Flashfire

1

He wasn’t there. The house at Colliver Pond was empty, and that was bad news. Melander and Carlson and Ross wandered the empty rooms, looked out the windows at the frozen lake, and they were not happy.

Dissension had started among them not twenty minutes after they’d left Parker at the motel in Evansville, with a handful of earnest money instead of his share of the bank job. Carlson had started it; being the driver, he was the brooder, the one with extra thinking time on his hands. “I don’t like it,” he’d said.

The other two had known immediately what he was talking about, and Melander had said, “Hal, we didn’t have a choice. We thought he’d come in. Tom Hurley would’ve come in.”

“But Hurley left. And he sent us this guy Parker, and I can’t help thinking we made a mistake.”

“No choice,” Melander said again.

“We had choices,” Carlson told him, keeping his eye on the road, Interstate 64, headed east, going to switch to 75 southbound at Lexington, aimed for Palm Beach.

Ross, seated beside Carlson up front, with Melander in back, said, “What choices, Hal? The Clendon jewels is the only thing we got, and this is the only way to get it.”

“If we were going to rob him—”

“Hey!” Surprised, a little angry, Melander said, “Rob him! Who, Parker?”

“Who else?”

“We didn’t rob him, we borrowed the money, he’ll get the whole thing, we explained it to him.”

“If you did it to me,” Carlson said, “I’d say you robbed me.”

They all thought about that for a minute, trying to imagine the situation reversed, and then Ross shrugged and said, “Okay, he thinks we robbed him. So what?”

“So maybe,” Carlson said, “we shouldn’t have left him alive.”

Ross stared at him. “Meaning what?”

“Come on, Jerry, you know what I’m saying. If we’re going to rob him, maybe we should go ahead and kill him.”

Melander, firm about it, said, “Hal, we don’t do that. We don’t kill the people we work with. How could we do that?”

“Then there he is,” Carlson said, “behind us, thinking how we robbed him. He didn’t strike me as a let-it-ride kind of guy.”

They thought about that awhile, going over their brief knowledge of Parker, and then Melander said, “We can keep in touch with him. We’ll call him, time to time, let him know we’re still gonna pay him, let him know it’s gonna be all right.”

“And make sure he’s in place,” Carlson said.

“That, too,” Melander agreed.

When Tom Hurley had bowed out of the bank job and suggested Parker to take his place, he’d given them a way to make contact, if they had to. There was a phone number, and they should ask for Mr. Willis. But they shouldn’t start off with that call, they should wait for him to make the first move, to let them know he was interested. As it happened, he’d done everything with that first move, so they hadn’t had to use the Mr. Willis number, but now they could.

Except, four days later, with their freshly installed telephone at the estate in Palm Beach, when they tried that number there was no answer. They had a go at it on and off for three days, and then Carlson said, “He’s following us.”

Melander didn’t like that. He walked around the empty living room, with the out-of-tune piano shoved into a corner, and he glared out at the terrace and the ocean and all the beautiful weather he was supposed to be enjoying instead of that icy northern shit, and he didn’t like it at all. “We left the son of a bitch alive,” he complained.

“Like I been saying,” Carlson pointed out.

“We left the son of a bitch alive,” Melander insisted, “so he’d know we were good for it, he can count on us, we’ll come through. Not so he could follow us around and make trouble. We’re busy here, we got a lot on our minds, we don’t need this shit.”

“Like I been saying,” Carlson said.

“Jesus, Hal,” Melander said, “what made you so fucking bloodthirsty all of a sudden? You never wanted to go around popping people before.”

“I don’t want to this time,” Carlson said. “It just seems to me, before we did what we did, we should have thought it through a little more.”

“Well, we didn’t,” Melander said, “and I don’t see what more fucking thought was gonna do about it. We did what we had to do, what we agreed we had to do, and we did it and it’s done and I swear to God, Hal, I want you out of my fucking face on this topic.”

“I’m just saying,” Carlson said.

“I hear you saying, and I’m tired of hearing you fucking saying, you follow me?”

Ross, speaking quietly as though in a room with some possibly dangerous dogs, said, “Maybe what we should do is go there.”

They stopped glaring at each other to frown at Ross. Melander said, “Go where?”

“Where that phone number is,” Ross said. “With a phone number, you can always get an address.”

Melander, feeling belligerent toward everybody, said, “Go there and do what? What’s the purpose?”

“Maybe there’s something there tells us where he is,” Ross said, still being very mild. “Or how to get in touch with him. And he’s supposed to have a woman there, too, maybe she knows where he is. Or maybe she should come stay with us awhile to make sure Parker doesn’t get to be too much.”

“The woman,” Melander said, nodding, losing his belligerence. “That’s a good idea.”

“I don’t know about that,” Carlson said. “Maybe that just makes it worse. First we rob him, then we kidnap his lady friend, maybe he’s gonna—”

Exasperated, Melander said, “Why do you keep worrying about how he’s gonna take it? Whose side are you on?”

“Mine,” Carlson said.

Ross said, “Let’s go take a look at the house.”

So they did, driving up the east coast to the still-icy North, and the house was in northwest New Jersey, seventy miles from New York, on a lake where most of the houses were seasonal, still shut up for the winter. The house the Mr. Willis phone number led to, behind a rural mailbox that said “Willis” on the side, was small, part gray stone and part brown shingles, with an attached two-car garage. It was surrounded by trees and brush, and it was empty.

People lived here. There was much evidence of the woman, less evidence of the man, who had to be Parker. They found three guns stashed in the house, one clipped under the living room sofa, one clipped under the bed, and one in a sliding wood panel in the garage, next to the kitchen door, just above the button to operate the overhead garage door. That last was the one that got to Carlson. He could see it: the guy makes an innocent turn to push that button, open or close the overhead door, and turns back with an S&W Chiefs Special.38 in his hand.

They could see that the woman had packed, and probably for an extended stay. But there was nothing to show where she’d gone, no travel agent’s itinerary, no notes about airline connections, nothing. There was nothing at all about Parker; his footprint was not deep in this house.

They stayed four days in the house, finding a couple of diners and a supermarket not too many miles away, waiting to see if anybody showed up or if there was a phone call. If Parker phoned, looking for his woman, they’d talk to him, see if they could cool him out, discuss it with him.

But nothing happened, no calls, no visits, and after four days Melander couldn’t stand it anymore. “And it’s fucking cold,” he said. “This isn’t where I was gonna be right now.”

Carlson said, “We aren’t doing anything here except act like jerk-offs.”

Melander, who’d been thinking the same thing, didn’t like the thought when he heard it expressed. “Jerk-offs? What are you talking about?”

“We’re sitting around here,” Carlson told him, “waiting for people who aren’t here and aren’t gonna be here and in fact are probably themselves in Palm Beach.”

“Getting warm,” Ross said.

“Fuck it,” Melander said. “Nobody’s coming here, let’s go back.”

“Like I said,” Carlson said.

They didn’t want Parker to know they’d been there, in case he did happen to drop by before the Clendon job went down, so they put everything back the way they’d found it, including restashing the guns. There was a late snowstorm, which delayed them another day and got Melander’s back up even more, and then they drove south, grousing at one another most of the way. They usually got along together, but the wait this time was getting to them, and the complication of Parker just made everything worse.

They got back to the estate in Palm Beach at almost midnight and went through switching on lights, echoing through the empty rooms, all of them looking for signs of Parker’s presence, but none of them saying so. They met again in the kitchen and Ross said, “No change.”

“Exactly like we left it,” Carlson said.

Melander opened the refrigerator and got out three beers. “Well, wherever he is,” he said, “at least he hasn’t been here.”

2

The funny thing is, she showed that condo two days later, the place where Daniel Parmitt — as if that was his name — told her about the three men who’d cheated him and who were going to steal Mrs. Miriam Hope Clendon’s jewels. And the funnier thing is, Mr. and Mrs. Hochstein from Trenton, New Jersey, loved the condo, didn’t want to haggle at all, didn’t want to look at a thousand other places, loved the Bromwich, wanted to close right this second. The first place she showed them, and they were hooked, they were hers, which has never happened in the entire history of real estate. It was a sign.

Lord knows she needed a sign. Leslie hadn’t heard from Parmitt since their discussion at the condo, and she would dearly love to know what was going on, but knew better than to call him and ask. He was a very private person, Mr. Daniel Parmitt. He would let you know how close you could get, and woe betide you if you crossed the line. She thought she understood Parmitt now, and how to deal with him. In a nutshell, he was everything that Gerry Mackenzie, her brain-dead ex, was supposed to have been but, it turned out, was not.

Gerry Mackenzie had been young Leslie Simons’s first attempt to break out of the third-rate life she’d been dealt, growing up poor in West Palm, right next door to the ultra-rich, but never being quite poor enough to just throw in the towel. No; all the time she was growing up, her mother’s favorite word had been “appearances.” They had to keep up appearances, God knows why. They had to spend money for show, not for necessities. With a divorced mom who worked as a supermarket cashier and a slightly retarded older sister who was never going to be useful for anything and was never going to marry and become somebody else’s burden, this meant for the young Leslie Simons an endless life of dreary pretense.

Gerry Mackenzie, a wholesale salesman for a big computer company, a glad-handing upbeat guy full of talk about the latest advances in the “industry,” full of expertise and inside dirt, as though he himself were just on the verge of becoming the next software billionaire, had seemed just precisely the right prince to rescue Leslie Simons from the dungeon of her life. Only after she’d married him had she discovered that her mother had been an amateur when it came to keeping up appearances; Gerry was the pro. It was all sparkle and flash with him, all salesman’s hype, all toothy grins and pay-you-back-next-week. It all came clear to her, one day in the second year of the marriage, when she’d heard two of Gerry’s fellow salesmen talking about him, and one said, “He comes on so great, but you know? He just can’t close.”

She understood there were salesmen like that, failed salesmen. (Not her, though; in real estate, she was a shark for closing.) As a talker, Gerry Mackenzie was a winner; as an earner, he was a flop. She got her real estate agent’s license during the marriage because somebody had to put food on the table, and after a while she realized all she was getting out of this deal was the opportunity to listen to Gerry gasbag all the time. Home wasn’t that great an alternative, but, until something else came along, it was better than Gerry. At least, she got to keep more of her earnings.

Was Daniel Parmitt the something else? Not to marry, God knows, or even to sleep with, but to make it possible for her to get out of here. On her own, this time. Far away from Palm Beach, far away from Florida entirely. Maybe the U.S. Virgin Islands, where she could kick back in her own little place and let the world go screw itself. On her own, strictly on her own.

Which had been the other thing she’d learned from marriage to Gerry Mackenzie: she didn’t much like sex. She never had, in the few times she’d tried it with other people before Gerry, but then she’d always assumed it was because she and the guy didn’t know each other well enough or weren’t compatible or whatever. With Gerry, they got to know each other very well, and Gerry certainly knew how to turn his salesman’s charm to the question of sex, so that was one area in which she couldn’t find him at fault.

No, it was her. She didn’t think she was a lesbian, she’d never had any interest in that direction, either. She thought it was just that she didn’t particularly need sex, so why go through with it? Messy, disorganized, and frequently embarrassing; the hell with it.

That was one of the good things about Daniel Parmitt; he didn’t mistake her interest for a sexual one, and he was too focused on his own plans to have time for irrelevancies like sex with his local girl guide. There were moments when she thought it might be interesting to go to bed with him just once, just to see what it was like, but then she’d remember how cold his eyes had been the time he’d made her strip so he could be sure she wasn’t tape-recording their conversation, and she knew that wasn’t the look of somebody interested in her body. Even today, Gerry Mackenzie would give her a better time than that, if that’s what she wanted.

It still surprised her that she’d been bold enough to go after Parmitt, before she’d known enough about him to know it was the right thing to do. Desperation, maybe, an antenna out frantically in search of a sign. Whatever it was, some instinct had grabbed her, that’s all, and said, This guy will get you out of here. He’ll get you out of here, and then he’ll get out of your life. Grab him.

Would he? Would the people he was mad at really steal Mrs. Clendon’s jewels and get away with it? Would Daniel Parmitt really take the jewels away from them? And would he really share some of the profit with her?

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

Did she have anything else going? Nothing. The commission on the Bromwich condo sale was very nice, but not what she needed. She’d known for a long time, you don’t change your life on commissions. You need a score. Somewhere, somehow, a score.

Keep healthy, Daniel Parmitt, she thought. I’ve bet the farm on you.

3

Elvis Clagg saw the whole thing, from the beginning, right there in front of him. It was incredible. It was like a movie.

At twenty-three, Elvis Clagg wasn’t the youngest member of the Christian Renewal Defense Force (CRDF), but he was the most recent recruit, having joined up only four months ago, bringing the CRDF’s strength up to twenty-nine, its highest enlistment in more than fifteen years. Still, not one of those guys had ever themselves seen anything as amazing, and they were the first to admit it. Even Captain Bob, in his years in Nam, had never seen the like, and Captain Bob was over fifty years of age.

Captain Bob Hardawl himself had founded the CRDF not long after he’d come back to Florida from Nam and had seen that the niggers and kikes were about to take over everywhere from the forces of God, and that the forces of God could use some help from a fella equipped with infantryman training.

Armageddon hadn’t struck yet, thank God, but you just knew that sooner or later it would. You could read all about it on the Internet, you could hear it in the songs of Aryan rock, you could see it in the news all around you, you could read it in all the books and magazines that Captain Bob insisted every member of the CRDF subscribe to and read.

That was an odd thing, too. Reading had always been tough for Elvis Clagg. It had been one of the reasons he’d dropped out of school at the very first opportunity and got that job at the sugar mill that paid shit and immediately gave him a bad cough like an old car. But now that he had stuff he wanted to read, stuff he liked to read, why, turned out, he was a natural at it.

They oughta figure that out in the schools. Quit giving the kids all that Moby-Dick shit and give them The Protocols of Zion, and you’re gonna have you some heavy-duty readers.

But the point is, with all the reading everybody’d done, and all the sights that everybody’d seen — and three of the CRDF troopers had done time up at Raiford, so you know they’re not exactly pansies — still and all, nobody had ever seen anything like this.

The entire troop of twenty-nine, Captain Bob Hardawl commanding, was deep in the Everglades on maneuvers, keeping up their tracking skills, learning jungle infiltration, when they heard the car. There was a road over there, of course, they’d just marched out on it, but you never heard a car on that road, it didn’t go anywhere. Just to some fallen-down shacks used to belong to alligator hunters or maybe even older, egret hunters, from when the fancy ladies up north liked to wear egret feathers in their hats. So why was a car coming this way?

Billy Joe, one of the more excitable members of the group, called, “Captain Bob, interlopers! Suppose they’re Feds?”

Feds! The deadly battle with government lawmen, always a possibility, always the threat out there waiting. Was it here now? Elvis searched the sky, clutching his Uzi to his chest, but he saw no black helicopters.

“Easy, boys,” Captain Bob called to his line of men, and held his Colt.45 automatic up in the air to signal they should stand where they were. The rest of them all carried Uzis adapted to fire only one shot at a time, to make them legal, which of course would be unadapted in a flat second once Armageddon started, but Captain Bob, as the leader, was the only one with a side arm.

“I see it!” Jack Ray called, and then they all saw it. A white utility vehicle, it was, looked foreign, moving along the road toward the curve where they themselves had turned off into the glades not five minutes ago.

Captain Bob gestured downward with the.45, and they all crouched, twenty-nine men in camouflage uniforms with greasepaint and Off! on their faces. In a minute, the car would go around that curve and on out of sight.

And then it happened, astonishingly. Instead of slowing, the car abruptly speeded up, and its right front door opened, on the side away from the CRDF, and a man fell or jumped out of it.

The car yawed this way and that, brakes on hard, tires slipping on the muddy road, and the near side rear door opened and another man came rolling out, and this one was clutching a rifle in vertical position against his chest, exactly the way Captain Bob had taught the CRDF to do, if they ever had to bail out of something big, moving fast.

The car slewed around, the first man started to his feet as though to run off into the glades, and damn if the second man didn’t come up on one knee, aim, and shoot the first man in the back. Whang! Down he went; son of a bitch!

And tried to get up. They could see him struggle as the man with the rifle got up and walked toward him and the white car finally came to a stop, and the driver stuck his head out to yell something to the shooter.

Captain Bob started yelling then, too: “Hey! Hold on there! You men stop there!”

But they couldn’t hear him, or they were concentrating too much to pay attention, so the whole CRDF watched the rifleman kick the man he’d shot to roll him down into the water, and then take aim to shoot him again up close.

That was when Captain Bob fired his side arm into the air to attract their attention.

Which it did. The driver of the car and the rifleman both turned to stare at the crouching CRDF, and then, quick as a wink, the rifleman whipped up his rifle and fired at them!

A fella named Hoby that had bad teeth and was three guys to Elvis’s left flopped backward like a cut line of wash. Just back and down.

The truth is, if it wasn’t for the CRDF, Elvis personally would have panicked at that point and gone running like a greyhound into the glades. But there was the CRDF, and he was part of it, and he stuck.

“Two lines!” called Captain Bob while the rifleman fired again and a fella named Floyd did the back-flop thing, and the remaining twenty-six troopers, with Captain Bob tall at their right end, quickly formed into two broad lines facing the foe. The front rank dropped to one knee.

“Front rank!” yelled Captain Bob as the rifleman suddenly took off running toward the car. “The vehicle!”

Which meant the rear rank, which included Elvis, was to take out the rifleman. Okay. Not much leading at this distance. Hands steady as a rock.

“Fire!”

Thirteen bullets went into the driver and thirteen bullets went into the rifleman.

The CRDF’s first military engagement. They’d taken two casualties out of a force of twenty-nine, and the opposing force was completely wiped out. As far as Elvis Clagg was concerned, the CRDF had just kicked ass.

4

“Dear,” said Alice Prester Young, “do we know a Daniel Parmitt?”

Jack Young looked up from his Wall Street Journal to smile across the breakfast table at his bride. “Who, dear?”

“Parmitt, Daniel Parmitt. It says here he’s staying at the Breakers.”

“It says where?”

“In the Herald.”

Jack Young’s smile was the soul of patience. “Dear,” he said, “why is Mr. Parmitt in the Herald?”

“Because he was shot. Not expected to live.”

“Shot!” Jack’s surprise was genuine. “Why would we know anybody that was shot?”

“Well, it says he’s staying at the Breakers, so I’m wondering if he’s here for the ball.”

“Well, if he’s been shot,” Jack said, “he isn’t likely to come to the ball.”

“No, dear, but I was just wondering.”

“If we knew him,” Jack said.

“Yes, dear,” she said, although by now she had realized that wasn’t the actual question at all. It wasn’t did they know this Daniel Parmitt, it was did she know him. Jack wouldn’t be likely to know anybody from her past, would he?

This was her first season at the beach as Alice Prester Young, after having been Alice Prester Habib forever. Eleven years; hard to believe. Before that, somebody else, before that, somebody else, who even remembers anymore?

It was very nice to bring an attractive new husband to the beach for the season, introduce him around, let the biddies turn green with envy. And it was especially nice to know that one could still look all right on the arm of such a husband. One didn’t look exactly like a girl anymore, but one certainly did look all right.

Particularly the body. Between the doctors and the dietitians and the personal trainers, it was possible, though not easy, to keep a hard youthful body forever, to offer an attentive young husband something interesting and responsive in bed. The face could be kept smooth and attractive, but never quite exactly girlish. The softnesses and roundnesses of youth can never be recaptured on the face, so the best you can hope for in that department is angular, slightly hollow, good looks, more striking than beautiful. But who could complain? At sixty-seven, to have a striking face above the body of a twenty-year-old wasn’t bad. And a twenty-six-year-old brand-new husband.

Why had she stayed so long with Habib?

Jack broke into her thoughts by saying, “Somebody shot this fellow at the Breakers?”

“No, dear, he’s staying at the Breakers. They kidnapped him—”

“What!”

“—and took him into the Everglades and shot him there.”

“Who? Why?”

“Apparently it was a case of mistaken identity. They were professional killers, and whoever they were supposed to kill they took this man Parmitt by mistake.”

“Now, that’s what I call bad luck,” Jack said, and laughed. “And besides that, he doesn’t get to go to the ball.”

“Oh, that reminds me, the auction,” she said. “Dear, would you be a dear?”

“Of course,” he said. He’d been just as attentive when he’d been an insurance company claims adjuster and they’d met after that silly automobile accident in Short Hills. Now, his bright blue eyes eager, he said, “What do you need, dear?”

“My albums,” she said. “Not last year’s, but the two years before that.”

“Coming up,” he said. He rose, smiled, folded his Journal, put it on the chair, and went off to her study, leaving her in the cool and quiet breakfast room, all pink and gold, with its view over the sea grape at the limitless ocean.

In a minute he was back with the two albums she’d asked for, both big thick volumes with padded pastel covers and glassine sheets within, inside which, every year, Alice inserted all photos and social-page stories involving her. Which meant, naturally, that most of the other important Beachers would also be seen in the various photos.

“What I’m looking for...,” Alice said, pushing her coffee cup aside and riffling through the first album, “what I want... is... yes! There, see it?”

She had found a newspaper photo showing the three co-chairs of a charity ball from two years ago, the last year Miriam Hope Clendon had still been active in society. The three overdressed women were lined up in a row to face the camera, Miriam in the center, of course, being the grande dame, with Helena Stockworth Fritz on her right and Alice on her left. But this time it wasn’t at herself Alice wanted to look, nor even at the rather portly and snout-faced Miriam, but at the necklace around Miriam’s neck, on which she tapped a mauve false fingernail.

Jack leaned attentively over her shoulder, smiling vaguely at the photo. “What am I looking at, dear?”

“The necklace, Miriam’s necklace. That’s what I’m going to bid on. I’ve had my eye on that necklace ever since I first met Miriam, oh, some years ago.”

“It’s beautiful,” Jack said, and in his eye was the glint, though Alice didn’t see it, of a man looking at a necklace he expects to inherit someday.

“We have to do a sealed bid on something to get into the auction,” she said with satisfaction, “and that’s what I’m after, and I believe I’ll get it.”

“Won’t other people bid for it?”

“Not for long,” she said. “It’s extremely valuable, you know.”

“Yes, it looks it.”

“Most people, I believe,” Alice said, “will just go for the baubles, because they won’t want to spend an awful lot of money this late in the season. Just so they take home some little thing. But I will bid on this necklace, and I’ll bid low, and because it’s so valuable it won’t come on the block until very late, when everybody else will already have their little something, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I get it for my opening bid.”

“How clever you are, Alice,” Jack said, and patted her shoulder before he went back around to his seat and his Wall Street Journal.

She continued to smile at the necklace in the photo. “What a coup,” she said. “To get that necklace cheap, and to wear it on every occasion.” Like all very wealthy women, Alice had strange cold pockets of miserliness. Her eyes shone as she looked across the table at Jack. “It will be an absolute steal,” she said.

5

Trooper Sergeant Jake Farley of the Snake River County sheriff’s department had never seen anything like this before. Four dead, one dying, all questions, no answers. Nothing but frustration, all the way around.

Starting with blowhard “Captain” Robert Hardawl and his collection of retards and misfits that he called the Christian Renewal Defense Force. Hardawl and his scruffy gang had been a thorn in Sergeant Farley’s side for years, always threatening violence, never quite going far enough to get themselves busted up and put away where they couldn’t be an offense to decent law enforcement people anymore.

Two, three times a year, Farley would sit down with Agent Mobley from the Miami office of the FBI to discuss the various hate groups and paramilitary loonies wandering around these swamps, and Hardawl and his crowd were always prominent in that discussion. And now they’ve gone ahead at last and killed two men, and there wasn’t one blessed thing Farley could do about it, because, goddammit, it was self-defense, and Hardawl had his own two dead bodies to prove it, shot with the same firearm that shot Daniel Parmitt.

Who was another frustration. Who the hell was he? Some rich fella from Texas, that’s all, spending part of the winter in Palm Beach, grabbed up by two professional killers from Baltimore either because somebody wanted Daniel Parmitt dead — to inherit his money, maybe? — or because they got the wrong man.

Being unable to ask Gowan and Vavrina who hired them because they’d been all shot to shit by Hardawl’s people, and being unable to ask Parmitt who might want him dead because he damn near was dead, unconscious and slowly slipping away, meant Farley had nobody to ask anything except Hardawl and his pack of losers, who didn’t know anything. It was enough to make a man bite his badge.

Four days. The Baltimore police and the Maryland state police had shared all the information they had on Gowan and Vavrina, which was a lot, but didn’t include the name of their most recent employer. The San Antonio police had passed on to Farley what they could find out about Parmitt, which wasn’t much: never been in trouble with the law, owned a house in a nice part of town, was loved by his bankers. The Breakers had sent along Parmitt’s possessions from the hotel, which consisted mainly of resort wear. He traveled with his birth certificate, which was about the only oddity Farley had seen in it all.

Snake River County didn’t get much of what Jake Farley thought of as big-city crime, meaning gangland killings, professional armed robbery, that sort of thing, but what they did get was all his; he was the one man in the sheriff’s department who’d been through the FBI courses and the state CID courses and had even been sent off with the help of federal funding for a couple of courses at John Jay College of Criminal Justice up in New York City; that had been an experience.

But even that hadn’t prepared him for this situation. He had the victim, he had the perps — far too many perps, in fact — he had the weapons, he had every damn thing, and yet he couldn’t have known less about what was going on if he was a brand-new baby boy. So here he was on the fourth day of the so-called investigation, seated at his corner desk in the bullpen at the sheriff’s department, trying to think of somebody to call, when his phone rang. He gave it a jaundiced look before he answered: “Farley.”

“Meany here, Sarge.”

Meany was the deputy on duty at the hospital, to report any change in Parmitt’s condition, so this was the one phone call Farley had definitely not wanted: “So he’s dead, huh?”

“Well, no, sir. The reason I’m calling, he woke up.”

Farley’s back lost its slump: “What?”

“And there’s a woman here to see him.”

“A woman? For Parmitt?”

“Yes, sir. Read about it in the Miami Herald, she said, said she had to talk to him.”

“Not before me,” Farley said. “Hold her there, keep him awake, I’ll be right over.”

The woman was a good-looking blonde of about forty with some heft to her; the kind of woman Farley was attracted to, in his off-duty hours. In fact, the kind of woman he was married to, which meant his off-duty hours were few and far between.

And this wasn’t one of them. He entered the waiting room, saw Meany standing there, saw the woman rise from one of the green vinyl sofas, and crossed to her to say, “Trooper Sergeant Farley, sheriff’s department.” He did not offer to shake hands.

She said, “I’m Leslie Mackenzie.”

“And you’re a friend of Daniel Parmitt’s.”

“Yes. I’d really like to talk with him.”

“So would I,” Farley told her. “Rank gets its privileges here. I go first, then we’ll see if the doctor says it’s all right for you.”

“I’ll wait,” she said, “however long it takes.”

So she was that kind of friend, a little more than a friend but not quite family. Farley said, “You can probably tell me more about him. We’ll talk in a while.”

“All right,” she said.

Farley turned away, giving Meany a quick frown and headshake that meant don’t-let-her-leave, then went out and down the hall toward Parmitt’s room.

This was only the second time he’d visited Parmitt, the first being shortly after the man was brought in, when visiting him was nothing but a waste of time. Parmitt was a real wreck then, shot, nearly drowned, and some of his ribs caved in.

What had happened was, he’d been shot in the back, the bullet passing through his body, hitting nothing vital, missing the spine by an inch, nicking a rib on the way out. Then the killer rolled him into the water, unconscious, and by the time the war with Hardawl’s crew was over, the fella was drowned.

One thing you had to give Hardawl credit for — and Farley hated to have to admit it — he did give his people good training, including drowning rescues and CPR. They knew enough to lay the man on his stomach, head to the side, somebody’s finger in his mouth to keep him from swallowing his tongue, while somebody else did some heavy bearing-down on his back, in slow rhythmic movements, to get the water out and start the process of breathing again. This can crack ribs, the way it did this time, and this time was even worse, because that was rough treatment for a torso that had just had a bullet pass through it, but Hardawl had realized there was no choice. If you don’t get the water out, the man’s dead anyway.

Well, he was a tough son of a bitch, Parmitt, and he survived the drowning rescue just the way he survived the shot and the drowning, but when they brought him in and Farley got that one gander at him, he sure did look like a candidate for the last rites. So what would he look like now?

Not that much better. They had the upper half of the bed cranked partway up, to make it easier for him to breathe, and his entire torso was swathed in bandages. His eyes were deep-set and ringed with dark shadow, his cheeks were sunken, and that snaky little mustache looked like somebody’s idea of a bad joke, painted on him as though he were a face in an advertising poster. His arms, held away from his body because of the thicknesses of wrapping around his chest, were above the blanket, lying limp, the big hands half-curled in his lap. He was breathing slowly through his mouth, and when he saw Farley the look in his eyes was dull and without curiosity.

A white-coated intern was in the room, looking at the patient, just standing there, and he turned to say, “Sheriff.”

Farley never bothered to correct people’s use of titles; he was in the tan uniform of the sheriff’s department, so if they wanted to call him Sheriff or Deputy or Officer or Trooper or anything else, he knew it didn’t mean much more than hello, so why fret it. He said, “How’s our patient?”

“Conscious, but barely. I understand you want to question him.”

“More than you can imagine.”

“Try to make it short, and if he starts to get upset, you’ll have to stop.”

“I understand,” Farley said “I’ve been at bedsides before.”

There were two chrome and vinyl chairs in the room. Farley brought one over to the side of the bed and sat on it, so he and Parmitt were now at the same height. “Mr. Parmitt,” he said.

The eyes slowly moved to focus on him, but Parmitt didn’t turn his head. Maybe he couldn’t. But it was a strange gesture; here the man was the victim, nearly dead, weak as a kitten, but in that eye movement he suddenly looked to Farley extremely dangerous.

Which was foolish, of course. Farley said, “How do you feel, Mr. Parmitt?”

“Where am I?” It was just a whisper, no strength in it at all. The intern, at the foot of the bed, probably couldn’t make out the words.

So Parmitt gets to ask the questions first. Okay, Farley could go along with that. He said, “You’re in the Elmer Neuman Memorial Hospital, Snake River, Florida.”

“Florida.” He whispered it like a word he didn’t know, and then his brow wrinkled and he said, “Why am I in Florida?”

“On vacation, like everybody else,” Farley told him. “Don’t you remember? You’re staying at the Breakers, up in Palm Beach.”

“I live in San Antonio,” Parmitt whispered. “I was... I was driving to my club. Was I in an accident?”

And this was something Farley had seen before, too. In bad accidents, or after bad scenes of violence, often the victims don’t remember any of the events leading up to the trauma. Later on it would come back to them, maybe, but not right away.

Unfortunate. Farley could see there was no point questioning the man now, he didn’t remember enough, and if he were told somebody out there was trying to kill him it just might put him into shock. So he said, “Yeah, you were in a kind of accident. You’re still getting over it, Mr. Parmitt. We’ll talk again when you feel better.”

“Was I driving?”

Farley had to lean close to understand the man. “What? No, sir, you weren’t driving.”

“I have ... an excellent safety record.”

“I’m sure you do, Mr. Parmitt,” Farley said, and got to his feet, and said, “We’ll talk later.”

Leslie Mackenzie was again seated on the vinyl sofa. She started to rise when Farley entered, but he patted the air, saying, “Stay there, Ms. Mackenzie, we’ll sit and talk.”

He sat at the other end of the sofa, half-turned to face her, and said, “You’re a friend of Mr. Parmitt’s. Known him long?”

“Only a few weeks,” she said, and opened her purse on her lap. “I’m a real estate agent in Palm Beach,” she explained, and produced her business card. “My card.”

He accepted it, looked at it, tucked it away in his shirt pocket, looked at her.

She said, “Mr. Parmitt was thinking of buying in Palm Beach, and I showed him some places, and we started to date. In fact, we had an appointment — to look at a house, not a date — and when he didn’t show up, I didn’t know what to think. Then I read about the — what is it? attempted murder — in the Herald, and I came here as soon as I could get away.”

Farley saw no reason to disbelieve the woman. She was who she claimed to be, and her relationship with Parmitt sounded about right. In fact, her hurrying down here all the way from Palm Beach suggested to Farley she’d had some idea of her friendship with Parmitt blossoming into something more. She wouldn’t be the first real estate woman in the world to wind up marrying a rich client. They walk into all those bedrooms together, and finally something clicks.

Well, more power to her. Farley said, “I have to tell you, Ms. Mackenzie, at the moment he doesn’t remember much. Doesn’t remember the shooting at all, doesn’t remember coming to Florida. Right now, he might not remember you.”

The slow smile she gave him was startlingly powerful. “Trooper,” she said, “or Sergeant. What do I call you?”

“Sergeant,” he said, pleased and grateful that she made the effort to get it right.

“Sergeant,” she said, “if Daniel Parmitt doesn’t remember me, I’m not half the woman I think I am.”

Farley always found himself growing awkward and foolish when a woman talked dirty in front of him. He blinked, and tried a half smile, and said, “Well, you can go and have a word with him if you like. The only thing, the doctor said, try not to get him excited.”

She laughed. After she left, he could feel the blush still hot on his face.

6

Leslie was shocked by the look of him. She hadn’t known what exactly to expect, but not this. He was like some powerful motor that had been switched off, inert, no longer anything at all. The look in his eyes was dull, the hands curled on his lap seemed dead.

Would he remember her? It had seemed to her that the best way to handle that sheriff sergeant was to give him the idea she and Daniel had something sexual going, because if that wasn’t the reason for her being here, what was the reason? Also, she could see that he was one of those men made uneasy by talk about sex from a woman, and it would probably be a good idea to keep him off balance a bit.

But in fact, if Daniel was as harmed as he looked, maybe he really wouldn’t remember her, maybe her imprint wasn’t that deep with him.

There was a white-coated intern in the room, seated in a corner on a chrome and vinyl chair, writing on a form on a clipboard. He nodded at Leslie and said, “You can talk with him, but not for long. You’ll have to get close, though, he can’t speak above a whisper.”

“Thank you.”

A second chair stood over beside the bed. Reluctant, wishing now she hadn’t come, that she’d merely telephoned to find out what his situation was — though then she wouldn’t have found out what she needed to know about the three men — she went over to that chair and sat down and said, “Daniel.”

His eyes had followed her as she crossed the room, and now he whispered, “What day is it?” The whisper was hoarse, rusty, and barely carried across the space between them.

She leaned closer. “Monday,” she said.

“Four days,” he whispered.

“Four days? What do you mean?”

“Auction.”

“What? You aren’t still thinking about that.”

He ignored her, following his own lines of thought, saying, “How do you know I’m here?”

“It was in the Herald. You were shot and the people who shot you were killed by—”

“Herald? Newspaper?”

“Yes. On Saturday. I couldn’t get here till now.”

“Leslie,” he whispered, “you’ve got to get me out of here.”

Now she was whispering, too, almost as inaudible as him, because of the intern, who was paying them no attention. She leaned closer yet to whisper, “You can’t leave! You can’t even move!”

“I can do better than they think. If I’m in the paper, somebody else could come to finish me.”

This was the subject she really wanted to talk about, and the main reason for her trip here. The three robbers. She whispered, “It’s the people you want to steal from, isn’t it? Do they know about me?”

“Different. Not them.”

That was a surprise. She’d taken it for granted it was the three men planning the robbery who’d discovered Daniel and had him shot, and quite naturally she’d wondered if they also knew about her. She whispered, “There’s somebody else? Who?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care. Just so I get out of here. Leslie.”

“What?”

“The longer I’m here, the more the cops are gonna wonder about me. My background, my name. And I can’t have them take my prints.”

“Oh.”

She sat back, considering him. He was really in a terrible situation, wasn’t he? Battered, weak, being pursued by killers he didn’t seem even to know, trapped in this hospital with police all around, and now it turns out his fingerprints would lead the police to something dangerous in his background. And the only person in the whole entire world who could help him was her.

This time, she wasn’t surprised by him, she was surprised by herself. She felt suddenly very strong. Her emotion toward Daniel Parmitt wasn’t love or sex, but it was tender. It was almost, oddly, maternal. Now she was the strong one, she was the one who could help. And she wanted to help; she wanted him to know that when he asked the question, she would be there with the answer.

She leaned even closer to him, one forearm on the bed as she gazed into his eyes, seeing they weren’t really as dull as he pretended. She whispered, “How bad off are you, really? Can you walk?”

“I don’t know. I can try.”

“In the paper, it said you weren’t expected to live. Won’t that make these other people wait?”

“Awhile.”

“All right,” she said. “I don’t know how I’ll do it, but I’ll do it. I’ll see what I can arrange, and I’ll come back tomorrow.”

He watched her leave. The intern sat in the corner, writing.

7

Mrs. Helena Stockworth Fritz was an extremely busy woman, never more so than since the death of dear Miriam Hope Clendon. There were the foundation boards to sit on, the press interviews, the arrangements for the charity balls, the lunches, the shopping, the phone calls with friends far and near, the yoga, the aura therapist, the constant planning for this or that event; and now the auction of dear Miriam’s jewelry, right here at Seascape.

And not merely on the grounds, but inside the house as well. Most times, charity occasions at Seascape were held out on the side lawn and the terrace above the seawall overlooking the Atlantic, but this time it was necessary to have the jewelry on display, and to have the auctioneer where all the attendees could see and hear him, and so it was necessary to open the ballroom at Seascape with its broad line of tall French doors leading out to the terrace and the famous view. So in the middle of all this frenzy of activity, the last thing Mrs. Fritz needed was the delivery, three days early, of the musicians’ amplifiers.

Jeddings came with the news, to the parlor where Mrs. Fritz was deep in concentration on her flower arranging. Jeddings looked worried, as she always did, and clutched her inevitable clipboard to her narrow chest as she said, “Mrs. Fritz, deliverymen at the gate.”

“Delivery? Delivering what?”

“They say the amplifiers for the musicians.”

“Musicians? We aren’t having musicians tonight.”

“No, Mrs. Fritz, for the auction.”

The auction. Yes, there would be music that night, of course, dancing and the drinking of champagne before the auction began, to loosen up the attendees. But that wasn’t till Friday, the day after the ball at the Breakers when the jewelry would first be publicly displayed, and today was only Tuesday. “What on earth are they delivering amplifiers now for?”

“I don’t know, Mrs. Fritz, they say this is the only time they can do it.”

“Let me see these people.”

Mrs. Fritz accompanied Jeddings to the vestibule, which was what they called the very well-equipped office at the front of the house, near the main door. Jeddings and two clerks operated from here, helping to keep all of Mrs. Fritz’s many charities and social events and other activities on track, and the video intercom to the front entrance was here.

Mrs. Fritz stopped in front of the monitor to frown at the TV image there. Once again, as always, that stray thought came and went: Why can’t these things be in color like everything else? But that, of course, wasn’t the point. The point was that, stopped just outside the gate, half blocking traffic, was a small nondescript dark van, containing two men. The driver was hard to see, but the passenger, a burly man with a thick shock of wavy black hair, was half-leaned out his open window, where he’d been speaking on the intercom and was now awaiting a reply.

“Tell him,” Mrs. Fritz said, “this is a very inconvenient time.”

“Yes, Mrs. Fritz.”

Jeddings sat at the desk, picked up the phone, and said, “Mrs. Fritz says this is a very inconvenient time.” Then she depressed the loudspeaker button so Mrs. Fritz could hear the reply.

Which was polite and amiable, but not helpful. Mrs. Fritz watched the burly man smile as he said, “I’m sorry about that. I don’t like no dissatisfied customers, but they give us this stuff and said deliver it today, and we got no place to keep it. We got no insurance for this stuff. These amplifiers, I dunno how much they cost, I don’t wanna be responsible for these things.”

Jeddings covered the phone’s mouthpiece with a hand and turned her worried face toward Mrs. Fritz. “We could store them in a corner of the ballroom, Mrs. Fritz. They wouldn’t be in the way.”

Mrs. Fritz didn’t like it, but she could see it was simply going to be one of those inconveniences one had to put up with, so grumpily she said, “Very well. But I don’t want to be tripping over them.”

“Oh, no, Mrs. Fritz,” Jeddings promised, and spoke into the phone: “Very well. Come in.” And she pushed the button to open the outer doors.

Mrs. Fritz could see that the burly man said something else, but this time Jeddings had not pressed the loudspeaker button. “That’s fine,” Jeddings said, and hung up, and the big wooden doors out there began to roll open.

Mrs. Fritz said, “What did he say?”

“He said thank you, Mrs. Fritz.”

“Polite, in any event. That’s a rarity.”

“Yes, Mrs. Fritz.”

“I’ll come along, see where you intend to place these things.”

“Yes, Mrs. Fritz.”

They went out to the front hallway, with the double curving staircase and the pink marble floor, cool in the hottest weather, and Jeddings opened the front door as the van came crunching across the gravel around the curving drive to roll past the entrance and then back up. “Shore Fire Delivery” was not very professionally printed in white on the doors.

The two men got out and came around to the rear of the van, the burly man smiling up at Mrs. Fritz and saying, “Afternoon, ma’am. Sorry about the inconvenience.”

“That’s all right,” she said, to be gracious, though everyone present was well aware it was not all right.

The driver was a smaller man, skinny, sharp-featured, with very large ears. The two were dressed in normal workman’s clothes, dark shapeless pants and T-shirts, the burly man’s advertising beer, the driver’s advertising the Miami Dolphins.

Why did the underclass so enjoy turning itself into billboards?

When the van doors were opened, two very large black boxes became visible inside, along with a hand truck, which the burly man brought out first. Then the two of them wrestled one of the boxes out of the van and onto the hand truck, and Mrs. Fritz and Jed-dings backed out of the doorway as the two men thumped the thing up the broad stairs and into the house. It had the usual dials and switches across the top, and black cloth across the front, and the brand name Magno in chrome letters attached to the front near the bottom.

Jeddings led the way through the house, the burly man wheeling the hand truck ahead of himself, the driver walking beside him with one hand on the amplifier to keep it from falling over, and Mrs. Fritz brought up the rear, looking to be sure their wheels didn’t hurt the parquet.

Fortunately, the placement of the display tables for the jewelry and the auctioneer’s dais had already been determined, and tables and dais were now all in place. Mrs. Fritz had not wanted to worry about details like that on the day. So they’d be able to place the amplifiers where they would not be underfoot while the rest of the preparations were being made, and would not be in a spot where it turned out something else had to be put.

It was the burly man, in fact, who suggested where to put the amplifiers. Pointing to the corner farthest from the display tables, he said, “Ma’am, if we put them over there, I don’t think they’d bother you.”

“Good,” she said, “do that, then.”

They did, and repeated the operation with the second amplifier, placing it beside the first. Then they wheeled their hand truck back to the front door, the burly man smiled his way through another set of apologies — Mrs. Fritz was gracious again — and then she went into the vestibule to watch on the monitor as the van drove away and the big doors were shut once more.

Jeddings said, “Mrs. Fritz, I’ll have staff put a tablecloth over them — you won’t even notice them.”

“Good. You do that.”

Jeddings did do that, and the amplifiers disappeared under a snowy damask tablecloth, and nobody gave them another thought.

8

“I don’t want to,” Loretta whined.

Loretta always whined, but her whines were different, sometimes merely expressing her general attitude toward life, other times standing for specific emotions, like anger or fear or petulance or weariness. This one right now was her bullheaded stubborn whine, with that extra twang in it, and rumbles of mutiny.

Time to put a stop to that. Leslie turned to her mother, across the table. “Mom,” she said, “I don’t ask much.”

Her mother, Laurel, put down her fork and frowned deeply, her leathery beige face creasing like a supermarket paper bag, because she never liked to have to mediate disputes between her daughters, between Leslie the quick one and Loretta the slow one, slightly retarded, badly overweight, never quite grasping what was going on.

The three were seated together at the dinner table on Wednesday evening, and Leslie knew she had to force the issue now because tomorrow would be the last day to try to get Daniel Parmitt out of the hospital. She’d thought and she’d thought, and this was the only idea she’d come up with for a way to slip him out of there, and it just simply required Loretta’s cooperation. No other choice.

But her mother was making trouble, as well. “Leslie,” she said, “if only you’d tell us why you want to do this.”

Which, naturally, she could not. But why should she have to? She was the provider in the family, she was the one who held it all together, how dare they question her? “Mom,” she said, forcing herself to be calm and reasonable, “this man is a friend. Not a lover, it’s not like that, a friend. He’s in trouble, and he asked me to help, and I’m going to help, and I need Loretta.”

“I don’t want to get in trouble,” Loretta whined.

“You won’t get in trouble,” Leslie told her, not for the first time. “You just do what I say, and it’ll be easy.”

“Mom,” Loretta whined.

Leslie looked at her mother. “Or,” she said, slow and deliberate, to let her mother know she was serious about this, “I could move out.” She didn’t mention, nor at this moment did she more than barely think about it, that if this all happened the way it was supposed to, she’d be moving out anyway.

Loretta looked stricken. She had only the vaguest idea what life would be like without Leslie in the house, but she understood it would be in some way horrible. Worse than now.

Their mother looked from one to the other. She sighed. She said, “Loretta, I think you have to do it.”

Loretta lowered her head to aim her put-upon look at the food on her plate. Her mother turned to Leslie: “What time will you want to leave?”

“At four,” Leslie said. “And it really will be easy, Mom. Nothing to it.”

9

Alice Prester Young knew she was a herd animal, and enjoyed the knowledge, because the herd she moved with was the very best herd in all the world. For instance, here she was, at five-thirty on this Thursday afternoon, in her chauffeured Daimler, on her way to the bank with her new husband, the delicious Jack, to pick up just the perfect jewelry for tonight’s pre-auction ball, and she knew when she arrived at the bank she would be surrounded by her own kind, chauffeured and cosseted women with attractive escorts, all coming to the bank (the only bank one could use, really) because this particular bank stayed open late whenever there was an important ball in town, just so the herd could come get its jewelry out of the safe-deposit boxes. And the bank would open again, later tonight, when the same herd left the ball and returned to redeposit their jewelry all over again.

The ritual of the bank was almost as enjoyable as the ritual of the ball itself, though shorter. The staff was quiet, methodical, servile without being obsequious. The herd cooed greetings to one another and exclaimed with pleasure over each other’s choice of which pieces to wear to this special occasion. The mirrors that the bank had installed in the rooms outside the safe-deposit vault were very special mirrors, not clear like common mirrors but tinted the most delicate gray, so that when the ladies of the herd looked at themselves as they put on their jewelry, they did not see as many wrinkles or age spots or other flaws as a common mirror might unfeelingly display. The bank cared about the feelings of the herd, and Alice Prester Young liked that, too.

How was it phrased, in that little map and pamphlet the tourists could pick up? The people of Palm Beach were “those who feel they have earned the right to live well.” Yes. Precisely. That’s exactly how Alice felt. She had — somehow — earned the right to move with this plump and comfortable herd, to ride in the Daimler with her brand-new husband, to the beach, to the ball, to the bank.

Another glorious night!

Five-thirty. Trooper Sergeant Jake Farley sat in a side booth at Cindy’s Luncheonette and drank coffee with FBI Agent Chris Mobley, a big spread-out Kentuckian with an easy grin and cold eyes. They were discussing, yet again, the wounded man from Texas, Daniel Parmitt.

“I just don’t know where else to get at this thing from,” Farley said. “The shooters are a blind alley, but every time I try to talk to Parmitt he gets all vague on me, can’t remember a damn thing. I asked him would he mind if I bring in a hypnotist, and he said yeah he did, so here I am, still stuck.”

Mobley said, “Why’d he nix the hypnotist?”

“Said he didn’t like ’em, thought they were phony.”

“If they’re phony,” Mobley said, “they can’t do nothing to him.”

“You can’t reason with a man in a hospital bed,” Farley said. “I’ve learned that a good long time ago. Man in a hospital bed feels sorry for himself and sore at the world. You can’t reason with him.”

Mobley sipped coffee and squinted toward the front of Cindy’s and the street outside. “You think he’s a wrong one somehow?”

Farley frowned at him. “How’d you mean?”

“Somebody shot him,” Mobley pointed out. “Man gets shot, usually it means somebody had a reason. How come he don’t know what the reason is?”

“He doesn’t remember the last week at all,” Farley said.

“Well, how about two weeks ago?” Mobley asked. “Wouldn’t the people with a reason have a reason back that far?”

Farley frowned deeper at that. “You think he’s fakin? Lyin? Stallin?”

“You’ve seen him, I haven’t,” Mobley said. “But the man oughta know who’s mad at him, oughta know at least that much.”

“Mmm,” Farley said, and frowned at his coffee.

“I tell you what,” Mobley said. “Tomorrow, you run off a set of his prints, fax ’em to me in Miami, we’ll check ’em up at SOG.”

Farley thought that over and slowly nodded. “Couldn’t hurt, I suppose,” he said.

Six o’clock. Leslie drove south on Interstate 95, Loretta an unhappy lump on the passenger seat beside her. Loretta was already dressed in the long tan raincoat and the wide-brimmed straw hat with the pink ribbon, and she was staring mulishly out the windshield. She wouldn’t look at Leslie and certainly wouldn’t talk to her. Loretta would go along with the plan, because she had no choice and she knew it, but she was definitely in a grade-A snit.

Well, it didn’t matter, just so she did her part. Everything was falling into place, starting with this car. Another rep at Leslie’s firm, Gloria, was what is called a soccer mom, which meant she spent all her nonworking time transporting masses of small children and all their necessary gear to sub-teen sporting events. For this purpose, her second car was this Plymouth Voyager, with the middle line of seats removed and a ramp installed that could be angled out from the wide side door to accommodate wheeled trunks full of basketballs or hockey sticks or whatever was needed. Leslie had arranged to borrow this vehicle from Gloria for this afternoon and evening, explaining she had to take her sister to a complicated medical procedure that would leave her unable to walk for a few days, and now they were on their way.

She looked out ahead, far down the straight wide road, and said with surprise, “Well, there’s something you don’t see every day.”

Loretta almost looked at Leslie, or asked what it was you don’t see every day, but she caught herself in time and went on being a lump.

Leslie watched the fire engine down there, rolling north, moving very fast in the left lane, overtaking everything on the road. “It’s a fire engine, Loretta,” she said. “A great big red fire engine. See it? I wonder where it’s going.”

Loretta finally did focus on the fire engine, having to turn her head to keep watching it as they passed one another. She actually started to smile, but then became aware of Leslie observing her, and quickly frowned instead.

“I like fire engines,” Leslie said, expecting no response and getting none.

“I like fire engines,” Hal Carlson said as they highballed north.

Seated beside him, Jerry Ross grinned. “What I like,” he said, “is fire.”

Seven-thirty. Mrs. Helena Stockworth Fritz was not part of the herd. She was, in fact, above the herd, as the whole world acknowledged, and that’s why she did not, before each ball, pay a visit at the bank.

The late Mr. Fritz (munitions, oil, cargo ships, warehouses, all inherited) had, many years ago, during a spate of politically inspired financier kidnappings, installed a safe room in the middle of Seascape, which Mrs. Fritz still used for her most valuable valuables. The safe room was a concrete box, twelve feet square and eight feet high, built under the building, into the water table but sealed and dry. A dedicated phone line in stainless-steel pipe ran underground from the safe room to the phone company’s lines out at the road, though in fact that telephone had never once been used.

If, however, some phalanx of Che Guevaras actually had launched an attack on Seascape back in those parlous times, Mr. and Mrs. Fritz would simply have locked themselves into the safe room, which included plumbing facilities and stored food, very like a fallout shelter from two decades before, and would have phoned the Palm Beach police to come repel the invaders.

That had never happened, but the room was far from useless. It was impregnable and temperature-controlled, and in it Mrs. Fritz kept her furs, her jewelry, and, in the off-season, much of her best silver. Which meant she never had to join the hoi polloi crowding around the gray mirrors at the bank.

The mirror in the safe room, before which Mrs. Fritz now stood, studying the effect she would make in this gown, with this necklace, these bracelets, this brooch, these rings, and this tiara, was not tinted a discreet gray, like the mirror at the bank. Mrs. Fritz was a realist and didn’t need to squint when she gazed upon herself. (Nor would she ever stoop to buy a thirty-year-old husband.) She had lived a long time, and done much, and enjoyed herself thoroughly along the way, and if that life showed its traces on her face and body, what of it? It was an honest life, lived well. She had nothing to hide.

Satisfied with tonight’s appearance, Mrs. Fritz left and locked the safe room, then rode the stairlift up to the ground floor, where her walker awaited. Charles LeGrand was her frequent walker, a cultured homosexual probably even older than she was, neat and tidy in his blazer and ascot, smiling from within his very small goatee. Offering his elbow for her hand, “You look charmante tonight, Helena,” he said.

“Thank you, Charles.”

They walked through the ballroom on their way to the car. Mrs. Fritz noted with approval the ranks of rented padded chairs for the bidders, now in rows facing the auctioneer’s lectern, each with its numbered paddle waiting on the seat. The platform for the musicians was in place, the side tables were covered in damask but not yet bearing their loads of plates and glasses and cutlery, the portable bar-on-wheels stood ready for tomorrow night’s bartender, and all was as it was supposed to be.

The amplifiers under their white tablecloths she didn’t even notice.

10

The Voyager’s dashboard clock read 7:21 when Leslie steered into the visitors’ parking area outside the Elmer Neuman Memorial Hospital in Snake River. Perfect timing.

In her three previous visits to Daniel here, Leslie had learned what she needed to know about the hospital routine. Was this what criminals called “casing the joint”? She knew, for instance, that visiting hours ended at eight P.M., to accommodate visitors who had day jobs. She also knew that down the hall from Daniel lay an old woman named Emily Studworth, who seemed to be permanently unconscious and to never receive visitors. And she further knew that the clerical staff at the hospital changed shift at six P.M.

Leslie shut off the Voyager’s engine and looked in the rearview mirror at Loretta. “Okay, Loretta,” she said. “We just go and do it and come right back out.”

Loretta was already in the wheelchair that Leslie had rented from a place in Riviera Beach called Benson’s Sick Room and Party Supplies. Her mulish pouting expression fit the wheelchair very well; she was great in the part.

Leslie got out of the Voyager, slid open its side door, pulled out the ramp, and carefully backed Loretta and the wheelchair down to the blacktop. Then she shut and locked the car, and pushed the wheelchair across the parking lot and up the handicap-access ramp to the hospital’s front door.

Since this was the first time she was arriving at the hospital after six P.M., the receptionist who checked the visitors in had never seen her before, and had no way to know that before this she’d always visited a patient named Daniel Parmitt. “Emily Studworth,” Leslie told her.

The receptionist nodded and wrote that on her sheet. “You’re relatives?”

“We’re her grandnieces. Loretta really wanted to see her auntie Emily just once more.”

“You don’t have much time,” the receptionist warned her. “Visiting hours end at eight.”

“That’s all right, we just want to be with her for a few minutes.”

Leslie wheeled Loretta down the hall to the elevators and up to the third floor. The people at the nurses’ station gave them a brief incurious look as they came out of the elevator. Leslie smiled at them and pushed the wheelchair down the hall to Daniel’s room, which was in semi-darkness, only one small light gleaming yellow on the wall over the bed. They entered, and she pushed the door mostly closed behind her.

He was asleep, but as she entered the room he was suddenly awake, his eyes glinting in the yellow light. She pushed the wheelchair over beside the bed and whispered, “Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“Help me, Loretta.”

Obediently, Loretta stood up from the wheelchair and removed the long coat and big-brimmed straw hat. She put them on the bed along with her purse, which had been concealed in the wheelchair. Then she and Leslie helped Daniel get out of bed.

He was stronger each day, but still very weak. The muscles in the sides of his jaw bunched and moved with his determination. He got his legs over the side of the bed, and then, with one of them on either side of him, he made it to his feet.

Leslie said, “Can you stand alone?”

“Yes.” It was whispered through gritted teeth.

He stood unmoving, like a tree. They helped him put on the long coat, over the hospital gown that was all he wore, then helped him ease down into the wheelchair. He folded his hands in his lap, to not be noticeable, and Leslie fixed the straw hat on his head.

Meantime, Loretta had sat on the bed to remove her fake-fur shin-high brown boots. She had soft pumps in her purse that she now slipped on instead.

The boots had been too big for Loretta; they were the right size for Daniel. The hat, the long coat, and the boots covered him completely. As long as he kept his head down and his hands in his lap, he would look exactly like the person Leslie had wheeled in here.

Loretta stood up from the bed, wearing the blue pumps. She had on a shapeless blue-and-white-print dress. “Do I go out now?” she asked.

Leslie considered her. “Don’t forget your glasses.”

“Oh!” Loretta took her black-framed glasses from her purse and put them on, becoming again the owlish, gawky person Leslie knew.

Leslie said, “You just walk out. We’ll be along in a minute.”

“All right.” Now that they were doing it, and nothing bad was happening, Loretta’s mood had improved considerably. She very nearly smiled at Leslie, and when she looked at Daniel in the wheelchair her expression became concerned. “He should stay here,” she said.

“He has his reasons,” Leslie assured her. “We’ll be along.”

Loretta left, and Leslie looked in the closet, expecting to find his clothes, surprised to see nothing in there at all. “Where’s your things?”

“Cops kept.”

“Oh. Well, let’s get you out of here.”

The return journey was simple, and outside, there was Loretta, waiting for them, standing over there beside the Voyager. As she pushed him across the parking lot, Leslie said, “I don’t know what you expect to do tomorrow night.”

“Kill some people,” he whispered.

11

Jack Young really did care for his new (old) wife, Alice, felt affection for her, enjoyed more about her than her money, though of course the money had come first. In fact, it had been just a joke at the beginning, when he’d met Alice Prester Habib up in New Jersey, where he’d worked for Utica Mutual as a claims examiner, and where, when he first became aware that this particular insured had the hots for him, it was nothing more than the subject of gags around the office.

It was Maureen, an older woman with the firm, computer processor, who’d put the bee in his bonnet. “You could do worse,” she’d said, and when Jack thought about it, he could do worse, couldn’t he? He’d almost done worse, two or three times.

It had been almost a year, at that time, since he’d broken up with his last serious girlfriend, or, more accurately, since she’d broken up with him. His life was a little boring, a little same-old same-old, and the idea of shaking it up in this really different and outrageous way came to appeal to him more and more. And don’t forget the money.

But the fact is, Alice was okay. God knows she was older than his mother, almost older than his grandmother, but she kept herself in shape like an NFL quarterback, and she was of an age where she had no timidity left in bed at all. So that part wasn’t so bad, and for the rest — the knowledge that people laughed at him behind his back, the term “boy toy,” which seemed to hover in the air around him like midges — fuck ‘em if they couldn’t take a joke.

Because you can take the boy out of the actuarial business but you can’t take the actuarial business out of the boy, and Jack was fully aware that he was (a) Alice’s only heir, attested to in the prenuptial agreement, and (b) likely to outlive her by forty to fifty years. Forty to fifty rich years.

So all he had to do was pay attention, in and out of bed, and otherwise be discreet. For instance, when he and Alice walked into the big ballroom at the Breakers Thursday evening for the pre-auction ball, with the tall gleaming mirrors reflecting the posh crowd, and the radiant chandeliers, and the band’s swing oldies echoing in the high-ceilinged space, and the swirl of revelers in their sprays of bright colors and gleaming gold and winking silver and sparkling jewels, the very first person he saw was Kim Metcalf, and he barely gave her a smile of recognition. She, too, with her shrewd blue eyes under the cloud of fluffy yellow hair, returned only the briefest of impersonal nods, including Alice as much as himself, before she moved on, holding to the arm of her husband, Howard, a retired tax lawyer she’d met as a stew on a first-class flight New York to Chicago. (She was still so much a stew in her heart that to this day she preferred the label “flight attendant.”)

As the Metcalfs moved on, Jack turned his eyes firmly away from Kim’s twitching creased behind within the shimmering pale blue satin, but his mind said: Saturday. The apartment Alice would never know about, down among the condos, where he and Kim managed to meet once or twice every week, came surging into his memory. Kim’s body was softer than Alice’s, which was also nice, but by now, for the both of them, the main point was to be able to have a conversation with somebody whose memory bank had not become full before you were born.

Turning to Alice and away from all temptation, Jack said, “Do you want to dance, darling, or meet people first?”

“We’ll dance, darling,” she decided. “We can always meet people.”

True enough.

The new red paint on the fire engine doors was dry, and the doors no longer read

It’s a good thing Crystal City, a sparsely populated area down near Homestead, had an Eng #2 as well, or the good folks there would be shit out of luck if a fire were to start up anywhere around town in the next couple of days. It was a volunteer fire department, like so many in the sticks, so there was never anybody around the small brick fire house except for fires and meetings, so it had been very easy, at five this morning, to bypass the alarm system and ease into the fire house and come roaring out with old Eng #1. By the time anybody started looking for it, Melander and Carlson and Ross would have finished with it.

At nine P.M., with the pre-auction ball in full swing up at the Breakers, Ross stood beside the driver’s door of Eng #1, an open quart of gold enamel paint in his left hand and an M. Grumbacher fine-line brush #5 in his right, with Melander just behind him to hold the flashlight. The fire engine now stood on the lawn at the right side of the house, out of sight from anywhere off the property. Ross, who had learned to be a passable sign painter during the first of his two stretches inside, leaned close to the door and drew the first vertical, then the U-shape to the right:

Farley’s wife had learned to sleep through the late-night phone calls, and Farley had trained himself to wake right up at the beginning of the first ring, his hand snaking out from under the covers toward the phone before his eyes had completely focused on the bedside clock: 1:14. There’d been worse.

“Farley.”

“Higgins here, Sarge,” being one of the deputies on night shift at the office. “We got a report of a missing man out to the hospital.”

“Parmitt,” Farley said.

“That’s right, Daniel Parmitt. The night administrator just called. They did their usual late-night check on the patients, and that one’s gone.”

How? He didn’t walk out, Parmitt, he wasn’t up to it. Somebody helped him. The real estate woman? Farley said, “You sent somebody over there?”

“Jackson and Reese.”

“Call them, tell them I’m on my way.” There wouldn’t be anything there; still, he’d have a look.

Damn; should’ve taken those prints yesterday.

He drove into Snake River at two in the morning in the rented Buick Regal. He’d be done here in an hour, then drive back to Miami International, have breakfast, take the morning flight west, be swimming in his own pool by midafternoon.

The woman who gave him his assignments, once or twice a year, was a lawyer in Chicago. They spoke guardedly on the phone, almost never met face-to-face, and unless he was on assignment he lived a quiet life indeed, writing occasional album reviews for music magazines. On assignment, he had a different name, different identification, different credit card, different everything. Different personality. He didn’t even listen to music, driving south and west from Miami.

The lawyer in Chicago had told him this wasn’t a rush job, but what was the point in dragging it out? Fly in, do it, fly away. “Just so it’s certain,” the lawyer had said, and he had said, “It’s certain,” because when you hired him, you hired the best. It had been certain every single time for the last twelve years.

Apparently, the client, whoever he was, had gone bargain basement the first time, brought in people who’d messed the job up, left the target alive but hospitalized. And the client really and positively wanted this target worse than sick; he wanted this target a fading memory.

He had never before had a target stationary in a hospital. And no guards on him round the clock, no steady police presence. It was almost too easy, as though he shouldn’t take his full fee for the job. Though he would. Still, it hardly seemed like work for a grown man, and he had to talk to himself as he parked the Regal on a side street three blocks from the hospital to walk the rest of the way. He had to remind himself that all assignments are serious, even if this one seemed like shooting ducks in a rain barrel. He had to remind himself that every mistake was serious and that overconfidence is the cause of more mistakes than anything else. He had to remind himself to treat this assignment just as though there might be some danger in it.

He approached the hospital catty-corner, through the parking lots. He was a tall lean man dressed all in black. One Beretta was in a holster in the small of his back, just above the belt, and the other was in his left boot. The right boot contained the throwing knife. Other than that, and his knowledge of several martial arts, he was unarmed; he never carried more weaponry than needed when on assignment.

The hospital’s main entrance and the emergency entrance around on the left side were both well lit, but the service entrance on the right was dark except for one small illuminated globe mounted on the wall above the door. He found the door unlocked — he’d have picked it if necessary — went in, and climbed one flight of concrete stairs before stepping through into a hallway. What he needed first was an operating room.

He avoided the lit-up nurse’s stations, moved through the halls, and soon found what he was looking for. And in the scrub-up room next door were several clean sets of green O.R. coats and pants. He took the largest set and put them on over his clothing; then he’d be able to move more freely along the halls, though still keeping out of other people’s way.

There had been no way to find out ahead of time what room the target was in, so all he could do was walk the halls and look at the patient names stuck into the labels outside the doors. How long could it take? Half an hour?

Less. Fifteen minutes after he entered the hospital, he came to the third-floor door labeled “Parmitt,” and without breaking stride or looking around he walked right in. Never pause and look indecisive, it attracts attention.

The target should be asleep; the knife would probably do. He crossed the dim room to the bed, starting to reach down toward his right boot, then realized the bed was empty.

Bathroom? Not away to therapy or anything like that, not at this hour. He looked around, saw the closed bathroom door, and walked around the bed.

He was almost to the bathroom when someone entered the room behind him, saying, “Doctor, we’d rather nobody touched anything in — what the hell, we can turn the light on.”

He spun around as the overhead fluorescents flickered on, and saw the rangy man in tan sheriff’s uniform in the doorway, and thought, I can be a doctor. Thirty seconds and I’m out of here.

“Whatever you say, Sheriff,” he said with an easy smile, and started toward the door.

But the sheriff was suddenly frowning. “What’s that under your scrubs?”

He wasn’t prepared for in-close observation. “Just my shirt, Sheriff,” he said, already stooping toward the boot with the Beretta in it, as he casually talked on, saying, “I get chilly at night.”

“Stop,” the sheriff said, and all at once had his side arm out and aimed, in the classic two-handed bent-kneed stance. “Straighten up with your hands empty,” he said.

He didn’t dare bend any more, but he didn’t straighten either. “Sheriff? What the heck are you doing?”

“I always hit what I aim at,” the sheriff told him. “And with you, what I’ll aim at is your knee.” Then he raised his voice, shouting toward the doorway behind him: “Reese! Jackson!”

He heard the rumble of running footsteps as he said, “Sheriff? I don’t know what your problem—”

Two uniformed deputies appeared in the doorway, trying not to look excited, one of them black, the other one white. The black, staring, said, “Sarge? Who’s this?”

“Exhibit one,” the sheriff said. His hands holding that automatic were as solid as a rock. “You two search him, see what armament he’s got on him.”

He thought: Can I go through the window? Thick plate glass, I’d either bounce off or get cut to pieces on the way out. Third floor. Three of them; what to do?

The deputies approached him, keeping out of their sergeant’s line of fire. The sergeant said, “If it happens you do have to shoot the son of a bitch, take out his legs. This one we’re gonna keep alive.”

12

After lunch, Leslie went shopping for Daniel, using the list he’d given her of his sizes. He had nothing, so she bought two sets of everything from the skin out, plus one pair of black loafers, and a small canvas bag to put it all in. It stretched her credit card, but he had given her a bank to call in San Antonio and a PIN, and the man there had confirmed that ten thousand dollars would be shifted to the real estate agency’s escrow account by noon tomorrow, where she’d be able to withdraw it without trouble.

Be nice to have a banker in San Antonio who’d wire you ten thousand dollars whenever you felt like it. Be nice to understand Daniel Parmitt, too, but she doubted she ever would.

Done shopping and with the canvas bag in the trunk of her car, she next showed seven condos to a couple from Branson, Missouri, who didn’t like any of them, and when she got back to the office Sergeant Farley was there, the sheriff from Snake River.

She’d been expecting this, she having been Daniel’s only visitor in the hospital, but it still frightened her when she saw the man standing beside her desk in his crisp tan uniform. It made her tense up, suddenly unsure of her ability to deceive him.

“Why, Sergeant,” she said, smiling, coming boldly forward, “what brings you here?” Then, affecting sudden concern to hide her nervousness, she said, “Has something happened? Is Daniel all right?”

“Something happened, okay,” he said, and gestured at the client chair beside her desk. “Okay if we sit for a minute?”

“Of course. Do.”

She was aware of the other reps throwing little surreptitious glances in this direction, but they were the least of her worries. She’d intended to bring Daniel his new clothes after writing up this afternoon’s wasted work, but did she dare, with Sergeant Farley around?

They sat turned toward one another, and he said, “To come right out with it, Parmitt’s gone.”

She acted as though she didn’t understand. “Gone? You don’t mean — no. I don’t know what you mean.”

“He left the hospital last night,” Farley said.

“But how could he? He’s so weak.”

“We figure,” Farley said, “somebody gave him some help. I was wondering, would that be you?”

“Me?” Don’t overplay this, she told herself. “He never asked me,” she said, then frowned at the papers on her desk as she said, “I don’t even think I would. He shouldn’t be out of the hospital, he’s too sick.” Then she looked at Farley again, saw him coolly watching her, and said, “He shouldn’t be anywhere else. Are you looking for him?”

“Checked all the motels round about,” he told her. “Talked to the cabbies, checked the bus terminal. Got no cars stolen. You’re right, Parmitt didn’t go out of there on his own, he had help.”

“Well, it wasn’t me,” she said. “Last night, was it?”

“Sometime before one. Between eight and one, we figure.”

“I was home,” she said, “with my mother and my sister, watching TV. I don’t know if your own family is considered a good alibi, but that’s where I was.”

“Okay,” he said, then seemed to think things over for a minute. “The point is,” he said, “anybody around Parmitt is likely to be in trouble.”

“For helping him, you mean.”

“No, a different kind of trouble. We caught a fella in the hospital last night, came there to kill our Mr. Parmitt.”

That did astonish her. “My God! No!”

“Yes. Might of slipped in and out, nobody the wiser, except we were already on the scene, account of Parmitt being gone. So now we got this fella, and pretty soon he’ll tell us who hired him, and then we’ll learn a lot more about Daniel Parmitt than we know right now.”

“Good,” she said.

“But the thing is,” Farley told her, “this is the second try at him we know about, the first being the gunshot put him in the hospital. Before we catch up with the fella that’s paying for all this, some other goon might catch up with Parmitt. And probably anybody standing too close to him.”

“Thank you, Sergeant,” she said. “I understand what you’re saying. Just in case I am involved with Daniel, I should know to watch out. But I’m not.” The laugh she offered was almost completely real. “Speeding tickets is as big a criminal as I’ve ever been.”

“Good, keep it that way,” he said, and got to his feet, at last. She also rose, as he said, “If you hear from him, I’d appreciate a call.”

“Absolutely,” she said. “And if you find out anything about him, would you let me know?”

“Will do.” He extended a hand. “Nice to meet you, Ms. Mackenzie.”

He’s got a thing for me, she thought, as they shook hands, but he’d never show it in a million years. She said, “I guess I can cross Daniel Parmitt off my list of eligible bachelors.”

His grin was just a little sour. “Good idea,” he said.

She had Daniel stashed in the condo where he’d first told her about the three men who planned to rob tonight’s jewelry auction. That condo had now been sold, by her, but the closing hadn’t happened yet, so nobody would have any reason to go in there for a couple of weeks. She’d brought him in last night, with the help of Loretta, who was suddenly happy and perky and full of good cheer now that the scary part was over, and they’d left him with milk and candy bars and two blankets.

Now, once she was sure Farley wasn’t still around and following her, she drove back down to the condo, carried the canvas bag in with her, and found Parker seated on the bench on the terrace, where they’d talked the first time. He had one of the blankets wrapped around himself.

“I have clothes for you,” she said, and showed him the canvas bag.

He got up stiffly, but he could move better today than last night. He took the bag from her and went off to another room, and when he came back, dressed, he looked almost his normal self, but more gaunt, and still moving slowly. “I could use a razor,” he said as he sat on the terrace bench again. His voice at last was above a whisper, was now a hoarse burr, like a palm brushing corduroy.

She sat beside him, saying, “Okay. Anything else?”

“Can you pick me up at seven-thirty?”

“Daniel, you still want to go after those people? Tonight?”

“Tonight’s when they’re doing it.”

“But you’re — I don’t suppose I could argue you out of it.”

“If you argue me out of it,” he said, “you don’t get anything.”

“If they kill you I don’t get anything either.”

“Maybe it won’t happen.”

“Maybe,” she said, giving up. “Sergeant Farley came to see me this afternoon.”

He watched her. “Did he worry you?”

“A little,” she admitted. “But he had more news.”

“What?”

She told him about the hired killer Farley had captured. He grunted at that and said, “That’s the end of it, then.”

“But who is he? Who’s after you like this?”

“The stupid thing is,” he said, “I don’t know. The guy’s making trouble, and he doesn’t have to.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I got some identification from a guy,” he said.

“Daniel Parmitt’s identification?”

He shrugged. “He’s a guy who does that kind of thing. He did it for somebody else, South American or Central American I think, maybe a drug guy or a general, whoever. Turns out that guy wants to erase anybody knows about his changeover. He sent people to kill the guy did the work for him. I was there, he thinks I know his story, too, he’s tracking me down. Only now the law’s gonna follow the string back from the guy they just nabbed, and they’re gonna find him, and his cover’s blown. He must be wanted badly somewhere, and it’ll come out. You’ll read about it in the papers, a month or two from now, some guy everybody’s after, he suddenly pops up.”

“But you’re not concerned about him,” she said. “He tries to kill you, and it doesn’t matter to you. These other people, you feel they cheated you, that’s all, but you won’t give up.”

“The other guy’s gonna self-destruct,” he told her. “He has to, he’s too stupid to last. He’s somebody used to power, not brains. But these three are mechanics, we had an understanding, they broke it. They don’t do that.” He shrugged. “It makes sense, or it doesn’t.”

Did anything about Daniel Parmitt make sense? Getting to her feet, she said, “I’ll see you at seven-thirty. With the razor.”

13

At seven, the big doors were opened onto the driveway to Mrs. Fritz’s house, and the police car drove in to park just off the gravel, facing out. The private security people set up their lectern on the left side of the entrance and stood around waiting, but no one was going to be unfashionably on time, and the first guests didn’t arrive till seven-twelve.

Each car stopped at the lectern, where the driver handed over to the guard the invitation the guest had received last night after making his sealed bid on one of the items up for auction. The guard checked the invitation against the list on his lectern, then politely nodded the guest through. At the main entrance, staff opened the car doors, the partygoers emerged, the driver was given a claim check, and the car was driven by a valet around to the parking area at the side.

Just over half a mile to the south, Melander and Carlson and Ross had started to dress. Stacked on the dining room table and on the floor were their fire boots, their rubberized gloves, red fire helmets, and black turnout coats with the reflective horizontal yellow stripes and, in block yellow letters on the back, PBFD. Leaning against a wall were their three black air canisters, also with PBFD on them in block white letters. When completely dressed, their visored eyeguards and the mouthpieces from their air canisters would cover their faces entirely.

“I love a costume party,” Ross said.

A few miles farther south, Leslie stood in the bathroom doorway and watched Daniel shave off that ridiculous little mustache. It changed him. Without the mustache, he was a hard man, very cold. She realized with surprise that, if she’d seen him this way at first, she wouldn’t have dared approach him.

He was still battered, though, and she didn’t see how he could hope to beat those three men. He’d stripped to the waist to shave, and his torso was still swathed in bandages, partly because of the bullet holes front and back but mostly because of the broken ribs. Why wouldn’t they just ride right over him?

And what happens to me? she wondered.

Mrs. Fritz’s ballroom quickly filled. All the men wore essentially what they’d worn at the Breakers last night, and all the women wore something strikingly different. Staff moved among them with canapés and champagne, and special lights gleamed on the display tables where the jewelry was arrayed. Maroon velvet ropes kept the guests from getting within reaching distance of the jewelry. Everybody was here now except the musicians, who would arrive later, and play for dancing after the auction was complete. To one side, Mrs. Fritz and the auctioneer, a professional man who’d worked any number of charity balls around here over the years, consulted together about timing.

“I think it’s time,” Melander said, and the three of them, encumbered in their full firefighter gear, tromped out of the house and around to the fire engine parked at the side. Carlson climbed up behind the wheel while Melander and Ross took up standing positions on the outside of the fire engine, just to increase the visual plausibility of the thing.

Carlson said, “Ready?” and the other two agreed they were ready. Carlson picked up the two small radio transmitters from the seat beside him and pressed down on the buttons.

In the ballroom, the incendiary rockets came thundering out of the amplifiers still in the corner. Some of the rockets flew straight up, to embed themselves in the ceiling and spray sparks and flame onto the people below. Some shot directly back into the wall, gouting flame and smoke, and the rest drilled down into the floor. None were aimed at the guests or the display tables of jewelry.

Shocking heat and noise and smoke abruptly filled the room. No one knew what had happened, where this sudden disaster had come from. A lot of people thought rockets were being fired from outside the house. Everybody milled around in sudden fear, trying to find a way out. The display tables and the auctioneer’s stand blocked the terrace doors, so the only way out was through the broad interior doorway into the rest of the house. People jammed together, making a bottleneck in the doorway, clawing to get through.

Outside, the police and the security guards stared in amazement at the sudden fire burning on the roof, listened unbelievingly to the screams from inside the house, gaped at each other in bewilderment, not knowing what they were supposed to do. Then, almost immediately it seemed, they felt the great relief of hearing that approaching siren.

The fire engine came rushing up from the south, red lights flashing, siren yowling. Police and guards cleared everybody out of the entranceway, and the fire engine went tearing around the curve, Melander and Ross clinging to the handholds, the fire engine rushing full tilt at the house, where the first of the fleeing guests were just now beginning to stagger out into the clear night air.

Carlson didn’t hit the brake until the very last second, the big fire engine spewing gravel as it shuddered to a stop. He switched off the motor and took the key with him, to cause a little extra trouble down the line, but left the siren on, screaming away, so communication among the other people present would be just that much more difficult.

Leslie helped Daniel into his shirt, and the two of them gathered up everything that had been brought into the condo. She said, “Are you sure, Daniel?”

“Time to go,” he said.

The three firemen ran heavy-footed through the house, pushing the panicked guests out of their way, finally helping the last of the guests and staff out of the ballroom. They slammed the double doors and slid a massive sideboard over the polished floor and up against the doors to block them.

Alice Prester Young staggered out of the house alone, into the glare and scream of the big fire engine, with more fire engines coming now from far away, racing south. She’d lost Jack somewhere, she’d been terrified, she had to struggle through the awful crowd completely on her own.

Where was Jack? Was he hurt, crushed by the people back there? Where was Jack?

She stared around at the people collapsing on the lawn, and all at once she saw Jack, and he was carrying somebody, in his arms, like a groom carrying a bride. He was reeling like a drunken man, but he was carrying a woman, and as he at last put her on her feet on the lawn Alice saw she was young Kim Met-calf, Howard Metcalf’s sexpot stewardess wife. And as she saw them, Jack saw her and stopped dead.

The stupid thing is, she hadn’t thought anything until Jack stopped like that, like... like a caught burglar. And Kim’s look of shock and guilt when she met Alice’s eyes across the reeling, weeping, stunned crowd, there was that, too.

Movement to her left. Alice turned her suddenly heavy head, and Howard Metcalf stood there, near her on the steps, gazing out and down at his wife. With great difficulty, Alice turned her heavy head again and looked at Jack, and now he seemed to have no expression on his face at all, like a bad drawing, or a minor figure in the background of a comic strip.

In all that racket, there was a great silence, enclosing the four of them.

In the ballroom, Melander and Carlson and Ross quickly shimmied out of their gloves, helmets, air tanks, fire boots, and turnout coats. Beneath, they each wore a black wet suit and a large zippered bag on a belt around the waist. The bags now held nothing but divers’ face masks and headlamps, which they removed so they could load the bags with all of Miriam Hope Clendon’s jewelry.

Leslie and Daniel drove northward in her Lexus, neither saying anything, he resting his head back, eyes closed. Conserving himself. Then he opened his eyes and looked out ahead and said, “Slow down.”

She did, but said, “Why?”

Instead of answering, he opened his window. She had the air-conditioning on, of course, and now the humid air billowed in, and with it a faint distant sound of sirens. She said, “Police?”

He laughed, a sound like a bark. “Fire engine,” he said. “I told you they were gaudy. They aren’t going in from the sea after all, they’re going in from the land, in a fire engine.”

“But there isn’t any fire,” she said.

“With them? There’s a fire. It’s along here now.”

He meant Mr. Roderick’s house, or whoever Mr. Roderick really was. As he closed his window, she said, “Do you want me to come in with you?”

“No. You go home. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“What if you don’t?”

“Then I don’t,” he said. “Stop here.”

She rolled to a stop near the Roderick house, and he paused, his hand on the door handle. “The question is, how do they get back out? Tuxes under the fire coats?”

She said, “To mingle with the guests, you mean? Could they do that?”

“They think they can do anything,” he said, and opened the door. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

At the Fritz house, more fire engines had arrived, blocked by the milling crowd and the still-screaming first fire engine that none of the later firefighters recognized. “Whose is this? Is this from West Palm? What the hell’s it doing here?”

In the ballroom, Melander and Carlson and Ross finished loading the jewelry into their waist bags. They put the air canisters back on, put on the divers’ face masks and the mouthpieces and the headlamps. From hooks inside their turnout coats they brought out pairs of black flippers.

Leslie found a place to park, locked the Lexus, and walked back down the road toward Mr. Roderick’s house.

Firemen hurried through the mansion and found the ballroom doors wedged shut. They had their axes and used them, splintering the doors.

Melander and Carlson and Ross heard the thuds of the axes. Melander shoved a display case out of the way and they went through the terrace doors and ran across the terrace, invisible in their black wet suits, holding their flippers in their hands. A little apart from one another, so they wouldn’t collide underwater, they dove into the sea.

Firemen smashed their way into the ballroom. Police followed. As the rockets fizzled out and the fires began to fade, they looked around at the emptiness.

All gone.