Dagger Key and Other Stories

DEAD MONEY

I knew slim-with-sideburns was dead money before Geneva introduced him to the game. Dead money doesn’t need an introduction; dead money declares himself by grinning too wide and playing it too cool, pretending to be relaxed while his shoulders are racked with tension, and proceeds to lose all his chips in hurry. Slim-with-sideburns-and-sharp-features-and-a-gimpy-walk showed us the entire menu, plus he was wearing a pair of wraparound shades. Now there are a number of professional poker players who wear sunglasses so as not to give away their tells, but you would mistake none of them for dead money and they would never venture into a major casino looking like some kind of country-and-western spaceman.

“Gentlemen,” Geneva said, shaking back her big blonde hair. “This here’s Josey Pellerin over from Lafayette.”

A couple of the guys said, Hey, and a couple of others introduced themselves, but Mike Morrissey, Mad Mike, who was in the seat next to mine, said, “Not the Josie? Of Josie and the Pussycats?”

The table had a laugh at that, but Pellerin didn’t crack a smile. He took a chair across from Mike, lowering himself into it carefully, his arms shaking, and started stacking his chips. Muscular dystrophy, I thought. Some wasting disease. I pegged him for about my age, late thirties, and figured he would overplay his first good hand and soon be gone.

Mike, who likes to get under players’ skins, said, “Didn’t I see you the other night hanging out with ‘A Boy Named Sue?’”

In a raspy, southern-fried voice, Pellerin said, “I’ve watched you on TV, Mister Morrissey. You’re not as entertaining as you think, and you don’t have that much game.”

Mike pretended to shudder and that brought another laugh. “Let’s see what you got, pal,” he said. “Then we can talk about my game.”

Geneva, a good-looking woman even if she is mostly silicon and botox, washed a fresh deck, spreading the cards across the table, and shuffled them up.

The game was cash only, no-limit Texas Hold ’em. It was held in a side room of Harrah’s New Orleans with a table ringed by nine barrel-backed chairs upholstered in red velvet and fake French Colonial stuff—fancy swords, paintings with gilt frames, and such—hanging on walls the color of cocktail sauce. Geneva, who was a friend, let me sit in once in a while to help me maintain the widely held view that I was someone important, whereas I was, in actuality, a typical figment of the Quarter, a man with a few meaningful connections and three really good suits.

It wasn’t unusual to have a couple of pros in the game, but the following week Harrah’s was sponsoring a tournament with a million dollar first prize and a few big hitters were already filtering into town. Aside from Mad Mike, Avery Holt was at the table, Sammy Jawanda, Deng Ky (aka Denghis Khan), and Annie Marcus. The amateurs in the game were Pellerin, Jeremy LeGros, an investment banker with deep pockets, and myself, Jack Lamb.

Texas Hold ’em is easy to learn, but it will cost you to catch on to the finer points. To begin with, you’re dealt two down cards, then you bet; then comes the flop, three up cards in the center of the table that belong to everyone. You bet some more. Then an up card that’s called the turn and another round of betting. Then a final up card, the river, and more betting…unless everyone has folded to the winner. I expected Pellerin to play tight, but five minutes hadn’t passed before he came out firing and pushed in three thousand in chips. LeGros and Mike went with him to the flop. King of hearts, trey of clubs, heart jack. Pellerin bet six thousand. LeGros folded and Mike peeked at his down cards.

“They didn’t change on you, did they?” asked Pellerin.

Mike raised him four thousand. That told me Pellerin had gotten into his head. The smart play would have been either to call or to get super aggressive. A middling raise like four thousand suggested a lack of confidence. Of course with Mad Mike, you never knew when he was setting a trap. Pellerin pushed it again, raising ten K, not enough to make Mike bag the hand automatically. Mike called. The card on the turn was a three of hearts, pairing the board. Pellerin checked and Mike bet twenty.

“You must have yourself a hand,” said Pellerin. “But your two pair’s not going to cut it. I’m all in.”

He had about sixty thousand stacked in front of him and Mike could have covered the bet, but it wasn’t a percentage play—losing would have left him with the short chip stack and it was too early in the evening to take the risk. He tried staring a hole through Pellerin, fussed with his chips, and eventually mucked his hand.

“You’re not the dumbest son-of-a-bitch who ever stole a pot from me,” he said.

“Don’t suppose I am,” said Pellerin.

As I watched—and that is what I mainly did, push in antes and watch—it occurred to me that once he sat down, Pellerin had stopped acting like dead money, as if all his anxiety had been cured by the touch of green felt and plastic aces. He was one hell of a hold ’em player. He never lost much and it seemed that he took down almost every big pot. Whenever he went head-to-head against somebody, he did about average…except when he went up against Mad Mike. Him, he gutted. It was evident that he had gotten a good read on Mike. In less than two hours he had ninety percent of the man’s money. He had also developed a palsy in his left hand and was paler than he had been when he entered.

The door opened, the babble of the casino flowed in and a security man ushered a doe-eyed, long-legged brunette wearing a black cocktail dress into the room. She had some age on her—in her mid-thirties, I estimated—and her smile was low wattage, a depressive’s smile. Nonetheless, she was an exceptionally beautiful woman with a pale olive complexion and a classically sculpted face, her hair arranged so that it fell all to one side. A shade too much make-up was her only flaw. She came up behind Pellerin, bent down, absently caressing the nape of his neck, and whispered something. He said, “You going to have to excuse me, gentleman. My nurse here’s a real hardass. But I’ll be glad to take your money again tomorrow night.”

He scooted back his chair; the brunette caught his arm and helped him to stand.

Mike, who had taken worse beats in his career, overcame his bad mood and asked, “Where you been keeping yourself, man?”

“Around,” said Pellerin. “But I’ve been inactive ’til recently.”

I smelled something wrong about Pellerin. Wrong rose off him like stink off the Ninth Ward. World class poker players don’t just show up, they don’t materialize out of nowhere and take a hundred large off Mad Mike Morrissey, without acquiring some reputation in card rooms and small casinos. And his success wasn’t due to luck. What Pellerin had done to Mike was as clean a gutting as I had ever witnessed. The next two nights, I stayed out of the game and observed. Pellerin won close to half a million, though the longest he played at a single sitting was four hours. The casino offered him a spot in the tournament, but he declined on the grounds of poor health—he was recovering from an injury, he said, and was unable to endure the long hours and stress of tournament play. My sources informed me that, according to the county records, nobody named Josey Pellerin lived in or near Lafayette. That didn’t surprise me. I knew a great number of people who had found it useful to adopt another name and place of residence. I did, however, manage to dredge up some interesting background on the brunette.

Jocundra Verret, age forty-two, single, had been employed by Tulane University nearly twenty years before, working for the late Dr. Hideki Ezawa, who had received funding during the 1980s to investigate the possible scientific basis of certain voodoo remedies. She had left the project, as they say, under a cloud. That was as much as I could gather from the redacted document that fell into my hands. After Tulane, she had worked as a private nurse until a year ago; since that time, her paychecks had been signed by the Darden Corporation, an outfit whose primary holdings were in the fields of bioengineering and medical technology. She, Pellerin and another man, Dr. Samuel Crain, had booked a suite at Harrah’s on a corporate card, the same card that paid for an adjoining suite occupied by two other men, one of whom had signed the register as D. Vader. They were bulky, efficient sorts, obviously doing duty as bodyguards.

I had no pressing reason to look any deeper, but the mention of voodoo piqued my interest. While I was not myself a devotee, my parents had both been occasional practitioners and those childhood associations of white candles burning in storefront temples played a part in my motivation. That night, when Pellerin sat down at the table, I went searching for Ms. Verret and found her in a bar just off the casino floor, drinking a sparkling water. She had on gray slacks and a cream-colored blouse, and looked quite fetching. The bodyguards were nowhere in sight, but I knew they must be in the vicinity. I dropped onto the stool beside her and introduced myself. “I’m not in the mood,” she said.

“Neither am I, cher. The doctor tells me it’s permanent, but when I saw you I felt a flicker of hope.”

She ducked her head, hiding a smile. “You really need to go. I’m expecting someone.”

“Under different circumstances, I’d be delighted to stick around and let you break my heart. But sad to say, this is a business call. I was wondering how come a bunch like the Darden Corporation is bankrolling a poker player.”

Startled, she darted her eyes toward me, but quickly recovered her poise. “The people I work for are going to ask why you were talking to me,” she said evenly. “I can tell them you were hitting on me, but if you don’t leave in short order, I won’t be able to get away with that explanation.”

“I assume you’re referring in the specific to the two large gentlemen who’ve got the suite next to yours. Don’t you worry. They won’t do anything to me.”

“It’s not what they might do to you that’s got me worried,” she said.

“I see. Okay.” I got to my feet. “That being the case, perhaps it’d be best if we talked at a more opportune time. Say tomorrow morning? Around ten in the coffee shop?”

“Please stay away from me,” she said. “I’m not going to talk to you.”

As I left the bar, I saw the bodyguards playing the dollar slots near the entrance—one glanced at me incuriously, but kept on playing. I walked down the casino steps, exiting onto Canal Street, and had a smoke. It was muggy, the stars dim. High in the west, a sickle moon was encased in an envelope of mist. I looked at the neon signs, the traffic, listened to the chatter and laughter of passers-by with drinks in their hands. Post-Katrina New Orleans pretending that it was the Big Easy, teetering on the edge of boom or bust. Though Verret had smiled at me, I could think of no easy way to hustle her, and I decided to give Billy Pitch a call and see whether he thought the matter was worth pursuing.

I had to go through three flunkies before I got to Billy. “What you want?” he said. “You know this is Survivor night.”

“I forgot, Billy. Want me to call back? I can call back.”

“This is the two-hour finale, then the reunion show. Won’t be over ’til eleven and I’m shutting it down after that. Now you got something for me or don’t you?”

I could hear laughter in the background and I hesitated, picturing him hunched over the phone in his den, a skinny, balding white man whom you might mistake for an insurance salesman or a CPA, no doubt clad in one of his neon-colored smoking jackets.

“Jack, you better have something good,” Billy said. “Hair’s starting to sprout from my palms.”

“I’m not sure how good it is, but…”

“I’m missing the immunity challenge. The penultimate moment of the entire season. And I got people over, you hear?”

Billy was the only person I knew who could pronounce vowels with a hiss. I gave him the gist of it, trying not to omit any significant details, but speeding it along as best I could.

“Interesting,” he said. “Tell me again what she said when you spoke to her.”

I repeated the conversation.

“It would seem that Miz Verret’s agenda is somewhat different from that of the Darden Corporation,” Billy said. “Otherwise, she’d have no compunction about reporting your conversation.”

“That was my take.”

“Voodoo business,” he said musingly.

“I can’t be sure it’s got anything to do with voodoo.”

“Naw, this here is voodoo business. It has a certain taint.” Billy made a clicking noise. “I’ll get back to you in the morning.”

“I was just trying to do you a favor, Billy. I don’t need to be involved.”

“Honey, I know how it’s supposed to work, but you’re involved. I got too many eggs in my basket to be dealing with anything else right now. This pans out, I’m putting you in charge.”

The last thing I had wanted was to be in business with Billy Pitch. It wasn’t that you couldn’t make a ton of money with Billy, but he was a supremely dangerous and unpleasant human being, and he tended to be hard on his associates. Often he acted precipitately and there were more than a few widows who had received a boatload of flowers and a card containing Billy’s apologies and a fat check designed to compensate for their loss and his lamentable error in judgment. In most cases, this unexpected death benefit served to expunge the ladies’ grief, but Alice Delvecchio, the common-law wife of Danny “Little Man” Prideau, accused Billy of killing her man and, shortly after the police investigation hit a dead end, she and her children disappeared. It was rumored that Billy had raised her two sons himself and that, with his guidance, hormone treatments, and the appropriate surgery, they had blossomed into lovely teenage girls, both of whom earned their keep in a brothel catering to oil workers.

Much to my relief, no call came the following morning. I thought that Billy must have checked out Pellerin and Verret, found nothing to benefit him, and hadn’t bothered getting back to me. But around ten o’clock that evening, I fielded a call from Huey Rafael, one of Billy’s people. He said that Billy wanted me to run on out to an address in Abundance Square and take charge of a situation.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Billy says for you to get your butt over here.”

Abundance Square was in the Ninth Ward, a few blocks from the levee, and was, as far as I knew, utterly abandoned. That made me nervous.

“I’m coming,” I said. “But I’d like to know something about the situation. So I can prepare for it, you understand.”

“You ain’t need nothing to prepare you for this.” Huey’s laugh was a baritone hiccup. “Got some people want watching over. Billy say you the man for the job.”

“Who are these people?” I asked, but Huey had ended the call.

I was angry. In the past, Billy had kept a close eye on every strand of his web, but nowadays he tended to delegate authority and spent much of his time indulging his passion for reality TV. He knew more about The Amazing Race and The Runway Project than he did about his business. Sooner or later, I thought, this practice was going to jump up and bite him in the ass. But as I drove toward the Ninth Ward, my natural paranoia kicked in and I began to question the wisdom of traipsing off into the middle of nowhere to hook up with a violent criminal.

Prior to Katrina, Abundance Square had been a housing project of old-style New Orleans town homes, with courtyards and balconies all painted in pastel shades. It had been completed not long before the hurricane struck. Now it was a waste of boarded-up homes and streets lined with people’s possessions. Cars, beds, lamps, bureaus, TV sets, pianos, toys, and so on, every inch of them caked with dried mud. Though I was accustomed to such sights, that night it didn’t look real. My headlights threw up bizarre images that made it appear I was driving through a post-apocalyptic version of Claymation Country. I found the address, parked a couple of blocks away, and walked back to the house. A drowned stink clotted my nostrils. In the distance, I heard sirens and industrial noise, but close at hand, it was so quiet you could hear a bug jump.

Huey answered my knock. He was a tall drink of water. Six-five, six-six, with a bluish polish to his black skin, a lean frame, pointy sideburns, and a modish goatee. He wore charcoal slacks and a high-collared camp shirt. Standing in the door, a nickel-plated .45 in hand, he might have been a bouncer at the Devil’s strip club. He preceded me toward the rear of the house, to a room lit by a kerosene lantern. At its center, one of Pellerin’s bodyguards was tied to a wooden chair. His head was slumped onto his chest, his face and shirt bloody. The air seemed to grow hotter.

I balked at entering and Huey said, “What you scared of, man? Lord Vader there ain’t going to harm you. Truth is, he gave it up quick for being a Jedi.”

“Where’s the other guy?” I asked.

“Man insisted on staying behind,” Huey said.

I had a sinking feeling, a vision of the Red House at Angola, guards strapping me down for the injection. “Jesus Christ,” I said. “You tell Billy I’m not going down for murder.”

Huey caught me by the shoulder as I turned to leave and slammed me up against the wall. He bridged his forearm under my jaw, giving me the full benefit of his lavishly applied cologne, and said, “I didn’t say a goddamn thing about murder, now did I?” When I remained silent, he asked me again and I squeezed out a no.

“I got things to take care of,” he said, stepping back. “Probably take me two, three hours. Here go.” He handed me the .45 and some keys. “You get on upstairs.”

“Who’s up there?”

“The card player and his woman. Some other guy. A doctor, he say.”

“Are they…” I searched for a word that would not excite Huey. “Uninjured?”

“Yeah, they fine.”

“And I’m supposed to keep watch, right? That’s all?”

“Billy say for you to ask some questions.”

“What about?”

“About what they up to.”

“Well, what did he tell you?” I pointed at the bodyguard. “I need something to go on.”

“Lord Vader wasn’t too clear on the subject,” said Huey. “Guess I worked him a little hard. But he did say the card player ain’t a natural man.”

Some rooms on the second floor of the townhouse were filled with stacked cots, folding tables and chairs, and with bottled water, canned food, toilet paper, and other supplies. It seemed that Billy was planning for the end times. In a room furnished with a second-hand sofa and easy chairs, I found Verret, Pellerin, and a man in his fifties with mussed gray hair and a hangdog look about the eyes. I assumed him to be Doctor Crain. He was gagged and bound to a chair. Verret and Pellerin were leg-shackled to the sofa. On seeing me, Crain arched his eyebrows and tried to speak. Pellerin glanced up from his hand of solitaire and Verret, dressed in freshly ironed jeans and a white T-shirt, gave me a sorrowful look, as if to suggest she had expected more of me.

“It’s the night shift,” Pellerin said and went back to turning over cards.

“Can you help us?” asked Verret.

“What’s up with him?” I pointed at Crain with the gun.

“He annoyed our previous keeper.” Pellerin flipped over an ace and made a satisfied noise. “He’s an annoying fellow. You’re catching him at his best.”

“Can you help us?” Verret asked again, with emphasis.

“Probably not.” I pulled a chair around and sat opposite the two of them. “But if you tell me what’s going on with you, what’s the relationship between the Darden Corporation and Tulane, the Ezawa project…I’ll try to help.”

Pellerin kept dealing, Verret gave no response, and Crain struggled with his bonds.

“Do you know where you are?” I asked. “Let me you clue you in.”

I told them who had ordered their kidnapping, mentioning the Alice Delvecchio incident along with a couple of others, then reiterated that I could probably be of no help to them—I was an unwilling participant in the process. I was sorry things had reached this pass, but if I was going to be any help at all, they ought to tell me what was up; otherwise, I couldn’t advise them on how to survive Billy Pitch.

Verret looked to Pellerin, who said, “He ain’t that damn sorry. Except where his own sorry ass is concerned.”

“Is he telling the truth?” she asked.

“More-or-less.”

Crain redoubled his efforts to escape, forcing muted shouts through his gag.

“I guess that’s why you’re so expert at the tables,” I said to Pellerin. “You’re good at reading people.”

“You have no idea, Small Time,” he said.

I wiggled the gun. “You’re not in a position to be giving me attitude.”

“You going to shoot me?” He gave a sneering laugh. “I don’t think so. You’re about ready to piss yourself just hanging onto that thing.”

“Josey!” Verret started to stand, then remembered the shackles. “I’ll tell you,” she said to me. “But I’d rather do it in private.”

Crain threw a conniption fit, heaving himself about in his chair, attempting to spit out his gag.

“You see,” she said. “He’s going to act like that every time I tell you something. I have to use the restroom, anyway.”

I undid the shackles, then I locked Crain and Pellerin in and escorted her down the hall, lagging behind a step so I could check out her butt. When she had finished in the john, we went into one of the storerooms. I set up a couple of folding chairs and we sat facing one another.

“May I have some water,” she asked.

“Help yourself.”

She had a drink of water, then sat primly with the plastic bottle resting on one knee. I knew I had to watch myself with her—I’d always been a sucker for tall brunettes who had that lady thing going. She must have had a sense of this, because she worked it overtime.

“Here’s what I know,” I said. “The Ezawa project was investigating voodoo remedies. And Josey Pellerin, according to your bodyguard, is not a natural man. That suggests…well, I’m not sure. Why don’t you just tell me everything?”

“Everything? That’ll take a long time.” She screwed the bottle cap on and off. “The project wasn’t considered important at the outset. The only reason Ezawa got funding was because he was a golfing buddy of one of the trustees. And he was brilliant, so they were willing to give him some leeway. He isolated a bacterium present in the dirt of old slave graveyards. He used dirt from the graveyard at the Myrtles—that old house over in Saint Francisville? The bodies were buried in biodegradable coffins, or no coffins at all, and the micro-organisms in the dirt had interacted with the decomposing tissues.”

She left room for me to ask a question, but I had none.

“A DNA extract from datura and other herbs was introduced into the growth medium,” she said. “Then the bacteria were induced to take up DNA and chromosomes from the extract, and Ezawa injected the recombinant strain into the cerebellum and temporal lobes of a freshly dead corpse. The bacteria began processing the corpse’s genetic complement and eventually the body was revivified.”

“Whoa! Revivified?” I said. “You mean, it came back to life?”

She nodded.

“How long were these people dead?” I asked.

“On the average, a little under an hour. The longest was about an hour and a half. The process required a certain amount of time, so the bodies had to be secured quickly.”

“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Getting the paperwork done for releasing a body generally takes more than an hour.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Jesus. Ezawa was basically making zombies. High-tech zombies.”

She started, I presumed, to object, but I headed her off.

“Don’t bullshit me,” I said. “I grew up voodoo. Datura’s one of the classic ingredients in the old recipe books. I bet he tried goat’s rue, too…and Angel’s trumpet. The man was making zombies.”

She frowned. “What I was going to say, the term was appropriate for most of the patients. They were weak. Helpless. They rarely survived longer than a day. But there were a few who lived longer. For months, some of them. We called them ‘slow-burners.’ We moved them out to a plantation house in bayou country and brought in a clinical psychologist to assess their new personalities. You see, the patients developed personalities markedly different from the ones they originally had. The psychologist, Doctor Edman, he believed these personalities manifested a kind of wish-fulfillment. His theory was that the process changed a portion of the RNA and made it dominant. ‘The bioform of their deepest wish,’ that’s how he put it. The patients manufactured memories. They recalled having different names, different histories. In effect, they were telling us—and themselves—a new life story, one in which they achieved their heart’s desire. The amazing thing was, they had abilities commensurate with these stories.”

I could have used some of Pellerin’s ability to read people. What she had told me had a ring of authenticity, but if I were to accept it as true, I would have to rearrange my notion of what was possible. I started to speak, but I was on shaky ground and wasn’t certain which questions to ask.

“It’s hard to believe,” she said. “But it’s the truth.” She let some seconds slip past and then, when I remained mute, as if she were trying to keep the conversation going, she went on: “I disagreed with Edman about a great many things. He demanded that we allow the patients to find their own way. He believed we should let their stories come out naturally. But I thought if we prompted them some, if we reminded them of their original identities…I don’t mean give them every detail, you understand. Just their names and a little background. That would have afforded them a stronger foundation and perhaps we wouldn’t have had so many breakdowns among the slow-burners. These people were re-inventing themselves out of whole cloth. They were bound to be unstable. I was hoping Crain would agree with me, but…” She made a contemptuous gesture, then seemed to remember where she was. “Do you want to know anything else?”

I still was at a loss for words, but I managed to say, “So I’m guessing Pellerin’s a slow-burner.”

“Yes. He was born Theodore Rankin. He’s forty-three. He believes he’s the world’s best poker player. And he may well be.”

“What was he before?”

“A bartender. He was killed during a robbery. I don’t know how the corporation got hold of the body.”

“The corporation. I assume they took the project over after it went in the toilet at Tulane.”

“That’s right. But there was a gap of ten years or so.”

“Why’re they so interested in a poker player?”

“It’s not the poker playing per se that’s of interest, it’s the patients’ underlying abilities. Their potentials go far beyond the life story they construct for themselves. We don’t understand what they can do. None of them lived long enough. But with the advances in micro-biology made during the last two decades, Doctor Crain thinks Josey may live for years. He’s developing more rapidly than the others, too. That may be a result of improvements in the delivery system. We used a heart pump at Tulane, but now they…”

“I don’t have to know the gearhead stuff.” I mulled over what she had told me. “You were fired from the original project. Why would Darden hire you? Where do you fit in?”

Verret toyed with the bottle cap. “I helped a patient escape. I couldn’t go along with what they were doing to him anymore. He developed some astonishing abilities while he was on the run. I’m the only person who’s dealt with someone that advanced.”

“What sort of abilities we talking about?”

“Perceptual, for the most part. Changes in visual capacity and such.”

She said this off-handedly, but I doubted she was being straight with me. I decided not to push it, and I asked what they had been doing at Harrah’s.

“At Tulane we kept the patients confined,” she said. “But Crain thought Josey would develop more rapidly if we exposed him to an unstructured environment under controlled conditions.” She gave a rueful laugh. “Turns out we didn’t have much control.”

“How much does Pellerin know?”

“He knows he was brought back to life. But he doesn’t know about the new personality…though he suspects something’s wrong there. It’s up to me to determine when he’s ready to hear the truth. Things go better if we tell them than if we let them piece it together on their own.”

“I still don’t understand your function. What exactly is it you do?”

“Patients need to bond with someone in order to create a complex personality. They have to be controlled, carefully manipulated. We were trained to instill that bond, to draw out their capabilities.”

She folded her arms, compressed her lips. I had the thought that, though none of what she had told me was comedy club material, talking about her role in things distressed her more than the rest.

“If the other therapists are good-looking as you,” I said, “I bet that instilling thing goes pretty easily.”

That seemed to distress her further.

“Come on, cher,” I said. “You going to be just fine. Y’all can be a significant asset for Billy, and that works to your advantage.”

She leaned forward, putting a hand on my knee; the touch surprised me. “Mister Lamb,” she said, and I said, without intending to, “Jack. You can call me Jack.”

“I want to be able to count on you, Jack. Can I count on you?”

“I told you I don’t have any control over the situation.”

“But can you be a friend? That’s all I’m asking. Can we count on you to be a friend?”

Those big brown eyes were doing a job on me, but I resisted them. “I haven’t ever been much good as a friend. It’s a character flaw, I’m afraid.”

“I don’t believe that.” She sat back, adjusting her T-shirt so it fit more snugly. “You can call me Jo.”

I contacted Billy Pitch, though not during prime time, fearing I might interrupt The Surreal Life or Wife Swap, and I told him what I had learned, omitting any mention of the “remarkable powers” that might soon be Pellerin’s, stressing instead his developing visual capacity. I wasn’t sure why I did this—perhaps because I thought that Billy, already powerful, needed no further inducement to use his strength intemperately. He professed amazement at what I had to say, then slipped into business mode.

“I got an idea, but it needs to simmer, so I’m going to stash you away for a while,” he said. “Get everybody ready to travel tonight.”

“By ‘everybody,’” I said, “you don’t mean me, right? I got deals cooking. I have to…”

“I’ll handle them for you.”

“Billy, some of what I got going requires the personal touch.”

“Are you suggesting I can’t handle whatever piddly business it is you got?”

“No, that’s not it. But there’s…”

“You’re not going to thwart me in this, are you, Jack?”

“No,” I said helplessly.

“Good! Call my secretary and tell her what needs doing. I’ll see it gets done.”

That night we were flown by private jet to an airstrip in South Florida, and then transported by cigarette boat to Billy’s estate in the Keys. Absent from our party was Dr. Crain. I never got to know the man. Each time I walked him to the john or gave him food, he railed at me, saying that I didn’t know who I was dealing with, I didn’t understand what was involved, causing such a ruckus that I found it easier to keep him bound and gagged in a separate room. I warned him that he was doing himself no good acting this way, yet all he did was tell me again I didn’t know who I was dealing with and threaten me with corporate reprisals. When it was time to leave, I started to untie him, but Huey dropped a hand onto my shoulder and said, “Billy say to let him be.”

“He’s a doctor,” I said. “He’s the only one knows what’s going on. What if Pellerin gets sick or something?”

“Billy say let him be.”

I tried to call Billy, but was met with a series of rebuffs from men as constricted by the literal limits of their orders as Huey. Their basic message was, “Billy can’t be disturbed.” Crain’s eyes were wide, fixed on me; his nostrils flared above the gag when he tried to speak. I made to remove it, but Huey once again stayed my hand.

“Let him talk,” I said. “He might…”

“What he going to say, Jack?” Huey’s glum, wicked face gazed down at me. “You know there ain’t nothing to say?”

He steered me into the corridor, closed the door behind us and leaned against it. “Get a move on,” he said. “Ain’t nothing you can do, so you might as well not think about it.”

Yet I did think about it as I descended the stair and walked along the corridor and out into the drizzly New Orleans night. I thought about Crain waiting in that stuffy little room, about whether or not he knew what was coming, and I thought that if I didn’t change the way things were headed, I might soon be enduring a similar wait myself.

Some weeks later I watched a videotape that captured Jo’s interaction with one of the short-lived zombies whose passage from death to life and back again she had overseen at Tulane. By then, I had become thoroughly acquainted with Pellerin and the zombie on the tape didn’t interest me nearly as much as Jo’s performance. She tempted and teased his story out of him with the gestures and movements of a sexier-than-average ballerina, exaggerated so as to make an impression on the man’s dim vision, and I came to realize that all of her movements possessed an element of this same controlled grace. Whether she was doing this by design, I had no clue; by that time I had tumbled to the fact that she was a woman who hid much from herself, and I doubted that she would be able to shed light on the matter.

Over the space of a month, Pellerin grew from a man whom I had mistaken for dead money into a formidable presence. He was stronger, more vital in every way, and he began to generate what I can only describe as a certain magnetism—I felt the back of my neck prickle whenever he came near, though the effect diminished over the days and weeks that followed. And then there were his eyes. On the same day I interrogated Jo, I was escorting him to the john when he said, “Hey, check this out!, Small Time.” He snatched off his sunglasses and brought his eyes close to mine. I was about to make a sarcastic remark, when I noticed a green flickering in his irises.

“What the fuck!” I said.

Pellerin grinned. “Looks like a little ol’ storm back in there, doesn’t it?” I asked him what it was and he told me the flickers, etched in an electric green, signaled the bacteria impinging on the optic nerve.

“They’re bioluminescent,” he said. “Weird, huh? Jocundra says it’s going to get worse before it gets better. People are going to think I’m the goddamn Green Lantern.”

Though he had changed considerably since that day, his attitudes toward almost everyone around him remained consistently negative—he was blunt, condescending, an arrogant smart-ass. Yet toward Jo, his basic stance did change. He grew less submissive and often would challenge her authority. She adapted by becoming more compliant, but I could see that she wasn’t happy, that his contentiousness was getting to her. She still was able to control him by means of subtle and not-so-subtle manipulation, but how long that control would last was a matter for conjecture.

The island where we were kept was Billy’s private preserve. It was shaped roughly like a T, having two thin strips of land extending out in opposite directions from the west end. Billy’s compound took up most of the available space. Within a high white brick wall topped by razor wire were a pool, outbuildings (including a gym and eight bungalows), a helicopter pad, and a sprawling Florida-style ranch house that might have been designed by an architect with a Lego fetish—wings diverged off the central structure and off each other at angles such as a child might employ, and I guessed that from the air it must resemble half a crossword puzzle. There were flat screen TVs in every room, even the johns, and all the rooms were decorated in a fashion that I labeled haute mafia. The dining room table was fashioned from a fourteenth century monastery door lifted from some European ruin. The rugs were a motley assortment of modern and antique. Some of the windows were stained glass relics, while others were jalousies; but since heavy drapes were drawn across them, whatever effect had been intended was lost. Every room was home to a variety of antiquities: Egyptian statuary, Greek amphorae, Venetian glassware, German tapestries, and so on. In my bathroom, the toilet was carved from a single block of marble, and mounted on the wall facing it, a section of a Persian bas-relief, was yet another flat screen. It was as if someone with the sensibility of a magpie had looted the world’s museums in order to furnish the place, and yet the decor was so uniformly haphazard, I had the impression that Billy was making an anti-fashion statement, sneering at the concept of taste. Elvis would have approved. In fact, had he seen the entirety of Billy’s house, he would have returned home to Graceland and redecorated.

Beyond the wall was jungly growth that hid the house completely. The beach was a crescent of tawny sand fringed by palms and hibiscus shrubs and Spanish bayonet, protected by an underwater fence. A bunkerlike guard house stood at the foot of the concrete pier to which the cigarette boat was moored, and a multicultural force (Cuban, white, African-American) patrolled within and without the walls. The guards, along with gardeners and maids, were housed in the bungalows, but they entered the house frequently to check on us. If we stepped outside they would dog us, their weapons shouldered, keeping a distance, alert to our every movement. It was easier to find privacy inside the house. Relative privacy, at any rate. Knowing Billy, I was certain that the rooms were bugged, and I had given up on the idea that I could keep anything from him. Whenever Pellerin and jo were closeted in their rooms, I would walk along corridors populated by suits of armor and ninja costumes fitted to basketwork men and gilt French chairs that, with their curved legs and positioned between such martial figures, looked poised for an attack. I would poke into rooms, examine their collection of objets d’art, uniformly mismatched, yet priceless. Sometimes I would wonder if I dared slip one or two small items into my pocket, but most of my thoughts were less concerned with gain than with my forlorn prospects for survival.

Occasionally in the course of these forays, I would encounter a maid, but never anyone else, and thus I was surprised one afternoon when, upon entering a room in the northernmost wing with a four-poster bed and a fortune in gee-gaws littering the tables and bureaus, I saw Jo standing by the entrance to a walk-in closet, inspecting the dresses within. She gave a start when I spoke her name, then offered a wan smile and said, “Hello.”

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“Browsing.” She touched the bodice of a green silk dress. “These clothes must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. They’re all designer originals.”

“No, I meant aren’t you supposed to be with Pellerin.”

“I need breaks from Josey,” she said. “His intensity gets to me after a while. And he’s getting more independent, he wants time to himself. So…” She shrugged. “I like to come here and look at the clothes.”

She stepped into the closet and I moved into the room so I could keep her in view.

“He must bring a lot of women here,” she said. “He’s got every imaginable size.”

“It’s hard for me to think of Billy as a sexual being.”

“Why’s that?”

“You’d have to know him. I’ve never seen him with a woman on his arm, but I suppose he has his moments.”

She went deeper into the closet, toyed with the hem of a dress that bore a pattern like a moth’s wing, all soft grays and greens, a touch of brown.

I perched on the edge of the bed. “Why don’t you try it on?”

“Do you think he’d mind?” she asked.

“Go for it.”

She hesitated, then said, “I’ll just be a second,” and closed the closet door.

The idea that she was getting naked behind the door inspired a salacious thought or two—I was already more than a little smitten. When she came out, she was barefoot. She did a pirouette and struck a fashion magazine pose. I was dumbstruck. The dress was nearly diaphanous, made of some feathery stuff that clung to her hips and flat stomach and breasts, the flared skirt reaching to mid-thigh.

“You like?” she asked. “It’s a little short on me.”

“I didn’t notice.”

She laughed delightedly and went for another spin. “I could never afford this. Not that I care all that much about clothes. But if I had a couple of million, I’d probably indulge.”

Shortly thereafter she went back inside the closet, re-emerging wearing her jeans and a nondescript top. It seemed that she had exchanged personalities as well as clothes, for she was once again somber and downcast. “I’ve got to get back,” she said.

“So soon?”

She stopped by the door. “I come here most days about this time,” she said. “A little earlier, actually.” Then, after a pause, she added, “It’s nice having someone to wear clothes for.”

We started meeting every day in that room. It was plain that she was flirting with me, and I imagine it was equally plain that I was interested, but it went on for over a month and neither one of us made a move. For my part, the fear of rejection didn’t enter in. I was used to the man-woman thing being a simple negotiation—you either did the deed or you took a pass—but I thought if I did make a move, I might frighten her off, that she needed to feel in control. If I had been free of constraint, my own agent, I might have given up on her…or maybe I wouldn’t have. She was the kind of woman who required a period of courtship, who enjoyed the dance as much as the feast, and she caused you to enjoy it as well. Basically an unhappy soul, she gave the impression of being someone who had been toughened by trouble in her life; but whenever she was happy, there was something so frail and girlish about the mood, I believed the least disturbance could shatter it. I grew more entranced by her and more frustrated day-by-day, but I told myself that not getting involved was for the best—I needed to keep clear of emotional entanglements and concentrate on how to stay alive once Billy came back into the picture. That didn’t prevent me, however, from exploring certain of her fantasies.

I knew that she had been married when she was a teenager and one morning while we sat on the bed, her cross-legged at the head and me sort of side-saddle at the foot, I asked her about it. She ran a finger along a newel post, tracing the pattern carved into it, and said, “It was just…foolishness. We thought it would be romantic to get married.”

“I take it, it wasn’t.”

She gave a wan laugh. “No.”

“Would you ever do it again?”

“Marry? I don’t know. Maybe.” She smiled. “Why? Are you asking?”

“Maybe. Tell me what type of man it is you’d marry. Let’s see if I fit the bill.”

She lay down on her side, her legs drawn up, and considered the question.

“Yeah?” I said.

“You’re serious? You want me to do this?”

“Let’s hear it, cher. Your ideal man.”

“Well…” She sat up, fluffed the pillow, and lay down again. “I’d want him to have lots of money, so maybe a financier. Not a banker or anything boring like that. A corporate tiger. Someone who would take over a failing company and reshape it into something vital.”

“Money’s the most important qualification?”

“Not really, but you asked for my ideal and money makes things easier.”

She had on a blouse with a high collar and, as often happened when thinking, she tucked in her chin and nibbled the edge of the collar. I found the habit sexy and, whenever she did it, I wanted to touch her face.

“He’d be a philanthropist,” she said. “And not just as a tax dodge. He’d have to be devoted to it. And he’d have an introspective side. I’d want him to know himself. To understand himself.”

“A corporate raider with soul. Isn’t that a contradiction?”

“It can happen. Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive and a great poet.”

“I like to think of myself as an entrepreneur when I’m feeling spunky. That’s like a financier, but I’m getting that we’re talking about two different animals.”

“You’ve got possibilities,” she said, and smiled. “You just need molding.”

“How about in the looks department?” I asked. “Something George Clooney-ish? Or Brad Pitt?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Movie stars are too short. Looks aren’t important, anyway.”

“Women all say that, but it’s bullshit.”

“It’s true! Women have the same kind of daydreams as men, but when it comes to choosing a man they often base their choices on different criteria.”

“Like money.”

“No! Like how someone makes you feel. It’s not quantifiable. I would never have thought I could…”

She broke off, thinning her lips.

“You would never have thought what?”

“This is silly,” she said. “I should check on Josey.”

“You never would have thought you could be attracted to someone you met at gunpoint?”

She sat up, swung her legs off the side of the bed, but said nothing.

“You might as well confess, cher,” I said. “You won’t be giving away any secrets.”

She stiffened, as if she were going to lash out at me, but the tension drained from her body. “It’s the Stockholm Syndrome,” she said.

“You reckon that’s it? We are for sure stuck on this damn island, and there’s not a whole lot to distract us. And technically I am an accomplice in your kidnapping. But there’s more to it than that.”

“You’re probably right,” she said, coming to her feet. “If we’d met on our own in New Orleans, I’d probably have been attracted to you. But that’s neither here nor there.”

“Why not? Because Pellerin’s your priority?”

She shrugged as if to say, yes.

“Duty won’t keep you warm at night,” I said.

“Keeping warm has never been my biggest goal in life,” she said with brittle precision. “But should that change, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

I didn’t go outside much. The guards made me nervous. When I did it was usually to have a swim, but some nights I went along the shore through a fringe of shrubs and palms to the west end, the crosspiece of the T, a place from which, if the weather was clear, I could make out the lights on a nearby Key. And on one such night, emerging from dense undergrowth onto a shingle of crushed coral and sand, littered with vegetable debris, I spotted a shadow kneeling on the beach. Wavelets slapping against the shingle covered the sound of my approach and I saw it was Pellerin. I hadn’t realized he could walk this far without help. He was holding a hand out above the water, flexing his fingers. It looked as if he were about to snatch something up. Beneath his hand the water seethed and little waves rolled away from shore. It was such a mediocre miracle, I scarcely registered it at first; but then I realized that he must be causing this phenomenon, generating a force that pushed the waves in a contrary direction. He turned his head toward me. The green flickers in his eyes stood out sharply in the darkness. A tendril of fear uncoiled in my backbrain.

“What’s shaking, Small Time?” he said.

“Don’t call me that. I’m sick of it.”

He made a soft, coughing noise that I took for a laugh. “Want me to do like Jocundra and call you Jackie boy?”

“Just don’t call me Small Time.”

“But it suits you so well.”

“You been through a rough time,” I said. “And I can appreciate that. But that doesn’t give you the right to act like an asshole.”

“It doesn’t? I could have sworn it did.”

He came to his feet, lost his balance. I caught him by the shirtfront and hauled him erect. He tried to break my grip, but he was still weak and I held firm. He had a soapy smell. I wondered if Jo had to help him bathe.

“Let me go,” he said.

“I don’t believe I will.”

“Give me another month or two, I promise I’ll tear you down to your shoelaces, boy.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

“Let me go!”

He pawed at my hand and I let loose of the shirt. That electric green danced in his eyes again.

“’Pears you growing a pair. Love must be making you bold.” He hitched up his belt. “Yeah, I been catching you looking at Jocundra. She looks at you the same. If I wasn’t around, the two of you be going at it like. But I am around.”

“Maybe not for too long,” I said.

“I might surprise you, boy. But whatever. As long as I’m here, Jocundra not going to stray. She’s just dying for me to tell her about every new thing I see. She finds it fascinating.”

“What do you see?”

“I’m not telling you, pal. I’m saving all of my secrets for sweet cheeks.” He took a faltering step toward the house. “How’s about we make a little side bet? Bet I nail her before you.”

I gave him a shove and he went over onto his back, crying out in shock. A guard stepped from the shadow of the trees—I told him to be cool, I had things covered. I reached down and seized hold of Pellerin’s arm, but he wrenched free.

“You want to lie there, fine by me,” I said, and started back along the shore.

He called to me, but I kept walking.

“Know what I see in your future, Small Time?” he shouted as I passed into the trees. “I see lilies and a cardboard casket. I see a black dog taking a piss on your grave.”

What he said didn’t trouble me, but I was troubled nonetheless. When I had reached for his arm, I had brushed the fingers of his right hand, the same hand that he’d been holding above the water. I wouldn’t have sworn to it, but it seemed that his fingertips had been hot. Not just warm. Burning hot. As if they’d been dipped into a bowl of fire.

If pressed to do so, I might have acknowledged Jo’s right to value her duties, but I was unreasonably angry at her. Angry and petulant. I kept to my room for a day and a half after that night on the beach, lying around in my boxers and doing some serious drinking, contemplating the notion that I was involved in a romantic triangle with a member of the undead. On the morning of the second day, I realized that I was only hurting myself and had a shower, changed my shorts. Still a little drunk, I was debating whether or not to see what was up in the rest of the house, when someone knocked on my door. Without thinking, I said, “Yeah, come in,” and Jo walked into the room. I thought about making a grab for my trousers, but I was unsteady on my feet and feared that I’d stumble and fall on my ass; so I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to act nonchalant.

“How are you feeling,” she asked.

“Peachy,” I said.

She hesitated, then shut the door and took a seat in a carved wooden chair that likely had been some dead king’s throne. “You don’t look peachy,” she said.

I’d cracked the drapes to check on the weather and light fell directly on her—she was the only bright thing in a room full of shadow. “I had a few drinks,” I told her. “Drowning my sorrows. But I’m pulling it together.”

She nodded, familiar with the condition.

“How come you didn’t tell me your boy could do tricks?” I asked.

“Josey? What are you talking about?”

I told her what Pellerin had been doing with the ocean water and she said she hadn’t realized he had reached that stage. She hopped up from the chair, saying she had to talk to him.

“Stay,” I said. “Come on. You got all day to do with him. Just stay a while, okay?”

Reluctantly, she sat back down.

“So,” I said. “You want to tell me what that is he was doing.”

“My previous patient developed the ability to manipulate electromagnetic fields. He did some remarkable things. It sounds as if Josey’s doing the same.”

“You keep saying that. Remarkable how? Give me an example.”

“He cured the sick, for one.”

“Did he, now?”

“I swear, it’s the truth. There was a man with terminal cancer. He cured him. It took him three days and cost him a lot of effort, but afterward the man was cancer-free.”

“He cured a guy of cancer by…what? Working his electromagnetic fields?”

“I think so. I don’t know for sure. Whatever he did, it produced a lot of heat.” She crossed her legs, yielding up a sigh. “I wish it had stopped with that.”

I asked what had happened.

“It’s too long a story to tell, but the upshot was, he built a veve…Do you know what a veve is?”

“The things they draw on the floors of voodoo temples? Little patterns?”

“That’s them. They relate to the voodoo gods, the loas.” She flicked a speck of something off her knee. “Donnell…my patient. He built the veve of Ogoun Badagris out of copper. Several tons of copper. It was immense. He said it enabled him to focus energy. He used to walk around on top of it and…one day there was an explosion.” She made a helpless gesture. “I don’t understand what happened.”

Neither did I understand. I couldn’t wrap my brain around the idea that Pellerin might be some kind of green-eyed Jesus; yet I didn’t believe she was lying.

“What do think was going on with him?” I asked. “With Pellerin. I mean, what’s your theory? You must have a theory”

“You want to hear? I’ve been told it’s pretty out there.”

“Yeah, and nothing about this is out there, so your theory’s got to be way off base.”

She laughed. “Okay. The bacteria we injected into Josey was the same strain we used at Tulane. All the slow-burners have reproduced those designs in one way or another. It’s as if they’re expressing the various aspects of Ogoun. Doctor Crain’s theory was that because the bacteria eventually infested the entire brain, the patients used more of their brains than normal people—this resulted in what seemed to be miraculous powers. And since the bacterial strain was the same, it prevailed upon the host brain to acquire similar characteristics. That makes a certain amount of sense as far as it goes, but Crain was trying to explain voodoo in terms of science, and some of it can’t be explained except in voodoo terms.”

She paused, as if to gather her thoughts. “Someday we may discover a biochemical factor that makes the patients prone to seeing the veve patterns. But we’ll never be able to explain away all the mystery surrounding Ezawa’s work. I think he discovered the microbiological analogue of possession. In a voodoo ceremony, a possession occurs quickly. The god takes over your body while you’re dancing or having a drink. You jerk around as the god acclimates to the flesh, and then you begin acting like that god. With the bacteria, it takes longer and the transition’s smoother. You notice a growing awareness in the patients that they’re different. Not just because they’ve come back from the dead. The real difference lies in the things they see and feel. They sense there’s something qualitatively different about themselves. They recognize that they have their own agendas. They grow beyond their life stories the way Jesus and Buddha outgrew the parameters of their lives. Things Donnell said…they led me to believe that the bacteria allowed them to access their gro bon ange. Do you know the term? The immortal portion of the soul? According to voodoo, anyway. And that in turn opened them to the divine. As the bacterial infestation increased, they became more open. The slow-burners all demonstrated behavioral arcs that fit the theory. I guess it sounds crazy, but no one’s come up with anything better.”

She seemed to be waiting for me to speak.

“You’re right,” I said. “That’s out there.”

“Donnell was seeing these peculiar shadows before he died. I think he was seeing peoples’ souls. I can’t come close to proving it, of course, but there were things he told me…” She sighed in exasperation. “I begged Crain to let me work with Josey my way. I thought if I started from a position of intimacy, we could forge a bond strong enough to endure until the end. We’d see the maturation of the new personality. If my theory’s right, we’d have a captive god fully integrated with a human personality. Whatever a god is. That might be something we could determine. Who knows what’s possible?” The energy drained from her voice and her tone softened. “As things stand I doubt we’ll ever get any further than I got with Donnell. He should have been given the space to evolve, but all they did was harass him.”

“I’m getting you liked this Donnell,” I said.

Her face sharpened. “Yes.”

“How about Pellerin?”

“He’s not very likeable. Part of it is, he’s afraid of everything. Confused. He doesn’t know yet who or what he is. He may never know. So he tends to be angry at everyone. That said, he’s coarse, he’s truculent and difficult to be around.” She made a sad face and pushed up from her throne. “I wish I didn’t have to go, but I should get back to him.”

“Jo?”

“Uh-huh?”

“Remember when you asked if you could count on me as a friend? For what it’s worth…”

“I know,” she said, coming toward me.

“We’ve been forced onto the same side, but…”

She embraced me, pulling my head down onto her shoulder. I breathed in her warm, clean smell, and kissed her neck. She tensed, but I nuzzled her neck, her throat, and she let her head fall back. When I kissed her on the mouth, she kissed me back, fully complicit, and, before long, we were rolling around on the bed. I worked her T-shirt up around her neck and had disengaged the catch of her bra, a hook located under a flare of white lace between the cups, when I realized that, although she was not resisting, neither was she helping out as she had a moment earlier. I slid my hand under the bra, but she remained motionless, reactionless, and I asked what was the matter.

“I can’t cope with this. You’re the first man I’ve been attracted to in a long time. A very long time.” She adopted an injured expression, like the one a child might display on running up against a rule that denied it a treat. “I want to make love with you, but I can’t.”

My hand was still on her breast and desire crowded all coherent thought from my head.

“Say something.” She shifted, turning on her side, and my hand was no longer happy.

“Does this have anything to do with Pellerin?”

“Partly.”

“You’re sleeping with him?”

“No, but I might have to. It may be the only way to control him.”

“Is that how you controlled Donnell?”

“It wasn’t like that! I was in love with him.”

“You loved him.”

“I know it sounds strange, but I was…”

I experienced a flash of anger. “It sounds twisted.”

She froze.

“You ever think,” I said, “you might have a kink for dead guys?”

She held my eyes for a second, then sat up, rehooked her bra and tugged down her T-shirt.

“Maybe I do,” she said. “Maybe I find them a vast improvement.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean that. I was just…”

“What did you mean?”

“It was frustration talking.”

“Don’t you think I’m frustrated, too? I could probably find an insult to toss at you if I wanted.”

I could have pointed out that she was the cause of her own frustration, but I’d already dug myself a hole and saw no good reason to pull the dirt down on top of me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I truly am.”

“It’s not important,” she said icily. “I’ve heard it before.”

She flung herself off the bed.

“Jo,” I said despairingly.

“Oh,” she said, stopping in the doorway. “I nearly forgot. Your employer has a message for you. He’ll be arriving in three days. Maybe you’ll find his company less perverse than mine.”

I wasn’t accustomed to viewing myself as an employee, and it took me a hiccup to translate the term “your employer” into the name Billy Pitch. I’d been anticipating his arrival, but the news was a shock nonetheless. My dalliance with Jo, brief and unsatisfying as it was, had placed our time on the island in the context of a courtship, and I needed to reorder my priorities. I knew I had to tell Billy everything—he had likely already heard it and our first conversation would be a test of my loyalty—and I would have to put some distance between Jo and me. You might have thought this would be an easy chore, given the state of the relationship, yet I was down the rabbit hole with her, past the point where longing and desire could be disciplined. Even my most self-involved thoughts were tinged with her colors.

Like advance men for pharaoh, Billy Pitch’s retinue arrived before him. Security people, chef, barber, bed fluffer, and various other functionaries filtered into the compound over the next day and a half. A seaplane brought in Billy the following morning and, after freshening up, accompanied by an enormous bodyguard with the coarse features of an acromegalic giant, he swept into the foyer of the main wing, the most grotesquely decorated room of all, dominated by a fountain transplanted from 19th century Italy, with floors covered by pink and purple linoleum and vinyl furniture to match. It had been over a year since I had seen Billy in the flesh, but I had known him for almost a decade and he had always seemed ageless in a measly, unprepossessing way—I was thus pleased to note a pair of bifocals hanging about his neck and that his fringe of hair was turning gray. He wore a garish cabana set that left his bony knees and skinny forearms bare. The outfit looked ridiculous, but amplified his air of insectile menace. He directed a cursory glance toward Pellerin, sitting on a plum-colored sofa, but his gaze lingered on Jo, who stood behind him.

“My, my! Aren’t you the sweet thing?” Billy wagged a forefinger at her. “Who’s she remind me of, Clayton?”

The bodyguard, a mighty android in a blue silk T-shirt and white linen jacket, rumbled that he couldn’t say, but she did look familiar.

“It’ll come to me.” He tipped his head pertly to one side and said to me, “Let’s talk.”

He led me into a room containing a functional modern desk and chairs and one of the ubiquitous flat screens, where I delivered my report. When I had done, he said, “Good job. Very good job.” He drummed his fingers on the desk. “Do you believe her? You think that boy is a miracle worker? Or you think maybe that girl in there’s gone crazy.”

“It sounds crazy,” I said. “But everything I’ve seen so far backs her up.”

He nodded like he wasn’t so much agreeing with me, but rather was mulling something over. “Let me show you a piece of tape I landed. Part of the Ezawa project at Tulane. The sound’s no good, but the picture speaks volumes.”

He switched on the TV and the tape began to play. The original of the tape had been a piece of film. It had an old-fashioned countdown—10, 9, 8, etc.—and then the tape went white, flickered, and settled into a grainy color shot of an orderly removing electrodes from the chest of a man wearing a hospital gown. He appeared to be semi-conscious and was sitting in a wheelchair. Rail-thin, with scraggly dark hair and rawboned hillbilly face. A woman in a nurse’s uniform came into view, her back to the camera, and there was a blurt of sound. The legend

“Tucker Mayhew” was briefly superimposed over the picture. Another blurt of sound, the woman speaking to the orderly, who left the room. Then the woman moved behind the wheelchair and I saw it was a younger, less buxom Jo, her make-up so liberally applied as to seem almost grotesque.

Billy asked why the heavy make-up and I replied, “She said they don’t see very well at first. Must be to help with that.”

Jo began to touch the man’s shoulders and neck. Initially he was unresponsive, but soon the touches came to act like shocks on him, though he was still out of it. He twitched and stiffened as if being jabbed with needles. His eyelids fluttered open and his eyes showed green flashes, already brighter than Pellerin’s.

“The part where she’s touching him went on longer,” Billy said. “I had it edited down.”

The man’s eyes opened. Jo left off touching him and moved away. He gaped, glanced around, his face a parody of loss. Jo spoke to him and he located her again. The change in his expression, from woebegone to gratified, was so abrupt as to be laughable. The sound came and went in spurts, and what I could hear was garbled, but I caught enough to know she was teasing out his life story, one he was inventing in order to please her, one that fit the absence in his mind. His eyes tracked her as she performed movements that in their grace and ritual elegance reminded me of Balinese dancers, yet had something as well of the blatant sexuality of bartop strippers you see in clubs on the edge of the Quarter. She passed behind the wheelchair and again touched him on the back of the neck.

Billy paused the tape. “There. Look at that.”

The man had his head back and mouth open, searching for Jo, and she was about to touch him again, her long fingers extended toward the nape of his neck. Her smile was, I thought, unreadable, yet the longer I stared at it, the more self-satisfied it seemed. The image trembled slightly.

“Anybody doing that job is going to look bad from time to time,” I said.

“But that’s the job she does, honey,” Billy said. “You can’t get around that.” He unpaused the tape and muted the sound. “Know what it puts me in mind of? Those women who marry men on death row. It’s all about being in control for them. They control the visits, letters…everything. They don’t have to have sex, yet they have all the emotional content of a real relationship and none of the fuss. And it’s got a built-in expiration date. It’s a hell of a deal, really. Of course our Miz Verret, she took it farther than most.”

A jump in the film, another edit. The man’s eyes blazed a fiery green that appeared to overflow his sockets. His coordination had improved, he made coherent gestures and talked non-stop. He struggled to stand and nearly succeeded, and then, after making an obviously impassioned statement, he fell back, dead for the second time. Jo stood beside the body for almost a minute before closing his eyes. A faint radiance shone through the lids. An orderly removed the body as Jo made notes on a clipboard. The screen whited out and another countdown started. Billy switched off the TV.

“Forty-seven minutes,” he said. “Scratch one zombie. You got to be careful around that girl.”

“Billy, I was…”

“I know. You were trying to get a little. But I’d hate to see you screw this up over a piece of ass.” His voice acquired a pinched nastiness. “Especially since the bitch is such a freak!” He peered at me over top of his glasses, as if assessing the impact of his words. He sighed. “Let’s go have a chat with them, shall we?”

We went back into the living room. Clayton and the other bodyguard stood at ease. Billy took a chair opposite the sofa where Pellerin was sitting and I hovered at his shoulder. Behind Pellerin, Jo tried to make eye contact with me, but I pretended not to notice.

“Mister Pellerin,” said Billy. “I have a question for you.”

Pellerin looked at me and said, “This dab of cream cheese is the badass you warned us about?”

“Clayton?” said Billy. “Would you mind?”

Two strides carried Clayton to the sofa. He backhanded Pellerin viciously, knocking his sunglasses off. Jo shrieked and Clayton stood poised to deliver another blow.

“In the stomach,” Billy said.

Clayton drove his fist into Pellerin’s belly, and Billy signaled him to step back. Jo hurried around the couch to minister to Pellerin, who was trying to breathe, bleeding from a cut on his cheek.

“I’m not a very good businessman,” said Billy sadly. “I let things get personal. I miss out on a lot of opportunities that way, but I’ve learned if you can’t have fun with an enterprise, it’s best to cut your losses. Do you need a moment, Mister Pellerin?”

“You could have killed him!” Jo said, glancing up from Pellerin.

“Precisely.” Billy church-and-steepled his fingers. “Your boy there’s a valuable commodity, yet because of my intemperate nature I might have done the unthinkable. Do we understand each other? Mister Pellerin?”

Pellerin made a stressed yet affirmative noise.

“Good. Now…my question. Is your ability such that you can control the play of seven or eight good card players so as to achieve a specific result?”

With considerable effort, holding his belly, Pellerin sat up. “How specific?”

“I’d like you to arrange it so that you and a certain gentleman outlast all the rest, and that he has a distinct advantage in chips at that point. Let’s say a four to one advantage. Then I’d like you to beat him silly. Take all his chips as quickly as you can.”

“That’s risky,” said Pellerin. “The guy could get a run of great cards. It’s hard playing heads-up from that far down. You can’t bluff effectively. Why do you want me to do it that way? If you let me play my game, I can guarantee a win.”

“Because he’ll want the game to continue if he thinks you lucked out. He’ll offer you a check, but you tell him it’s cash or nothing.”

“What if he…” Pellerin began, and Billy cut him off: “No what-ifs. Yours not to wonder why, yours but to do or die.” He looked to Clayton. “Is that Byron?”

“Tennyson,” said Clayton. “‘The Charge of the Light Brigade.’”

“Yes, of course!” He gave himself a pretend-slap for having forgotten. “Well. Can you do the job, Mister Pellerin?”

“I’ll need a little luck, but…yeah. I guess I can do it.”

“We all need a little luck.” Billy popped out of the chair. “You’ll be leaving for Fort Lauderdale day after tomorrow. The Seminole Paradise Casino. I’ll have my people watching, so don’t worry about anything untoward. You will be closely watched. I’ll give Jack the details. He can tell you all about it.”

He walked away briskly, but then he turned and pointed at Jo. “I got it! Big Brother All-Stars. The seventh season. You remember, Clayton?”

Clayton said, maybe, he wasn’t sure.

“Come on, man! Erica. The tall bitch with the big rack. She played the game real sneaky.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Clayton. “Yeah, I can see it.”

The Seminole Paradise Hard Rock Hotel and Casino was a hell of a mouthful for what amounted to your basic two-hundred-dollar-per-room Florida hotel complete with fountain display and an assortment of clubs and bars notable for the indifferent quality of their cuisine and the bad taste evident in their decor. Particularly annoying was Pangaea, a club decorated with “authentic tribal artifacts” that likely had been purchased from a prop supply company. The entire complex was a surfeit of fakes. Fake breasts, fake smiles, fake youth, fake people. Why anyone would choose such a place to put a dent in their credit cards, I’ll never know—maybe it offered them the illusion that they were losing fake money.

We went down to the casino early the same afternoon we checked in, and Pellerin nabbed a chair at one of the poker tables. I watched for a while to ascertain whether he was winning—he was—and went for a stroll. I wanted to see how far my leash would stretch. There were several men hanging about who might be Billy’s people and I was interested to learn if any of them would follow me. I also wanted to get clear of the situation and gain some perspective on things. Once I reached the entrance to the grounds, I turned right and walked along the edge of the highway, working up a sweat in the hot sun, until I came to a strip mall with about twenty-five or thirty shops, the majority of them closed. It was Sunday in the real world.

A Baskin-Robbins caught my eye. The featured flavors were banana daiquiri and sangria. Sangria, for fuck’s sake! I bought two scoops of vanilla by way of protesting the lapsed integrity of ice cream flavors and ate it sitting on the curb. I tried to problem-solve, but all I did was chum up mud from the bottom of my brain. The assignment that had been forced upon us—upon Pellerin—was to attract the interest of a wealthy developer named Frank Ruddle, an excellent poker player who frequented the Seminole Paradise. Pellerin’s job was to play sloppy over the course of a couple of weeks. That way he would set himself up as a mark and Ruddle would invite him to the big cash game held each month at his Lauderdale home. According to Billy’s scenario, once Ruddle went bust, he would feel compelled to open his vault in order to obtain more cash. At this point Billy’s people would move in on the game. He wanted something from that vault. I thought it might be more of a trophy than anything of actual value, and that his real goal was purely personal. The plan was paper-thin and smacked of Billy at his most profligate. There were a dozen holes in it, a hundred ways it could go wrong, but Billy was willing to spend our lives for the chance to gain a petty victory. Had the aim of the exercise been to secure the item at any cost, it could have been far more easily achieved. That he was willing to squander an asset with (if Jo were to be believed) unlimited potential was classic late-period Billy Pitch. If we failed, it was no skin off his butt. He’d wait for his next opportunity and while away the hours throwing Tanqueray parties for his fellow reality-show addicts. And if we succeeded, he might decide that his victory would not be secure so long as we were alive. I saw a couple of outs, but the odds of them working were not good.

Across from the mall lay a vacant lot overgrown with weeds, sprinkled with scrub palmetto, and adjoining it was another, larger lot that had been cleared for construction, the future site of LuRay Condominiums—so read a sign picturing a peppy senior citizen couple who seemed pleased as all get out that they would soon be living next door to a casino where they could blow their retirement in a single evening. Farther along was a cluster of tiny redneck dwellings set among diseased-looking palms. Squatty frame houses with shingle roofs and window-unit air conditioners and front yards littered with sun-bleached Big Wheels and swing sets. They looked deserted, but each of them harbored, I imagined, a vast corpulent entity with dyed hair and swollen ankles, who survived on a diet of game shows and carbohydrates, and went outside once a day to check the sky for signs of the Rapture. Now and then a car zipped past and, less frequently, one pulled into the mall and disgorged a porky Florida Cracker family desirous of some Burger King or a couple of bare-midriffed Britney Spears clones in search of emergency eye liner.

This dose of reality caused the mud to settle, the sediment to wash from my thoughts, but clarity did not improve my prospects. I tossed my trash into a bin. Zombie hold ’em players and doe-eyed ladies who were a little damaged…I wanted that crap out of my head, I wanted things back the way they had been. Small Time. That was me. Yet I was content with my small-time life. I was adept at it, I was pleased with my general lack of ambition. Tentatively, I gave the trash bin a kick. It quivered in fear, and that inspired me to unload on it. The bin rolled out into the parking lot and I kept on kicking it. I crushed its plastic ribs, I flattened it and squeezed out its soggy paper-and-crumpled-plastic guts. Inside the Baskin-Robbins, people stared but didn’t appear terribly alarmed. They were accustomed to such displays. Heat drove men insane in these parts. The manager took a stand by the door, ready to defend his tubs of flavored goo, but the moment passed when I might have stormed his glassed-in fortress and engendered the headline Five Dead In Baskin-Robbins Spree Killing—Louisiana Native Charged In Crime. I strode out to the highway, fueled by a thin, poisonous anger, and was nearly struck by a speeding Corvette that veered onto the shoulder. Dizzy with adrenaline, I gazed off along the road. Despite the vegetation, I felt I was on the edge of a desert. Weeds stirred in a fitful breeze. One day the Great Sky Monkey, sated with banana daiquiri ice cream, would drop down from the Heavenly Banyan Tree to use the place for toilet paper. I tried to calm myself, but everywhere I cast my eye I saw omens and portents and outright promises of doom. I saw a wine bottle shattered into a spray of diamonds on the asphalt, I saw a gray-haired man poking his cane feebly at a dead palm frond, I saw a sweaty twelve-year-old girl with a mean, sexy face pedaling her bicycle full tilt toward me, and I saw a black car with smoked windows idling beside a dumpster under the killing white glare of the sun.

Frank Ruddle looked like an empty leather gym bag. He had recently lost a great deal of weight, something he proclaimed loudly and often, and his skin had not tightened sufficiently to compensate. Forty-something; with thinning blond hair and a store-bought orange tan and a salesman’s jaunty manner; these attributes—if attributes they were—had been counterbalanced by dewlaps, jowls and an overall lack of muscle tone. His outfits always included some cranberry article of clothing. A tie, a pair of slacks, a shirt. I assumed this was his lucky color, for it was not a flattering one, serving to accent his unhealthiness. At the tables, prior to making a bold play, he was in the habit of kissing a large diamond signet ring. He appeared to have taken a shine to Pellerin, perhaps in part because Pellerin was an even unhealthier specimen than he, and, when sitting at the same table, he would applaud Pellerin’s victories, including those won at his expense, with enthusiasm.

“Damn!” he would say, and give an admiring shake of the head. “I didn’t see that coming.”

Pellerin, in heads-up play, let Ruddle win the lion’s share of the pots and took his losses with poor grace. Watching him hustle Ruddle was like watching a wolf toy with a house pet, and I might have felt sorry for the man if I had been in a position to be sympathetic.

We had been at Seminole Paradise ten days before Ruddle baited his hook. As Pellerin and I were entering the casino in the early afternoon, he intercepted us and invited us for lunch at the hotel’s fake Irish pub, McSorely’s, a place with sawdust on the floor, something of an anomaly, as I understood it, among fake Irish pubs. Pellerin was in a foul mood, but when he saw the waiter approaching, a freckly, red-headed college-age kid costumed as a leprechaun, he busted out laughing and thereafter made sport of him throughout the meal. The delight he took from baiting the kid perplexed Ruddle, but he didn’t let it stand in the way of his agenda. He buttered Pellerin up and down both sides, telling him what a marvelous player he was, revisiting a hand he had won the night before, remarking on its brilliant disposition. Then he said, “You know, I’m having some people over this weekend for a game. I’d be proud if you could join us.”

Pellerin knocked back the dregs of his third margarita. “We’re going to head on to Miami, I think. See what I can shake loose from the casinos down there.”

Ruddle looked annoyed by this rebuff, but he pressed on. “I sure wish you’d change your mind. There’ll be a ton of dead money in the game.”

“Yeah?” Pellerin winked at me. “Some of it yours, no doubt.”

Ruddle laughed politely. “I’ll try not to disappoint you,” he said.

“How much money we talking here?”

“There’s a five hundred thousand dollar buy-in.”

Pellerin sucked on a tooth. “You trying to hustle me, Frank? I mean, you seen me play. You know I’m good, but you must think you’re better.”

“I’m confident I can play with you,” Ruddle said.

Pellerin guffawed.

“I beg your pardon?” said Ruddle.

“I once knew a rooster thought it could run for president ’til it met up with a hatchet.”

Ruddle’s smile quivered at the corners.

“Shit, Frank! I’m just joshing you.” Pellerin lifted his empty glass to summon the leprechaun. “This is a cash game, right?”

“Of course.”

“What sort of security you got? I’m not about to bring a wad of cash to a game doesn’t have adequate security.”

“I can assure you my security’s more than adequate,” said Ruddle tensely.

“Yeah, well. Going by how security’s run at the Seminole, your idea of adequate might be a piggybank with a busted lock. I’ll send Jack over to check things out. If he says it’s cool, we’ll gamble.”

I sent Ruddle a silent message that said, See what I have to put up with, but he didn’t respond and dug into his steak viciously, as if it were the liver of his ancient enemy.

Somehow we made it through lunch. I pushed the small talk. Movies, the weather…Ruddle offered curt responses and Pellerin sucked down margaritas, stared out the window and doodled on a napkin. After Ruddle had paid the check, I steered Pellerin outside and, to punish him, dragged him on a brisk walk about the pool. He complained that his legs were hurting and I said, “We need to get you in shape. That game could go all night.”

I walked him until he had sweated out his liquid lunch, then allowed him to collapse at a poolside table not far from the lifeguard’s chair. They must have treated the water earlier that day, because the chlorine reek was strong. In the pool, a huge sun-dazzled aquamarine with a waterfall slide at its nether end, packs of kids cavorted under their parents’ less-than-watchful eyes, bikini girls and speedo boys preened for one another. Close at hand, an elderly woman in a one-piece glumly paddled along the edge, her upper body supported by a flotation device in the form of a polka-dotted snail. The atmosphere was of amiable chatter, shrieks, and splashings. A honey-blond waitress in shorts and an overstrained tank top ambled over from the service bar, but I brushed her off.

“You got a plan?” Pellerin asked out of the blue.

“A plan? Sure,” I said. “First Poland, then the world.”

“If you don’t, we need to start thinking about one.”

I cocked an eye toward him, then looked away.

“That’s why I played Ruddle like I did,” Pellerin said. “So you could get a line on his security.”

“We do what Billy tells us,” I said. “That’s our safest bet.”

Three boys ran past, one trying to snap the others with a towel; the lifeguard whistled them down.

“I did have a thought,” I said. “I thought we could tell Ruddle what Billy’s up to and hope he can protect us. But that’s a short-term solution at best. Billy’s still going to be a problem.”

“I like it. It buys us time.”

“If Ruddle goes for it. He might not. I’m not sure how well he knows Billy. He might be tight with him, and he might decide to give him a call.”

A plump, pale, middle-aged man wearing a fishing hat and bathing trunks, holding a parasol drink, negotiated the stairs at the shallow end of the pool, stood and sipped in thigh-deep water.

“I’ll check out Ruddle’s security. It may give me an idea.” I put my hands flat on the table and prepared to stand. “We should look in on Jo before you start playing.”

Pellerin’s lips thinned. “To hell with her.”

“You two got a problem?”

“She lied to me.”

“Everyone fibs now and again.”

“She lied about something pretty crucial.”

I suspected that Jo had told him he hadn’t always been Josey Pellerin. “Mind if I ask what?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I mind.”

I watched him out of the corner of my eye. His features relaxed from their belligerent expression and he appeared to be tracking the progress of something through the air. I asked what he was looking at, half-expecting him to claim that he had discovered a microscopic planet with an erratic orbit, but he said, “A gnat.” Then he laughed. “A gnat with a fucking aura.”

“You see that shit all the time?”

“Auras? Yeah. Weirder stuff than that.”

“Like what?”

“Shadows.” He fumbled in his pocket and fished out a wad of bills, napkins, gum wrappers—there must have been thirty or forty hundreds in with the debris; he selected a twenty, tossed the rest on the table and hailed the blond waitress. “Margarita rocks,” he told her. “Salt.”

“Better slow down,” I said. “If you’re going to play poker, that is.”

“You kidding me? I need a handicap to play with those old ladies.”

I let my thoughts wander, vaguely mindful of the activity in the pool, speculating on the rate of skin cancers among the patrons of the Seminole Paradise, reflecting on the fact that I had not seen a single Seminole during our stay, if one omitted the grotesque statue of Osceola in the lobby, fashioned from a shiny yellowish brown material—petrified Cheese Whiz was my best guess. The waitress set Pellerin’s margarita down on the table; her eyes snagged on the cash strewn across it. She offered Pellerin his change and he told her to keep it. He tilted his head, squinted at her name tag, and said, “Is waitressing your regular job, Tammy, or just something you do on the side?”

Tammy didn’t know how to take this. She flashed her teeth, struck a pose that accentuated her breasts and said, “I’m sorry?”

“Reason I ask,” said Pellerin, “I wonder if you ever done any hostessing? I’m throwing a party up in my suite tonight. Around ten o’clock. And I was hoping to get a couple of girls to help me host it. You know the drill. Take care of the guests. See that everyone’s got a drink. You’d be doing me a huge favor.” He reached into his other pocket, peeled what looked to be about a grand off his roll and held it out to her. “That’s a down payment.”

A light switched on in Tammy’s brain and she re-evaluated Pellerin. “So how many guests are we talking about?” she asked.

“I’m the only one you’d have to worry about.” Pellerin gave a lizardly smile. “But I can be a real chore.”

“Why, I think we can probably handle it.” Tammy accepted the bills, folded them, stashed them next to her heart. “Around ten, you say?”

“I’m in the Everglades Suite,” said Pellerin. “Wear something negligible. And one more thing, darling. It’d be nice if your friend was a Latina. Maybe a Cuban girl. On the slender side. Maybe her name could be…Thomasina?”

“Why, isn’t that a coincidence! That’s my best friend’s name!” Tammy turned and twitched her cute butt. “See ya tonight.”

As she sashayed off, Pellerin slurped down half his margarita and sighed. “Ain’t freedom grand?”

“What was that bullshit?” I said. “You’re in the Everglades Suite?”

“Three nights from now, we could be lying in a landfill,” he said. “I booked myself a suite and I’m going to have me a party.”

“This isn’t wise,” I said. “Suppose she gets a look at your eyes?”

“Did you get a load of the brain on that girl? I could tell her I was down in the Amazon and got stung by electric bees, she’d be fine with it.”

I wasn’t too sure about that, but then I was distracted from worry by thinking about Jo all alone in Room 1138.

“Yeah, boy!” said Pellerin, and grinned—he’d been watching me. “What they say is true. Every cloud has a silver lining.”

I made no response.

“Hell, if Jocundra don’t do it for you,” he said, “I’m sure Tammy and Thomasina wouldn’t mind accommodating another guest.”

“That’s all right.”

“On second thought, I believe you’re the kind of guy who needs that old emotion lotion to really get off.”

“Shut your hole, okay?”

Pellerin finished his margarita, signaled Tammy for another. I was through cautioning him about his drinking. Maybe he’d drop dead. That would let us off the hook. More people had jumped into the pool—it looked like a sparkling blue bowl of human head soup. There came a loud screech that resolved into “The Pina Colada Song” piped in over speakers attached to the surrounding palms. I was half-angry, though I couldn’t have told you at what, and that damn song exacerbated my mood. Tammy brought the margarita and engaged in playful banter with Pellerin.

“Does your friend want a friend?” she asked. “Because I bet I could fix him up.”

“Naw, he’s got a friend,” said Pellerin. “The trouble is, she ain’t treating him all that friendly”

“Aw! Well, if he needs a friendly-ier friend, you let me know, hear?”

I shut my eyes and squeezed the arms of my chair, exerting myself in an attempt to suppress a shout. Eventually I relaxed and my mind snapped back into on-duty mode. “What kind of shadows?” I asked Pellerin.

He gazed at me blankly. “Huh?”

“You said you were seeing shadows. What kind?”

“You’re starting to sound like Jocundra, man.”

“What, is it a big secret?”

He licked salt off the rim of his glass. “I don’t guess they’re shadows, really. They’re these black shapes, like a man, but they don’t have any faces. Sometimes they have lights inside them. Shifting lights. They kind of flow together.”

I laughed. “Sounds like a lava lamp?”

“Everybody’s got one,” he said. “But it’s not an aura. It’s more substantial. I see patterns, too. Like…” He poked around in the pile of money and trash on the table and plucked out a napkin bearing the McSorely’s logo. “Like this here. The whole thing creeps me out.”

On the napkin were several sketches of what appeared to be ironwork designs: veves. I asked why it creeped him out.

“When we were on the island,” Pellerin went on, “I found these books on voodoo. And while I was leafing through them, I saw that same design. It’s used in the practice of voodoo. Called a veve. That there’s the veve of Ogoun Badagris, the voodoo god of war. And this…” He pointed to a second sketch. “This one’s Ogoun in his aspect as the god of fire. I get that one a lot.” He paused and then said, “You know anything about it?”

I had no doubt that he could read me if I lied and, although it was my instinct to lie, I didn’t see any reason to hide things from him anymore; yet I didn’t want to freak him out, either.

“Jo told me she had another patient who saw this same sort of pattern,” I said.

“What else she tell you?”

“She said he did some great things before…”

“Before he died, right?”

“Yeah.”

There ensued a silence, during which I noticed that the song playing over the speakers was now “Margaritaville”.

“She told me he got to where he could cure the sick,” I said.

He stared at me. “Fuck.”

“Let’s get through the weekend, then you can worry about it,” I said.

“Easy for you to say.”

“It’s a lot to process, I give you that. But you can’t…”

“I knew she was holding back, but…man!” He picked up his drink, put it back down. “You know, I don’t much fucking care if we get through the weekend.”

“I care,” I said, but he appeared not to hear me, gazing out across the pool toward the hedge of palms and shrubbery that hid the concrete block wall that separated Seminole Paradise from a Circuit City store.

“You ever have the feeling you’re on the verge of understanding everything?” he said. “That if you could see things a tad clearer, you’d have the big picture in view? I mean the Big Picture. How it all fits together. That’s where I’m at. But I’m also getting this feeling I don’t fucking want to see the big picture, that it’s about ten shades darker than the picture I already got.” He chewed on that a second, then heaved up to his feet. “I’m going to the casino.”

“Wait a second!” I said as he walked away.

I busied myself plucking the hundreds out of the mess we’d made on the table, and I pressed the clutter of bills into his hands. He seemed startled by the money, as if it were an unexpected bonus, but then he stepped to the edge of the glittering pool and said in a loud voice, “Hey! Here you go, you lucky people!” and tossed the money into the air.

There couldn’t have been more than four or five thousand dollars, but for the furore it caused, it might have been a million. As the bills fluttered down, people surged through the water after them; others sprawled on the tiles in their mad scramble to dive into the pool. Children were elbowed aside, the elderly were at risk. A buff young lad surfaced with a joyous expression, clutching a fistful of bills, and was immediately hauled under by a bikini girl and her boyfriend, their faces aglow with greed. The water was lashed into a froth as by sharks in a feeding frenzy. Terrified screams replaced the prettier shrieks that had attended roughhousing and dunkings. One man dragged a woman from the melee and sought to give her mouth-to-mouth, whereupon she kicked him in the groin. The lifeguard’s umbrella toppled into the water. He shouted incoherent orders over his mike. This served to increase the chaos. He began blowing his whistle over and over, an irate clown with his cheeks puffed and a nose covered in sun block.

Pellerin was laughing as I pulled him away from the pool, and he was still laughing when I shoved him through the double glass doors of the hotel. I adopted a threatening pose, intending to lecture him, and he made an effort to stifle his laughter; but then I started laughing, too, and his mirth redoubled. We stood wheezing and giggling in the lobby, giddy as teenage girls, drawing hostile stares from the guests waiting in line at Reception, enduring the drudgery of check-in. At the time I assumed that we were laughing at two different things, or at different aspects of the same thing, but now I’m not so sure.

That picture of Pellerin laughing by the side of the pool, bills fluttering out above the water…it emerges from the smoke of memory like a painted dream, like one of those images that come just before a commercial break in a television drama, when the action freezes and the colors are altered by a laboratory process. Though it seems unreal, the rest—by comparison—seems in retrospect less than unreal, a dusting of atoms, whispers, and suggestions of hue that we must arrange into a story in order to lend body to this central moment. Yet the stories we create are invariably inaccurate and the central moments we choose to remember change us as much or more as we change them, and so, in truth, my memories are no more “real” than Josey Pellerin’s, although they have, as Jo would put it, more foundation…But I was saying, that picture of Pellerin beside the pool stayed with me because, I believe, it was the first time I had acknowledged him as a man and not a freak. And when I went to see him late the next morning, it was motivated more by curiosity over how he’d made out with Tammy and Thomasina than by caretaker concerns.

The door to the suite had been left ajar. I sneaked a look inside and, seeing no one around, eased into the foyer. The living room was empty, an air-conditioned vacancy of earth tones and overstuffed furniture, with potted palms and a photomural of the Everglades attempting a naturalistic touch. Everything was very neat. Magazines centered on the coffee table; no empty glasses or bottles. On the sideboard, a welcome basket of fruit, wine, and cheese was still clenched in shrinkwrap. I proceeded down the hall and came to an open door. Wearing a terrycloth bathrobe and sunglasses, Pellerin sat beside the rumpled bed, his feet propped on a table covered with a linen cloth and laden with dishes and metal dish covers, drinking champagne out of a bottle and eating a slice of pizza, looking out the window at the overcast. In the bed, partly covered by the sheets, a brown-skinned girl lay on her belly, black hair fanned across her face. Thomasina. There was nary a sign of Tammy, though the bed was king-sized and she might well have been buried beneath the covers. I knocked and he beckoned me to come on in. A big scorch mark on the wall behind his head, about the size of a serving tray, caught my notice. I asked what had happened and he told me that Tammy had shot an aerosol spray through a lit cigarette lighter, producing a flamethrower effect.

“You know those sons-of-bitches wouldn’t let me order in a pizza last night,” he said. “Is that bullshit or what? I had to bribe the bellboy.” He pointed to a Domino’s box on the floor—it held two slices fettered with strings of congealed cheese—and told me to help myself.

I declined, sat opposite him, and he asked what time it was.

“Around eleven.” I picked up a plastic pill bottle from the table. The label read:

R. Saloman

Viagra 50 mg.

1 tablet as needed.

“Who’s R. Saloman?” I asked.

“Beats me. Friend of the bellboy, maybe. The kid’s a walking pharmacy.” Pellerin scratched his chest. “Want some room service?”

“I’m okay.”

“How about some coffee? Sure, you want some coffee.”

He reached for the phone, ordered coffee and sweet rolls. Thomasina stirred but did not wake.

“Where’s Tammy?” I asked.

“In the head? Or she might have gone home. We were doing shots last night and she got sick.”

“You trying to kill yourself, man? Maybe you haven’t noticed, but you’re not in the best of shape.”

Pellerin had a swig of champagne. “You my fairy godmother now?”

“I’m just being solicitous of your health.”

“Because that was Jocundra’s job, and I shit-canned her.”

“Look, don’t get the idea you’re in charge here. You’re not in charge.”

“Oh, I’m far from having that idea. We all know who’s in charge.”

Jocundra’s voice called from the living room. “Josey!”

“In here, darling!” He gave me a wink. “This ought to be good.”

Seconds later, Jocundra materialized in the doorway, dressed in jeans and a man’s pinstriped dress shirt with the sleeves neatly rolled up. Her eyes stuck on Thomasina, then went to me and Pellerin. “I need to talk to you. I’ll come back.”

“Don’t be that way,” said Pellerin. “We’re all pals. Sit with us. We got coffee coming.”

She had another glance at Thomasina, then came to the table and took the chair between me and Pellerin.

“I spoke to management,” she said. “They’re not going to kick us out, but you’re banned from the pool area.”

“Damn!” said Pellerin. “And here I was dying for a swim.”

Jocundra started to speak, likely to reprimand him, but thought better of it. An edgy quiet closed in around us.

“You know they got a couple of live gators in that pond in the courtyard? That’s why there’s a fence around it.” Pellerin shook his head in mock amazement. “They don’t never show themselves. Can’t say as I blame them.”

Another stretch of quiet.

“I’m going over to Ruddle’s house later to see what I can see,” I said. “It’s right on the water. That might be good for us. It’s a potential avenue of escape if things go south.”

There would probably have been another interval of silence, if not for Tammy who, wearing a towel turbaned around her hair and nothing else, entered the room, said, “Oops!”, and tippy-toed to the bed, slipping in under the covers next to Thomasina. She sat up, shook out her hair, and said to me, “Is this your friend? She’s so pretty!”

“Hey, babe!” Pellerin said. “I thought you went home.”

“I was making myself sweet for you,” said Tammy in a little-girl voice.

“I’ll be in my room,” said Jocundra.

“Why you acting this way?” Pellerin caught her wrist. “Like you been wronged or something. If anyone’s been wronged, it’s me. Sit down and be polite. There’s no reason we can’t act like friends.”

Tammy, baffled, gestured at me and said to Pellerin, “I thought she was his friend.”

Jocundra twisted free and walked out. I caught up to her in the living room. “Hey, slow down,” I said, blocking the door to the suite.

She folded her arms and lowered her head, shielding her eyes with one hand, as if close to tears. “Let me by!”

“All right.” I moved aside, inviting her to leave. “You’re not helping him by behaving like this. You’re not helping me, you’re not helping yourself. But go ahead. Take a break. I’ll handle things. Just try and pull yourself together by Saturday night.”

She stood a moment, then walked over to a sofa, stood another moment and sat down.

“Why’re you getting so bent out of shape?” I dropped into a chair. “I thought you didn’t have a strong connection with this guy.”

“I don’t!”

“Then why…”

“Because I couldn’t make a connection with him. It’s my fault he’s alone.”

“He’s not exactly alone,” I reminded her.

“You know it’s not the same. He needs someone with him who understands what he’s going through.”

With two people breathing in it, the room seemed almost airless, like a room in a Motel 6 with bolted-shut plastic windows. I thought about yanking back the drapes and opening the glass door onto the balcony, but I couldn’t muster the energy.

“He’s not exercising,” Jocundra said. “He’s not taking his meds.”

“Maybe you should have slept with him.”

“I tried once, but…I couldn’t. And that’s your fault.”

I was about to ask her why it was my fault—I knew why, but I wanted to hear her say it—when Pellerin limped into the room.

“I’ve been taking my meds. And I’m not a fool.” He lowered himself into a chair, smirking at us. “You crazy kids! Why don’t you run away and get hitched?”

Jo’s startled expression waned; she folded her hands in her lap and bowed her head, like Anne Boleyn awaiting the inevitable.

“It’s no big thing,” said Pellerin. “Really. So how about we ditch the soap opera and move on?”

“I’m worried about you,” Jo said.

“Fine. Worry about me,” said Pellerin. “But don’t get all fucked up behind it.”

The doorbell bonged and a man’s voice called out, “Room service.”

“I’ll get it,” I said.

I prevented the room service guy from entering, but he peered over my shoulder as I signed for the coffee and rolls. After I had poured coffee for me and Jo, Pellerin asked if I’d see whether the girls wanted anything, so I walked back to the bedroom to check and found Tammy and Thomasina engaged in activity that would have made the White Goddess blush. I returned to the living room and, in response to Pellerin’s inquiring look, said, “They’re good.”

“We were thinking,” Jo said, “that we should have a Plan B.”

I joined her on the sofa, tore open a package of Sweet ’n Low and dumped the contents into my coffee. “I didn’t realize we had a Plan A.”

“Confessing to Ruddle,” said Pellerin.

“That’s our plan? Okay.” I stirred the coffee. “Maybe we could create a disturbance. Get away in the confusion. I don’t know.”

Pellerin said, “You’re not exactly an expert criminal, are you?”

“I’m not a criminal at all. I arrange things, I put people together. It’s a gray area.”

“He’s an entrepreneur.” Jo smiled at me as if to cut the sting of what she’d said.

A shift in alignment seemed to have occurred—judging by that remark, she had repositioned herself closer to Pellerin than to me. I wondered if she were aware of this. A cruel comment came to mind, but I chose not to make it.

“We could cause a major earthquake, and I doubt it would help,” I said. “Josey can walk pretty good, but I expect running’s going to be called for and he’s not up to that.”

Even the coffee sucked at Seminole Paradise—I set my cup down. Pellerin fiddled with the sash of his robe and Jo clinked a spoon against her cup, tapping out a nervous rhythm.

“What about the stuff I saw you doing on the island?” I asked Pellerin. “The night we had that dust-up on the beach, you were doing things with the water. Pushing waves around.”

A hunted expression flashed across his face, and I had the thought that he might be hiding something. “I can do a few parlor tricks,” he said.

“What’s your best one?” I asked. “Give us a demonstration.”

“All right.” He leaned over the table and put a napkin in an ashtray. “Sometimes I can do it, but other times…not so much.”

He concentrated on the napkin, wiggled his fingers like a guitar player lightly fingering the strings. After about twenty, thirty seconds, smoke began to trickle up from the napkin, followed by a tiny flame. He snuffed it out with a spoon. Jo made a speech-like noise, but didn’t follow up.

“That’s my biggie,” he said, leaning back. “If we had another month, I might could do something more impressive. But…” He shrugged, then said to Jo, “If we come through this, I want you to tell me about Ogoun Badagris. How that relates to me.”

She nodded.

“You know, that might have possibilities,” I said. “If you could start an electrical fire, we…”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” he said. “After you get back from Ruddle’s, we’ll talk then.”

“I’ll tell you now if you want,” Jo said. “About Ogoun. It won’t take too long.”

Pellerin suddenly appeared tired, pale and hollow-cheeked, slumping in his chair, but he said, “Yeah, why don’t you?”

I was tired, too. Tired of talking, tired of the Seminole Paradise, tired of whatever game Jo was playing, tired of listening to my own thoughts. I told them I was off to Ruddle’s place and would return later that afternoon. On my way out, I heard a hissing from down the hallway. Tammy, wearing bra and panties, waved to me and retreated toward the bedroom, stopping near the door.

“Is your friend going to stay?” she asked in a stage whisper.

“For a while.”

She frowned. “Well, I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what?”

“We didn’t bargain on a four-way, especially with another woman.”

“You got something against women? It didn’t look like you did.”

Tammy didn’t catch my drift and I told her what I had witnessed.

“That’s different,” she said primly.

“Would more money help?”

She perked up. “Money always helps.”

“I’m going out now, but I’ll take care of you. I promise?”

“Okay!” She stood on tip-toe and kissed my cheek.

“One more thing,” I said. “Jo’s kind of shy, but once you start her up, she’s a tigress.”

“I bet.” Tammy shivered with delight. “Those long legs!”

“So in a few minutes why don’t you…maybe the both of you. Why don’t you go out there and warm her up? She really loves intimate touching. You know what I mean? She likes to be fondled. She may object at first, but stay with it and she’ll melt. I’ll get you your money. Deal?”

“Deal! Don’t worry. We’ll get her going.”

“I’m sure you will,” I said.

The one salient thing I learned at Ruddle’s was that a pier extended out about a hundred feet into the water from a strip of beach, and at the end of the pier was moored a sleek white Chris Craft that had been set up for sports fishing—the keys to the boat, the Mystery Girl, were kept in a small room off the kitchen that also contained the controls to the security system. The house itself was a post card. Big and white and ultramodern, it looked like the Chris Craft’s birth mother. An Olympic-sized pool fronted the beach, tennis courts were off to the side. The grounds were a small nation of landscaped palms and airbrushed lawn, its borders defined by a decorous electric fence topped with razor wire and guarded by a pink gatehouse with a uniform on duty. There was a plaque on the gate announcing that the whole shebang was called The Sea Ranch, but it would have been more apt if it had been named The Sea What I Got.

Ruddle’s son showed me around—a blond super-preppie with a Cracker accent that had acquired a New Englander gloss. During our brief time together he said both “y’all” and “wicked haahd,” as if he hadn’t decided which act suited him best. He was impatient to get back to his tanned, perfect girlfriend, an aspiring young coke whore clearly high on more than life. She sat by the pool, listening to reggae, painting faces on her toenails, and flashed me an addled smile that gave me a contact high. I made sure to ask the kid a slew of inane questions (“Is that door sealed with a double gromit?” “What kind of infrared package does that sensor use?”), delaying and stalling in order to annoy him until, growing desperate, he gave me the run of the house and scurried back to her side.

The card room could be isolated from the remainder of the house. It had no windows and soundproofed walls, a bar, and, against the rear wall, three trophy cases celebrating Ruddle’s skill at poker. The place of honor was held by a ring won at a World Series of Poker circuit tournament in Tunica, Mississippi. It was flanked by several photographs of Ruddle with poker notables, Phil Ivey and Chris “Jesus” Ferguson and the like, who were apparently among those he had defeated. I was inspecting the table, an elegance of teak and emerald felt lit by a hanging lamp, when a lean, longhaired, thirtyish man in cut-offs walked in, holding an apple, and asked in a Eurotrash accent what I was doing. I told him I was casing the joint.

“No, no!” He wagged a finger at me. “This is not good…the drugs.”

I explained that “casing the joint” meant I was looking the house over, seeing whether it would be possible to burglarize it.

He took a bite of his apple and, after chewing, said, “I am Torsten. And you are?”

I thought he had misunderstood me again, but when I had introduced myself, he said, “You have chosen a bad time. There will be many here this weekend. Many guards, many guests.”

“How many guards?” I asked.

“Perhaps five…six.” He fingered the edge of the table. “This is excellent work.”

“Are you a friend of the family?”

“Yes, of course. Torsten is everyone’s friend.” He strolled around the table, trailing a hand across the felt, and said, “Now I must go. I wish you will have success with your crime.”

Later that afternoon as I was preparing to leave, sitting in my rental car and making some notes, I spotted him outside the house. He was carrying a Weed Whacker, yelling at an older man who was pruning bushes, speaking without a trace of an accent, cussing in purest American. There might be, I thought, a lesson to be drawn from this incident, but I decided that puzzling it out wasn’t worth the effort. While driving back to the hotel, I noticed that a motorcyclist in a helmet with a tinted faceplate was traveling at a sedate rate of speed and keeping behind me. Whenever I slowed, he dropped back or switched lanes, and when I parked in the hotel lot, he placed a call on his cell phone. Aggravated and wanting to convey that feeling, I walked toward him, but he kicked over the engine and sped off before I could get near.

A Do Not Disturb card was affixed to the doorknob of the Everglades Suite, so I went down to 1138. Jo, who had been napping, let me in and went into the bathroom to wash her face. I sat at her table and put my feet up. She came back out and lay down on the bed, turned to face me. After I’d briefed her on what I had learned, she said softly, “I’m glad you’re back.”

“I’m glad you’re glad,” I said glibly, wondering at the intimacy implied by her tone.

She shut her eyes and I thought for a moment she had drifted off. “I’m afraid,” she said.

“Yeah. Me, too.”

“You don’t act afraid.”

“If I let myself think about Saturday, I get to shaking in my boots.” I leaned toward her, resting my elbows on my knees. “We got to tough it out.”

“I’m not feeling very tough.”

I said something neutral and she reached out her hand, inviting me to take it. She caressed my wrist with her fingertip. Holding her hand while sitting on the edge of the chair grew awkward, and I moved to the bed. She curled up against me. I stroked her hair, murmured an assurance, but that seemed insufficient, so I kicked off my shoes and lay down, wrapping my arms around her from behind.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?”

“For how I behaved on the island. For this morning. You must think I’m a terrible tease. But when I see Josey like that, I feel I should comfort him, even though…”

“What?”

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

“Say.”

Her eyes teared; she pressed my hand against her breast. “It’s not him I want to comfort. You know that.”

I told her not to cry.

She drew a deep breath, steadying herself. “That’s how I was brought up,” she said. “I was taught to deny what I wanted, that I had to let it come second to what everyone else wanted.”

“It’s okay.”

“No! It’s not! I watched my mother wither away taking care of my daddy, his brothers, of every stray that wandered by. She could scarcely let a second pass without doing something for him. I swore I wouldn’t be like her. But I’m exactly like her.”

I came to realize that we were less having a conversation than engaging in a litany: she, the priestess, delivering the oration, and I, the acolyte, offering appropriate responses. And as we continued this ritual of confession and assurance, the words served to focus me on the hollow of her throat, the pale skin below her collarbone, the lace trim of a brassiere peeking out between the buttons of her shirt, until the only things in the world were the sound of her voice and the particulars of her body. For all it mattered, she could have been reciting a butcher’s list or reading from a manual on automotive maintenance.

“Feeling that way screwed up almost every relationship I ever had,” she said. “Because I didn’t feel that way. Not at heart…not really. It was just a rule I couldn’t break. I resented men for making me obey the rule, but they didn’t enforce it. I did. I couldn’t simply be with them, I couldn’t enjoy them. And now I don’t care about rules, I finally don’t care, and it’s too late.”

I told her it wasn’t too late, we’d pull through somehow.

Dominus vobiscum,

Et cum spiritus tuo.

Tears slipped along the almost imperceptible lines beside her eyes. I propped myself up on an elbow, intending to invoke some further optimistic cliché, wanting to make certain that she had taken it to heart. Lying half-beneath me, searching my face, her expression grew strangely grave, and then her tongue flicked out to taste my mouth, her hips arched against mine. The solicitude, the tenderness I felt…all that was peeled away to reveal a more urgent affinity, and I tore at her clothing, fumbling with buttons, buckle, snaps, rough with her in my hurry. She cried out in abandon, as if suffering the pain of her broken principles. Cities of thought crumbled, my awareness of our circumstance dissolved, and a last snatch of bleak self-commentary captioned my desire—I saw in my mind’s eye the image of a red burning thing in a fiery sky, not a true sun but a great shear of light in which was embedded an indistinct shape, like that of a bird flying sideways or a woman’s genital smile, and beneath it a low, smoldering wreckage that stretched from horizon to horizon, in which the shadows of men crouched and scuttered and fled with hands clamped to their ears so as to muffle the echoes of an apocalyptic pronouncement.

We spent that night and most of the next day in 1138. Every so often I would run up and check on Pellerin, but my concern was perfunctory. We stayed in bed through the afternoon and, late in the day, as Jo drowsed beside me, I analyzed what had happened and how we had ended up like this, who had said what and who had done what. Our mutual approach seemed to have been thoroughly crude and awkward, but I thought that, if examined closely, all the axiomatic beams that supported us, the scheme and structure of every being, could be perceived as equally crude and awkward…yet those scraps of physical and emotional poetry of which we were capable could transform the rest into an architecture of Doric elegance and simplicity. The romantic character of the idea cut against my grain, but I couldn’t deny it. One touch of her skin could make sense out of stupidity and put the world in right order.

About seven o’clock, simply because we felt we should do something else with the day, we walked down to the strip mall, to the Baskin-Robbins, and sat by the window in the frosty air conditioning. I had two scoops of vanilla; she had a butterscotch sundae. We ate while the high school girls back of the counter listened to the same Fiona Apple song again and again, arguing over the content of the lyrics as if they espoused an abstruse dialectic. Jo and I talked, or rather I talked and she questioned me about my childhood. I told her my father had been a saxophone player in New Orleans and that my mother had run off when I was seven, leaving me in his care. Jo remarked that this must have been hard on me, and I said, “He wasn’t much of a dad. I spent a lot of time running the streets. He was primarily concerned with dope and women, but when he was in the mood, he could be fun. He taught me to play sax and guitar, and made up songs for me and got me to learn them. I could have done worse.”

“Do you remember the songs?”

“Bits and pieces.”

“Let’s hear one!”

After considerable persuasion, I tapped out a rhythm on the tabletop and sang in a whispery voice:

“They most of them were like that one,” I said. “The old man was a bear for religion. He’d haul me down to the temple once or twice a week and have me anointed with some remedy or another.”

“I can picture you singing that when you were a little boy,” she said. “You must have been cute.”

In the darkened parking lot, I saw the black car I had noticed a few days earlier, the occupants invisible behind smoked glass. The sight banished my nostalgia. I asked Jo what she had told Pellerin the previous day when she talked to him about Ogoun Badagris.

“I told him about Donnell,” she said.

“About the big copper veve and all?”

“Yes.” She licked the bottom of her spoon.

“How about your theory? About the Ezawa process being an analog of possession. You tell him about that?”

“I couldn’t lie to him anymore.”

“What’d he say?”

“He was depressed. I told him if we got out of this situation, he’d live a long time. Long enough to understand everything that was happening to him. That depressed him even more. He said that didn’t motivate him to want to live that long. I tried to cheer him up, but…” She pinned me with a stern look. “Did you sic those girls on me?”

“What girls?” I asked innocently.

“You know which ones.”

“I was pissed at you. I’m over it now, but I was seriously pissed.”

“Then you would have been delighted by my reaction.” She dabbed at her lips with a napkin. “Once they came in, that was it for the conversation.”

“So y’all had some fun, did you?”

“Maybe,” she said, drawing out the first syllable of the word, giving it a playful reading. “I thought the dark-haired girl was very attractive. You never know, do you, when love will strike?”

“Is that right?”

“Mm-hmm. Think I should have gotten her number?”

“We could invite her on the honeymoon, if you want.”

“Is that what we’re having? A honeymoon?”

“It might have to do for one,” I said.

Not long afterward, we left the Baskin-Robbins and, as we crossed the lot, I noticed a motorcyclist, the same one, judging by his bike, who had tailed me the day before. He was parked about ten slots down from the black car. I thought Billy must be getting paranoid, now that he was close to his goal, and had doubled up on security. We walked along the shoulder through the warm black night. Moths whirled under the arc lamps like scraps of pale ash. Jo’s shampoo overbore the bitter scents of the roadside weeds. She slipped a hand into mine and by that simple gesture charged me with confidence. Despite the broken paths we had traveled to reach this night, this sorry patch of earth, I believed we had arrived at our appointed place.

There was some talk that we should approach Ruddle prior to the game, but I convinced Pellerin and Jo that the wisest course was to wait until we had a better idea of the connection between Ruddle and Billy Pitch. We held a strategy session before the limo picked us up, but since our strategy was basically to throw ourselves on Ruddle’s mercy, the meeting was more-or-less a pep rally. Pellerin, however, was beyond pepping up. As Jo and I led the cheers, he glumly flipped through channels on the TV and, instead of his usual pre-game ritual of slamming drinks, sipped bottled water.

During the drive, Pellerin sat with a suitcase full of cash between his legs, flipping the handle back and forth, creating a repetitive clicking noise that I found irritating. I rested my eyes on Jo. She had on the black cocktail dress that she wore the first time I saw her. Whenever she caught me looking, her smile flickered on, but would quickly dissolve and she would return to gazing out the window. I managed to sustain my confidence by rehearsing what I intended to say to Ruddle. But as we pulled past the gatehouse and the lights of that enormous house floated up against the dark, like a spaceship waiting to take on abductees, I felt a tightness in my throat and, the second we stepped through the door, I realized that Plan A was out the window and, probably, Plan B as well. Standing with a group of middle-aged-to-elderly men at the entrance to the living room, wearing what looked to be powder blue lounging pajamas, was Billy Pitch. Clayton was not in evidence, but close by Billy’s shoulder stood a lanky individual with a prominent Adam’s apple and close-cropped gray hair and a cold, angular hillbilly face. I recognized him from New Orleans—Alan Goess, a contract killer. Clayton, I assumed, was too showy an item for Billy to take on a trip. Seven or eight young men in private security uniforms waited off to one side, watching their elders with neutral expressions, but contempt was evident in their body language.

Ruddle steered Pellerin away and introduced him to the other players, who were dressed in clothes that appeared to have been bought from the same Palm Beach catalogue. Clad in burgundy, olive, nectarine, coral, aqua, and plum, they bore a passing resemblance to migratory birds from different flocks gathered around a feeder. He introduced Billy as an old friend, not a player.

“Not a poker player, anyway,” said Billy, giving Pellerin’s hand a three-fingered shake.

Goess’s eyes licked Jo head to toe. She didn’t seem as anxious as I would have thought, or else she kept her anxiety contained. With Goess in the picture, my best guess was that Billy planned to humiliate Ruddle, then kill him. Whatever his plans, the odds against our surviving the evening had lengthened. I tried to think of an out, but nothing came to me. Ruddle shepherded us across the living room, a considerable acreage with a high ceiling, carpeted in a swirly blue pattern that was interrupted now and again by a sofa grouping or a stainless steel abstract sculpture—it reminded me of the showroom of an upscale car dealer, minus the cars. I wanted to cut Pellerin out of the herd and tell him about Goess, but the opportunity did not arise.

A dealer had been brought in for the occasion, a motherly brunette carrying some extra pounds, dressed in a tuxedo shirt and slacks; a thin, sleek Cubano was behind the bar, dispensing drinks with minimal comment. Some of the men seemed to have a prior relationship with the dealer; they cracked jokes at her expense, addressing her as Kim. Goess and Billy took chairs on opposite sides of the central trophy case, separating themselves from each other, and from Jo and I, who sat in the corner, with Pellerin facing us at the table. Once everyone was settled and a few last pleasantries observed, Kim said, “The game is Texas Hold ’em, gentlemen. No Limit. The buy-in is five hundred thousand. Play will run until eight AM, unless an extension is agreed upon. If you go bust, you can make a second buy-in, but not a third.”

The buy-ins commenced, cash being traded for chips. The cash was placed in a lockbox and then wheeled off on a luggage cart by two of Ruddle’s employees. This done, Kim dealt the first hand.

For the better part of an hour, some chips passed back and forth, but no serious damage was done and the men bantered amiably between hands, telling dumb stories about one another and chortling, huh huh huh, like apes at a grunt festival. As best I could judge, there were two dangerous players apart from Ruddle and Pellerin—a portly man with heavy bags under his eyes by the name of Carl, who rarely spoke other than to raise or check or call, and an ex-jock type with an Alabama accent, his muscles running to fat, whom everybody called Buster and treated with great deference, laughing loudly and long at his anecdotes, though they were none too funny. The remaining four were dead money, working their cards without discernable stratagem or skill.

“We can gossip and trade antes all night,” said Ruddle, “but I call that a ladies’ bridge tournament, not a poker game.”

“I didn’t notice you stepping up, Frank,” said Pellerin. “You been betting like you playing with your mama’s pin money.”

The table shared a chuckle.

Ruddle took it good-naturedly, but there was an edge to his smile and I knew he couldn’t wait to hurt Pellerin.

Truthfully, my mind was not on the game, but on Billy and Goess. The transfer of the lockbox to the vault made it clear that Billy’s true interest did not lie in that direction. My uneasiness intensified and it must have showed, because Jo gave my hand a squeeze. The play remained less than aggressive until, several hands later, Pellerin check-raised Ruddle’s bet after the flop by twenty thousand.

“I bid five clubs,” he said, causing another outburst of laughter.

Having watched him play every day at the Seminole Paradise, I knew this was a move he had been setting up ever since he arrived in Florida. He’d backed off a lot of players with it in the casino and it usually signified a bluff, something of which Ruddle would be aware. Now, I thought, he might have a hand. The flop was the four of spades, the seven of spades, and the seven of clubs. Pellerin bet another twenty thousand. From the way Ruddle had bet before the flop, I figured him to be holding a second pair, probably queens or better. If Pellerin wasn’t bluffing, he might have a third seven. Ruddle, after thinking it over, called the raise. Everyone else got out of the way. The turn card was the queen of hearts. Pellerin pushed out thirty thousand in chips.

“You got the nuts?” Ruddle asked him.

“There’s one way to find out,” said Pellerin.

Ruddle riffled a stack of chips and finally called. “Now we’re playing poker,” he said.

The river card was the eight of spades. With four spades face up, both men had the possibility of a flush draw.

“I hate to do this to our gracious host, but I’m all in,” Pellerin said.

“Call,” said Ruddle. He didn’t wait for Pellerin to show his hand—he slapped his hole cards down on the table. Ace of diamonds and ace of spades. He had made an ace-high flush.

“You got the high flush, all right.” Pellerin turned over his cards. “But mine’s all in a row.”

His hole cards were the five and six of spades, filling an eight-high straight flush.

The other players responded with shocked “Damns!” and “Holy craps!” Having lost close to half a million on the turn of a card, when there were only a couple of hands that could have beaten him, four sevens or a gutshot straight flush, Ruddle was speechless. Pellerin had been lucky, but he had played the hand so that if the cards were friendly, he was in position to take advantage.

“If you’d re-raised on the turn, I would have folded. Shit, all I had was a draw.” Pellerin began to stack his winnings. “Who was it said Hold Em’s a science, but No Limit is an art? I must be one hell of an artist.” He waved at the bartender. “Jack Black on the rocks. A double.”

I expected Billy to be angry that Pellerin had moved on Ruddle so early in the evening, and I scrunched down so I could see him through the glass of the trophy case. He was sitting placidly, as if watching an episode of The Amazing Race, but I detected a little steam in the way his neck was bowed. Jo caught my eye and we exchanged a disconcerted vibe.

“Yes sir,” Pellerin said expansively. “You might have whupped a bunch of Leroys and Jim Bobs down in Tunica, but this here’s a different world, Frank.”

Ruddle stood and, walking stiffly, left the room. Some of the other gamblers followed him, doubtless to commiserate over the bad beat. Kim called for a short break, and Billy stepped over to me and whispered, “What’s he doing?”

“I’ll find out,” I said.

Billy’s nose was an inch from my face—I could smell his breath mints. “I want the bastard to suffer! You tell him that!”

He went to join the commiserators. I pulled Pellerin aside and told him Billy was upset.

“He’ll get his pound of flesh,” said Pellerin. “This’ll make it easier to manage the game. Ruddle will play tight for a while, and that gives me time to clear out the garbage.”

“Don’t do anything stupid,” I whispered. “The guy in the camel blazer’s a hired killer. I know him from New Orleans. Alan Goess.”

“Is he? No lie?” His eyes flicked toward Goess and he smiled. “Hey, guy!” he said to Goess. “How they hanging?”

For a split-second, the real Alan Goess came out from behind his rattlesnake deadboy guise, and I got a hint of his underlying madness; then the curtain closed and he said, “I’m doing well. So are you, from the looks of things.”

“Looks can be deceiving,” said Pellerin. “Yea, I am a troubled soul, but a firm believer in the Light and the Resurrection. How about yourself?”

“’Fraid not,” said Goess. “I’ve never yet seen anyone come back.”

“You just think you haven’t,” Pellerin said, and would have said more, but I hustled him out of the room and told him not to screw around with Goess.

“I got it under control, boss,” he said. “I know exactly what I’m doing.”

In the living room, Billy was having a chat with Carl, and Buster had cornered Jo. The other players were huddled up around Ruddle, patting him on the back, saying that Pellerin had been lucky, encouraging him to get back in the game. I gazed out the window toward the Mystery Girl, floating serene and white under the dock lights, impossibly distant.

Ruddle had had more chips than Pellerin, so the beat hadn’t wiped him out; but he didn’t have enough left to compete and he made a second buy-in of a quarter-million. The game resumed, albeit with a less convivial atmosphere. The room, small already, seemed to have shrunk and the men sat hunched and quietly tense under the hanging lamp. Conversation was at a minimum…except for Pellerin. He drank heavily and whenever he won a pot he’d offer up a disparaging comment, engaging the ire of one and all. After taking forty grand off Buster, he said, “Where’d you learn poker, old son? From some guy named Puddin’ in the jock dorm?”

Buster said, “Why don’t you shut up and play cards?”

This notion was seconded by some of the others.

“In case you didn’t notice, I’m playing cards,” said Pellerin. “Damned if I can figure out what you’re playing.”

When Buster won a pot at his expense, he said, “Jesus must love a hillbilly fool.”

I had to admire Pellerin. Though he had a distinct advantage in the game, it took great skill to manipulate the fortunes of six other poker players. Ruddle gradually built his stack, winning back the majority of the chips he had lost. His mood grew sunnier and he began to joke around with the table, but when involved in a hand with Pellerin, he was barely civil, speaking brusquely if at all. By one o’clock, two lesser players had been driven out and another was teetering on the brink, down a quarter of a million, pushing in antes and mucking his cards hand-after-hand. At three-thirty, Buster decided to cut his losses and withdrew.

“Thanks for the contribution, Busted…I mean, Buster,” said Pellerin, grinning hugely. “We going to miss you, sure enough.”

Kim called for another break and everyone made for a buffet that had been set-up in the living room. Billy gave me a thumbs-up before heading over to the food. Standing apart from the rest, I told Jo about Goess and said that we had better do something soon or else I didn’t like our chances.

“I thought we were going to wait until the last minute,” she said.

“Far as I can see, this is the last minute.”

She seemed amazingly calm. “I have go to the restroom. Just wait, okay? Don’t do anything.”

I watched her cross the living room, her long legs working the dress, hips rolling under the silky fabric, and then went back into the card room, where Pellerin was playing with his chips.

“If you’ve got something in mind,” I said, “now might be the time to try it.”

“Right now?”

“Whenever you see an opening.”

He nodded. “All right. Y’all be ready. I’ll give you a warning beforehand.” He picked up a stack of chips and let them dribble through his fingers. “Life ain’t never as sweet as it appears,” he said.

“What that supposed to mean?”

“Just my personal philosophy.”

“Fuck a bunch of personal philosophy. Get your mind right! Okay? When it comes time, I’ll handle Goess.”

“You take care of Billy. Leave Goess to me.”

“You think you up to it?”

“It’s a done deal,” he said.

“What are you going to do?”

He spread the deck of cards face-up on the table and started nudging out the painted cards with the tip of his forefinger.

“Tell me!” I said.

“I believe I may have to violate his personal space,” said Pellerin.

I would have inquired of him further, but people began to wander back into the card room, carrying plates of food. Ruddle, Kim and Carl took their places at the table. Jo patted my arm and gave me a steady look that said everything’s okay, but it was not okay and she knew it…unless she had slipped gears and gone to Jesus. Billy, Goess, and a straggler came in. I sought to make eye contact with Billy, but he stared straight ahead. The game resumed three-handed, with Carl winning a decent pot. Pellerin made his bets blind, not bothering to check his cards, tossing in chips until after the flop, and then folding. As Kim was about to deal a second hand, he stood up and said, “Gentlemen. And ladies. Before we begin what promises to be an exhilarating conclusion to the evening, I’d like to propose a toast.”

He lifted his glass. With his left hand, I noticed. His right hand was afflicted with a palsy, the fingers making movements that, though they were spasmodic, at the same time seemed strangely deft.

“Frank,” Pellerin went on. “You have my deepest gratitude for hosting this lovely occasion. I’d love to stick around and pluck your feathers, but…duty calls. I want to thank you all for being so patient with my abusive personality. Which, I should say, is not entirely my own. It comes to you courtesy of the folks at Darden, where your good health is our good business.”

“Are you through?” Ruddle asked.

“In a minute.” Pellerin’s voice acquired a sarcastic veneer. “To Miz Jocundra Verret. For her ceaseless and unyielding devotion. You’ll always be my precious sunflower. And to Jack Lamb, who—sad to say—is probably the closest thing to a friend I have in this world. What are friends for if not to fuck over each other? Huh, Jack?”

“Sit your ass down,” said Carl. “You’re drunk.”

“True enough.” Pellerin gestured with his glass, sloshing liquor across the table. “But I’m not done yet.”

Billy gave a squawk and leaped from his chair, backing away from Goess. I leaned forward and had a look. Goess’s eyes bulged, his hands gripped the arms of the chair, his face was red, glistening with sweat, and his neck was corded. He began to shake, as if in the grip of a convulsion.

“To Mister Alan Goess, who’s about to burst into flames!” Pellerin raised his glass high. “And let’s not forget Billy Pitch, at whose behest I came here tonight. I hear you like those reality shows, Billy. Are you digging on this one?”

The Cuban bartender had seen enough—he ran from the room. Buster started toward Goess, perhaps thinking he could render assistance, and Pellerin said, “Y’all keep back, now. Combustion’s liable to be sudden. Truth is, I suspect he’s already dead.”

“It’s a trick,” said Carl. “The guy’s faking it.”

Pellerin whipped off his sunglasses. “What you think, Tubby? Am I faking this, too?”

Green flashes were plainly visible in his eyes.

Ruddle threw himself back from the table. “Jesus!”

“Not hardly.” Pellerin laughed. “You folks familiar with voodoo? No? Better prepare yourself, then. Because voodoo is most definitely in the house.”

Everyone in the room was frozen for a long moment, their attention divided between Goess and Pellerin. Goess’s skin blistered, the blisters bursting, leaking a clear serum, and then there came a soft whumpf, a big pillowy sound, and he began to burn. Pale yellow flames wreathed his body, licking up and releasing an oily smoke. I smelled him cooking. Kim screamed, and people were shouting, crowding together in the doorway, seeking to escape. Billy dipped a hand into his voluminous hip pocket. I grabbed his shoulder, spun him about, and drove my fist into his prunish face, knocking him into a trophy case, shattering the glass. His mouth was bleeding, his scalp was lacerated, but he was still conscious, still trying to extricate something from his pocket. I kicked him in the gut, again in the head, and bent over his inert body, fumbled in the pocket and removed a switchblade and a platinum-and-diamond money clip that pinched a thick fold of bills. The clip was probably worth more than the bills. With millions resting in Ruddle’s vault, I felt stupid mugging him for chump change. Jo’s hands fluttered about my face. She said something about listening to reason, about waiting, but I was too adrenalized to listen and too anxious to wait. I gave Billy a couple of more kicks that wedged him under the wreckage of the trophy case, and then, shoving Jo ahead of me, glancing back at Goess, who sat sedately now, blackening in the midst of his pyre, I went out into the living room.

Ruddle’s security was nowhere to be seen, but Ruddle, Kim, and the rest were bunched together against the picture window, their egress blocked by tracks of waist-high flame that crisscrossed the blue carpet, dividing the room into dozens of neat diamond-shaped sections. It was designer arson, the fire laid out in such a precise pattern, it could have been the work of a performance artist with a gift for pyrotechnics. Beside a burning sofa from which smoke billowed, Pellerin appeared to be orchestrating the flames, conducting their swift, uncanny progress with clever movements of his fingers, sending trains of fire scooting across the floor, adding to his design. I recalled the scorch mark on his bedroom wall. Along with everyone else in this lunatic circumstance, Pellerin had been holding something back. I thought if you could see the entirety of the pattern he was creating, it would be identical to one of the veves he had sketched on the napkin that day by the pool. I maneuvered as close to him as I dared and shouted his name. He ignored me, continuing to paint his masterpiece. The fire crackled, snacking on the rug, gnawing on the furniture, yet the noise wasn’t sufficiently loud to drown out the cries of Ruddle and his guests. Some were egging on Buster and another guy, who were preparing to pick up a sofa and ram it against the window. I shouted again—again Pellerin ignored me. Bursts of small arms fire, like popcorn popping, sounded from the front of the house.

Billy’s people, I told myself.

“Did you hear that?” Jo clutched my arm.

I bellowed at Pellerin. He looked at me from, I’d estimate, twenty-five feet away, and it was not a human look. His features were strained, his lips drawn back, stretched in a delirious expression, part leer and part delighted grin. That’s how it seemed, that he had been made happy beyond human measure, transported by the perception of some unnatural pleasure, as if the fire were for him a form of release. I was frightened of him, yet I felt a connection, some emotional tether, and I was afraid for him as well. I urged him to come with us, to make a try for the boat. He stared as if he didn’t recognize me, and then his smile lost its inhuman wideness.

“Come on, man!” I said. “Let’s go!”

He shook his head. “No way.”

“What the hell are you doing? You’re going to die here!”

His smile dimmed and I thought his resolve was weakening, that he would break through the fences of flame separating us and join us in flight; but all he did was stand there. Behind me, I heard an explosive crash as the window gave way; the gunfire grew louder.

“Listen!” I said. “That’s Billy’s men out there! You want them to catch you?”

“That ain’t Billy! Don’t you believe it!” He pointed at Jo. “Ask her!”

Despite the high ceiling, smoke was beginning to fill the room, drifting down around us, and Jo was bent over, coughing.

“This shit isn’t working for me.” Pellerin seemed to be talking mostly to himself. “It’s just not acceptable.”

I understood what he meant, but I entreated him once more to come with us. He shook his head again, an emphatic no. Turning his attention to the fire, he performed a series of complex gestures. The latticework of flames surrounding us appeared to bend away from his fingers and a path opened, leading toward the kitchen. The heat was growing intolerable—I had no choice but to abandon him. My arm around Jo’s waist, I started along the path, but she panicked, fighting against me, scratching my face and slapping the side of my head. I hit her on the point of the jaw, picked her up in a fireman’s carry as she sagged, and broke into a stumbling run.

The sky was graying as I emerged from the house and staggered across the lawn; the Mystery Girl lurched in my vision with each step, appearing to recede at first, as though I were on a treadmill that kept carrying me backwards. The small arms fire had intensified—at least a dozen weapons were involved. I had no idea what was happening, and not much of an idea where I was going. If the boat had gas, I thought I would head north and search for the entrance to the intercoastal waterway, try and make it to Tampa where I had friends. But if Billy had survived, Tampa would not be safe and I didn’t know where to go. Not New Orleans, that was for sure. I could have kicked myself for not shooting the scummy little weasel when I had the chance.

The planks resounded to my footsteps as I pounded along the dock, and the smells of creosote and brine hit me like smelling salts. When I reached the Mystery Girl, I laid Jo in the stern. She moaned, but didn’t wake. I climbed the ladder to the pilot deck, keyed the ignition, and was exultant when the engine turned over. The needle on the fuel gauge swung up to register an almost-full tank. I pulled away from the dock and opened up the throttle. There was a light chop on the water close to shore, but farther out, beyond the sandbar, the surface was smooth and glassy, with gentle swells. Crumbling banks of fog blanketed the sea ahead. Once inside them we’d be safe for a while. I wondered what had gotten into Pellerin, whether it was Ogoun Badagris or simply a madness attaching to having been brought back to life by bacteria that infested your brain and let you use more of it. Maybe there wasn’t any difference between the two conditions. Jo’s first slow-burner had gone out in much the same way, in the midst of a huge veve, so you were led to conclude that some pathology was involved…and yet it might be the pathology of a god trapped in a human body. I remembered how he’d smiled, leering at his fiery work, and how that smile had planed seamlessly down into a human expression, as if the man he was had merely been the god diminished by the limitations of the flesh.

I cleared my mind of ontological speculation and focused on practical matters, but when I tried to think what we were going to do once we reached Tampa, it was like trying to walk on black ice and I wound up staring at the flat gray sea, listening to the pitch of the engine. I zoned out and began to think about Pellerin again. Formless thoughts, the kind you have when you’re puzzled by something to the point that you can’t even come up with a question to ask and are reduced to searching the database, hoping that some fact will provoke one.

I had all but forgotten about Jo and when she called out to me, I turned toward the sound of her voice, full of concern. She came scrambling up the ladder and, once she had solid footing, she told me to cut the engines, having to shout to make herself heard. The wind lashed her hair about, and she held it in place with one hand.

“Are you crazy?” I gestured at the fog bank. “Once we’re into the fog, we’ll be okay.”

“We’ll never get away! If I thought we could, I’d go with you. You know that, don’t you?”

“You are going with me,” I said. “What’s the problem?”

She didn’t answer, and I glanced over at her. She had moved away from me and was standing with her legs apart, aiming a small automatic with a silver finish. A .28 caliber Berretta. With that black cocktail dress on, she might have stepped out of a Bond movie. She had to be wearing a thigh holster. The unreality of it all tickled me and I couldn’t repress a laugh.

“Where’d you get that thing?” I asked her. “Out of a cereal box?”

She fired, and a bullet dug a furrow in the control console an inch from my hand.

I recoiled from the console. “Christ!”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

She looked sorry. Her make-up was mussed. The heat of the fire had caused her to sweat, and sweat had dragged a mascara shadow from the corner of her eye, simulating a tear. She told me again to cut the engines, and this time I complied. The boat lifted on a light swell. I heard the faint cries of seagulls—they sounded like the baying of tiny, trebly hounds. I heard another noise, then. Two dark blue helicopters were approaching from the south.

“Who the hell is that?” I shouted.

“Calm down. Please! This is…” The wind drifted hair across her face; she brushed it aside and said weakly, “It’s the only way. They’re relentless, they keep coming after you.”

“You did this? You told them where we were?”

“They always knew! They never went away! Don’t you get it?”

“You knew the whole time? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know. Not for sure, not at first. And what good would it have done? You didn’t listen to Doctor Crain.”

“I would have listened to you,” I said.

One of the helicopters positioned itself off the port side of the Mystery Girl; the side door had been slid back and someone in harness sat in the opening. I couldn’t see what he was doing. The other helicopter hovered above the boat. A gilt script D was painted on the nacelle.

“I love you, Jack,” Jo said.

“Yeah, uh-huh.”

“I do! Back at the hotel…they contacted me. They were going to step in, but I convinced them to keep the experiment going.”

“The experiment. This was an experiment?”

“I told them we might learn more about Josey if he went through with the game. Maybe that was wrong of me, but I wanted some time with you.”

I was unable to line up all the trash she’d told me about her mother, how it had warped her, with her capacity for betrayal. Yet what she had said smacked of a childish willfulness and a clinical dispatch that, I realized, functioned as a tag-team in her personality. Until that moment, I had not understood how dangerous these qualities made her.

“I can lose them in the fog,” I said.

“You can’t. You don’t know them.”

“I’m damn well going to try. You think they’ll let me go after what I’ve seen? They just wiped out twenty people!”

“I’m sure they didn’t kill them all.”

“Oh…well. Fuck! That’s all right, then.”

I punched in the ignition; the engine sputtered and caught, rumbling smoothly.

“Don’t, Jack! Please!”

“I’m fucking dead if they catch me. Do you understand? I am dead!”

The barrel of the automatic wavered.

“You’re not going to shoot me,” I said.

I pushed the throttle forward. Jo said again, “Don’t,” and I felt a blow to my back, a wash of pain. I was out of it for a while, and when I was able to gather my senses, I found myself lying on the deck, with my head jammed up against the base of the control console. I knew I’d been shot, but it felt like the bullet had come from something larger than a .28. The guy in the harness, maybe. I was hurting some, but a numb feeling was setting in. It was a chore to concentrate. My thoughts kept slipping away. Jo knelt beside me. I locked on to her face. Looking at her steadied me. “Did you…” I said. “Did you shoot…?”

“Don’t talk,” she said.

Silhouetted against the gray sky, a man was being lowered from the helicopter overhead, along with a metal case that dangled from a hook beside him. It seemed as big as a coffin. The sight confused me visually, and in other ways as well. I closed my eyes against it.

Jo laid a hand on my cheek. The touch cooled the embers of my anger, my disappointment with her, and I was overwhelmed with sentiment. Bits of memory surfaced, whirled, dissolved. She lay down on the deck beside me. She became my sky. Her face hanging above me blotted out the chopper and the man descending.

“I’ll take care of you, I promise,” she said.

Her brown eyes were all that was holding me. A gurgling came from inside my chest. She started raving, then. Getting angry, swearing vengeance, weeping. It was like she thought I’d passed out, like I wasn’t there. Half of it, I didn’t understand. She said they would regret what they’d made her do, she’d make certain I remembered everything, and I would help her make them pay. I didn’t recognize her, she was so possessed by pain and fury. She laid her head on my chest. I wanted to tell her the weight was oppressive, but I couldn’t form the words. The lengths of her hair were drowning me. Her voice, the helicopter rotors, and the fading light merged into a gray tumult, an incoherence.

“Jack…”

…Jack…

A jolt, as of electricity, to the back of my neck.

Jack…Jack Lamb…

My eyelids fluttered open.

A gray ocean surrounded me, picked out by vague shapes.

Jack Lamb…Jack…

Another jolt, more intense than the first. I tried to move, but I was very weak and I succeeded only in turning my head. Someone passed across my field of vision, accompanied by a perfumey scent. Wanting to catch their notice, I made a scratchy noise in my throat. The effort caused me to pass out.

Jack…

“Jack? Are you awake?” A woman’s voice.

“Yeah,” I said, my tongue thick, throat raw.

Something was inserted between my lips and a cool liquid soothed the rawness. My chest hurt. My whole body hurt.

“How’s that? Better?” The voice had a familiar ring.

“I can’t see,” I said. “Everything’s a blur.”

“The doctor says you’ll be seeing fine in a few days.”

I asked for more water and, after I had drunk, I said, “I know you…don’t I?”

“Of course. Jocundra…Jo.” A pause. “Your partner. We live together. Don’t you remember?”

“I think. Yeah.”

“You’ve been through a terrible ordeal. Your memory will be hazy for a while.”

“What happened to me?”

“You were shot. The important thing is, you’re going to be fine.”

“Who shot me? Why…what happened?”

“I’ll tell you soon. I promise. You don’t need the stress now.”

“I want to know who shot me!”

“You have to trust me,” she said, placing a hand on my chest. “There’s psychological damage as well as physical. We have to go cautiously. I’ll tell you when you’re strong enough. Won’t you trust me ’til then?”

I asked her to come closer.

Something swam toward me through the gray. I made out a crimson mouth and enormous brown eyes. Gradually, the separate features resolved into a face that, though blurred, was indisputably open and lovely.

“You’re beautiful,” I said.

“Thank you.” A pause. “It’s been a while since you told me that.”

Her face withdrew. I couldn’t find her in the murk. Anxious, I called out. “I’m here,” she said. “I’m just getting something.”

“What?”

“Cream to rub on your chest and shoulders. It’ll make you feel better.”

She sat on the bed—I felt the mattress indent—and she began massaging me. Each caress gave me a shock, albeit gentler than the ones I had felt initially. Soft hands spread the cream across my chest and I began to relax, to feel repentant that I had neglected her. I offered apology for doing so, saying that I must have been preoccupied.

Her lips brushed my forehead. “It’s okay. Actually, I’m hopeful…”

“Hopeful? About what?”

“It’s nothing.”

“No, tell me.”

“I’m hoping some good will come of all this,” she said. “We’ve been having our problems lately. And I hope this time we spend together, while you recuperate, it’ll make you remember how much I love you.”

I groped for her hand, found it. We stayed like that a while, our fingers mixing together. A white shape melted up from the grayness. I strained to identify it and realized it was her breast sheathed in white cloth.

“I’m up here,” she said, laughter in her voice, and leaned closer so I could see her face again. “Do you feel up to answering a few questions? The doctor said I should test your memory. So we can learn if there’s been any significant loss.”

“Yeah, okay. I’m feeling more together now.”

I heard papers rustling and asked what she was doing.

“They gave me some questions to ask. I can’t find them.” More rustling. “Here they are. The first one’s a gimmee. Do you recall your name?”

“Jack,” I said confidently. “Jack Lamb.”

“And what do you do? Your profession?”

I opened my mouth, ready to spit out the answer. When nothing came to me, I panicked. I probed around in the gray nothing that seemed to have settled over my brain, beginning to get desperate. She touched the inside of my wrist, a touch that left a trail of sparkling sensation on my skin, and told me not to force it. And then I saw the answer, saw it as clearly as I might see a shining coin stuck in silt at the bottom of a well, the first of a horde of memories waiting to be unearthed, a treasure of anecdote and event.

Firmly, and with a degree of pride as befitted my station, I said, “I’m a financier.”