Skull Duggery

TEN

Tony’s “apartment” was in the Casa del Mayordomo, the one-time plantation manager’s house, now divided into quarters for Carl, Annie, Tony himself, Jamie, and Josefa Gallegos, the housekeeping manager who was, Julie had told him, more of a charity case than an employee; she was Tony’s aunt by marriage, the widowed wife of his mother Beatriz’s brother.

Other than the upstairs bathroom and bedroom, Tony’s unit consisted of one large, simple space with whitewashed walls that were hung with Mexican Primitive paintings. The room had been outfitted as a living room-dining room-a cove-like kitchen was tucked into one corner-with Mexican Colonial furniture, including a museum-quality, elaborately painted dinner table with the place settings-plate, spoon, fork (but no knife)-painted right on it.

Julie and Gideon were the last to arrive. When they got there the others were clustered near one end of the table, where bottles of mezcal, wine, and beer were waiting (Gideon noticed that the painted surface had received a thick coating of plastic or polyurethane to protect it from spills) and from which hors d’oeuvres were being served by Dorotea’s two teenage nieces, who were her kitchen assistants.

As Julie had implied, Tony had done some serious prepping on Gideon, and on forensic anthropology as well. With a few drinks apparently under his belt by the time they got there, he had quickly collared Gideon and pretty much appropriated him for discussion of matters osteological.

Julie had said that, despite a few disagreeable personality traits, he was likeable, and he was: a big, blustery, affable guy with a voice that sounded like the clatter of the Eighth Avenue Express coming up through a grate in the sidewalk. Physically, he was not an attractive man. He bore a three-day growth of stubbly beard, trendy if you believed the fashion ads, but as usual with men who had a few too many chins and not enough neck, he wound up looking more scruffy than macho. He was, as Julie had said, considerably overweight, with the bulgy, button-popping look that comes from having recently put on a lot of pounds that haven’t yet figured out where they are eventually going to settle. His flushed, yellowish skin, and the threadlike purple tracery of broken capillaries that emerged from the stubble and crawled up his cheeks and onto his nose spoke of the dedicated boozehound. But if he was a drunk, he was a genial drunk, on this night at any rate, and he had clearly taken a liking to Gideon.

“Hey, what are you drinking?” he said early on. “Is that wine? Nah, put that crap down, you gotta try this. You like mezcal?”

Gideon didn’t know. “I’ve never tried it.”

“Never tried it?” Tony was astounded. “Where’ve you been all your life?” He led Gideon to the drinks table and lifted one of several dark purple bottles with Hacienda Encantada labels. “Now, this stuff is special. This is made from maguey right on the property, the same plants they made the sisal from in the old days. I get it bottled at a distillery in Tlacolula. They only make a few cases a year. Okay, now do like I do.”

Gideon did as instructed. The mezcal was poured into a shot-sized, cylindrical glass and placed on a saucer with four lime wedges and a cinnamon-colored spoonful of salt mixed with powdered chile peppers. A wedge of lime was dipped into the salt mixture, sucked on, and followed by a sip of mezcal. Four wedges, four sips. Then on to the next saucer. Because Gideon knew that tequila also came from the maguey and he had never developed a taste for tequila, he hadn’t expected to like it, but mezcal turned out to have a rich, smoky taste, more like Scotch than tequila.

“It’s good,” he said truthfully, but turned down the offer of a third. Tony shrugged and poured one for himself. “Now, then,” he said, arranging the salt and lime wedges to his satisfaction, “I want to talk to you-” A slurp of lime, a sip of mezcal. “-about, like, racial differences in, like, cranial form…”

Ten minutes later, with Tony still monopolizing Gideon, the group sat down to dinner. “This guy,” Tony declared to one and all, with his arm draped collegially around Gideon’s shoulder, “this guy is famous. I Googled him; he’s all over the Net. The Skeleton Doctor.” The nape of Gideon’s neck was jovially, if a little too vigorously, squeezed. “Right, Gid?”

“Actually,” Gideon murmured, “not that it matters-”

“The Skeleton Doctor. They even had a TV show on him. On A amp;E.”

“Well, not on me. I was just a small part of it. It was-”

“And there was a whole article on him in Discover magazine.”

That much was true, but Gideon was getting uncomfortable. Tony was at the head of the table with Gideon on his left and Julie on his right. The rest, other than Jamie, who was chewing his lip and brooding over something, were smiling at him, or at least in his general direction, with apparent interest. But long-time professor that he was, he was an old hand at recognizing the glazed, overly bright stare and glassy smile of a captive audience. Tony Gallagher in full throttle was a hard man to ignore or to interrupt; no doubt even harder when he also happened to be el patron.

In the end it was Tony himself who came to Gideon’s rescue, interrupting himself in the middle of a sentence. “Hey, Jamie, why the long face, as the bartender said when the horse walked into the bar? You look like you just lost your best friend.”

“Oh-sorry, Tony. It’s nothing. I was just thinking…”

Jamie was much as Julie had described him, a skinny, narrow-shouldered man with Woody Allen glasses and a sad-sack, permanently worried, Woody-Allenish demeanor to match. Gideon couldn’t help smiling, thinking of the wonderfully apt Yiddish word his old mentor, Abe Goldstein, would have used to describe him: nebbish. He had an aluminum cane hooked on the back of his chair, and it was obvious that he was still in some discomfort from his knee operation.

“Come on, little brother, out with it,” Tony said amiably.

Jamie hunched his shoulders. “Well, it’s just that I’ve been thinking about what you were telling me about on the way down, your new… installation. I put some working figures together, and honestly, I don’t see how we can make it work. I mean, I’m not criticizing-”

“Oh yeah,” Tony cried, “I was gonna get around to that.” He removed his arm from Gideon’s shoulder and rearranged himself in his chair. “Everybody listen to this now,” he said, hammering on the table with freshened enthusiasm. “Jamie thinks I’m out of my mind, but you’re gonna love it. This is Preciosa’s idea, actually, and I think she’s really got something this time.” He looked proudly toward the foot of the table where Preciosa, his “current sweet patootie,” sat smiling.

Only “sweet patootie” didn’t come close to conveying Preciosa’s looks. A tall, languid woman in her forties, exotic in a long-nosed, high-cheekboned way, over-made-up and overjeweled (six of her long, thin fingers bore rings, three of worked silver, and three with amethyst stones that closely matched her purple lipstick and eye shadow), she put Gideon in mind of one of those big wading birds, a heron or an ibis, exaggeratedly slow-moving and studiedly graceful. And, like a heron, endowed with an extraordinarily long and sinuous neck, so that her narrow head gave the impression of bobbing slightly on its slender support. As a physical type, she was as different from Tony as two people can be. Tony was one of those people who seemed to take up more space than he was entitled to, and to be made of something denser and heavier than plain flesh. The supple, lissome Preciosa seemed as if she could conform to any space available, like jelly, like smoke.

Gideon could see that identifying her as the originator of the idea to come did nothing to increase the receptiveness of Carl, or Josefa, or Jamie; instead, there was a flurry of exchanged, wary glances and even a few rolled eyes. Annie’s feelings about her “harebrained schemes,” it appeared, were widely shared. Like Tony, however, Preciosa seemed oblivious to the reception, responding to Tony’s tribute with a slow, refined nod. Gideon had the impression that she might have enough English to get bits of the drift of what was being said, but not much more.

At this point Dorotea’s nieces brought out chopped salads of avocado, corn, tomato, and jicama, along with bowls of cumin-scented dressing. Tony waited for them to finish setting them out, then made his announcement. “We-get ready for this-are gonna put in a temazcal .” He looked around with an expectant grin, but the only response came from Carl, and it wasn’t what Tony was hoping for.

“A what?”

Tony shoulders sagged. He looked at Carl disgustedly. “Aw, Carl-a temazcal, for Christ’s sake. It’s like sort of a-it’s hard to-it goes way back to the Aztecs, it’s-you tell them, Gid, you’re the anthropologist.”

Gideon put down the forkful of salad-the first-that was on its way to his mouth. “To tell the truth, it’s not anything I’m all that familiar with, Tony, but I do know it’s something that was found in a lot of Pre-Hispanic cultures-Aztec, Mayan, Zapotec, Mixtec-a kind of ritual sweat bath or sweat lodge, something like what you still see in some Native American groups. It was probably in use right here in the Valley of Oaxaca. I seem to remember that herbs were involved, and that the rituals were basically connected to healing. Is that the kind of thing you’re talking about?”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Tony cried, his exuberance having returned.

“No, my love, that is not exactly what I had in mind,” said Preciosa, whose English was just fine-better than fine: Smooth, coldly formal, and elegantly accented. “Yes, of course we will have the traditional elements of fire and water and curative plants,” she said with a boneless wave of her fingers, “and people will sit naked on woven petate mats to drink herbal teas and meditate. But there will also be a more modern focus on the healing powers of crystals and aromatherapy, both of which, I might add, will provide a welcome avenue to the sales of many a high-profit item.”

She sat back, regal and smiling, like an opera star surrounded by adoring fans.

“Uh… did you say ‘naked’?” Carl asked.

“Yes,” said Preciosa, “it’s the traditional way, but”-a condescending shrug-“if some people are too closed-minded for that, they can wear swimsuits if they choose. And don’t look so worried, Carlos, my dear, there won’t be any orgies. It’s not at all like that.”

“If you say so.” Carl looked far from convinced.

“But what”s it going to cost?” Jamie asked anxiously. “Have you taken into consideration the kind of facility it would require? You’re not just talking about some simple concrete-block cube. The specialized plumbing requirements, the ventilation-”

Tony aimed a finger at him. “A new facility will not be necessary, my man. You know the empty room at the end of the storehouse that we don’t use for anything-well, cleaning supplies and stuff? Well, Preciosa checked it out and says it’d be perfect: no windows, solid stone walls, and stone floor And the rest of the building”s already plumbed, so how much could it cost to run pipes to it?”

“And ventilation?”

“Ventilation? We knock a couple of slits in the walls, high up.”

“ Slits in the walls? The health inspectors would never-”

He was cut off by a contemptuous laugh from Tony. “Hey, I can take care of the health inspectors, trust me. Look, the thing is, Preciosa says these things are making a comeback all over the place-but not here in the Valley, not yet. I checked it out for myself, and she”s right, there isn”t one; this would be the very first. It’ll be a hell of an attraction, a hell of an income stream. Do you have any idea of what these weirdos pay for that aromatherapy crap? And it costs next to nothing to get. So-what do you all think about it?”

Not much, apparently. Tony”s question received no answer at all for a good five seconds, until Carl spoke.

“It”s your money,” he said with amiable resignation. “As long as you don’t expect me to take my clothes off and get into it myself, it”s fine with me. One question, though-who”s going to run this thing? I mean, you can’t just have naked people running in and out and sitting around meditating together.” He frowned. “Or can you?”

“Ah, that”s the beauty part,” Tony said. “Preciosa knows this healer, or teacher, or curandero, or whatever the hell you call him-they’re actually certified-who’ll run the sessions for us for half of what we charge, which is going to be a hundred and twenty bucks a pop. Valderano, his name is.”

“ Valeriano, mi gordito,” Preciosa corrected.

“Whatever. The point is, we don’t have to worry about it, we just rake in the money.” He rubbed his hands together. “So, anybody else got anything to say-anything positive to say?”

“Who”s supposed to keep it clean?” was Josefa’s mumbled comment. “Gonna need more help if you think it”s gonna be me.” Josefa, short, square-faced, square-bodied, and scowly (Gideon, seemingly in an animal-metaphor rut, was reminded of a slow, grumpy, old bulldog), was a woman in her sixties with a way of speaking that seemed not to be directed at any particular person, and rarely in response to any particular comment. She was like a radio that went on and off of its own accord.

“Aw, come on, you guys,” Tony pleaded, his arms spread, palms up, “how about a little enthusiasm? Jamie, I showed you the figures. It”s doable, isn”t it?”

“I have serious doubts about those figures, Tony. This place isn”t in the financial condition it was two years ago, you know. The exchange rate on the dollar, the money we put down the drain on the swimming with the Fishes-”

“You wouldn’t have lost money if you’d done it the way I said,” Preciosa said hotly.

“And then the bad publicity we got on the mud bath fiasco; that didn’t help. We’re still paying damages on that.”

Preciosa impaled him with a ferocious look. “There wouldn’t have been any fiasco, if you had just listened-”

“Knock it off, you two,” Tony intervened. “How about letting me worry about all that crap, huh?”

“I was under the impression that worrying about ‘all that crap’ is what you pay me to do,” Jamie said bravely.

“And you do a hell of a job, bro, a hell of a job,” Tony said, but he was obviously getting bored with the subject.

Jamie wasn’t interested in compliments. “I have to tell you, Tony,” he said with a fretful, frowning shake of his head. “We are not in good shape, not anymore. I have my doubts about this. I have my grave doubts.”

Tony responded with a snort of laughter. “You gotta excuse Jamie,” he told Gideon with a doting glance at his brother. “He can’t help it, that”s just the way he is. He was born that way; it”s in his genes. Remember that guy in the old Superman comics? Mr. Mxtlplx or something? With a little black rain cloud hanging over his head wherever he went? That”s my baby brother all the way. There”s always a disaster around the next corner.”

“You could… you could use a few more of those genes yourself, Tony,” Jamie ventured.

“I sure could!” Tony said happily.

“What are we all arguing about, anyway?” Carl asked. “You’re the boss, Tony. If you want it, I figure we might as well get used to living with it.”

More appreciative honking from Tony. “Damn right. Now you’re getting the picture.”

Clearly, he was used to having his parades rained on and perhaps was even amused by it. It was also clear that none of their opinions on the temazcal were, or ever had been, factors in the decision. The thing was settled, had been settled before he ever brought it up. The Hacienda Encantada would have the first temazcal in the Valley of Oaxaca, or more accurately the first temazcal in a thousand years or so. He would have preferred that they like the idea, but if they didn’t, he’d have no trouble living with the fact.

He looked up with interest as Dorotea herself led her nieces in bringing in more food. “Hey, here comes the main course,” he said, picking up a knife and a fork in his fists. “Whoa, look at that! Are you kidding me? Is that caguesa? My favorite dish in the whole damn world! Dorotea, you outdid yourself again.”

Dorotea responded with an ungracious shrug and said something in spanish; “You always did like peasant food,” Gideon thought it was. This was not a woman who went out of her way to butter up her boss. Or anyone else, as far as he could see. Presumably she got away with it on the strength of her famous cooking.

Indeed, the caguesa turned out to be a pungent and delicious stew of chicken, tomato, and toasted corn, perfectly flavored with garlic and served with melt-in-your-mouth fresh corn tortillas and rice. Once a few spoonfuls had been put away, individual conversations resumed. With Tony and Julie reminiscing about family matters and members unfamiliar to him, he tried conversing with Josefa, who was seated on his left. (“I understand Tony is your nephew?” “Are you originally from Teotitlan?” “Have you always lived here?”) But she was intently focused, first on cleaning her silverware with her fingernails and her napkin, then on eating her meal, and even when he tried the questions in Spanish, the only thing he got out of her other than si s and no s was an unsolicited comment about Preciosa:

“I bet she no back next year,” she said with satisfaction, jerking her head in that lady’s direction. “She getting old. Look at them hands, all them veins, all them bumps. She get all the face-lifts she want, she still an old lady. Always you can tell from the hands.” As before, the remarks were made, not quite to Gideon, but to some invisible person now a few feet behind him, now just in front of him, sometimes a few feet above him. He wondered if she might not be aware that she was expressing her thoughts aloud.

In any case, he had to admit (to himself), she did have a point. Preciosa’s veiny, arthritic hands were a good twenty years older than her face. It was the sort of thing he ought to have noticed, or so he thought, but somehow he never did. He revised her age upward to the fifties, probably the late fifties. Well, he’d always had trouble judging a woman’s age, at least when she still had flesh on her bones.

He gave up on talking to Josefa and tuned back in to the conversation between Julie and Tony. “I used to envy you all so much,” Julie was saying. “I would have given anything to have grown up here on the Hacienda, the way you and Jamie did.”

Tony, who had been guzzling steadily but seemed no drunker than before (nor any less, either), paused in shoveling stew into his mouth and gave a low, gravelly laugh. “Like Jamie, maybe, but not like me.”

“Why? What do you mean?”

Tony looked puzzled. “You mean you don’t know the story? Of my misspent youth? Sure, you do.”

“No, she doesn’t, Tony,” said Carl, who was sitting on Julie’s other side. “Don’t you remember? She was just a wide-eyed kid back when she was working summers here. We all figured there was no point in loading all that baggage on her. You did too. So no, she doesn’t know, and as far as I’m concerned, there’s still no point.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Disappointed, Tony went back to eating.

“Now, wait a minute, you two,” Julie said, putting down her fork. “Just you wait one cotton-pickin’ minute. I am no longer a wide-eyed kid, and I am certainly not innocent. I am a worldly, experienced, married woman. You should hear some of the things Gideon talks to me about. If there’s something about this family that I don’t know about, I want to hear it.”

“Aw, Julie…” Carl began, and Gideon could see from her suddenly frozen expression that she was kicking herself, having suddenly realized that it might have to do with Blaze, a subject she now knew to be so painful to Carl. But it didn’t, as Tony made clear.

“You’re absolutely right,” he said, perking up. “Time you found out what a hell-raiser your Uncle Tony was. Which reminds me, you’re plenty old enough to drop that ‘Uncle’ shit now-hey, sorry, pardon my language. Anyway, it makes me feel a hundred years old, besides which I’m not your uncle in the first place, I’m your-” He scowled. “What am I to her, Gid? Anything?”

“Well, let’s see,” Gideon said. “Carl is her uncle, and you’re Carl’s brother-in-law, so that would make you her… nothing. You’re not genetically related, and while some cultures would have a formal name for the relationship, we don’t.”

Tony nodded his satisfaction. “See? I’m nothing,” he said to Julie. “Plain old Tony.”

“You’re on,” Julie said, clinking glasses with him. “From now on you’re nothing to me; plain old Tony.” She was on her second beer, and the buzz was showing a little. There was something about beer that had always gone quickly to her head. “Now let’s hear the story.”

“Okay. First of all, I was a confirmed dope addict by the age of twelve…”

She laughed, thinking he was joking, as did Gideon.

“No, I’m serious,” Tony insisted. “Jamie, was I a dope addict or not?”

“You were a dope addict,” confirmed Jamie, who was sitting two seats down, on the other side of Carl. “But it wasn’t your fault, Tonio. What happened to you was a damned shame. You were just a little kid, how could you know what was going on?”

“Thanks, Jaime, I appreciate that.”

Gideon had noticed earlier that they sometimes used the Spanish versions of their names when they were feeling affectionate or familial. Tony was Tonio, Jamie was Jaime, Carl was Carlos, Annie was Anita. “But the truth is the truth. Julie, Gideon, you’re looking at the man who was the world’s youngest speed freak. However, let me point out that from that point on in my life… from that point on, I went rapidly downhill.” Another brief, rolling, belly-shaking laugh, but not as hearty as his earlier ones. This man sure laughs a lot, Gideon thought. It wasn’t hard to take in small doses, but he’d be hell to live with. “Seriously, I was, like, nine years old when it started; ten at most.”

He was looking at Julie and Gideon as he spoke, but once again he was really addressing the table at large. This time he had their honest attention. It might have been a familiar story to them, but apparently that didn’t make it any less engrossing.

“You see,” he said, “as a kid, I was kind of overweight.”

“You mean, as opposed to now?” Julie asked with a giggle. She was a little under the influence, all right.

“Hey, watch your mouth!” Tony said, reaching out to tousle her hair. “No, I mean really overweight.” He puffed out his cheeks to illustrate. “Remember, Jamie?”

“Not too well,” Jamie said. “When you were twelve, I was only three years old.”

“Oh yeah, I keep forgetting,” Tony said. “It’s because you’re always acting like my older brother, not my younger brother. Anyway…”

Anyway, Vincent Gallagher, Tony’s father, had been distressed, maybe obsessed, over his son’s weight, Tony explained. The senior Gallagher had dreamed from the beginning that Anthony, his firstborn, would inherit and run the ranch some day, and a waddling, three-hundred-pound cowboy didn’t fit the picture he had in mind. He had tried all kinds of remedies and had finally taken Tony to a weight-reduction specialist in Oaxaca, a doctor who had prescribed what was then the trendiest, most up-to-date reducing drug available: methamphetamine.

By the time he was eleven, he was well on his way to being hooked. Vincent sent him away for treatment, first to a rehab facility in Mexico City and then to one in Pennsylvania. Both times the cure had been pronounced successful; both times he had relapsed. By the second time, the use of meth had become a little more widespread, and Tony took up with another kid from a nearby village who had also developed addiction problems.

“Huicho,” he said with a nostalgic smile. “Huicho Lozada. Now there’s someone I haven’t thought about for a long time. Jesus, he was in worse shape than I was, but we were both meth heads, plain and simple,” he said. “Tweakers. And we got ourselves into a lot of trouble on account of it. I mean, a whole lot of trouble. Not as much as I got into later-now, that was real trouble-but enough.” His mood had darkened. The others had grown more grave as well, except for Preciosa, who was smiling possessively at him, almost like a mother at her child.

He had run off at sixteen, unable to live with either the unavailability of the drug or the unrelenting pressure from his father about shaping up and eventually taking over the ranch. And then had come the “real” trouble. Life on the streets and in the twilight worlds of Oaxaca, of Miami, of Tijuana, of Cleveland; wherever a supply of methamphetamine could most easily be gotten. More than once he’d awakened in the gutter-literally-or in some filthy doorway, not knowing where he was or how he’d gotten there. He had robbed and been robbed, he had beaten people up and been beaten up, he’d been arrested five or six times-he couldn’t remember how many or even where. And he’d been convicted and jailed twice, both times on drug charges, once in Las Vegas for sixty days, and then in Mexican prisons for almost four years, from the time he was twenty-one until he was twenty-five.

“How horrible,” Julie said. “That must have been… I can’t imagine what that must have been like.”

“Sure you can,” Tony said. “Just think about what you’ve heard about Mexican jails-you know, movies, TV-and what frigging nightmares they are. Okay? Got a mental picture? Now multiply it by a hundred. That’ll give you a small idea. I’m here to tell you, once you survive that, you can survive anything. The only good thing was, I could still get meth on the inside, at least for the first two years, when they had me in Tijuana, and that was all that mattered-although, trust me, you don’t want to know what I had to do for it.”

But even that dismal comfort came to an end when he was transferred to the infamous Reclusorio Oriente, the high-security prison in Mexico City, for the last two years of his sentence. There it was either lick his addiction cold turkey or commit suicide. More than once he had been on the very edge of the latter, and of his sanity as well, but an older fellow prisoner, a grizzled Mexican double-murderer serving a life sentence, had taken an interest in him. It was thanks to that old convict’s kindness, Tony said, that he not only survived the ordeal, but eventually walked out of prison free of drugs and determined to stay that way. And he had.

Tony’s story had taken them through coffee and a simple, luscious dessert of platanos asados -soft, tiny grilled bananas with cinnamon and cream, served family style.

“That’s quite a story,” Gideon said, helping himself to another couple of bananas and dousing them with cream. “It’s not often that people can turn their lives around like that.”

“I’ll say,” said Julie. “I had no idea, Uncle Tony. I mean plain old Tony.” She reached over to give his hand a squeeze.

“Well, I don’t want to brag,” Tony said, “but, what the hey, it’s true. I did come a long way. And I owe it to two people: Lalo Arenas-the old guy in prison; he’s dead now-and my father. My father-” He knocked twice on the table for emphasis. “My father never lost faith in me. Never.”

“That’s so,” Jamie put in. “I was only a kid, but I remember, while you were gone all those years, Dad used to tell us-Blaze and me-‘Don’t you worry about your big brother Tony; he’ll be all right. He just has to get it out of his system, that’s all. He’ll be back.’ ”

“Yeah,” said Tony quietly (for him). “Dad was great. He died while I was in jail, you know, and when I found out he left the ranch to me, I couldn’t believe it. I mean, talk about faith. There I was, rotting away in this hellhole, a loser through and through. I hadn’t even bothered to get in touch with him for years… and he trusts me with his precious ranch.”

“You were his firstborn,” Jamie said. “He loved you. From the day you were born, you were the one who was going to inherit.” If there was any resentment behind the words, Gideon couldn’t see it.

“Yeah, that’s true,” Tony said with a wondering shake of his head. “And his trusting me like that was what really turned me around. I had to deliver. Still, it was a little tricky when I first came back. I still feel bad about… I mean, I feel like part of it’s my fault that-” He shot a brief, wary glance at Carl. “Well, never mind, doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Your fault that what?” asked Julie, not nearly as perceptive as she would have been without the beers.

“I said never mind, okay?” Tony barked at her, abruptly, surly.

He slapped his napkin down on the table and stood up. “Shit. Look, it’s been a hell of a long day. What do you say we call it a night?”“BUT what did I say?”a stricken Julie asked Gideon as they walked back to their room in the cool night air.

“Julie, I have no idea. Well, some idea-it had something to do with Carl; I could see that much.”

“It must have been something about Blaze, then,” Julie said, shaking her head. “Honestly, I don’t remember everybody being so sensitive before. You really have to watch your step around here, don’t you?”

“Like walking on eggshells,” Gideon agreed. “All the same, I think the guy owes you an apology. That was really uncalled for.”

“Oh,” she said, sighing, “that’s just Tony. It’s just the way he is.”