Alice in Jeopardy

11

Garcia’s column is indeed in the coveted upper-right-hand position of the Sunday section’s first page. His photograph runs in a box at the top of the column. It shows him smiling at the camera.

The story that leads off “Dustin’s Dustbin” is titled:

The subhead reads:

The story reads:

There are some people out there who know that Garcia’s little story is a pack of goddamn lies.

Well, not Phoebe Mears.

She accepts unconditionally that Alice Glendenning took little Jamie and Ashley to Disney World and forgot to tell the school about it. But if she sent her own sister to pick up the kids after school Wednesday, then what was that phone call from her asking about did they miss the bus and all? Had she also forgotten her sister was picking up the kids?

Phoebe knows that Mrs. Glendenning has been through a lot lately, her husband drowning and all. In which case, she can be forgiven a lapse of memory every now and then. So she agrees that all’s well that ends well, and that everything was probably just much ado about nothing, after all. Which is just as she likes it, yes.

Luke Farraday can’t figure out why that newspaper reporter would give him fifty bucks to tell him about the blue Impala and the blonde driving it if he knew all along that it was Mrs. Glendenning’s sister picking up the kids. And also, what was that business about wanting to put an announcement about a party in the social calendar, when instead it turns out the kids went to Disney World with their mother? Or is the party next week sometime? Is it a birthday party? Is that why Mrs. Glendenning took the kids to Orlando? Was it a birthday present? Is it one of their birthdays coming up?

Sometimes, Luke gets confused.

Then again, it said in the paper that “A simple failure to communicate caused a dollop of confusion and measure for measure of consternation these past few frantic days,” so maybe everybody’s confused and consterned about whatever arrangement the sisters made between them.

One thing good about it, though.

He now knows why those kids would’ve got in the car with a stranger. It was their aunt all along.

Anyway, the hell with it.

He’s still fifty bucks ahead.

Jennifer and Rafe are in bed when they read the story in the Tribune. In fact, except for the five minutes it took Jennifer to put on a robe and go out to the mailbox for the paper, they have not budged from that bed since they climbed into it late Friday night. Rafe even called his wife from Jennifer’s bed yesterday afternoon.

Rafe knows an old joke that goes like this:

“Do you always tell your wife you love her after you have sex?”

“Oh yes. Wherever I am, I make a point of calling her.”

Rafe told Jennifer this joke after he’d spoken to Carol yesterday. It did not seem to trouble him that he had his head on Jennifer’s left breast while he spoke to his wife. It did not seem to trouble Jennifer, either. She laughed when he told her the joke.

They are not laughing now.

They have just finished reading Dustin Garcia’s little story.

“Total bullshit,” Rafe says.

“What makes you think so?” Jennifer asks.

“Think so?” Rafe says. “Think? I know for a fact that there is not a word of truth in this article. To begin with, my wife is not a blonde. She has black hair. So does her sister. So it wasn’t my wife or her sister who picked up those kids after school. That’s the first thing. The second thing is my wife didn’t get down here to Florida till yesterday morning, so she couldn’t have been going to Disney World with her sister and the kids on Thursday, whenever the article says it was, that’s the second thing. And the third thing, I was in my sister-in-law’s house, the fucking place was crawling with cops, they know the kids’ve been kidnapped, so this whole story about Disney World is pure and total bullshit. Either it’s something Alice herself gave to the paper to protect herself because the paper was pestering her, or else the cops themselves planted it for some reason or other.”

“That’s what I think it is,” Jennifer says.

“The cops planted it?”

“Yes.”

“Which means they were working with this Cuban fuck, whoever he is,” Rafe says. “Where’d he get that name Dustin, anyway?”

“His mother probably was a fan.”

“Of Dustin Hoffman’s, you mean?”

“Yes, of course Dustin Hoffman,” Jennifer says. “Who else is named Dustin besides Dustin Hoffman?”

“Well, this guy, for example,” Rafe says, and taps the byline on the column. “In fact, maybe it’s the other way around,” he suggests. “Maybe Dustin Hoffman was named after Dustin Garcia.”

Jennifer gives him a look.

“So you think that’s it, huh?” she says. “They figured this out between them. Garcia and the cops?”

“Don’t you think?”

“But why?” she says. “I don’t see what they hope to accomplish.”

“Here’s his picture right here,” Rafe says, and grins like a barracuda. “Why don’t we just go ask him?”

Tully Stone, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s regional office seventy-two miles north of Cape October, has copies of all the southwest Florida newspapers on his desk that Sunday morning, but the one that interests him most is the Cape October Tribune. There on the first page of the Sunday section, someone named Dustin Garcia has written a droll little story about Alice Glendenning — the woman Stone’s agents have been busting their asses over — taking her kids to Disney World for a couple of days and thinking it’s comical that everyone’s in an uproar about them being missing.

“It’s a plant,” Sally Ballew tells him.

“No question,” Felix Forbes says.

The two agents read the story early this morning, and then drove all the way up here to Stone’s office at regional HQ, an hour’s drive in very light traffic. Stone was perturbed on the telephone, and he is visibly upset now, to say the least.

“It’s nothing to worry about,” Sally tells him. “Just another example of the way the Mickey Mouse department down there is handling the case.”

“Do you think there’s any truth to it?” Stone asks.

“Not a word,” Forbes says.

“Pure misinformation,” Sally amends.

“Did they advise you of this?”

“That they were planning to do it? No.”

“Then how do you know it was them?”

“Who else could it’ve been?” Forbes asks.

“Maybe the woman herself.”

“Why?” Sally asks.

“Let the perps think she’s being a good little girl. Let them think she hasn’t called the cops.”

“Well, I guess that’s a remote possibility,” Sally says dubiously, “but my guess is a plant.”

“Shall I call them?” Stone asks.

“Why not?”

“See what’s on their alleged minds.” He pulls the phone toward him, begins looking through his directory.

“He’s probably at the Glendenning house,” Forbes suggests.

“Have you got that number?”

“Sure,” Sally says, and writes it down for him.

“What’s his name down there?”

“Sloate. Wilbur Sloate.”

“That’s a name, all right,” Stone says, and begins dialing. Sally is thinking “Tully Stone” ain’t such a winner, either.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice says.

“Mrs. Glendenning?”

“Yes.”

“Is Detective Sloate there?”

“Who’s this, please?”

“FBI. Special Agent in Charge Tully Stone.”

“Just a minute, please.”

Stone waits.

“Sloate,” a voice says.

“Detective Sloate, this is Special Agent in Charge Tully Stone, calling from FBI Regional?”

“Yes, sir,” Sloate says.

“It was our understanding till now that a kidnapping has taken place down there, which of course if true would naturally attract our attention…”

“Yes, sir, it already has. Agents Ballew and Forbes were down here visiting with us already.”

Visiting, Stone thinks.

“I am aware of that,” he says. “But, Detective, I have here on my desk a copy of this morning’s Cape October Tribune, and on the first page of the Sunday section there’s a story written by a man named Dustin Garcia…”

“Yes, sir, I’m familiar with the story.”

“Then you know it says the Glendenning children weren’t kidnapped at all, they merely went on a little outing to Disney World.”

“Yes, sir, that’s what the story says.”

“Tell me, Detective, did you folks plant that story?”

“Yes, sir, we did.”

“Would’ve been nice if you’d told us what you were up to.”

“Would’ve been nice if you’d told us you had a make on the woman who rented that blue Impala at the airport.”

Stone says nothing.

“Or that the name she gave Avis is a phony. Would’ve been nice to know all that without us having to go digging all the way to New York on it.”

“If we’ve been remiss—”

“You have indeed, sir.”

“—then I’m sorry, Detective. But the lines are somewhat blurred here…”

“They wouldn’t be if we could share information and work this together.”

“What do you think that story’s going to accomplish?” Stone asks, changing the subject.

“We’re hoping they’ll turn the kids loose and go on a spending spree.”

“Have they given any indication that they’re about to do that?”

“No, sir. But we’re with the Glendenning woman now, awaiting further word from them. We’re hoping—”

“Does she know you planted that story?”

“Yes, sir, she has been informed of that.”

“What was her reaction?”

“She did not seem terribly pleased, sir.”

“Neither are we,” Stone says flatly. “It’s my understanding that a ransom was already delivered. Is that the case?”

“Yes, sir. The drop was made on Friday morning at ten o’clock.”

“And no word from them yet?”

“Well, she called…”

“She?”

“The black woman. One of the perps. She called Mrs. Glendenning to tell her the kids were okay, and they were checking the money.”

“What does that mean, checking the money?”

“I don’t know, sir. Those were her exact words.”

“And that was when?”

“Friday afternoon, sir.”

“This is Sunday. What makes you think they aren’t in Hawaii by now?”

“They could be, that’s true.”

“Well, has the mother heard from them since then?”

“No, sir. What we’re hoping is the black woman and her blonde accomplice—”

“What blonde? Is this a new development?”

“No, sir, we’ve known all along it was a blonde woman who picked up the children after school on Wednesday. I believe your people know that, too, that’s one of the things we shared. What I’m saying is the ransom notes are marked, and we’re hoping—”

“How are they marked?”

“The serial numbers. The bills are supers, difficult to detect without special equipment. But they’re all A-series bills, and the serial number is identical on each and every bill. We’ve circulated that number to every—”

“Who the hell’s gonna check serial numbers?” Stone asks.

“Someone might.”

“Or someone might meanwhile kill those kids,” Stone says.

The line goes silent.

“Here’s what I’m gonna do, Sloate.”

No more “Detective,” Sally notices. The gloves are off.

“I’m sending Forbes and Ballew to the Glendenning house. They should be down on the Cape by…”

He looks up at the wall clock.

“…eleven, eleven-thirty. Let’s say twelve noon to be safe. They’ll be running the case from now on, and I expect your full cooperation in bringing it to a swift and—”

“With all due respect, sir, it’s your department that hasn’t been—”

“You don’t understand me, Sloate, do you? This just went federal on you. The case is ours. Ballew and Forbes are running it from this minute on.”

Sloate says nothing.

“Think you’ve got that?” Stone asks.

“Yes, I’ve got it,” Sloate says.

“Good,” Stone says, and hangs up.

He looks across his desk at Sally.

“You heard,” he says.

“We heard,” Sally says.

Ashley is complaining that it’s Sunday, and they want to have waffles.

“We always have waffles on Sunday,” she says.

Christine explains that there isn’t a waffle iron here on the boat, but she can make pancakes if they’d like. Would they like her to make pancakes?

“Why’d we have to come here, anyway?” Ashley asks. “And why can’t I talk to Mommy again?”

“Yes or no, honey?” Christine says. “Pancakes or cereal, which?”

“Daddy always makes waffles on Sunday,” Ashley says. “Where is he, anyway?”

“Up at the front desk. Getting the newspapers.”

“I’m gonna tell him you wouldn’t make waffles for us.”

“Fine, tell him,” Christine says. “Pancakes or cereal?”

“Pancakes,” Ashley says grudgingly.

Eddie comes back with the newspapers some ten minutes later.

“She wouldn’t make waffles for us,” Ashley tells him.

“That’s okay,” he says. “Pancakes are good, too.”

“Not as good as waffles.”

“But I see you ate them all, didn’t you?”

“When are we going home, Daddy?”

“Soon,” he says. “Why don’t you go watch television awhile? Lot of good shows on Sunday morning.”

“Jamie?” she says. “You want to watch TV?”

Jamie nods and gets up from the table.

“You got a kiss for Daddy?” Eddie asks.

Jamie offers his cheek, but doesn’t say a word. It breaks Eddie’s heart that his son doesn’t talk anymore. He wonders if that has anything to do with the drowning, some kind of reaction to the supposed drowning. He’d hate that to be the case. But he hates a lot of things about this entire undertaking. He only knows that a man has to do what he has to do. Intently, he watches his children as they go into the forward stateroom. He hears cartoons starting on the television set. He sighs heavily.

Taking Christine topside, he shows her the Sunday section.

“What do you make of it?” she asks.

“Well, we know it isn’t true,” he says. “It’s just some story she invented for this reporter.”

“But why?”

“To let us think she didn’t call the police.”

“We know she called the police!” Christine says. “They followed us. And she knows that, too. I told her we were followed. So why this story in the paper?”

“She’s trying to convince us she knows nothing about that maroon Buick. She’s telling us the cops don’t know anything at all about this, we’ve got the money now, so just let the kids go.”

“I think you’re right,” Christine says. “That’s what it means, honey. She’s promising safe passage, is what this story is. Let the kids go, and we’re home free.”

“If only it was as simple as that,” he says.

“What do you mean?” she says.

“Nothing,” he says.

“No, tell me, hon. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” he says again.

Wearing a pale blue sports jacket with darker blue slacks, a blue straw hat with a snap brim, and blue loafers with a fancy Gucci buckle, Dustin Garcia feels he looks quite dapper on this sticky hot morning. He comes walking out of the Trib building jauntily, a man secure in the knowledge that he is a big-time celebrity in this little town that is Cape October.

As he is about to enter his car in the parking lot behind the building, the pair of them suddenly appear. Big burly man, tall beautiful blonde woman.

“Mr. Garcia?” the man says.

“Yes?”

Fans, Garcia thinks. He is not surprised. His photo is at the top of his column and he has even been approached for an autograph once or twice, which can become annoying when a man is having dinner in a restaurant.

“Few questions we’d like to ask you,” the man says. “Want to come with us, please?”

“Who…?”

The man grabs Garcia’s right arm, just above the biceps. He squeezes hard. Not fans then. In which case…?

“The red car,” the man says. “Right over there.”

Garcia says nothing as they lead him to the car and open the front door on the passenger side. The man urges him inside with a polite little shove. The blonde takes a seat beside him, behind the wheel. Car doors slam. The blonde twists the ignition key, starting the car and the air conditioner.

“You know, of course—” Garcia begins.

“We just want to ask some questions,” the man says.

“It doesn’t look that way.”

“It is that way,” the blonde says.

“All right, I’ll accept that. What are your questions?”

“Why’d you and the cops concoct that story in your column this morning?”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

“About the Glendenning kidnapping. Why’d you make up a fake story?”

“What kidnapping? I don’t know anything about a kidnapping.”

“Your Disney World story,” the blonde says.

“You know those kids didn’t go to Disney World,” the man says.

“You know those kids are missing,” the blonde says. “So why the phony story?”

“Those are the facts as I collected them,” Garcia says.

“From who?”

“From Mrs. Glendenning herself.”

“That’s a lie and you know it.”

“Look,” Garcia says, “who the fuck are you people?”

“Language, language,” the man warns.

The car has cooled off rapidly. Outside in the parking lot, the black asphalt reflects shimmering waves of heat, but it is cool here in the car now, and yet Garcia is sweating. He wonders who these people are. Is it possible they’re part of a gang that took the Glendenning kids? Is there in fact a gang instead of just the black woman and her blonde accomplice, as Sloate and his people seem to think? If so, and if these two are part of a gang, if there is a gang and not just the two women, and if this ape of a man is part of the gang, then Garcia is in danger here. So tell them what they want to know, he thinks.

Instead, he asks, “How do you know about any kidnapping? If, in fact, there’s been a kidnapping?”

“You know there’s been a kidnapping,” the man says.

“The Glendenning kids,” the blonde says.

“You know a quarter of a million dollars in phony bills has already been paid.”

As a matter of fact, Garcia does not know this. Neither Sloate nor anyone on his team ever once mentioned that the ransom money was counterfeit. They told him the bills were marked, yes, but they did not say they were fake. So this, now, is a new development. He is once again sniffing Pulitzer prize in the air.

“Let’s say the children were—”

“Look,” the man says, leaning closer to him and talking directly into his ear, “let’s cut the shit, okay? The kids were snatched, and you know it. All we want to know is what the cops know about whoever done it.”

“Did you do it?” Garcia asks.

“Don’t be a fucking moron,” the man says.

Garcia’s mind is reeling. If these two are not, after all, part of any gang that kidnapped the Glendenning kids, then who or what are they? And what do they want?

“The cops only know it’s a blonde and a black girl,” he says, and looks the blonde directly in the eye, hoping she will blink. She does not.

“Locals?” she asks.

“Probably not. It was a rental car.”

“The Impala?”

“Yes.”

“Who rented it?”

“The black girl.”

“What’s her name?”

Garcia doesn’t know her name. Sloate didn’t tell him her name. All he said was that a black girl rented the Impala at the Fort Myers airport, and that this led them to believe the perps had flown in.

“What’s she look like, this black girl?”

“Hot. Jungle meat.”

“And the blonde?”

“Delicate features, hair to her shoulders.” He pauses. “Like you,” he says.

The blonde still doesn’t blink.

“What else?” she asks.

“That’s all they’ve got.”

“Why the phony story?” the man asks.

“I don’t know.”

“You wrote the fucking thing…”

“They told me what to write!”

“But not why, huh?”

“Only broad strokes.”

“Let’s hear the broad strokes.”

“Sloate wants… he’s the local cop on the case,” Garcia explains.

The man nods. He already knows this. But if they have nothing to do with the kidnapping, how…?

“He wants the black girl and her blonde accomplice to believe that Alice Glendenning followed their instructions and did not go to the police. The black girl warned her not to go to the police, you see. Told her if she wasn’t alone when she dropped off the ransom money, they’d kill the children. Told her if she wasn’t back where she was supposed to be in half an hour, they’d kill the children. So my story was all about protecting those two kids. If the kids went to Disney World, there was no kidnapping, you see? In which case, it’s safe to return them, drop them off on a street corner someplace, anyplace, just get rid of them. Sloate wants those kids back safe and sound. That’s what he hopes the story will accomplish.”

“It just might,” the blonde agrees.

“Do the cops have any idea where these people are holding the kids?” the man asks.

“If they knew that—”

“Do they even have a fucking clue?”

“Not that I know of.”

There’s one thing Garcia hasn’t given them. He hasn’t told them that once the two dames let the kids loose, Sloate hopes they’ll go on a spending spree. Run out to spend all those marked hundred-dollar bills. Buy themselves some fur coats and diamond rings. Leave a trail a mile wide. That was one of the purposes of the story. But he hasn’t told them this.

“Okay to go now?” he asks.

“No, now we’re gonna shoot you,” the blonde says.

For an instant, Garcia’s heart stops.

But the blonde is laughing.

Garcia is still sweating when he steps out of the red Thunderbird into blistering heat.

As the pair drive off, he hears more laughter from inside the convertible.

His name is Joseph Ontano, and that is the name he goes by at work. But Angelet and Holmes know him as Joey Onions because in addition to being an insurance adjuster, Joey is also a gambler, and they are the men with whom he places his frequent bets. At the moment, and by their virtually infallible count, Joey Onions is into them for some fifty thousand bucks, give or take. Which is why he is always so happy to provide them with sometimes valuable information about the inside workings of Garland Insurance. The numbers racket, as Angelet and Holmes both know, is premised on the insurance business, which is why it is also sometimes known as the “policy game” — but that’s another story, and that’s not why they’re looking for Joey today.

Angelet and Holmes know exactly where to find him because that is their business, even on a Sunday. At ten minutes past noon, on this particularly sweaty hot Sunday in May, when the dogs aren’t running, they look for Joey at a cockfight in the black section of Cape October. Florida’s HB 1593 makes it a felony to breed, sell, or possess dogs or birds for the purpose of fighting. But hey, man, this is Colleytown.

Colleytown was, in fact, once a real town named Colley before it got incorporated as part of greater Cab’Octubre after the Civil War. Minuscule in comparison to some of the sprawling black ghettoes elsewhere in the South — there are maybe, what, two, three thousand people here? — Colleytown can hold its own with the worst of them. Because Cape October is a resort destination with sandy beaches and palm trees and fishing piers and little hidden lagoons, one tends to forget that it’s a part of the South, or that the entire state of Florida, in fact, is really the deepest part of the South. In the South, there are ghettos. And in ghettos, there are drugs and prostitution and gambling, and the gambling often includes illegal sports events like cock-fights. Then again, that holds true for almost every city in the United States. So who gives a shit about what happens in the rest of the world? Holmes thinks. Then again, Holmes is black. And he considers himself lucky that he’s here in Florida living off the fat of the land instead of getting shot at in some foreign hood like all his dumb fuckin brothers in Bush’s stupid fuckin crusade.

The cockfighting season in Cape October roughly coincides with the tourist season, though not too many tourists are attracted to what its devotees call “a blood sport.” The end of May will mark the official end of this season’s fights, but even now, in the middle of the month, there are fewer fights than there were last month or the month before then. Actually, the fights began tapering off shortly after Easter, which is when the tourist season unofficially ends. There have been only two or three fights a week since then, at different times and in different venues, depending on how much advance knowledge the police have managed to gather. This Sunday’s fights were supposed to take place last night at a venue in Bradenton. Instead, the local fuzz were alerted, and so the venue was changed to Colleytown, and the time was changed to Sunday afternoon, when most good people are home reading the comics.

This Sunday afternoon, there are plenty of good people about to watch the first of the fights, which is between a rooster named Ebony because he is as black as midnight, and a rooster named King Kock because he has been crossbred with a very large pheasant and is positively enormous. Nurtured on steroids to increase their muscle tissue, dosed with angel dust to numb any pain, both birds are equipped with fighting spurs before they enter the carpeted ring. In India, where the “sport” enjoys wide popularity, the birds fight bare-heeled using only their God-given claws to shred and destroy. In Puerto Rico, a long plastic apparatus that resembles a darning needle is attached to each of the bird’s heels. Here in this part of Florida, the chosen artificial device is called a slasher. It is a piece of steel honed to razor-sharp precision. These spurs are fastened to both claws. One of these birds will die a horrible death in the next few minutes.

King Kock is the favorite to win, the odds on him being five-to-six. This means that if Joey bets two grand on the bird’s nose — or his beak, to be more accurate — he will take home twenty-four hundred dollars, which is not a fortune but which is better than a kick in the face. He has been on a losing streak this past month, which is why he’s into Angelet and Holmes for such a large sum, and so he takes the favored bet, King Kock to win at five-to-six.

Ebony turns out to be a vicious little bastard.

The crowd roars, “Kill him, kill him! ” — this is such a genteel sport — as he tears King Kock apart, limb by limb, feather by feather.

Joey Onions has just lost a lot of money on this stupid fuckin King Kock, and he’s not happy. He is even less happy to see — entering the barn enclosing the ring — the two men to whom he still owes fifty large. Sometimes these people come around to collect at the most inopportune times. Like now, when he has just dropped two thousand dollars on a bird that couldn’t peck shit out of his own grandmother. If they are here for even part of the fifty, they haven’t got a prayer. But if they decide to get ugly about this, he may very well go home with a broken kneecap.

This is not what Joey Onions enjoys about gambling. He does not enjoy losing, but even less does he enjoy crossing the path of an irate bookie. Or bookies, as is the case here and now, pushing their way through the crowd toward him, one of them Hispanic and the other black, and both of them bigger than the big bald guy at the door, who Joey now wishes hadn’t let him into the ring in the first place, where he’s just lost two grand he could now be handing over to these two thugs if that’s why they’re here, which he certainly hopes isn’t the case.

“Hey, guys,” he says jovially. “What gives?”

“No check in the mail, bro,” Holmes says.

Joey doesn’t like it when a nigger calls him “bro,” but he’s willing to take any kind of insult so long as this isn’t about the money he owes these guys. Or is that what Holmes means by “No check in the mail, bro?” Is that his cute nigger way of saying “You still owe us fifty large, bro, and here you are throwing away money on the birds”?

“Which check might that be, Dave?”

“We spoke to the lady yesterday,” Angelet says. “No check in the mail.”

“And which lady might that be, Rudy?”

“That lady might be Alice Glendenning, who you said a check went out to from Garland last week.”

“Oh,” Joey says.

So that’s what this is about.

What occurred, actually, was the last time these two came around asking about money matters and such, they happened to mention that they were still in the hole for two hundred K from a guy named Glendenning who drowned out on the Gulf seven, eight months ago, it must’ve been, and whereas they might be getting stiffed by him because he was dead and all, this didn’t mean they were going to let themselves get snookered by a small-time little shit like Joey who was still alive, was actually what they’d called him. Which was when Joey happened to mention that he recalled the name Glendenning from some correspondence back and forth between Garland and a lawyer, and he would look into the matter for them if they so desired.

So he went back to the office and checked the files, and sure enough there was indeed a claim filed by a woman named Alice Glendenning as beneficiary of a $250,000 double indemnity policy on the life of her husband, Edward Fulton Glendenning. According to the records, this claim had not yet been satisfied, though it looked as if it might soon be.

Now Joey is not a very big reader, but he is fond of the sequence in George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-four where the hero is being tortured with caged rats about to eat his face, and he yells, “Do it to Julia!” who is his girlfriend, telling them to put the rats on her face instead of his, thereby betraying her to save his own skin.

So Joey stretches the truth a tiny little bit and goes back to Angelet and Holmes with news that a check has already gone out to the Glendenning woman, and they should look to her for payment of her husband’s gambling debt, instead of coming around breaking his balls all the time for a lousy fifty G’s.

“Yeah, that check went out,” he tells them again now.

Which is another lie.

“You sure about that?” Holmes asks.

“Positive,” Joey says.

And then — figuring it can’t do any harm, can it? — he embroiders the lie just a tiny little bit more.

“In fact, it was already cashed,” he says. “I saw the cancelled check last week sometime.”

“Then the fuckin bitch is lying to us,” Holmes says.

“I’ll bet,” Joey says.

What the hell, he thinks.

Let her mother worry.

The FBI arrives at twenty minutes past noon.

Brusquely and bustily informing Sloate and Di Luca that the Feds have now taken over the case, Sally Ballew immediately begins detailing the way things will be handled from this moment on.

“First,” she says, ticking the point off on her index finger, “Mrs. Glendenning will never again talk directly to the kidnappers. Is that clear? Detectives? Mrs. Glendenning?”

“What if they ask for me?” Alice says.

“Hand the phone to me.”

“That can be dangerous,” Sloate says. “They told her not to call—”

“They already know we’re in it,” Sally says. “From what I understand, you blew surveillance.”

“A garbage truck intervened,” Sloate says.

Sloate offers the excuse like a kid explaining that the dog just ate his homework. Sally merely gives him a look.

“Second,” she says, using her middle finger to tick off another point, “no one outside of law enforcement enters this house again.” She turns to Carol as if just discovering her and asks, “Who are you, miss?”

“I’m Alice’s sister,” Carol says.

“She stays,” Alice says.

“Fine, just keep out of the way,” Sally says, dismissing her.

“How do you plan to get my children back?” Alice asks.

“Exactly the way we’ve done it before,” Sally says.

“And how exactly is that?”

“First,” Sally says, using her fingers again, “we let them think they’re running the show.”

They have been running the show, Alice thinks. And they’re still running it. They’ve got the money, and they’ve got my kids. What does that add up to, if not running the show?

“They are running the show,” she says.

Sloate says nothing. He is enjoying seeing someone else in the hot seat for a change. Marcia is enjoying this, too. She hasn’t liked Sally from minute one, and her opinion of her hasn’t changed an iota. The two local dicks can barely suppress smiles.

“Next,” Sally says, ticking it off on her ring finger, “we find out where they are…”

“And how do we do that?” Alice asks.

“We are still currently checking hotels, motels, bed and—”

“Suppose they rented a private house?” Alice asks. “Or a condo? There are hundreds of—”

“We’re checking real estate agents as well. We have the woman’s false name, we’re hoping she may have used that. Once we learn where they are, we contain them there with the children, and we move in.”

“Move in?” Alice says. “What about my kids?”

“Don’t worry, they’ll be completely safe.”

“How can you promise that?”

“Trust us,” Sally says.

The telephone rings.

Marcia is about to put on earphones. The phone rings again. Sally grabs the earphones from her and puts them on her own head. The phone rings a third time. “Take it,” she tells Alice. “If it’s them, put me on. I’ll do the talking.” Alice picks up on the fourth ring.

“Hello?”

“Mrs. Glendenning?”

“Yes?”

“This is Rudy Angelet. You’re lying to us. We’ll be there to pick up the money in half an hour.”

The line goes dead.

“Who the hell was that?” Sally asks.

12

At the Shell station on Lewiston Point Road and U.S. 41, they buy a road map and two containers of coffee, and then go out to Jennifer’s T-Bird to study the map.

The top is up and the air conditioner is blowing full blast; Rafe is afraid his wife might be out buying a container of milk or something, and he doesn’t want her to spot him in an open red convertible with a gorgeous blonde. For all Carol knows, he’s on the road to Atlanta, which reminds him that he ought to call the kids when he gets a chance, make sure they’re okay. He hasn’t yet mentioned this to Jennifer, because he knows how women feel about another woman’s kids. Rafe thinks he knows a lot about women.

Poring over the map, sipping at their coffees, he and Jennifer could easily be two tourists trying to figure out the best way to get to Sea World or someplace. Instead, they are trying to figure out the best way to get to the black woman and the blonde who have Alice’s children and incidentally $250,000 in so-called super-bills.

“Half hour’s drive from here,” Jennifer says.

“Is what the man said.”

Told her if she wasn’t back where she was supposed to be in half an hour, they’d kill the children.

Was what Garcia said, exactly.

Half an hour from the gas station here on 41 and Lewiston.

“Means what?” Rafe says. “Thirty or forty miles in any direction?”

“Depending on traffic, right.”

“Is there a scale on this thing?”

They turn the map this way and that until they find a scale of miles in the lower left-hand corner. They don’t have a ruler in the car, but it looks like an inch equals thirty miles, more or less. An inch is about the length of the top joint of Rafe’s thumb. So if the two chicks are holding the kids someplace a half hour away from the Shell station here, then using the station as the center of a circle, and using Rafe’s thumb joint as the radius…

Thirty miles to the east of Cape October would put them in the middle of the General George C. Ryan Wildlife Refuge. Is it possible they’re keeping the kids in a tent out there?

“I don’t want to go anyplace where there are any snakes,” Jennifer says. “Fuck the two-fifty.”

“Me, neither,” Rafe says.

But he wouldn’t mind facing a few snakes if it meant getting his hands on all that cash. Hell, people on Survivor did that for a lot less money.

Just southeast of the refuge, on route 884, is the town of Compton Acres, which Rafe has never heard of. About a half hour north of the Cape, on U.S. 41, there’s Port Lawrence. About a half hour south is Calusa Springs. To the west of the Cape are the offshore keys and the great big Gulf of Mexico.

“Let’s call some real estate agents,” Jennifer suggests.

On her way home from twelve o’clock Mass, Rosie Garrity picks up the Cape October Tribune. She does not begin reading it until she is in her own kitchen sipping a cup of hot tea. She knows at once that Dustin Garcia’s story is a complete lie.

First, she was right there in the Glendenning house when that black woman called and told Mrs. Glendenning she had the kids.

Next, she has met Mrs. Glendenning’s sister — Carol Matthews is her name — and she knows damn well that woman ain’t no blonde. Her hair is as brown as Mrs. Glendenning’s, the two of them could pass for twins, in fact, there ain’t no way the blonde in the blue Impala could be Carol Matthews, no way at all.

So what is this all about?

Is this some kind of cop trick?

Are they working in cahoots with the newspaper?

In which case, the police have taken some action, after all. In which case, her efforts have not been in vain. There is still hope for those two innocent little kiddies.

But what are they trying to accomplish with their lies about Mrs. Glendenning’s sister and a trip to Disney World? Rosie knows Mrs. Glendenning and her sister didn’t take their kids to no Disney World. Little Jamie and Ashley, poor dears, were picked up by a blonde in a blue Impala, all right, but that wasn’t no Carol Matthews, and there wasn’t no trip to Orlando in the offing. That was somebody working in cahoots with a black woman who called to say she had the kids and would kill them if the police were informed.

She feels like calling Mrs. Glendenning right this minute, tell her that instead of screaming at her on the phone the way she did Friday night, she should get down on her hands and knees and thank God for people like herself, Rosie Garrity, who did in fact inform the police, and who is damn glad she did!

Something’s in the wind now, she feels certain of that, all those lies in the paper.

“So what’s new today?” her husband asks.

“Bunch of lies, is what,” Rosie says.

“Who’s lying now?” he asks.

He is still in his pajamas. She hates it when he comes to the breakfast table without even throwing on a robe. Almost one-thirty, he’s still in his pajamas.

“Mrs. Glendenning,” Rosie says. “What time did you get in last night, George?”

“Little before midnight,” George says, and pours and drinks a glass of orange juice. “What’s she lying about?” he asks, and pops a pair of frozen waffles into the toaster.

“Her kids getting kidnapped.”

“Oh?”

“I told you, remember? She’s now saying they weren’t kidnapped at all.”

“Why would she do that?”

“‘Liar, liar, pants on fire,’ is why.”

“Uh-huh,” George says, totally uninterested, and pours himself a cup of coffee from the pot on the stove. He butters the waffles, pours maple syrup on them, and then sits down at the table to eat. He is silent for several moments. Then, suddenly, he snaps his fingers.

“That’s who he looked like!” he says.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, George.”

“Her husband who drowned.”

“What about him?”

“I thought I saw him last night.”

“Well, that’d be some kinda miracle,” Rosie says, “seein’ as how he’s been dead these past eight months.”

“Well, of course,” George says. “I know it wasn’t him. I’m just saying it looked like him. Even though the blond hair was long, like a hippie. Besides, he was with some black girl, so of course it wasn’t him. Especially since he’s dead.”

Long blond hair, Rosie thinks.

Black girl, she thinks.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God!” she says aloud.

If the FBI or the local cops knew that Edward Fulton Glendenning was still alive, their check of real estate agents on the Cape and in neighboring vicinities would most likely include a search for an Edward Fulton as well as any recent renter with the initials EG. As taught in Identity Change 101, they know that a person deliberately getting lost will often use his own initials in choosing a new name, or simply use his existing middle name as his new surname. Rarely will he change his given name. He is too used to being called Frank or Charlie or Jimmy.

But the law enforcement people making phone calls in Alice’s living room do not know that Edward Glendenning is still alive, or that he is now an entirely new individual who calls himself Edward Graham. So their calls to various real estate agents and condo rental offices ask only for a possible renter named Clara Washington, the only name they have, who they know is a black woman in the company of a blonde.

Listening to them making their fruitless phone calls, Alice realizes they are merely clutching at straws. She stopped believing in God on the morning they informed her that her husband had drowned in the Gulf of Mexico. If God truly existed, He would not have allowed such a thing to happen. But now she begins praying, desperately and silently, that Clara Washington and her blond girlfriend will call again soon to tell her they’ve now “checked the money,” whatever that means, and are letting the children go. Please, dear God, she prays, let the phone ring.

It does not ring.

Instead, the doorbell does.

The first thing Holmes sees when the door to the Glendenning house opens is a chesty black woman holding what looks like a nine-millimeter Glock in her fist.

He backs off at once, almost knocking Angelet off the front steps.

“Hey, sistuh,” he says, holding up both hands, palms toward her, “ain’ no need for the cannon.”

“You’re no brother of mine,” Sally says.

Angelet is already turning to run.

“Hold it right there!” she snaps.

He freezes in his tracks.

“Both of you step inside here,” she says.

Holmes goes in first, sidling past her, looking around as he enters. Angelet comes in behind him. Sally closes the door. Neither of the men knows what the hell is going on here. Is this a holdup they’ve stepped into? Everybody seems to be strapped, except for the Glendenning woman and another woman who looks just like her. There are four women and two men altogether. The big busty sister who answered the door with a gun in her hand — and it is a Glock, Holmes now confirms — another woman wearing a shoulder holster and sitting behind what looks like some kind of electronic equipment, plus the Glendenning woman and her look-alike. The two men are also wearing shoulder holsters and packing big weapons. It suddenly occurs to Holmes that perhaps Alice Glendenning has informed the law on him and his good buddy Rudy here. Which, if true, was not a very nice thing to do.

“Look,” he says, “I don’t know what’s going on here, but nobody’s done nothin to—”

“What’s going on here,” Sally says, “is you’re trying to extort money from Mrs. Glendenning here…”

“Extort? Hey, no…”

“Hey, no, no,” Angelet says, holding up his hands in denial. “All we’re doing—”

“All you’re doing is threatening to harm her if she doesn’t make good on her—”

“No, no, hey—”

“—deceased husband’s debt!”

“Threaten her? Who threatened her? Lady, did we threaten you?” Holmes asks Alice, and takes a step toward her, which must appear menacing to the lady with the Glock because she raises it again and points it at his head.

“Hey,” he says, “watch it with that gun, okay? Who the hell are you, anyway? What’s it to you, this woman’s—?”

“Special Agent—”

“—husband owes us—”

“Sally Ballew, Federal Bureau of—”

That’s enough for Holmes. He knows the rest of the sentence, doesn’t have to hear the rest of it. The titty sister here is an FBI agent. Eddie Glendenning’s widow done called the fuckin FBI on them!

“Okay, we’re out of here,” he says. “Lady, forget what your husband owes—”

“Just one damn second!” Sally shouts.

Alice blinks.

The pistol is steady in Sally Ballew’s hand. It is undeniably pointed straight at David Holmes’s head. It is aimed directly between his eyes, as a matter of fact.

“Put it in writing,” Sally says.

“Whut?”

“Put it in writing. Felix, get the man a pen and some paper.”

“Yes, Sally,” Forbes says, and reaches into his inside jacket pocket to remove from it a genuine bona-fide fountain pen, which Holmes didn’t know people actually wrote with anymore. Forbes tears a page from a little leather-bound notebook, and hands both pen and paper to Holmes, who looks at Sally and shrugs expectantly.

“Write what I tell you,” Sally says.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Satisfaction of IOU,” she says. “Write it.”

“How do you spell ‘satisfaction’?” Holmes asks.

Angelet spells it for him. He is very eager to get out of here. He will sign a satisfaction agreement or whatever the hell this document is supposed to be — which he doubts is legal, by the way, and talk about extortion — he will even sign his own mother’s death warrant if he can get out of here before the black FBI agent puts any holes in him. Holmes is already writing. He’s not too enthusiastic about hanging around here, either.

“Satisfaction of IOU,” he repeats aloud, writing.

“Underline it,” Sally says.

He underlines the words.

“Now write the name Edward Glendenning…”

“Edward Glendenning.”

“And under that… how much was it, Mrs. Glendenning?”

“Two hundred thousand dollars.”

“Two hundred thousand dollars,” Sally says.

“Two hundred thousand dollars,” Holmes repeats, writing.

“Two hundred thousand dollars,” Angelet agrees, and gives a little encouraging nod to Holmes, urging him to write faster so they can get the hell out of here.

“Now write ‘Paid In Full…’”

“Paid In Full,” Holmes repeats, writing.

“And both of you sign it.”

Holmes signs it. Angelet takes the pen from him at once. He signs his name with a flourish, and then puts the cap back on the pen and hands it to Forbes.

“Now fold it and give it to Mrs. Glendenning,” Sally says.

Holmes folds the page. He hands it to Alice.

“Thank you,” she says.

“My pleasure, ma’am,” Holmes says.

“The debt is satisfied, is that correct?” Sally asks.

“Yes, ma’am, the debt is satisfied,” Holmes says.

“It’s satisfied,” Angelet agrees, nodding.

“Which means you have no further reason to bother this woman, is that also correct?”

“That is correct, yes, ma’am,” Angelet says.

Until now, he always thought it might be pleasant to go to bed with a black woman. He has now changed his mind about that.

“And just for your information,” Sally says, “in case you ever decide to come near Mrs. Glendenning again, in the state of Florida extortion is a second-degree felony punishable by up to fifteen years in prison and a ten-thousand-dollar fine. Not to mention the civil suit that might ensue if you breach the document you just signed. My advice?”

Both men look at her like kids who’ve been rowdy in class and are now in the principal’s office.

“Crawl back in your holes and don’t come out again,” Sally says.

“Good advice, ma’am,” Angelet agrees. “Can we go now?”

“Go,” Sally says, and points the Glock toward the front door.

They are gone in a flash. Alice goes to the drapes, parts the Venetian blinds. She sees the white Caddy burning rubber out of her driveway, hears it scratching off. Behind her, Sloate tells Sally, “That paper they signed is total bullshit.”

“I know,” Sally says.

Alice is wishing that she herself could behave the way Sally Ballew just did. She is thinking that from the minute she met Edward Fulton Glendenning, she was dependent on him for her every move. And the minute Ashley was born, and later Jamie, she became even more and more reliant on her husband, until finally she lost sight of herself entirely, became merely an extension of Eddie, a mere “Mrs. Glendenning” who was essentially unable to function without him.

She remembers an argument she and Eddie had several weeks before the accident. The fight was about money. That was the only thing they ever fought about, money. There never seemed to be enough money. Even though he was always at the office working late, studying his damn computer, trying to figure out his next market move, they never had enough. The argument that night…

“I’m investing in stocks for us,” he tells her.

“Well, when do these stocks begin paying off, Eddie? I look at our savings account, it just keeps going down every month.”

“Well, shit,” he says, “I wish I had a crystal ball, too, Alice, but I don’t. I’m just a poor working stiff trying to earn enough money to support—”

“Oh, please, Eddie, where are the violins?”

“You’re worried so much about money, why don’t you go get a job at Mickey D’s?”

“I have a job, Eddie! I’m raising two kids.”

“I mean a real job.”

“That is a real job, Eddie.”

“Yes, I know, you’ve told me at least—”

“And I’d have what you call a real job if—”

“Yes, here we go again.”

“Yes, if I’d gone in with Denise when she—”

“Right, you’d be a big movie producer now.”

“I’d be somebody, Eddie. Instead of a person whose husband thinks raising two kids isn’t a real—”

“Oh, fuck the kids!” he shouts.

“Don’t you dare…”

“You keep using the kids as an excuse for—”

She rushes him with her fists clenched and raised, her eyes blazing, ready to strike him for what he just said.

“No, Mommy!”

Jamie’s voice.

She turns. He is standing in the doorway to his bedroom, tears in his eyes.

“Don’t hurt Daddy,” he says.

She takes him in her arms.

She hugs him close.

“I’m sorry, honey,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”

Three weeks later, Eddie drowned at sea.

And she wonders now if Jamie stopped talking only because he overheard their bitter argument and somehow blamed Alice for what happened out there in the Gulf of Mexico.

Ashley is talking in whispers because she doesn’t want her father or Christine to hear what she’s saying. She knows they are going to get under way as soon as it’s dark. She has heard them discussing this. She is afraid of what might happen after they get under way.

“What Daddy said is that he kidnapped us, do you know what that means, ‘kidnapped’?”

Jamie nods and pulls a face.

“And he asked for a ransom, do you know what ‘ransom’ is?”

Jamie rolls his eyes heavenward.

“So what he told Christine is that he can’t just let us go, he’s got to figure out what to do with us.”

Jamie looks puzzled.

“I think he’s afraid we’ll tell on him,” Ashley says.

Jamie is listening intently now.

“I think he’s going to drown us, Jamie.”

They get their first real clue on a call they make to Calusa Springs. The woman at Barker Real Estate there says, “What’s all this sudden interest?”

“What do you mean, sudden interest?” Sally asks.

“Second call we’ve had today about a black woman and a blonde,” the woman says.

“Oh?” Sally says. “What do you mean?”

Alert now. Alice senses this in her posture, her entire attitude. Doesn’t know exactly what Sally’s hearing on that telephone, but realizes it may be important.

”Policeman called here an hour or so ago,” the woman tells Sally. “Said he was trying to locate two women traveling together, a blonde and a black woman, who may have rented recently here in Calusa Springs. I told him I hadn’t rented any property to any people answering that description.”

“Nor anybody named Clara Washington, is that right?” Sally asks at once.

“Now how do you know that name?” the woman asks.

“How do you know that name?” Sally asks.

“She called me, had to be two months ago, said she’d seen on the Internet I had some cottages for rent, wondered how much they were renting for and whether I had one available for April and May.”

“Called from where?”

“New Orleans.”

“This was when did you say?”

“Had to be the middle of March.”

“Said her name was Clara Washington?”

“Yes, she did.”

“Did she give you an address where you could reach her?”

“No, but she gave me a phone number. Is she wanted for something?”

“May I have that number, ma’am?”

“Well, I don’t have it anymore, I’m sorry. I told her I’d need a hundred-dollar deposit if she wanted me to hold the rental and I also told her I could only hold the reservation for ten days. When I didn’t hear from her again, I tossed the number.”

“But it was a number in New Orleans, is that correct?”

“It was a 5-0-4 area code. That’s New Orleans, isn’t it?”

“That sure is New Orleans, ma’am. Tell me about this policeman who called you. Did he give you a name?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Would you happen to remember it?”

“Well, it was only an hour or so ago, I guess I can remember it.”

“Can you tell me what it was?”

“Ralph Masters,” the woman says.

Sally merely nods.

Alice knows she’s onto something. Maybe there’s a God, after all.

“Thank you very much,” Sally says, and hangs up, and turns to where Carol is sitting alongside her sister on the living room sofa.

“Mrs. Matthews?” she says.

“Yes?” Carol says.

“Your husband’s name is Rafe, isn’t it? Rafe Matthews?”

“Yes?”

“He ever use the name Ralph Masters?”

“No. Ralph Masters? No. Why would he?”

“Just curious,” Sally says. “His own initials being RM and all. Maybe he’s sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong.” She turns immediately to Alice. “We’re going to have to leave you for a while,” she says.

“What is it?” Alice asks.

“Clara Washington called Florida from New Orleans. If the phone company can give us the information we need—”

“What’s my husband got to do with this woman?” Carol asks.

“He called Calusa Springs to ask about her maybe renting there.”

“That’s not likely,” Carol says, shaking her head. “Rafe’s on the road to Atlanta. In fact, he’s probably home by now.”

“Maybe so,” Sally says, and turns to Sloate. She is all efficiency now, not a wasted motion, not a wasted word. “You and Marcia might want to go back to your office, too, Wilbur.”

“What for?” Sloate asks.

“Help us find that number Clara Washington called from in the middle of March. From someplace in New Orleans to Barker Realty in Calusa Springs. Knowing how cooperative…”

She lands heavily on the word, almost sneering, almost spitting it out.

“…the phone company can be…”

Stressing that word, too.

“…maybe we should all try our luck.”

“What’s happening?” Alice asks. “Can you please tell me?”

“Will you be okay here alone?” Sally asks.

“She won’t be alone,” Carol says pointedly.

“Here’s where you can reach me if you need me,” Sally says, and hands Alice a card with the FBI seal on it. Not two minutes later, she is out the door.

“I need a road map,” Carol says, and goes out to the Explorer.

“Where’s Calusa Springs?” she asks Alice.

The map is open on the kitchen table.

“About a half hour south of here,” Alice says. “On U.S. 41.”

“Why would Rafe be phoning a town south of here, if he was heading north to Atlanta?”

“I don’t know,” Alice says.

She is wondering what Sally Ballew plans to do with a New Orleans phone number, if ever the phone company gives her one. She is wondering how a New Orleans phone number will help them locate Clara Washington — if that’s her name — and the blonde woman who together have stolen her children.

“Why would he call a real estate agent at all?” Carol wonders out loud. “And what did she mean about him using the name Ralph Masters?”

“I don’t know,” Alice says, and suddenly remembers what Clara Washington said to her on the phone Thursday night.

If you don’t come to that gas station alone, your children will die. If you don’t have the money with you, your children will die. If anyone tries to detain me, your children will die. If I’m not back where I’m supposed to be in half an hour, your children will die.

“I don’t like that woman, do you?” Carol says.

“I think she knows her job,” Alice says.

If anyone tries to detain me, your children will die.

“She’s very bossy, I think,” Carol says.

If I’m not back where I’m supposed to be in half an hour, your children will die.

Half an hour, Alice thinks.

They’re half an hour from the Shell station on Lewiston and 41!

“Let me see that map,” she says, and grabs it from her sister, and locates the scale of miles, and then roughly measures thirty miles north, east, south, and west from the gas station.

Port Lawrence to the north.

The wildlife refuge to the east.

Compton Acres to the southeast on route 884.

Calusa Springs due south.

“What are you doing?” Carol asks. “What is it?”

And to the west, the keys and the Gulf of—

“They’re on a boat!” Alice says.

She finds the card Sally Ballew left, goes to the phone at once, and dials the number.

“FBI,” a male voice says.

“Sally Ballew, please.”

“Moment, please.”

She waits. She can hear ringing on the other end.

“Special Agent Warren Davis,” another man says.

“Sally Ballew, please.”

“Sorry, she’s not here just now,” he says. “Anything I can help you with?”

“Yes, can you please give her a message when she comes in? Tell her Alice Glendenning called…”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“…with something I don’t think she’s considered yet.”

“Yes, ma’am, and what’s that?”

“I think my children may be on a boat. We’ve been checking land accommodations, but they may be on a boat someplace. Miss Ballew may want to alert the Coast Guard, or—”

“Yes, ma’am, I’ll tell her.”

“Thank you,” Alice says.

There is a click on the line. She has the feeling she’s just been brushed off. She replaces the receiver on its cradle, and is staring at the phone in anger and disbelief when suddenly it rings.

She picks up the receiver at once.

“Hello?” she says.

“Mrs. Glendenning?”

“Yes?”

“This is Rosie Garrity. Please don’t hang up, ma’am.”

“What is it, Rosie?”

“My husband, you know? George?”

“Yes.”

“He’s a waiter out on Siesta Key? In Sarasota? A restaurant called The Unicorn?”

“Yes, Rosie, what about him?”

“He was working last night when this man came in for dinner. A white man with a black woman.”

“Yes?”

“George thought he recognized him, so he went over to the table and introduced himself—”

“Rosie, what is it you’re—?”

“Do you remember that Saturday my car broke down and George had to drive me to work? And he met Mr. Glendenning going out to the mailbox for the newspaper?”

Alice is suddenly listening very hard.

“Well, George thought this man last night was your husband. Was Mr. Glendenning.”

“Why… why would he think that, Rosie?”

“Well, this man was the same height and build, and he had blue eyes, and blond hair.”

“Even so, Rosie…”

“Though now he’s wearing it much longer. To his shoulders, actually.”

“What are you saying, Rosie?”

The line goes silent.

“Rosie? You said he’s wearing it much longer. What are you trying to tell me? Who’s wearing it much longer?”

“God forgive me, your husband!” Rosie says. “Mr. Glendenning.”

“Rosie, that’s imposs—”

“I know, I know. Your husband drowned last year, how can I believe it was him sitting there in that restaurant?”

Mom, I can’t believe it!

The words her daughter shrieked into the phone.

“But this man paid the bill with a credit card, and the last name on the card was Graham, but his first name was Edward…”

Oh Jesus, Alice thinks.

“…so I can’t help believing…”

“Oh Jesus!” she says aloud.

“Mrs. Glendenning?” Rosie says. “Please don’t fire me. I just had to tell you what I was thinking.”

“You’re not fired, Rosie. Thank you. I have to go now.”

“Mrs. Glendenning? Do you think it really was—?”

Alice puts the receiver down on the cradle.

Her heart is pounding.

“What?” her sister asks.

“Eddie’s alive,” she says.

“What!”

“He’s alive. He was out last night with that black woman, he’s alive!”

“That can’t be.”

“It is.”

She goes into the bedroom and takes the.32-caliber pistol from her top dresser drawer.

“Come on,” she tells her sister.

13

“He’s the one who has the kids,” Alice says. “Him and this black woman… whoever she is.”

They are driving out to Lewiston Point. Alice is thinking that she doesn’t know who the woman is, and she doesn’t know who Edward Graham is, either. Edward Fulton Glendenning no longer exists. These people are both strangers to her.

“He knows boats,” she says. “He’d be comfortable on a boat. And they’d be less obvious on a boat than in a hotel or a motel. Besides, we took the kids there four years ago. They loved it. They’d feel safe and protected there.”

“Where, Alice? Where are we going?”

“Marina Blue. That’s what Ashley was trying to tell me on the phone. Not Maria, not Marie, but Marina Blue. Out on Crescent Island. Half an hour from the Shell station.”

The women are silent for several moments.

The Mercedes truck bounces along Lewiston Point Road, which in the past few minutes has gone from potholed asphalt to rutted dirt. Either side of the road is lined with thick mangroves. Beyond, they can hear the gentle lap of water. The sun is beginning to set. Nightfall comes quickly here on the Cape, especially near the water, where the sky turns from red to violet, to blue, and then black with a suddenness that can stop the heart.

“That’s why the kids got in that car,” Carol says, nodding. “It wasn’t a stranger, it was their father.”

Was, Alice thinks.

Was their father.

Who knows what he has become now?

Eddie has paid the marina bill, refueled the boat, and brought it back to their dockside mooring. Christine knows that his plan is to get under way as soon as it’s dark. She knows nothing beyond that. When she comes topside, he is sitting at the helm, alone and silent, smoking a cigarette. He raises the flip-up bolster, making room for her on the upholstered companion seat. She sits beside him and takes his left hand. It is a warm evening, but his hand is cold to the touch.

“You okay?” she asks.

“Yes, fine. What are the kids doing?”

“Watching television.”

He nods.

“When do we call Alice again?” she asks.

“Well, there’s no hurry,” he says.

“Because we should tell her where we’re leaving the kids, you know.”

“Yeah,” he says, and nods, and takes a long drag on the cigarette.

They are silent for several moments.

Out on the water, a fish jumps.

Then all is still again.

“Are we going to just leave them here on the dock?”

“No, that wasn’t my plan,” he says.

“Because I thought we were getting under way…”

“That’s right.”

“…soon as it got dark.”

“Right.”

“Which is pretty soon, Eddie.”

“I know it is.”

“So where are we going to leave the kids?”

“You see…” he says, and then stops, and shakes his head.

She looks at him.

“They saw me,” he says.

He draws on the cigarette.

“They know I’m alive,” he says.

She is still looking at him.

“We can’t turn them loose,” he says.

“We can’t take them with us, either, Eddie. The police’ll be looking for them everywhere we—”

“I know that.”

“We have to let them go, Eddie.”

“But we can’t,” he says.

“Then what…?”

He draws on the cigarette again.

“We’ll move out in about five minutes,” he says, and looks at the luminous dial of his watch. “We’ll head straight out to the Gulf.”

“I don’t understand. What about…?”

He does not answer.

He turns away from her penetrating gaze and tosses the cigarette overboard. Its glow arcs against the sudden blackness of the night and hits the water with a brief dying hiss.

They get to the ferry landing just as the boat is about to leave. Alice pulls the truck into a parking space alongside a red Taurus. Carol jumps out and first begins waving and shouting at the lone dockhand who is already tossing lines aboard, and next at the pilothouse to let the captain know they’re here. Alice slams the door shut on the driver’s side. They both run for the dock.

“Take it easy, you’ve got time,” the dockhand says.

The ferry carries passengers only, no cars. There are perhaps half a dozen people aboard when the captain gives a final warning toot on his horn and begins backing away from the dock. He makes a wide circle, coming around, and then points the boat’s prow toward Crescent Island, some thousand yards across the inlet.

Ten minutes later, the boat is docking on the island side.

The night is balmy and still.

Eddie has already started the engines.

The Sundancer is idling at the dock.

The two women come striding out of the darkness beyond, moving rapidly toward where he is crouched over the forward line. He does not recognize them until the dockside stanchion lights pick them up, and then he sees that it is Alice and her sister, Carol. He shakes his head and smiles because Alice looks so utterly ridiculous and helpless, her left foot in a cast, limping across the dock like a cripple. And then he sees the pistol in her hand, and the smile drops from his face. He loosens the line from its cleat and tosses it aboard. In the next instant, he leaps aboard himself, and reaches into a locker alongside the wheel.

“Where are the kids?” Alice shouts.

He is already behind the wheel.

Alice does not raise the pistol in her own hand until she sees that what he’s taken from the locker is a gun.

“Put it down!” he yells.

The thirty-two is shaking violently in her fist.

“Give me the children and leave,” Alice says. “You’re Edward Graham now, you can forget all this.”

“But will you?” he says, and smiles thinly. “Will your sister? Will the kids?”

The gun in his fist is a nine-millimeter Glock. It looks very large and very menacing, and it is pointed at her head.

“You know the penalty for kidnapping in the state of Florida?” he asks.

His tone is almost conversational. He could be giving a little talk on the wisdom of investing in growth stocks.

“You can leave Florida,” she says. “Take your girlfriend and—”

“My wife,” he corrects.

“Your…?”

“Kidnapping is a life felony, Alice. If they ever catch up with us…”

“No one will even try, Eddie. Just let the kids go!”

“Well, no,” he says, “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

And throws the engines into reverse.

She hears a click in the dark.

Is there a safety on the gun?

Has he just thrown off a safety?

She hears two simultaneous voices.

“Don’t, Eddie!”

“No, Daddy!”

The first voice is the voice Alice has heard so many times before on the telephone, the voice of the woman she came face-to-face with outside the Shell station’s ladies’ room, the woman she now sees again, rushing up from below, holding out her hand beseechingly to Eddie. His wife, Alice thinks. His wife.

The second voice is a voice Alice has not heard since the morning they learned that Eddie drowned out on the Gulf.

The second voice belongs to her dear son, Jamie.

“Don’t hurt Mommy!”

His son’s voice has no effect on him. He still has the Glock in his right hand, pointed at Alice’s head. His left hand is still steady on the stainless steel wheel as he starts to maneuver the Sundancer away from the dock.

This is the man who once matched her foot to a midnight blue slipper.

This is the man she once loved with all her heart.

She squeezes her eyes shut.

Opens them again at once, and fires.

Fires another time.

And yet another.

Blood spurts on his yellow windbreaker. She sees him crumpling over the wheel. The boat swerves back and bangs violently against the dock. She throws down the gun, and leaps onto the boat, and rushes to her son where he stands trembling just outside the slatted wooden doors leading below. The black woman whose name she still does not know says nothing. Her eyes are darting, calculating.

“Mom?”

Ashley comes from below, her eyes wide.

She glances once at her father where he lies slumped and still over the stainless steel wheel smeared now with his blood. Then she, too, rushes into Alice’s arms.

The black woman hesitates a moment longer, and then suddenly leaps ashore.

“Gee, no,” Carol says, and points the pistol at her head.

They have called all the real estate agents and condo rental offices they could find in the Yellow Pages, and have even visited one personally, but have not come up with any information on a blonde and a black woman having rented any kind of dwelling at any time during the past two months. Or at any time at all, for that matter.

So there is nothing to do now but make love again.

Rafe reflects afterward, as they both lie spent and damp on rumpled sheets in Jennifer’s bedroom, that there’s a certain time of day in Florida when a hush seems to come over the entire land. The traffic seems to come to a halt, the streets are all at once deserted, even the insects and the birds seem to fall suddenly still. Overhead, the ceiling fan rotates lazily, scattering dust motes climbing shafts of silvery moonlight. Lying on his back beside her, Rafe thinks that maybe it’s this way everywhere in the world after you’ve just made love to a beautiful passionate woman, maybe there’s just this, well, this sort of serenity that comes over you. A stillness that causes you to believe your heart has stopped, causes you to believe that maybe you’re even dead. And causes you to think.

He knows he’s going to be leaving here soon.

He knows he’s going to get out of this bed, and shower in this lady’s bedroom, put on his Jockey shorts and his jeans and his denim shirt, and his socks and loafers, and then either take a taxi or ask her to drive him to the truck stop where he’s parked the rig, knows he is going to walk out of this bedroom, and out of this house, and never see this woman again. Because no matter what Eminem has to say about opportunity knocking just once or whatever the words were, seize the moment, seize the music, he knows that maybe such dreams are okay for a talented kid on 8-Mile Road, but they’re just not there for people like Rafe who don’t know how to rhyme.

Opportunity may have come knocking when he learned about all those phony bills out there someplace, and maybe it kept knocking and knocking when he found this beautiful passionate woman willing to chase the dream with him, but man, there is no way on earth he is going to find those two chicks sitting on that fake bread, no way in the world at all. He has tried to seize the moment and the music, but his hands have closed on nothing but thin air.

So he knows he will now go back.

Knows he will go back to Carol and the kids, knows in his deepest heart that eventually he will go back to jail, too, that’s what recidivism is all about. It’s all about making the same mistakes over and over again. Going back home again to a woman he no longer loves and kids he never wanted, going back on the shit again, too, and getting caught with it, and going back to jail as a three-time loser who once upon a time heard opportunity knocking, and opened the door to let it in, and found nobody standing there, nobody at all.

It’s kind of sad, really.

It’s kind of so fucking sad.

She drives him to where he parked the rig.

They stand outside the cab in the harsh bright overhead lights, and they hold hands, both hands, his outstretched to hers, hers clasped in his, and he tells her he’s sorry this didn’t work out the way he was hoping it would, tells her he can still think of a hundred and six ways the two of them together could have spent all that money. He tells her he’s never met a woman like her in his entire life, tells her that these few days he’s spent with her have been the happiest days in his life, he wants her to believe that. He tells her that there are a couple of things he still has to straighten out back home in Atlanta, but that as soon as he’s taken care of these few little odds and ends, he’ll be coming back down here to Florida, where he hopes she’ll be waiting for him.

“Wait for me, Jenny,” he tells her, though she’s asked him not to call her Jenny, but he’s already forgotten this.

Still holding both her hands in his, he draws her close to him, and kisses her on the mouth. She kisses him back. They pull apart from each other at last, still holding hands, and he nods silently and solemnly, and finally drops her hands and climbs into the cab and rolls down the window.

“I’ll be back soon,” he promises, and starts the engine.

She watches as he backs the truck out of its space. She watches as he drives it over to the exit. Before he pulls out onto U.S. 41 North, he waves back at her from the open window. Then he is gone.

She walks over to where she parked the red convertible. She puts the key into the ignition, and sits there for a long while without starting the car. Then, aloud, she says, “You’re all so full of shit,” and starts the car, and turns on the radio very loud, and drives out of the lot.