember. Stick to the point. When, where? Stay calm.”

“Okay.”

“Pick it up.”

He throws the LISTEN switch. Alice picks up the receiver.

“Hello?” she says.

“We can’t give you the kids today,” the woman says.

“You promised…”

“We have to check out the money first.”

They’ll discover it’s fake, Alice thinks. They’ll—

“Give us time,” the woman says, and suddenly her voice softens. “Your kids are okay, just give us a little time here.”

And she is gone again.

6

It is ten past two by the time Carol gets to I-75 South. Big rigs like the ones Rafe drives are roaring at her on the other side of the divider.

She figures it will take her some ten to twelve hours to get to Cape October. According to her map, it’s a good hour or more to Macon, some sixty-five miles or so, before she has to turn off at the Valdosta exit to merge with I-475 South. Just now, she feels wide awake and peppy, but she plans to stop at a motel for the night, get to the Cape in time for breakfast tomorrow morning. The longest stretch of road will be the four-hundred-plus miles between Macon and St. Pete, but she’s made the trip before — with kids screaming in the backseat, no less — and she knows she can make it this time, too, with no sweat.

She cannot possibly imagine how Alice must feel, her kids gone and a passel of fools handling the case. She can remember times when the two of them were growing up in Peekskill, Carol the older sister and constantly getting Alice out of jams. But nothing as serious as this had ever—

Well, Eddie drowning that way.

Carol had taken the first plane down out of Atlanta. She thought her younger sister would never get through it; God, how she loved that man. Held her sister in her arms, sobbing, Alice clutching a photo of Eddie with his shining blue eyes and crooked grin and pale unruly hair.

Carol wonders what it’s like to love a person that much. Here alone behind the wheel of the Ford Explorer, trucks coming at her like attacking Martian spaceships, she wonders if in fact she really loves Rafe at all, really ever loved him at all.

Unlike her sister, Carol never went for the slight slender type, oh no, it was always the big brawny college football hero or the wrestling team champ. Though Rafe is neither, Rafe never even graduated from high school; no wonder he got in trouble with the law those two times. Well, dope. Everybody’s into dope these days, she hopes some damn dope fiends haven’t got their hands on those two adorable kids, what on earth is wrong with the cops down there, handling this so damn stupidly?

Her foot is pressed hard to the accelerator.

A glance at the speedometer tells her she’s hitting seventy, seventy-five, the needle wavering. She doesn’t want to get stopped by the Georgia Highway Patrol, but neither does she want to drive along too slowly, risk lulling herself to sleep that way. Rafe told her once that he averages ninety miles an hour on his long hauls; he was probably lying to her, ninety is really too fast.

His call this morning was… well, peculiar.

Broke the news to her about the kidnapping, told her Alice was already on the way to meet whoever it was had the kids, carrying a bag full of funny money, he sure hoped those people would accept it.

“What do you mean?” Carol said.

“Otherwise, there might be trouble.”

“You mean if they…?”

“If they tip to the money being fake,” Rafe said.

“Well, you just told me it’s very good stuff.”

“Is what the cops told Alice, yes.”

“So how can they tip?”

“These people ain’t fools, you know,” Rafe said. “You can’t be a moron and figure out something like this.”

“That’s right, it takes a rocket scientist to grab two kids and ask for ransom.”

“I mean, the way they’ve been handling it, Carol. I’ve been right here, you know, I see how the woman hangs up every two, three seconds, I see how carefully they’ve worked this whole thing out. All I’m saying is I hope they don’t realize Alice brought them counterfeit money. I worry about them kids, Carol.”

She wonders now if he really worries about Alice’s kids, or anybody’s kids, for that matter. Or anyone but his own self.

Carol has long suspected that her husband plays around on these long trips of his. Never calls her when he’s on the road — today was an exception, but it’s not every day your sister’s kids get kidnapped. Gone sometimes three, four weeks when he’s hauling to the West Coast, you think he’d call every few days, tell her he loves her, whatever. Never does. That’s either a man who’s in tight control of his emotions, or else it’s a man fooling around with whatever comes his way on the road, she wouldn’t be at all surprised.

Something else he said continues to bother her.

It was just before Christmas. Carol had invited Alice and the kids up to Atlanta, but she said she had to stay down there on the Cape, where Jamie’s speech therapist was, he had already stopped talking by then. Rafe told Carol that he’d read something in the Atlanta Constitution about some insurance company paying any accident-related claims within a week of filing, even without death certificates.

“So when’s this insurance company of Alice’s gonna pay her that two-fifty?” he asked.

“I’m sure Alice is asking that very same question along about now,” Carol said.

“Be nice to get our hands on some of that, wouldn’t it?” Rafe said.

“What makes you think…?”

“Be real nice,” he said.

Carol wondered about this at the time. She knew her sister would be coming into $250,000 as soon as that insurance claim was settled, and she knew she and Rafe still had a big mortgage on the house, and payments on the Ford to make each and every month, and it would certainly be helpful if Alice decided to be generous with a little of that money. But Carol would never ask, and Rafe knew that, and so it was funny that he’d brought up the insurance money, and she’d wondered about it at the time.

She is still wondering about it.

She keeps her foot pressed hard to the accelerator.

“How do we know they didn’t rent a condo?” Forbes asks.

“That’s another possibility,” Sally says.

“People come down, rent a condo for a week or two,” Forbes elaborates.

“I know that.”

“What I’m saying, this could turn into a wild goose chase,” Forbes says.

In fact, he doesn’t like the way this whole damn thing is shaping up.

First off, they are putting those children in harm’s way. That is the plain and simple truth of the matter. Stone knows that, and so does Sally. You go knocking on someone’s door, ask did they rent a blue Impala at the airport, if they’ve got the kids inside there with them, they’re going to panic and maybe blow the kids away. That is a fact that should be evident to any law enforcement officer. That is the first thing that stinks to high heaven here.

The second thing is that this is once again turning into a footrace with the local fuzz, everybody grabbing for the gold ring, never mind the welfare of the vics. It’s who’s gonna bring home the bacon, who’s gonna end up the glory boys and girls. There’s no question but that the FBI can use a little praise these days, the way we fouled up before and after 9/11, none of us has yet found whoever it was mailed that anthrax around, now have we?

So jump on the merry-go-round, boys and girls, and let’s see who can find that blue Impala first, us or the local yokels, and pray to God nobody behind one of those hotel, motel, B & B, what-have-you doors won’t start blasting away the minute we say those words “FBI” and show the shield, just pray to God, boys, just pray to God.

The FBI has not shared with the Cape October PD’s Criminal Investigations Division the information it gathered from the Avis desk at the airport. So Captain Roger Steele does not know that the person who rented a blue Impala four days ago showed identification bearing the name Clara Washington.

Steele knows only that a blue Impala driven by a slender blonde picked up a good-looking black girl some five feet seven inches tall — close enough to the five-eight or — nine described by the Avis woman, but that’s another thing he doesn’t know. He does know that the girl was carrying Alice Glendenning’s Louis Vuitton bag full of Monopoly money, and he further knows that the car was subsequently obscured by an orange Cape October Department of Sanitation garbage truck, thereby eluding their grasp this morning. He also knows that the blue Chevy has got to be out there someplace because, as Detective Wilbur Sloate put it to him, “Ever’body gotta be someplace, boss.”

So Steele has put out an all-points bulletin for the car, and meanwhile, his entire CID team is out checking every hotel and motel in town, hoping to locate the blue car and consequently the black girl and her blonde girlfriend.

Cape October is a city of 143,000 year-round residents, 90 percent of them white, 8 percent of them Cubans who have drifted over to the West Coast from Miami, 2 percent of them black, and the remainder a tiny spattering of Asians. There are twenty-four churches of varying denominations on the Cape, ranging from Catholic to Baptist to Jewish (Orthodox and Reform) to Presbyterian to Lutheran to Seventh-Day Adventist and including two for the Mennonite sect, its followers identified by the black clothing and beards worn by the men, and the plain dresses and simple white caps worn by the women.

And because the Cape is a tourist destination, there are also fifty-two hotels, motels, small inns, and cottages in this town, not to mention a few dozen more bed-and-breakfast places.

Roger Steele does not think the kidnappers would risk taking those two kids to any of the bigger hotels or even to one of the resorts out on the keys. But there are small motels all up and down the Trail, and even some out on Grosse Bec. These are the ones his team of sixteen CID detectives are checking. Sixteen detectives. That’s all Steele has. This is a very small number of detectives for such a mighty number of venues, even assuming the perps are still in the state of Florida.

And besides, it is starting to rain again.

The manager of the Shell station on U.S. 41 and Lewiston Point Road is not happy to see three detectives from the Cape October Police Department coming out of the rain at two-thirty that Friday afternoon.

One of the cops, a burly black man named Johnson, tells the manager they’re investigating an automobile theft.

“The thief may have used the ladies’ room sometime this morning. So we’d like to go in there and look around, if that’s okay with you.”

“What kind of car was it?” the manager asks.

“Cadillac Saville,” Johnson lies, without batting an eyelash.

“We get lots of Savilles in here,” the manager says.

“Yeah,” Johnson says. “So if you’ll unlock the ladies’ room for us, we’ll just go about our business.”

“It’s unlocked as it is,” the manager says.

“Well, fine then, we’ll just get out of your way.”

The three Mobile Crime Unit cops have been sent by Captain Steele to get everything they can from the ladies’ room where Mrs. Glendenning dropped the ransom money, and where an as-yet-unidentified suspect picked up the bag and managed to elude a successful surveillance. Steele’s game plan, such as it is, is to find out if the black girl who sashayed off with two-fifty large in supers has a record of any kind. From what his detectives have told him, Steele has a pretty good inkling that Mrs. Glendenning isn’t too happy about the continued presence of the Cape October Police in this case. So he intends to send Sloate and Di Luca back to her with some real information, as soon as he gets some real information, before she goes blabbing on television that the cops in this neck of the woods don’t know what they’re doing.

Unfortunately, the two suspect women — the blonde and the black girl — have thus far eluded pursuit, and so far none of the Cape October uniforms have spotted the suspect blue Impala. So he figures if the MCU can come up with real meat, then he can go back to the Glendenning woman and calm her down regarding the procedure they’ve been following, a perfectly sound procedure, by the way, that resulted in a capture and conviction in the Henley case three years ago, even though the little boy was dead by the time they got there.

The three MBU cops know how important this case is to the captain, so they go over the ladies’ room with more devotion to detail than they might normally lavish at any crime scene. They vacuum the place top to bottom for stray hairs or fibers, they dust the sink faucets and knobs for latent fingerprints, and the paper towel dispenser, and the hand drier, too, and the doorknobs — inside and out — on the entrance door, and the turn bolt lock on the entrance door, and the latch on the door to the one stall in the room, and the flush handle on the toilet, and the toilet seat, and the toilet-paper holder, and the windowsill, and the little pulls on the window sash, and the window itself, and anything and everything in that room. It is almost two-thirty by the time they leave the place.

The manager tells them he’s had a lot of complaints from ladies who had to pee.

Johnson, the detective/first heading up the team, tells him he should have directed them to the men’s room.

“Shoulda thought of that,” the manager says.

It is still raining.

In Cape October, during the rainy season — but May is not the rainy season — you can expect a thunderstorm along about three or four every afternoon, at which time the humidity and the heat have combined to leave the suffering citizenry virtually limp. The rain, when it comes, mercilessly assaults the sidewalks and the streets, but only for an hour or so. During that short while, the torrential downpour brings at least a semblance of relief. But once the rain stops, you’d never know it had been there at all. Oh, yes, the gutters are running with swift-flowing muddy water, and there are huge brown puddles everywhere, and here and there a truly flooded street — but the heat and the humidity follow as closely behind the brief storm as does a rapist his victim. Within minutes you are sweating again.

This is not the rainy season; this is May.

But by three o’clock that afternoon, the rain is coming down in buckets.

Detectives Wilbur Sloate and George Cooper have been driving in the pouring rain from motel to motel ever since two o’clock. Following the Cape October city and county grid supplied to them by Captain Steele, they have already visited twelve motels, and when they spot an Impala in the courtyard outside the Tamiami Trail Motor Lodge, they can hardly wait to get out of the maroon Buick they’re driving.

“Go!” Sloate shouts, and both detectives burst out of the car and into the rain, dashing across the courtyard to the motel office, where — in his soft-spoken, seemingly subservient black way — Cooper tells the clerk behind the desk that they are looking for a person driving an Avis-rented blue Impala, and they’ve just noticed that there is such a vehicle parked outside, sir.

“Yeah?” the clerk says.

“Want to tell us who’s driving that car?” Cooper asks.

“Let me see your badges,” the clerk says.

They both flash the Cape October PD tin.

The clerk studies the shields as if they were freshly minted. He is not sure how he feels about cops on the property. He is sure his boss won’t like learning about it when he comes in tomorrow morning. But there’s nothing he can do about their being here, he supposes, unless…

“You got a search warrant?” he asks.

“Mister,” Cooper says, “let’s just see your damn register, okay?”

This turns out to be academic because Sloate is already turning the register so they can read it. They have no trouble finding the license plate number from the car outside, or matching it with the name alongside it, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Holt from Cleveland, Michigan.

“This the room they’re in?” Cooper asks. “3B?”

“It’s a cabin. We don’t have rooms here, we have cabins,” the clerk says.

“This the cabin then?”

“That’s the one.”

“They happen to be black, these people?”

“Man was white. Didn’t see the woman, she stayed in the car. Lots of them stay in the car while the man registers. Specially if it’s raining.”

“Was it raining three days ago, when it says here they checked in?”

“I don’t know what it was doing three days ago,” the clerk says.

“Then you want to show us where 3B is?” Sloate says.

“It’s right across the courtyard,” the clerk says. “What’s this all about, anyway?”

“Just checkin on a car, is all,” Cooper says.

The clerk figures they’re looking for either a wanted desperado or an al-Qaeda terrorist, but he points them in the right direction, and hopes there won’t be any gunplay here.

The white man who opens the door is wearing a bathrobe over pajamas. This is a quarter to four in the afternoon and he’s ready to go to bed. Meanwhile, the two detectives are standing in the rain.

“Mind if we come in, sir?” Sloate asks.

“Well, gee, I don’t know,” Holt says.

He has a little Charlie Chaplin mustache. Behind him, the television set is on with a rerun of a cop movie. The detectives have just showed him their shields, but Holt seems more interested in the movie than in the real live cops standing in front of him. They can hear a shower running behind a closed door they assume leads to the bathroom. Mr. Holt’s wife, no doubt, if indeed she is his wife. Quarter to four in the afternoon, he’s ready for bed. Can it be his wife? They are still standing in the rain. He still hasn’t asked them to come in.

Sloate steps in, anyway, guidelines be damned. Cooper comes right in behind him. Holt still doesn’t know what they want, but to play it safe he tells them he’s from Cleveland, Michigan — which they already know from the register — and that he has been coming down to Cape October ever since 1973, when he caught bronchitis and his doctor advised him to go someplace warm for the winter. He tells them that he is here with his wife, Sophie, who is at this moment taking a shower, and he tells them that tomorrow he will be taking her to Disney World in Orlando.

“Been coming down here for more ’n thirty years now, never been to Disney World, can you imagine?” he says.

“Is your wife black?” Cooper asks.

“Black?” Holt says. “No. What kind of question is that? Black? I’m from Cleveland. What do you mean, black? My wife? What’s this all about, anyway?”

He does not look or sound like the sort of person who has kidnapped a pair of little kids, but then again not many rapists look like rapists or bank robbers like bank robbers, at least not in the experience of these two cops. In any case, there is just this one room here, and the bathroom beyond, where they can still hear the shower going, so they have to assume — until they can check out the bathroom, at any rate — that since there are no little kids in evidence, this is not the man and woman who kidnapped the Glendenning children. Unless Mrs. Holt — if she is Mrs. Holt — turns out to be the black Sheena of the Jungle they followed strutting up Citrus Avenue with the expensive French luggage bouncing on her hip and the wide gold bracelet on her arm.

“We’d like to have a look in that bathroom whenever Mrs. Holt is finished in there,” Sloate says.

“I don’t suppose you have a search warrant, do you?” Holt asks.

“No, we don’t, Mr. Holt,” Sloate says. “Do you want us to go all the way downtown to get one?”

Holt decides he would rather not have them do this.

For the next five minutes or so, they stand around awkwardly, waiting for Mrs. Holt to finish her shower. At last, she turns off the water. Holt goes to the bathroom door, knocks on it, and says, “Hon, there’re some police detectives here. You’d better put something on before you come out.”

“There are some what here?” a woman’s voice answers.

She does not sound black.

She comes out a moment later, wearing a pink robe and a bemused expression that says, Gee, there really are two people who look like detectives standing here with my husband!

She is definitely not black.

She is, however, blonde.

But not the slender blonde with hair to her shoulders Sloate saw at the wheel of the Impala. Instead, she is in her late forties, a somewhat stout little woman, her short hair still wet and straggly, her face shiny bright from the shower.

“Sorry to bother you, ma’am,” Sloate says, and they both go into the bathroom to look around, though neither of them now believes there are any kids here in this motel room.

“Sorry to bother you,” Sloate repeats as they come out of the bathroom. “Just had to check out something.”

“What is it you’re looking for?” the woman asks.

“Routine matter,” Cooper says in his shuffling, soft-spoken way, and they thank the Holts for their time, and then leave the room, and drive out of the motel grounds, on their way to the next place on their list.

“Now what do you make of that?” Holt asks his wife.

Judy Lang is perhaps five feet seven inches tall, and slender, and quite beautiful in a fox-faced way, her blonde hair cut so that it falls loose and straight to just above her shoulders. When she opens the door to the tenth-floor condo, she is barefoot and wearing a brown mini and a short pink cotton sweater that exposes a ring in her belly button. Her blue eyes open wide when she spots the yarmulke on the back of Saltzman’s head. Her first thought is that somebody has told the rabbi she’s been dating an eighteen-year-old Cuban.

Dating isn’t quite the proper word, either, since she and Ernesto haven’t yet gone anywhere together, except the backseat of his brother’s big roomy Oldsmobile. Judy knows that her husband will kill her for sure if he ever finds out about what she’s been doing in that car every day of the week except Saturday and Sunday, with a Cuban teenager, no less. So here’s this big tall guy with a yarmulke, standing on the doorstep, here to read her passages from the Talmud, she feels certain. Instead, he flashes a badge that has the initials copd on it, which — it immediately becomes clear — stand for Cape October Police Department.

“Detective Julius Saltzman,” he says. “My partner, Detective Peter Andrews.”

The shorter guy with him mumbles something Judy doesn’t quite catch. At least they aren’t here from the synagogue.

“May we come in, please?” Saltzman asks.

“Well… my husband isn’t home,” she says.

“It’s you we want to talk to,” Andrews says. “If you’re Judy Lang?”

“Well… yes, I am,” she says. “But why?” Despite the exuberant breasts in the snug sweater and the lissome hips in the tight-fitting mini, there is a certain adolescent gawkiness about this woman. Both detectives suddenly wonder if Ernesto de Diego hasn’t nailed himself another little teenager here, instead of the thirty-something housewife Judy Lang actually is. They follow her into a living room that overlooks the wide green expanse of a golf course below, and take seats on a sofa opposite her. All they want to know is whether or not Judy Lang might have been the blonde who picked up the Glendenning kids yesterday afternoon. Being cops, however — and small- town cops at that — they can’t come right out and ask her if she happened to kidnap two kids. Instead, they go at it in a more subtle manner, they think.

“Do you drive a car?” Andrews asks.

“Yes, I do,” she says.

“What kind of car is it?”

“A white Jag. My husband gave it to me for my thirty-fifth birthday.”

Thirty-five then. Going on thirty-six.

“Ever drive a Chevy Impala?”

“I don’t think so. No. Why?”

“Blue Chevy Impala?”

“No.”

“You weren’t driving a blue Chevy Impala this past Wednesday afternoon, were you? Down in Cape October?”

“Not this past Wednesday or any Wednesday,” Judy says. “I’ve never been to Cape October in my life.”

“But your boyfriend’s from the Cape, isn’t he?”

“What boyfriend?” she says. “I’m a married woman. What are you talking about, boyfriend?”

“Do you know a girl named Maria Gonzalez?”

“No. Did somebody run her over with a Chevy Impala?”

“Ever hear of a woman named Alice Glendenning?”

“No. Who is she?”

“Did Maria Gonzalez ever mention the Glendenning children to you?”

“I told you I don’t know anybody named Maria Gonzalez.”

“Judy?”

A voice from the front door. They all turn to look at the arch leading to the entrance foyer.

“Is someone here, dear?” the voice asks.

He is wearing sandals, khaki slacks, and a lime green shirt. He is a man in his fifties, they guess, bald, tanned, with a dead cigar in his mouth. Putting his keys back into his pants pocket, he enters the living room, his eyes squinching in puzzlement when he sees the two men sitting on the sofa.

“Yes?” he says.

“Darling,” Judy says, and rises, and goes to him and takes both his hands in hers. “These gentlemen are from the Cape October Police Department.”

“Oh?” he says.

“Detective Saltzman,” Saltzman says.

“Detective Andrews,” Andrews says.

“Murray Lang, what can I do for you?”

His manner is abrupt and hostile. He is not used to finding policemen in his luxurious condo, even if one of them is wearing a yarmulke, and his attitude clearly wants to know what the hell they’re doing here. Judy’s eyes are darting all over the place, from one detective to the other. Just a few minutes ago, they mentioned a boyfriend, which means they know about Ernesto. She is sensing imminent disaster here. She is thinking of throwing herself out the window before her husband finds out what’s been going on. Her eyes have a desperate pleading look. They are saying, “Please, officers, don’t tell him about Ernesto, okay? Please.”

The detectives don’t want to cause any trouble here. All they want to know is whether or not Judy Lang and some black woman—

It suddenly occurs to Saltzman that they may have real meat here. However unlikely might seem the menage à trois formed by a married Jewish lady in her thirties, a teenage Cuban boy, and a black woman also in her thirties, the possibility exists that Judy Lang, Ernesto de Diego, and the nameless woman on the telephone are all in this together. A coalition of the willing, so to speak.

“We’re trying to locate a blue Chevy Impala,” he says.

“Why?” Murray Lang asks. “And what’s it got to do with us?”

“A woman who fits your wife’s description—”

“Am I going to need a lawyer here?”

“Not unless you want one, sir.”

“Because I have lawyers coming out of my wazoo, you want lawyers.”

“We want to know where your wife was at two-thirty P.M. Wednesday afternoon, sir. Is all we want to know.”

“Tell them where you were, Judy. And then you can get the hell out of here,” Murray tells the detectives.

Judy can’t tell them where she was Wednesday afternoon at two-thirty because at that time she was on the backseat of an Oldsmobile parked behind A&L Auto Repair, where Ernesto and his brother work, and where everybody else who works there knows that Ernesto fucks the nice Jewish lady at two-thirty every afternoon on the backseat of his brother’s car. A&L Auto is where Judy first met Ernesto when she brought the white Jag in for a tune-up a month ago, little realizing that Ernesto would soon be giving her regularly scheduled tune-ups the likes of which she has never before had in her life. But she can’t tell the detectives any of this, not while her beloved husband Murray is standing there glowering with a dead cigar in the corner of his mouth. She thinks again that throwing herself out the window might not be such a bad idea.

“Ma’am?” Saltzman prods.

“Wednesday afternoon,” she says, thinking hard.

“Yes, ma’am. At two-thirty.”

“Why do you want to know this?”

“Were you in Cape October Wednesday afternoon at two-thirty?”

“No, I was not. I told you. I’ve never been to Cape October in my entire life.”

“At Pratt Elementary?” Andrews says.

“Is that a school down there?” Murray asks.

“It’s a school, yes, sir. Were you at Pratt Elementary—”

“I told you I’ve never been to Cape—”

“—behind the wheel of a blue Chevy Impala?”

“Did some schoolkid get run over?” Murray asks. “Is that it?”

“Were you, ma’am?”

“No, I was not.”

“Then where were you?”

“Tell them where you were, Judy.”

“Shopping,” she says.

This Murray can believe. His wife knows shopping. Boy, does she know shopping!

“Shopping where?” Saltzman asks.

“International Plaza.”

“Is that a shop, ma’am?”

“No, it’s a mall.”

“Where’s it located?”

“Near the airport,” Murray says. “Everybody knows International Plaza.”

“We’re not that familiar with Tampa,” Saltzman says. “Can you tell us where it’s located?”

“Boy Scout and West Shore.”

“Are those cross streets?”

“They’re boulevards. Boy Scout Boulevard, West Shore Boulevard.”

“Where in the mall did you shop?” Andrews asks Judy.

“Different shops.”

“Which ones?”

For a moment, she hesitates. But she’s been to the mall often, and she’s familiar with all the stores there.

“Neiman Marcus,” she says. “Arden B. Lord & Taylor. St. John Knits. Nordstrom. A few others.”

“Must’ve bought a lot of stuff,” Andrews says.

“No, I didn’t buy anything at all.”

This causes Murray’s eyebrows to go up onto his forehead. The detectives look surprised, too.

“I didn’t see anything I liked,” Judy explains.

“What time did you leave the mall?”

“Around three-fifteen.”

Which is about when she was pulling up her panties and rearranging her skirt on the backseat of Godofredo’s Olds.

“Spent about forty-five minutes there, is that it?”

“Little bit longer,” Judy says.

“Came right back home, did you?”

“No, I stopped for a small pizza at the California Pizza Kitchen.”

“Where’s that?”

“In the mall. On the first floor. Right by Nordstrom.”

“Had a pizza there, did you?”

“A small pizza, yes.”

“See anybody you know in the Pizza Kitchen?”

“California Pizza Kitchen. No.”

“Or anyplace else in the mall?”

“No.”

“So we just have your word for where you were.”

“Her word is good enough for me,” Murray says, smiling, and goes to her and takes her hand, and pats it.

“We’ll be checking all those shops you went into,” Andrews says.

“See if anybody remembers anyone answering your description,” Saltzman says.

“Was it a kid got run over?” Murray asks.

In the hallway outside, Andrews says, “She’s lying.”

“I know,” Saltzman says.

“We really going to check out all those stores?”

“I don’t think so, do you?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Cause if she kidnapped those kids, I’ll eat my yarmulke.”

Andrews looks at his watch.

“We’re gonna hit traffic going back,” he says, and sighs heavily.

Back at the lab — which is a very modern lab for a town the size of Cape October — the boys print the latents they lifted at the Shell station, and run them first through their own Bureau of Criminal Identification, but they come up with nothing on the multitude of stuff they gathered. So they try the Automated Fingerprint Identification Section next, and come up blank with them as well. Having exhausted their own BCI and the nationwide AFIS, and having no other letters in the alphabet to turn to, they inform Captain Steele that the black woman Mrs. Glendenning met outside the toilet has never been in the armed forces, has never held a state or federal position, and has never been arrested for any criminal activity whatsoever, otherwise her prints would be on file someplace.

This is now almost five-thirty in the afternoon.

“So what are we dealing with here?” Steele asks Johnson. “Amateur night in Dixie?”

He is commenting about the kidnappers, Johnson hopes.

“We do have some nice hair and fiber samples,” he says. “We ever get anything to compare against.”

Rosie Garrity is at home that evening when the local news comes on at six P.M. Her husband, George, is a waiter at the Unicorn Restaurant up in Sarasota, and he’s already left for work, so she’s alone, sitting in the genuine-leather recliner/easy chair he bought for her at Peterby’s Furniture on the Trail.

The television news anchor is a man named Taylor Thompson, handsome as homemade sin, with a voice as deep as an Everglades swamp. He is giving them the headlines of the stories he will discuss at greater length later. Rosie likes Taylor Thompson even better than she likes Tom Brokaw.

“…raging out of control in downtown Fort Myers,” Taylor is saying. “A pair of housewives foil a holdup attempt in a Sanibel supermarket. And in Cape October…”

Rosie leans forward in her recliner.

“…a cat in a jacaranda tree is rescued by heroic firemen. This is Taylor Thompson, back to you in a moment with all the news in the Fort Myers area.”

“Not a word about those poor little darlins,” Rosie says aloud.

More and more, Alice is beginning to believe that the two women who kidnapped her children are lunatics. They have their goddamn money, why haven’t they called yet?

“And what is it Ashley couldn’t believe?” she asks Charlie, as though he’s been reading her thoughts. “That they were even letting her talk to me?”

She is pacing the room. The steady ticking of the grandfather clock is a constant reminder that they still haven’t called.

“Were they treating her so badly that just allowing her to talk to her own mother…”

“Don’t go there, Al,” Charlie warns.

“She sounded so amazed, Charlie! ‘Mom, I can’t believe it!’”

In her mind, she goes over the entire conversation yet another time.

Tell her you and your brother are okay, that’s all. Nothing else. Here.

We’re both okay. Mom, I can’t believe it!

What can’t…?

Do you remember Mari—?

And she was cut off.

So… well, of course… she’d been about to say “Maria.” And that had to be Maria Gonzalez. What other Maria could it possibly be? Alice doesn’t know anyone else named Maria. Or even Marie. So, yes, the black woman grabbed the phone because she didn’t want Ashley saying Maria’s name.

But what is it that Ashley found so goddamn unbelievable?

Maria surfacing again after almost two years, more than two years, however long it was? Maria returning to kidnap her?

Well, yes, that’s unbelievable.

To Alice, it is utterly unbelievable that this mild-mannered, soft-spoken, chubby little girl who still spoke English with a Spanish accent would come to kidnap her children all this time after she’d babysat them, that is totally and completely unbelievable to Alice — but apparently not to Captain Steele, who has sent his Keystone Kops chasing after her.

We’re both okay. Mom, I can’t believe it!

And then, immediately: Do you remember Mari—?

Even before Alice completed her sentence, even before she possibly could have known that Alice was about to ask “What can’t you believe, honey?”

Do you remember Mari—?

And silence.

A dead line.

“Something’s missing,” she tells Charlie.

And the phone rings.

It is ten minutes past seven.

Charlie immediately puts on the earphones.

“Hello?” Alice says.

“Mrs. Glendenning?”

A male voice. No one she’s ever heard before.

“Yes?” she says.

Her heart is suddenly beating faster. Is this another accomplice? The blonde, the black woman, and now…

“This is Rick Chaffee, night editor at the Cape October Tribune?”

“Yes?”

“I hope I’m not—”

“What is it?” Alice says.

“We got a call from some woman… we get many such calls, Mrs. Glendenning, especially since Iraqi Freedom. You have no idea how many people see anthrax bubbling in their toilet bowls, or hear bombs ticking in their closet…”

Charlie is already shaking his head in warning.

“But this woman—”

“What woman?” Alice asks.

“Woman named Rose Garrity, does that name mean anything to you?”

“Yes?”

“Said she’s your housekeeper, is that correct?”

“What’s this about, Mr…. Jaffe, did you say?”

“Chaffee. C-H. Is she your housekeeper, ma’am?”

Charlie is shaking his head again.

“Yes, she is,” Alice says.

“Well, ma’am, she called here some ten minutes ago to say she informed the police and then the FBI that your children were—”

“No,” Alice says.

“—kidnapped the other day…”

“No, that isn’t true.”

“It isn’t, huh?”

“It isn’t.”

“Claims there’s been no action from either the local police or the—”

“Perhaps that’s because nothing’s happened here. Mrs. Garrity is mistaken.”

“She seemed pretty sure some black woman—”

“I just told you she’s wrong,” Alice says, and slams the receiver down onto its cradle. She picks it up again at once, begins dialing a number by heart. Her eyes are blazing.

“Hello?”

“Are you trying to get my kids killed?” she yells into the phone.

“Mrs. Glen—?”

“Stay away from this, do you hear me?”

“I’m so worried about them…”

“Shut up!” Alice yells.

The line goes silent.

“Do you hear me, Rosie?”

“I was only trying to—”

“No! Don’t try to help, don’t try to do anything at all. Just keep your damn nose out of it!” she yells, and slams the receiver down again.

“Wow,” Charlie says.

“Yeah, wow,” Alice says.

But she knows the damage has already been done.

7

The three men meet in a roadside joint that calls itself the Redbird Café. Not far from the Fort Myers airport, the Redbird is a shack adjacent to a gasoline station, open only for breakfast and lunch on weekdays, but also for dinner on weekends. This is now seven-thirty on a Friday night, and the three men are eating dinner.

Rafe has ordered the broiled catfish dinner with green beans and fries. The other two men are eating fried pork chops with mashed potatoes and the green beans. All three men are drinking coffee. They’re dressed casually, these three, Rafe wearing the blue jeans and denim shirt he always wears when he’s driving, the other two also wearing jeans and what look like Western shirts with those little darts over the pockets. The two men are wearing boots. Rafe is wearing loafers, which are easy to drive in. His rig is parked outside, alongside the Plymouth both the other men arrived in.

All three men did time at Rogers State Prison in Reidsville for violation of Code 16-13-30 of the Georgia State Statutes. That’s where they met, each serving what the three of them called “bullshit narcotics violations.” The prison facility was a small one, housing only twelve-hundred-some-odd inmates, some of them pretty odd, as the old joke went. It was easy for the men to make each other’s acquaintance in the yard, especially since their so-called crimes were similar in nature.

The Redbird is almost empty at this hour, but the men are speaking softly, anyway. Hell, they’re discussing big bucks here. It makes them feel important to be discussing $250,000 in hundred-dollar bills, even if the bills are counterfeit, even if their voices are low.

“Super-bills, huh?” Danny Lowell says.

“Is what the cops called them.”

“You ever hear of super-bills, Jimbo?”

“Never in my life.”

“So good you can’t tell ’em from the real thing,” Rafe says, and picks up some fries with his fingers and shovels them into his mouth.

“Is what your sister-in-law said, right?”

“Is what the cops said.”

“Two-fifty large, right?”

“Is how much they turned over to this black chick.”

“What makes me nervous,” Jimmy Coombes says, “is there’s a kidnapping involved here. I don’t know what the law is here in Florida, but back home, you do a kidnapping, you’re looking at the ‘Seven Deadly Sins,’ man. That means life without parole. I ain’t eager to do that kind of time.”

“I don’t think it’s the same in Florida,” Rafe says. “Besides, we wouldn’t be involved in no kidnapping.”

“I tend to agree with James,” Danny says. “We’d in effect be sharing in the proceeds of the crime, and that might be cause to link us to the crime as co-conspirators or whatever. If Florida has as tough a kidnapping law as Georgia, we could be looking at the long one, Rafe.”

Jimmy hates it when Danny sounds like a fuckin jailhouse lawyer. He also hates to be called either James or Jimbo, when his fuckin name is Jimmy. At the same time, Danny is agreeing with him. They have to be careful here. Doing time for kidnapping ain’t no walk in the park.

“There is no way we could be linked to the snatch,” Rafe says. “We don’t even know who these people are. How can we possibly get linked to a conspiracy?”

“Conspiracy to commit kidnapping,” Danny says reasonably, and looks to Jimmy for confirmation.

“Which is another thing that bothers me,” Jimmy says. “Our not knowing who they are.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Rafe says.

“Are your chops okay?” Jimmy says.

“Yeah, they’re fine,” Danny says. “Why?”

“Mine are a little overdone.”

“They have to cook pork that way. Because of trichinosis,” Danny says.

“They don’t have to burn the fuckin things,” Jimmy says.

“Mine are fine,” Danny says, and shrugs.

“I got a cholesterol problem,” Jimmy says, “I eat red meat—”

“Pork is white meat.”

“Yeah, bullshit,” Jimmy says. “I eat beef, pork, maybe once a month, twice if I wanna live real dangerously. So when I order pork chops, I don’t expect to get burnt shoe leather. I mean, this is a treat for me, eating pork.”

“So send them back if they’re not the way you want them,” Danny says.

“I’m almost finished with them already.”

“Then finish them already.”

“I’m just saying,” Jimmy says, “this is supposed to be a fuckin treat here. Instead, they’re burned to a crisp.”

The men eat in silence for several moments.

“Also,” Danny says, “there’s more than one of them. That’s what you said, right, Rafe?”

“Yeah, but one of them’s a chick. Maybe both of them, for all I know,” Rafe says. “Maybe these two chicks got it in their heads to steal my sister-in-law’s kids. They know she’s coming into big money…”

“You’re sure about that, huh?”

“Positive. It’s a double indemnity policy. It’ll pay two-fifty.”

“When it pays,” Danny says.

“If it pays,” Jimmy says.

“It’ll pay,” Rafe assures them. “Besides, who cares about the policy? We’re talking about the fake money here. We’re talking about two-fifty large already in the hands of whoever’s got the kids. We’re talking about retrieving that money.”

“Who we don’t even know who they are,” Danny says.

“Miss?” Jimmy says, and raises his hand to the waitress. She signals that she hears him, finishes taking the order at a table across the room, and then comes over to them.

“Freshen it?” she asks.

“Please,” Jimmy says. “Also, my chops were overdone.”

“Gee, I’m sorry about that,” she says.

She’s maybe eighteen years old, little blonde girl in a yellow uniform, big tits and frizzy hair, Southern accent thick as molasses.

“You’da told me, I’da ast the chef to do them all over again,” she says. “You want me to do that now?”

“No, that’s okay,” Jimmy says.

“Won’t take a minute,” she says.

“I’m fine, thanks,” Jimmy says.

“Y’all want more coffee, too?” she asks the other two men.

They both nod. Danny, in fact, lifts his cup and puts it on her tray, smiling. He fancies himself a ladies’ man even though he’s ugly as homemade sin. That’s another thing Jimmy doesn’t like about him. His vanity. Vanity just ain’t appropriate on a man. The waitress fills their cups, returns Danny’s smile even though he’s ugly, and leaves the table. Jimmy is having very serious doubts here about going into an enterprise with a man like Danny, who calls him Jimbo and James and who thinks he’s handsome as hell when he ain’t. Also, kidnapping is a serious offense.

“Also,” he says, thinking out loud, “suppose there’s more than just the two chicks? Or suppose it’s just the black chick your sister-in-law knows about, plus some guys, let’s say. Maybe some hardened criminals, let’s say, and not some small-time drug shits like the three of us. We go after that money…”

“He’s got a point, Rafe. We could be walking into a hornet’s nest here.”

“Or not,” Rafe says. “Instead, we could be walking away with two hundred and fifty thou in bills that look so real you can lick them off the page.”

“If it’s true.”

“It’s what the cops said.”

“Cops,” Jimmy says.

“You trust what cops say?” Danny says.

“The bills have to look good,” Rafe says. “You think they’d endanger those kids’ lives? Come on, be reasonable.”

“He’s got a point, James,” Danny says.

“So let’s say, for the sake of argument,” Jimmy says, “these bills do look like the real thing…”

“Exactly my point,” Rafe says.

“And let’s also say, for the sake of argument, that we manage to somehow get our hands on these bills…”

“And split them three ways, don’t forget.”

“What does that come to?” Danny asks.

“Eighty-three K for each of us.”

“Comes to a big thousand bucks a year,” Jimmy says.

“I don’t follow.”

“Assuming Florida’s as tough on kidnapping—”

“We don’t know that for sure.”

“—and assuming I live to be eighty-three years old,” Jimmy says.

“Behind bars,” Danny says, nodding in agreement.

The table goes silent.

“So what are you saying here?” Rafe asks.

“I’m saying count me out,” Jimmy says.

“Me, too,” Danny says.

Rafe sits alone at the table long after his so-called friends have got into their car and driven off. Man, he thinks, you can’t count on a fucking soul these days. Asshole buddies in the lockup — well, not literally — they get a taste of fresh air and then chicken out of the sweetest little setup anyone could ever want. Two-fifty large sitting out there someplace in the hands of two dizzy chicks, just waiting to be ripped off. Well, he can’t do it alone, that’s for sure, everybody needs their back covered, man.

He drinks a second cup of coffee, checks the cash Danny and Jimmy left on the table as their share of the bill and tip, adds his own share to it, and then calls the little blonde waitress over.

“S’pose I oughta get out of here, huh?” he says with a grin. “Before you start charging me rent.”

“Oh, don’t let that worry you none,” she says. “We got plenty to do here ’fore we close.”

“What time would that be?” he asks.

“We’re usually out of here by ten.”

The clock on the wall reads five minutes to nine.

“What do you do then?” he asks. “After you get out of here?”

She knows at once he’s putting the moves on her. She takes a deep breath to fill out the uniform chest, rolls her big blue eyes, and says, “Well, usually, my boyfriend picks me up here.”

“How about tonight? Is he picking you up tonight?”

“I reckon,” she says, without a trace of regret. “Did you want me to take this now?” she asks, and lifts the plate with the cash and the bill on it.

“Sure,” he says. “Thanks.”

Her rejection annoys him even more than his so-called pals’ did. Telling him, in effect, she prefers a pimply faced kid who probably slings burgers at McDonald’s to a sophisticated thirty-five-year-old man who’s been around the block a few times, sweetheart, and who can teach you some tricks you never learned here at the old Redbird Café. He’s beginning to regret having left a fifteen percent tip on the plate. Ten percent would’ve been enough. More than she’d see down here in a week. Pay for a fuckin two-week vacation. He leaves the table before she comes back.

His rig is parked outside.

He settles himself in the cab, starts the engine, and then turns on the cell phone. Nothing he can do down here anymore, he might as well head back home. He dials his home number, lets it ring three times, and is surprised when a voice he doesn’t recognize answers.

“Hello?”

“Who’s this?” he asks.

“It’s your nickel, mister,” the woman says. “Who’s this?”

“This is Rafe Matthews, and I live there, ma’am! Now who the hell…?”

“Oh, golly, Mr. Matthews,” the woman says, “I’m sorry, this is Hattie Randolph. I’m sittin your kids while your missus is gone.”

“Gone? Gone where?”

“Down to Florida. To see her sister.”

“Cape October?”

“I reckon, sir. She gave me the number there, if you’d like it.”

“I have the number. When did she leave?”

“Early this afternoon. Said she should be there by tomorrow morning sometime.”

“Okay,” Rafe says.

He is already thinking.

“Did you want me to tell her anything? If she calls?”

“No, I’ll get in touch with her myself, Hattie, thanks. How are the kids?”

“Fine. I just put them to bed.”

“Well, give them a kiss for me in the morning, okay?”

“Yes, sir, I’ll do that.”

“Good night, Hattie.”

“Good night, Mr. Matthews,” she says.

He turns off the phone, and sits alone in the cab, in the dark, thinking. He doesn’t like the idea that Carol just picked up and left for Florida without first consulting him about it. On the other hand, the fact that she’s on the road and doesn’t expect to get down here in Florida till tomorrow morning means that she’ll be stopping at a motel to sleep over, which further means he’s free as a bird till morning, when he’ll give her a call to bawl her out.

Rafe doesn’t realize this about himself, but his usual way of dealing with disappointment or frustration is to look for female companionship. His rejection by first his former jailhouse cronies and next the big-titted little blonde waitress might have remained just mere annoyance if Carol had been home where she was supposed to be. Instead, he calls and gets some black woman he never heard of, while his wife is driving alone in the dark and sleeping Christ knows where on the road, and this pisses him off further, this truly pisses him off mightily.

Suddenly—

Or at least he thinks it’s suddenly.

He remembers the blonde who ran over Alice’s foot.

He activates the phone again. Dials Information. Presses the

SEND button.

“Cape October, Florida,” he says.

“Yes, sir?”

“Jennifer Reddy,” he says. “That’s R-E-D-D-Y. I don’t have an address.”

He waits.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the operator says. “I don’t have a listing with that spelling.”

“What do you have?” he asks, about to get angry all over again.

“I have a Ready-Quik Car Wash, and a Ready-Serv Rental…”

“No, this is a residential listing. And it’s not Ready, it’s Reddy. R-E-D-D-Y.”

“Could it be Redding, sir? R-E-D-D-I-N-G? I have a J. Redding on Mangrove Lane. Could that be it?”

“It might,” he says.

Redding, he thinks. Jennifer Redding.

“I’ll try it for you, sir.”

He hears the operator dialing. Hears the phone ringing on the other end.

“Hello?”

A woman’s voice. A Jennifer Redding voice. Crisp and young and sensual.

“Miss Redding?” he says.

“Yes.”

“This is Rafe Matthews?”

“Who?”

“I was at Alice Glendenning’s house when you stopped by yesterday.”

“Alice…? Oh. Yes.”

There is a silence on the line.

“So… uh… what is it?” Jennifer asks.

“I happened to notice you. Through the drapes.”

Another silence.

“I wouldn’t intrude this way,” he says, “but I know you’re a friend of Alice’s…”

“Well, actually, I ran her over,” Jennifer says.

“Yes, so I understand.”

“Is that what this is about?”

“No, no. Not at all.”

“Then why…?”

“Point is, I’m still in the neighborhood, more or less, and I was thinking you might like to meet me for a cup of coffee. Or something.”

“What do you mean by ‘more or less’?”

“Actually, I’m in Fort Myers. Near the airport here. Or we could meet for a drink. If you’d prefer a drink.”

“Why should we meet at all?” Jennifer asks. “For anything?”

“Well, like I said, I happened to notice you through the drapes…”

“And so?”

And so I’d like to fuck your brains out, he thinks, but does not say.

“If you’re busy,” he says, “I’m sorry I bothered you.”

“I’m not busy,” she says. “And you’re not bothering me. It’s just… I don’t know you at all.”

“Well, that’s the idea,” he says.

This is getting too difficult, he thinks. Fuck it. I’ll go back inside and hit on the waitress again.

“Get to know each other a little better,” he says.

“Well, now, why would I want to do that?”

It suddenly occurs to him that she may be flirting.

“Friend of Alice’s and all,” he says.

“I told you,” she says. “All I did was run over her foot.”

“Glad it wasn’t my foot,” he says.

She laughs.

“I’ll bet,” she says.

“So what do you think?” he asks. “Coffee? A drink? Or get lost?”

She laughs again.

“Can you be at the Hyatt by ten?” she asks.

“I’m not dressed for the Hyatt,” he says.

“What are you wearing?”

“I’m driving a rig. I’ve got on jeans and a denim shirt.”

“Casual, huh?”

“And loafers,” he says.

“Okay, drive out to the end of Willard Key. There’s a place out there on the water, it’s called Ronnie’s Lounge, which sounds gay but it isn’t. You’re not, are you?”

“No, ma’am, I am not.”

“Who shall I look for?”

“Big handsome guy in jeans and a denim shirt.”

“Modest, too,” she says.

But she laughs again.

“Ten o’clock,” he says.

“See you,” she says, and hangs up.

Hot damn! he thinks.

Actually, Rafe has done this sort of thing many times before. The trick is to make it look as if he’s never done it before. In the past, he’s never blatantly flashed his wedding band — nor is he doing that tonight — but if the subject happened to come up, he never denied he was married, either. The way the conversation is going here in Ronnie’s Lounge, it looks as if the subject might come up any minute now.

Jennifer Redding is wearing a little black fuck-me dress that’s cut high on the thigh and low over what Rafe considers an exuberant set of lungs. She is wearing strappy black sandals with a stiletto heel, and her legs are crossed, and she is jiggling one foot, which always makes him think a woman is about to come. She looks overdressed for the kind of place this is — especially after he told her on the phone he was in denim and jeans — but she doesn’t seem uncomfortable here. In fact, some of the other women draped here and there around what is essentially a wooden shack hung with fishing nets and buoys are also dressed to the nines whereas the guys look like they just got off either a boat or a horse.

Jennifer is drinking a Cosmopolitan, which he never heard of before tonight, and which she earlier explained is a cocktail composed of four parts vodka, two parts Cointreau, one part lime juice, two parts cranberry juice, a dash of orange bitters, and an orange twist.

“You’re supposed to set fire to the oil from the orange peel before you drop it in the glass, but I never saw any bartender down here do that,” she told him.

But now the conversation has moved toward more basic matters, as for example how he happens to know Alice Glendenning. This is the moment of truth.

Rafe lifts his glass. He is drinking Wild Turkey bourbon on the rocks. He takes a sip, puts the glass down again. Looks across the table at her.

“She’s my sister-in-law,” he says.

Jennifer doesn’t seem at all surprised.

“I knew that,” she says. “I was testing you.”

“Did I pass the test?” he says.

“Is she your brother’s wife?”

“No. My wife’s sister.”

“Ah,” Jennifer says.

“Yeah,” he says, and lifts the glass again, and takes another sip.

“So what are you doing here with me?” she asks.

“I told you. I thought we might get to know each other better.”

“The way you know your wife’s sister better?”

“No, no. Hey, no! Definitely not. There’s nothing going on between me and Alice.”

“Then what were you doing there yesterday?”

“I happened to be in the neighborhood, so I stopped by to see her. She’s my sister-in-law, for Christ’s sake!”

“Okay,” Jennifer says, and nods again.

She sips at the Cosmopolitan. He sips at the bourbon. The table is silent for several moments. Somewhere across the room, the jukebox is playing some kind of country-western song about a guy leaving home in his pickup truck with his hound dog.

“So what are we supposed to do now?” she asks. “You being married and all?”

“That’s entirely up to you,” Rafe says.

“I’m not the one who’s married,” she says. “Being married is your problem, not mine.”

“I don’t see it as a problem. How do you see it as a problem?”

“Well, gee, let me think,” Jennifer says. “Being married means there’s a wife someplace, right?”

“Yeah, but not here,” Rafe says.

“Then where?”

“Right now, I guess she’s in a motel somewhere on the interstate.”

Jennifer looks at him, puzzled.

“Driving down from Atlanta to see her sister,” Rafe explains. “Won’t be here till tomorrow morning sometime.”

“Which means you’re alone for the night, is that it?”

“It would appear so, yes,” Rafe says.

“Is this what you do all the time? While your wife’s on the interstate?”

“First time,” he says.

“I’ll bet.”

Jennifer nods again, thinking it over. She is still jiggling her foot.

Rafe moves his glass around on the tabletop, making wet rings. He is sure her shoe will fall off.

“So what do you think?” he asks.

“I think I’d like another Cosmo,” she says.

Alice has just brought a pillow and a blanket into the living room when car headlights splash across the drawn blinds. Both she and Charlie turn at once toward the windows. Outside, they hear a car engine quitting. A car door slamming. Moments later, the front doorbell rings.

The grandfather clock reads 10:45 P.M.

“I’ll get it,” Charlie says, and motions for Alice to move back. She steps away from the door. Charlie glances over his shoulder to make certain she cannot be seen from the outside, and then he says to the closed door, “Who is it?”

“Dustin Garcia,” a man’s voice says.

“Who’s Dustin Garcia?”

“Cape October Trib. Could you open the door, sir?”

“Send him away,” Alice whispers.

“Only make it worse,” Charlie says, and motions again for her to stay out of sight. He unlocks the door, opens it, peers out through the mesh of the screen door. Bugs are clattering around the porch light.

The man standing there is short and slight. He is wearing a tan suit with a dark brown sports shirt, no tie. He is also wearing a brown snap-brim straw hat and brown shoes. He holds up a card with his photo on it and the word PRESS in green across its face.

“Sorry to bother you this time of night,” he says. “My editor says he talked to you earlier…”

“Yes, what is it?” Charlie says.

“Rick Chaffee, do you remember him calling?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“You are, sir?”

“Charlie Hobbs.”

“Nose for news, Rick has,” Garcia says. “He thought I ought to stop by and talk to you.”

“Is that what he thought?”

“Yes, sir. All right for me to come in?”

“Sorry,” Charlie says. “No.”

“Awfully buggy out here.”

“Then go back to your car,” Charlie says. “Bet it’s not buggy there.”

“Rick seems to think somebody’s been kidnapped here.”

“Rick’s wrong.”

“Two little kids, Rick seems to think.”

“Look, Mr. Garcia, it’s late…”

“I’d like to come in and talk to Mrs. Glendenning.”

“She’s asleep.”

“Do you live here, sir?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Where are the Glendenning children, Mr. Hobbs?”

“Asleep. Where are your children this time of night?”

“I don’t have any children.”

“I don’t, either,” Charlie says. “Mr. Garcia, it was nice of you to stop by, but nothing’s happened here, and you’re wasting your time.”

“Then let me talk to the kids.”

“No.”

“I’ll talk to someone at Pratt first thing tomorrow morning, you know,” Garcia says. “That’s where they go to school, isn’t it?”

“School’s closed tomorrow,” Charlie says.

“I’ll find somebody.”

“Good night, Mr. Garcia,” Charlie says, and closes and locks the door.

Rafe realizes that it might not be provident to ask a lady if she’d mind your parking a truck and trailer weighing some forty thousand pounds empty in front of her house overnight. He suggests that she follow him to a truck stop he knows near the airport — which is a good half hour away from Ronnie’s Lounge out on Willard — and she tells him to go park the truck there all by himself, thanks, and then catch a cab to her house if he’s still interested. He does not get to Mangrove Lane until eleven-thirty.

The only light burning in any of the houses on the street is a little blue one in the house next door to hers. Someone watching television. Otherwise the street is dark. He pays and tips the cabby, goes to the front door, and rings the bell. Jennifer answers it a moment later.

She is wearing red silk lounging pajamas, a black silk robe, and the same strappy black sandals she had on earlier tonight.

“Thought you’d never get here,” she says.

“The last flight came in from Tampa at nine,” he says. “Not a taxi in sight. I had to phone for one.”

“But you’re here,” she says.

“It would appear so, yes.”

“That’s a verbal tic,” she says.

“What’s a verbal tic?”

He doesn’t know what a verbal tic is. But she thinks he’s asking her to clarify exactly which words constitute the verbal tic, whatever it may be.

“Saying ‘It would appear so, yes.’ You said the same thing when I asked if you were alone for the night.”

“Then it must be true,” he says. “I am in fact alone for the night, and I am also in fact here.”

“While your wife is in a motel on the interstate.”

“That’s where I guess she is.”

“What does she look like, your wife?”

“She’s about five-six, and she has brown hair and blue eyes.”

“But you prefer blondes, is that it?”

“I prefer blondes who look like you,” he says.

“Do you have any children?”

“Two.”

“You should be ashamed of yourself, fucking around this way.”

“Well,” he says, “so far I’m not doing much fucking around, am I?”

Jennifer laughs. Her laugh is raw and sexy. He hopes this doesn’t turn out to be a false alarm here, because he’s already getting hard in his jeans and he doesn’t want to have to call another cab.

“Would you like a drink?” she asks.

“I think I’ve had enough to drink.”

“I’m going to have another drink,” she says, and crosses the living room to where the drop-leaf front of a wall unit is hanging open. The black silk robe flutters about her like the wings of a butterfly. He wonders if she’s wearing anything under those red silk lounging pajamas. He’s never seen Carol in lounging pajamas. Do women wear anything under lounging pajamas? He sure as hell hopes she doesn’t turn out to be a cock tease.

“Sure?” she says, and turns from the bar to hold up a glass.

“Positive,” he says.

She shrugs, pours vodka for herself into a short fat glass, and screws the cap back onto the bottle. Leaving the glass on the open bar top, she moves to the audio equipment in the wall unit, slides a couple of CDs into the player, and presses a button. A female singer whose voice he can’t recognize begins singing a bluesy number. Jennifer picks up her glass and dances over to him, arms wide, robe fluttering, floating again to where he is still standing across the room. She takes a swallow of her drink, looks at him over the rim of the glass, smiles, and kisses him on the mouth. She pulls away just as he starts getting hungry.

“How do I know you’re not fucking Alice?” she asks.

“Nobody’s fucking Alice,” he says. “Her husband drowned eight months ago. She’s still grieving.”

“Did you try?”

“I knew better,” he says.

“How come you didn’t know better with me?”

“Did your husband drown?”

“I don’t have a husband.”

“Then let’s go to bed,” he says.

“No, let’s dance,” she says, and sips at the drink again, and goes into his arms.

They move about the floor slowly. His hand slides from the small of her back to the swell of her ass under the silk garments. She backs away from him, raises her eyebrows like a virgin, and then moves out of his arms completely to sip at her drink again. Her nipples are puckered under the silk. Jesus, he thinks, please don’t let this be a false alarm.

“What time will your wife be getting down here tomorrow?” she asks.

Back to the wife again.

“Around breakfast time, I’d guess.”

Is she building up to kicking him out of here? Once, in St. Louis, he made the mistake of hitting on a flight attendant staying at the same Holiday Inn he was, but it turned out she was a friend of the flight attendant he’d fucked two weeks earlier. Gave her the same line. Only she knew the line already because her friend had told her all about him. So she let him buy her dinner and walk her back to her room, even invited him in for a drink, where he kept giving her the same jive he’d given Gwen — that was the first girl’s name — two weeks earlier. She finally told him he should change his line at least as often as he changed his underwear, and showed him the door. Couldn’t even remember her name now, the bitch, but was this the same thing here? Was Jennifer getting him all hot and bothered only to turn him out into the night?

“Aren’t you afraid she might see your truck where you parked it?”

“She won’t be going near the airport. Anyway, what I do is my business.”

“Oh? Is that right? Have you got some kind of arrangement or something?”

“No, but I’m my own man.”

“Oooo, big macho man,” she says.

“Look,” he says, “if you’re not—”

“Be still,” she says.

“I mean, I’m married, okay? If that—”

“I said be still.”

She moves away from him, glides to the bar, sets her empty glass down in front of the bottles arrayed there, and then lifts the folding top, closing the bar. As she turns back to him, she lets the black silk robe slide from her shoulders. And then she is fiddling with the silken cord at her waist, loosening it, untying it, allowing the pajama bottoms to slide down over her thighs and her knees, bunching at her ankles, stepping out of them in her high heels and taking a stride toward him, the palms of her hands flat on her naked thighs now.

Her pubic hair is black.

“Are you sure you prefer blondes?” she asks, and when he doesn’t answer, she says, “Why don’t you just come on over here and eat me, hmm?”