HEART BREAKER

Copyright 1990, 1994, 1996 by John Argo. All rights reserved.

Synopsis:

Mary Shane MacLemore is an attractive, perky young obit writer and hopeful reporter for the newspaper in a small, coastal California town. Not only is she struggling with her career, but she has zilch for a love life, and her 10 year old son is in and out of remission from bone cancer. At last her big break: a string of eerie and unexplained murders involving animals at the zoo leads her to an investigation that includes a possible serial killer and some supernatural phenomena. Finally, the trail leads to a 65-million year old spaceship whose cargo was poised to take over the Earth. But when she finds the spaceship populated by town residents, the strange becomes positively chilling -- in The Haunted Village.

PROLOG

65 MILLION YEARS AGO

On a warm, humid evening, in what would one day be called West Africa, a female dinosaur approached a brackish pond to drink, maybe even to kill once more before nightfall.

Ten thousand miles above, streaking through the void, was a huge black vessel. It was a space ark, crammed with a complete world's worth of flora and fauna, and in its final approach trajectory for Earth orbit.

On the ground, before stepping onto the grassy bank, the female dinosaur froze behind lush ferns and listened for danger. But for the buzz and flutter of insects, the vast swamp was still. The air around the pond smelled fetid from a herd of triceratops that had finished drinking and lumbered away. Detecting no immediate danger, she stretched her neck with snake-like slowness. Her head glided out of the ferns. The moments of drinking were her most vulnerable. She made a slow, bird-like step forward, soundless, without disturbing ferns. Her tough hide with its big orange, black, and white polygons blurred in rapidly failing light. She would spend a minute at most, crouched at the pond. Her belly and neck would be close to the ground for protection.

The ark was piloted by the last surviving member of his race, in deep cryosleep in the core of the ship. An electronic avatar of the Pilot occupied the heavy-metal computer core. The analog's head glowered in the near-darkness of the cockpit; three small crooked antlers projected from its head, for the genetic code of the home world ran in odd numbers rather than even. Too late, the analog Pilot discovered that the ark was about to crash into a stray meteorite. He tried to guide the ship and at the same time waken the Pilot.

On Earth, the female dinosaur froze again. Under the murky surface, between floating lily pads and lacy white flowers, she saw the exposed belly of a long-necked, herbivorous pond lizard. He reveled in twilit water warm from being in the sun all day. The female dinosaur savored the faintly oily life-smell of the pond lizard. Parting her jaws and two-inch teeth, she tensed every muscle in her body to strike and kill. There was a breaking of the surface, a pleasurable snort as the pond lizard breathed. In the final moment of dusk, fireflies winked. Nocturnal creatures began their barks and bellows. The pond lizard, smelling his stalker, panicked and dove down in a deep gurgling arc. The water seethed with pounding fury as she lunged.

Ship's alarms sounded throughout long murky corridors and coldly steaming bays and pens. Amid the millions of species frozen, only the Pilot was being awakened: too late! The crash ruptured the ship's hull, spewing the precious cargo to their deaths in space. The Pilot died before reaching full consciousness. He had hardly begun to open his three eyes or stir his three arms and nine legs.The ship was burning. Breaking up. The computer core, containing the Pilot's analog, plunged headlong into the atmosphere.

In the star-spattered sky, a long silent line appeared. A stutter of smoke puffed at the tip of the line, glowing redder and hotter as it entered thicker atmosphere. There was a flash. Flash and smoke had disappeared, lost in the constellations.

The dinosaur's teeth caught a tough tail. Tossing her jaws, breaking the surface as she did so, she turned the kicking, struggling pond lizard onto his back, but kept his head under water where he drowned. She dragged him half ashore. There, she raked claws through his underbelly, churning up viscera and half-digested vegetable matter. Smelling blood, she groaned hungrily and buried her battery of teeth into this fresh meal--her last meal. Seconds after the flash in the sky, a ferrous object struck the earth. Traveling so quickly that it glowed red-white, the object struck the pond and exploded, instantly vaporizing the water and all its contents.

Moments after the control core slammed down, the rest of the ship broke up, vaporizing in the atmosphere.

The holocaust burned for weeks. The atmosphere turned dark with roiling smoke. Vast primeval forests burned day after day. As the smoke and clouds boiled up, encasing the world, Temperatures fell. Vegetation died. The air was nearly unbreatheable. The pond lizards, the dinosaurs, many hundreds of species, vanished from the earth.

Within two years, new lush vegetation appeared. Fresh winds scoured the sunny blue sky. New types of animals came to the lakes and ponds to drink, to mate, to kill, to eat. The leisurely dance of time in its millions of years continued.

The control core yearned to put itself back together, as it had been programmed, and repair a ship it did not know was forever destroyed. The avatar Pilot longed to fly again among the stars; was willing to wait however long; and when the opportunity finally came, would be cold and ruthless as the mission demanded.

THE SAN TOMAS DAILY NEWS, 1984

LOME, TOGO (ENS) -- Making a surprising detour in his pilgrimage through West Africa, Pope John Paul II visited the capital of this small former French colony. The pontiff made a one-day stopover in the nation's capital, a city of 150,000, many of whom believe in Africa's Animist, or nature spirit, religion. Surprising his entourage, the pope insisted on visiting an island in the middle of Lake Togo. Amid rattles, drums, and shrill pipes, local spirit doctors welcomed him onto this forested island where the pope visited for two hours with animists in ghostly face and body paint. They are said to guard shrines containing evil spirits and devils held captive by magic since the creation of the world. The demons are imprisoned in statues, rocks, and other fetish objects. The witch doctors showed the Pope empty shrines that had been looted of their fetishes during the past century by European and American adventurers. The stolen totems, they said, were now in Europe or America. Those spirits, they told the Pope, had already begun their evil work in the world.

SAN TOMAS, CALIFORNIA

Relentlessly, the mocking spirit tormented Dr. Johnathan Smith, D.D. by whispering cruel and dirty things in his head. You have one foot in hell already, it said laughing, you can't beat me and you can't get me out of your head and I'm going to take you to the pit of demons with me!

In the cheap rented room, torn plastic curtains had been drawn. Sunlight angling through made a dance of dust motes striking a tangle of clothes half in, half out of a suitcase. The cover flap of the suitcase lay open like a screaming mouth. Tangled pants suggested disembodied men trying to run away. Rumpled shirt sleeves suggested ghosts waving for help.

In a corner stood the wooden statuette carved centuries ago in Africa; its scarred face suggested maniacal amusement at Smith's pain, its insides darkened by a strange heavy-black substance like iron, just visible if you looked underneath.

Courage, the aged fundamentalist thought, twining his arthritic fingers together over his ragged shirt and heaving chest.

The telephone rang.

The old man reached out, drew back his hand, then picked up.

"Smith, this is Mulcahy... ...Hello? ...Hello?"

"Thank God, it's you finally."

"Smith, what's wrong?"

The old man cried, feeling the pain in his soul: "It's tormenting me terribly." Inside, the three-eyed demon chuckled.

"Is there some way I can help you?" Mulcahy sounded tired and dubious.

"You don't seem to believe me, but I have a piece of Satan sitting here in the room with me. It's the evidence we need, Mulcahy. We can prove the existence of Satan, therefore of God." ...up to your ass in dirty sex, the devil said overriding.

Mulcahy said after a moment's consideration: "I could walk over and meet you by the Zoo entrance."

"Please! I need a witness."

"It's all nonsense, you know. There has to be a scientific explanation. There is, if we look for it."

"You fool," Smith said, feeling contempt mixed with anxiety to confront Satan. "We're so close. Why do you keep crapping out on me?"

An hour later, as lights winked on in office buildings silhouetted against the darkening sky, Smith shuffled toward the main entrance of the San Tomas Zoological and Botanical Gardens. Under his arm, wrapped in a dirty pillowcase, was the statuette, weighing heavily. The zoo was closed, and the last one or two of its office staff were just leaving. They avoided the old man. He barely noticed them.

A sudden cawing sound; a large bird thing threw itself between branches. Smith looked up into towering eucalyptus trees. "I know you're here," he whispered.

Someone--or something--chuckled in the darkness. A merciless sound. I'm going to kill you! I'm going to tear out your heart! Ha ha ha...

"For God's sake, Mulcahy, where are you? Hurry!"

Something stirred under the trees, something wrapped up in a darkness more total than the blackness of night. Smith's mouth opened, and once again his heart beat wildly. He stepped back, short of breath. He held his hands to his aching chest as though he must somehow relieve the pressure. He felt powerless to run. Where in God's name was Mulcahy?

Oh God, the stars.

The thing he had pursued and that in turn now pursued him, stepped between Smith and the sky. Loomed over Smith. The statuette fell clattering to the sidewalk. The demon pulled back its cowl to reveal its face. It looked ... the thing was... what? Ancient, inscrutable, Egyptian... part man, part jackal?... But instead of jackal ears, it had three small crooked horns. Three eyes burned like pools of hot red wax. Its carrion teeth were exposed in a predatory grin. ...was THIS the face of Satan?

SAN TOMAS, CALIFORNIA

Gilbert Burtongale, a tall scraggly man of 40 with long dirty hair and beard stubble, sole heir to the town's oldest and greatest fortune, stood in the darkness outside the zoo his family had founded in the 1800's. Gilbert wondered why the Thing in his head had made him come here. Some old fool shuffled up the walk holding something in a bag, it looked like. The old man cried out in the windy darkness, something like: "Mulcahy...are you...hurry!" Gilbert looked about uneasily. The old man cried: "...know you're there..." Gilbert fingered his switchblade knife, ready to open it. But things took care of themselves, as the Thing in his head had promised, not with words, just with feelings.

There! What flew through the air? A large bird. No. Something...furry. A bear? Yes, a flying bear. The old man looked up in horrified, frozen silence as the animal flew over the zoo wall and directly into his face. The old man fell down, the bear blanketing him. The animal snarled once, briefly, tearing the old man's heart out in one grab.

Gilbert stared in fascination. But the Thing made him turn his head. Far away on a moonlit path, a figure in black was striding along smoking a cigar. The cloud of silvery smoke hovered over Mulcahy's head like a crooked thought. Gilbert brought the knife out, with a snarl of his own. He'd been long wanting to-- But No. The Thing did not want... It was most important to...

The bear vanished. Evaporated as Gilbert watched. The old man lay sprawled and broken in a lake of blood. His heart lay yards away where it had landed during the frenzy. Gilbert picked up the statuette, whose battered face smiled wickedly, a blurry and mysterious visage in wood. Its metal core seemed to throb with poisonous love.

Gilbert climbed into the driver's seat of his van. He stashed the statuette under his seat, slipped the door shut, and drove away on quiet cylinders before Mulcahy could probably notice. Gilbert drove up to the zoo entrance a quarter mile away and honked the car horn. As he waited for the night guard to open up, he cherishingly regarded at the old, tattered photograph taped to the roof: A beautiful young woman, smiling with sunny innocence, her hands clasped by her chin in sensuous indolence. I will possess you, Mary Shane, he thought, and we will die together, yet live forever. Soon, my love. Soon.

PART ONE:

SHANE

San Tomas, California--The Present

"Mom, what's a faloshian?"

Shane brushed a wisp of hair from her forehead while concentrating on the road ahead. "Not now, honey." Her son's cancer had been in remission for nearly five years, and yet a questionable something had appeared in a leg X-ray. They had just been to the doctor's office and she was fighting an inner scream of panic. At the same time, life demanded that it be lived from minute to minute. She was late for everything, as usual. A basket of overdue library books bounced on the back seat.

Kippy frowned, pulling in his chin. "There's a dead one outside the zoo. They said so on the news this morning."

She held up her left hand in the slipstream to help the magenta nail polish dry. Traffic was heavy, and she needed to find a place to cut over two lanes. A blue van kept creeping up behind on her right blind spot. "Kippy please, I'm trying not to miss the exit to grandma's house. You can tell me there, okay?"

Serious tone: "Oh, okay."

A pair of young men whistled in Shane's direction. She barely turned her blonde head and raked them with her Icy Glance. They turned onto a side street. The blue van drifted away. Minutes later, as she pulled into shaded Mulberry Street, Shane saw that, once again, her mother was displeased with her. Shane knew how to read her mother's house. If Mother was pleased, she would be waiting: watering the lawn, smiling, waving. Instead, Mother was inside. Sullen, without any sign of welcome, the house seemed to turn its face away.

"Want a hand?" The old question.

"Naw." The familiar answer. Kippy pushed the door open with his right arm. With practiced speed and confidence, he swung first one leg, then the other, onto the street. Shane regarded her son through a thick layer of old love and pain. Wearing his school uniform, he was ten and looked beautiful. She was proud. "Grandma's mad about something," Kip noted with a glance up the hill. "What do you suppose it is this time?"

They had a silent walk up to the house together. He worked hard on his clicking crutches. She, wearing medium heels and businesslike skirt, but gray sweat jacket with dangling hood, matched his pace with hands clasped behind her back.

"Kippy, can you wait here a few minutes?" She indicated the lath gazebo vined with pink and white trumpet flowers. She banged on the door. No answer. Worried, she rattled the handle, but the door was locked. Fumbling, she found the key. In contrast to her annoyance, Kippy sat patiently. He had one forearm draped over both crutch handles while his interested gaze followed the flight of a butterfly. As she got the door open, she tried to take along some of Kippy's calmness.

"Mom!" her voice echoed through the house, with a harsh edge. "Mo-om!" Nobody. Mother's house was a dark swirl of silvered mirrors, petulant lace, sullen mahogany.

"Mary Shane, dear, you don't have to shout and bang around."

Shane gave a jump. "I, I -- you scared me."

Mother smiled ceremoniously while placing pussy willow twigs in a small vase. "I was here in the kitchen the whole time. Where's Kippy?"

"In the gazebo." Shane threw the envelope down on the table. "Here are the rent checks." She did not apologize that they were three days late.

"Why didn't he come in?" Mother searched for the perfect spot to place a twig held up like a spear.

"I just wanted to drop these off. I'm late for work. Is something wrong?"

Mother circled around the vase, evaluating. "There." She stabbed the twig into place, then wiped her hands on her apron. "I wouldn't say wrong, Mary Shane." She put the vase on a high window sill. "There. Tomorrow or the day after I'll cut some marigolds and add them in. That'll look nice, don't you think?"

Shane took nail polish from the sweat jacket's belly pocket. Sitting at the table, she worked on her right hand. Waiting.

Mother looked through the checks. "Was someone short?"

"No, just late. Davidson forgot to leave his rent money with me before he went on a weekend trip."

"If you're ever short--"

"Naw."

"How did Kippy's doctor appointment go?"

"The doctors found a blip or something on his leg." It was not the first such scare, but her fingers were trembling.

"Mary Shane!"

"They want more time to evaluate the results." She wasn't sure if she could be patient with Mother just now.

"Mary Shane, I thought..." Mother looked ready to cry. "Five years... remission..."

Shane snapped: "Doctor Boutros said he's sure Kippy is probably okay but he wants to check with another specialist."

Mother said, "Darling, I know you love him so." Mother rubbed Shane's back. "Make sure he always gets his rest, and eats right, and..."

Shane felt herself starting to lose it. "What do you think I have done every day for years, Mother?"

Mother sat down, folded her hands on the table, and looked at Shane. Shane felt her looking but did not look up. After a minute or two, Mother sighed. "It's none of my business, Mary Shane, but Harold Berger has called several times this week."

Shane closed the nail polish bottle. "I don't believe it." A flush crawled up her cheeks.

"He is trying awfully hard to reach you, darling."

Shane pictured Howard in her mind, cocked her elbow back, and punched him into the next country.

"Kippy really likes him."

"Kippy loathes him, Mother. And by now, so do I. I have to go. I have to drop Kippy off at school, and I'm late for work."

"Mary Shane, the boy needs a man in his life."

"I'm not going to marry Howard."

Mother reproved with a look that said, there you go again, bitch in tight jeans, make all the boys crazy.

Shane changed the subject: "I asked for a promotion."

"At that job?" Mother made 'job' sound dirty.

Shane rose. She was glad she'd had Kippy wait outside. "Mother, no guy is interested in a widow with a crippled son. I work damn hard and I need something better than life with Howard the nerd. I'm going to be thirty in two years. No Prince Charming is coming along to rescue me, so THAT JOB as you put it is my only hope to make it on my own!"

"He is a wealthy man. A good man. Young. Good-looking. What more could you want?"

Shane strode away through the house assaulted by dull rumblings of china behind glass. There was something she was walking away from. What was it? A black hole in her past, graying toward daylight with numb time in women's prison, a threat to lose Kippy if she did not shape up...

Her mother's voice rose to a near hysterical pitch as she invoked Shane's failed marriage. "For God's sake, Mary Shane, don't do it again! Remember what happened with you and Frank! Remember what he did to you and Kippy!"

Shane was glad to get back into the sunshine. "Ready, Kip?"

"Yep." Click of crutch. "How'd it go?"

Shane knelt and embraced him. His free hand stole around her neck. She smelled a hint of bath soap in the wet ends of his hair. Nobody was going to take this guy away from her.

They walked to the car. "Grandma wants me to do something I don't want to do."

"Oh, is that all?" Kippy tossed the crutches in. "What else is new?"

"Kippee-e," she warned as her son climbed in. Tugging her door open, she saw that he was grinning. Driving away unnecessarily fast, she tossed the nail polish bottle in the glove compartment that bulged with paperbacks. "Well, at least I got my nails finished."

"Oh yeah Mom, I almost forgot. They got a dead faloshian at the zoo. Do you think they'll have a picture of it in the paper?"

Shane breezed into the City Room of the San Tomas Herald, ignoring a dirty look from Managing Editor Mart Willow.

At the Obituary section, tucked in a nook near the newspaper's morgue (library), Shane let out a big breath and threw down jacket, hair brush, purse, and jangling keys. Terri 'Wiz' Kcikiewicz, her fellow obit writer, was just finishing a midmorning yogurt. Odd duck, Terri; kept a vase in the form of a skull on her desk. Anchored in a sea of paper, Terri looked up and her glasses slid down her nose, as they always did.

"Hi Wiz," Shane said. She sipped coffee from a styrofoam cup and brushed her blonde curls.

"Hi kid. How's the boy?"

"They found a blip on his right leg. The doctor is going to consult another specialist."

Wiz looked sad. "When do you find out?"

Shane sighed. "He said a day or two." Pushing aside an overwhelming cloud of dread and grief, she threw her hands up while circling around her desk looking for her stapler. "Why is Mart Willow here? I thought he was on vacation this week."

Wiz cleaned out her cardboard yogurt cup with a paper towel. "He was. They called him back in. Must be something big. He's been growling around like Father Zeus all morning."

Shane found the stapler and banged on the top drawer handle of her desk, at the same time pulling on the middle drawer. On the third try, the desk unlocked itself. "Don't suppose anyone will ever fix this thing. Everything is going to pieces, Wizzie. My car, my hair, my life."

Wiz nodded. "Well, the main thing is you and Kippy. He's going to be okay. Speaking of old bumble-butt..."

"Oh God." Shane scrambled into her chair and logged into the newspaper's microprocessor network. She sat brightly and erectly, clicking away at the keys as Mart Willow's sullen redness floated past. The morgue door slammed and Shane exhaled.

Wiz slipped the empty yogurt container into the huge handbag by her desk. Shane liked Wiz, eccentricities and all. Used the cups in her garden, Shane remembered. Sometimes she envied Wiz, even if Wiz was fifteen years older. Wiz had a guy in her life, and she carried a glow. Shane, after breaking up with Howard Berger three months ago, had zilch for romance. Shane attacked the first obit: Rocco Balsamo, 89, died in Belgrave Park after a long illness. Mr. Balsamo had been a member of Plumber's Union Local 5679 for fifty-nine years. He was also a past Grand Panjandrum of the Lodge of Oriental Potentates. What was a panjandrum, and was that the right spelling? "Hey Wiz, pass me the dictionary, will you?"

"What are you looking up?" Wiz asked. Her glasses slipped down.

"Pan-jan-drum. Why?"

"I was just wondering if you were near the t's someplace."

"I could make a detour." Shane licked her finger and turned pages. Her left contact was beginning to sting.

"Theologian," said Wiz, whose spelling was legendarily bad. "One ell or two?"

Shane started to laugh. Wiz looked sheepish. Shane felt a frown replace her laughter. "Hey, you got a dead one there?"

"That's why we're in the obit department."

"No kidding," Shane said. "Kippy was saying something about a Faloshian, I thought he was saying. Couldn't figure out what he meant. One ell, Wiz."

"Thanks. Here, check this out. It's a doozy." Wiz tossed a handful of pages across.

Shane picked up the copy. As she did so, she bit loudly into a large red apple. The morgue door opened. Oh no, she thought, and looked up. There was Mart Willow, looking directly at her. As she looked at him, a dust mote flew up and her eye burned. She blinked at him several times in rapid succession. She hid the offending eye with her hand. Mart huffed off to his office.

"Winking at him now," Wiz observed.

Shane lowered her head onto the desk and hid under her hands. She shook her head and wondered why she had not called in sick.

"Cheer up," Wiz said. "I'll take you to lunch."

"Oh goody. Maybe I can eat some poisoned mushrooms and posthumously prove to my mother that I really did care about anything. Geez, this is weird." She read the beginning of Wiz's obit: Johnathan Smith, 68, died under mysterious circumstances yesterday evening on Zoo Lane. Mr. Smith, a professor at Whitbread Baptist Seminary in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was a prominent fundamentalist theologian... "Good spelling, Wiz."

"Went through the checker three times."

"Died right near the main entrance to the zoo, sounds like. That's what Kippy was talking about," she repeated in wonderment.

"Note," Wiz said, leaning forward so that her ebony hair dangled lankly. She said in a very soft voice, "Died on Zoo Lane. Right on the Burtongales' doorstep."

Shane caught the implication. The Burtongale family had founded San Tomas and owned chunks of it, including the zoo. "Do you suppose that's why bumble-butt, instead of shooting elk in Canada, is here shooting the shit with us?"

Wiz nodded. "Afraid so. The old Burtongale mafia rides again. And here comes another one now."

Jules Loomis, City Editor and, like Mart, member of the Burtongale clan by marriage, stopped at Shane's desk. Jules was short and pudgy, given to wearing unironed white shirts and baggy pants with trademark suspenders. He held papers in one hand and an editorial pencil in the other. Hair uncombed, he puffed on a curved-stem pipe. Shane liked his tobacco; it wasn't aromatic (too much bite, Jules had once explained after coffee and Danish at Vogelmann's) but more woodsy like a hay barn in the fall. Jules had hired Shane six years ago, and he liked her, tended to protect her, although Mart was technically Jules's boss, and might have fired her long since.

Jules, not given to formalities, nodded to Wiz while restuffing and relighting his pipe. To Shane: "See you a moment?"

"Yes?" She walked down to his office and knocked on the door. "C'mon in." She let the wood window-door slide shut with a glassy rattle. She eased herself into one of the old-fashioned wood office chairs around his desk. The morning edition lay folded nearby. A sidebar read: "BEAR DEAD IN CAGE. (Special) Andy, a four year old grizzly bear, unexplainedly..."

Jules relit his balky pipe and put his feet up on a desk drawer. "Coupla things. One, just want to let you know Mart Willow was in here this morning sounding me out about why you were late again."

Shane felt a welling up of anger.

"I told him it was your son's checkup. Then he mentioned you've been out or late a bit more than usual the past week or two and I had to say I suppose that might be true, because it is true."

Shane banged her fists on her knees. "I'm sorry."

Jules calmly continued: "I also told him, hey look, I seem to remember the same thing happening every three months or so like clockwork and damned if it ain't the week before your boy's checkup. I told him I figure she maybe can't sleep for worrying and why don't he go away and worry about his own problems."

"Thanks, Jules. Honestly."

He added darkly: "There is the other thing too."

She knew what it was and felt a rushing in her ears. A dark, turbulent spot in her memory flicked on, blackwhite blackwhite, censoring, canceling...

"I don't like to bring it up, but of course Mart knows you spent some time in prison. You know I think the world of you, but from time to time that will come up again."

Blood rushed in her ears, and his voice came across like words filtered through a wall.

"Oh well," he said, that settled. Puffing on his pipe, hands in pockets, he walked around the office. "You've been after me to get on the City Room staff as a reporter. I'm going to send you along with Perry for a while. Let you play assistant police reporter. See how you do."

"Yow!"

"I've pushed it with Mart Willow and he says no. Shane doesn't have a degree. I said neither do I but I'm city editor. He didn't say anything but his look said, you'll never maker it any higher. Anyway, I was talking with Perry Stein about you. He's willing to take you in the field."

"Jules!" She gripped his arm. "Yowee!!"

"Shh-hh, don't let Mart Willow see you. Seeing you happy always ruins his day."

She clapped her hand on Jules's forearm. "What is it between me and him? Why does the sight of me put him in a rage?"

Jules puffed and gazed far away. "Oh, I don't know. It's only a guess. Chemistry, probably. It happens like that. He's an old office nazi from way back, and you're sort of a free spirit."

"Why do you stand up for me, Jules?"

"Because, frankly, my dear... You're almost the only ray of sunshine in this dismal place. Go with Perry. Take a shot at it. I want to give you your chance."

Perry Stein's car was at least a block long and smelled strongly of disinfectant. In the back seat were several mops and buckets. Perry and his wife took night cleaning jobs around town.

"I thought you gave that up," Shane said as they drove along Canoga Avenue, where flowers bloomed by the shopping mall.

Perry was a tall, curly-haired Samoan with thick lenses and one wandering eye. "Naw. Matilda and I talked about it some. On a small-town paper like this you don't make enough money. Not if you have five kids like we do."

Shane watched expensive San Tomas stores glide by in unwavering peninsular sunshine. "This is exciting, Perry. I love the newspaper. Do I get to do some writing? I'm looking for a real kick-start out of this ditch I've been in all these years."

"For now, you tag along. You'll get your chance."

"Sure, Mart Willow will fall all over himself to promote me."

"You always did have that little bite, like maybe a jalapeno too many. What you need to do, Shane, is look for a story. Maybe a big story. Something you can put your personal stamp on. Then you'll be on your way."

She sat back dismayed. "It's Mart Willow again, isn't it? What does he think--if they print something I write, the paper will explode in people's hands? What an asshole."

"It's not my idea of a way to break you in," Perry sympathized.

The corridors of the city morgue were shadowy and cool in contrast to the growing heat outside. "I'm trying to act nonchalant, Perry, but this is my first trip to a real morgue, so grab me if I pass out."

The body of Johnathan Smith was not, as Shane had imagined, in a large room whose walls were covered with aluminum doors and whose concrete floors had cruel drains. Instead, it lay under a sheet in a plain, almost cozy, paneled room at one corner of the building. The blinds were drawn, but comforting sunlight peeked through. One of the live men in the room was San Tomas PD Lt. Vic Lara, the primary police investigator on the case. Shane thought he had beautiful shifting eyes. She felt attracted to him, and yet something about him gave her goosebumps. Had she known him in a dark past life or something?

Perry's wandering eye wandered. She had once, over coffee and Danish at Vogelmann's, heard someone of less sensitivity ask Perry how his eye got to be that way. He had held up one index finger and curled it into a hook. "Childhood fishing accident." Some answers left a Silence. ("Actually it's Lazy Eye," Perry had later confessed).

The M.E. pulled back the sheet and there lay Mr. Smith on his gurney. It reminded Shane of old Frankenstein movies, the way his body had been ripped to pieces and approximately sewn back together. "It would have to have been a big, quick, powerful, and very violent animal to do this," he said. "There have been no reports of animals missing from the zoo. And the only animal I know that fits that description is the human." He waved a finger over his work. "Miss, er, Shane," the M.E. said, "the cuts and stitch marks around the neck are from the autopsy, in case you don't know. So are the big cross cuts on the chest. As to the rest of the damage-- someone or something kind of tore him apart. They simply reached in and tore his heart out. It was found some distance from the body, partially eaten by a small animal."

It was neither horrible nor clinically neutral. She felt sorry for Johnathan Smith. The severed arms were crossed at the wrists, fingers resting in rubbery repose, awaiting some funeral ceremony.

"...Like Ripper work," Lara said. He had a kind of hardboiled way, Shane thought, talked with his chin cocked sometimes back, sometimes up, hands in pockets. Looked lean and mean in his starchy suit.

The doctor sighed. "There's a sick one out there."

Shane looked more closely at the face. In death, Smith did not look particularly peaceful, given the odd twist of the lips and the faint shine of eyeballs between stiff eyelids.

"Miss MacLemore," Lara said, "people try to figure out the dead person's expression. There isn't any. It's just the odd ways that muscles and ligaments shrink and harden."

She told him: "Call me Shane. Thanks for that information, Lieutenant."

"You working with Perry, Shane?"

"On and off," she said. The way he regarded her gave her chills. Had they been acquaintances somewhere long ago? Her mind, with a subconscious life of its own, groped: In an earlier life? Beneath the ocean floor? She reached for metaphors and found no perfect one, only a memory of terrible violence, like a private Big Bang. She shrank from the past, chilled, glad to return to the warm and sunny present.

Lara's look was penetrating but opaque. "See you around, huh?" His gaze caressed her the way one stroked a cat.

In the car, headed to the zoo, Shane asked: "Perry, why are the Burtongales all nervous about this?"

He made a cynical face. "Afraid of the publicity? Paranoid? Who knows. I'd like to leave this town and get on a better paper. One not owned by a ninety year old woman dictator."

When Shane and Perry arrived near the zoo, they found, still piled to one side, sawhorses and tangled yellow tape saying "Police Line -- Do Not Cross." There were stains on the sidewalk, puddles with long thin paint-like runnels going to the gutter. Shane knew the smell of dead animals in bushes, and these stains had in them the smell of death. The stink invaded her sinuses and hammered her brain, making her feel faint.

"Are you okay?" Perry asked.

"Excuse me," she said and walked away quickly. She made it about a half a block to a sandy area and there blew lunch like a garden hose.

Perry hollered something from a distance, and wind tattered his words.

She waved and yelled: "I'll be okay in a minute."

SomeThing gripped her mind and made her walk slowly, as if searching for something. She took small steps. She held her purse in both hands. It was very still there on the sand. A frog burruped nearby. A cricket critcketed. A bird clucked. Something violent had happened here on the sand long ago. It had been covered by blood. By deep sadness. She bent over as though programmed, and picked up the tiniest of things. At first she thought it was a seashell. Then she saw it was a tooth. A human tooth, too big to be a child's; somehow, she knew: an old person's tooth, bronzed with age underneath, bleached by years on top where it had lain on the sand, this beach not of the sea but of time. An echo welled up in her mind: Herself, long ago, drowning in tragedy, something to do with this tooth. She put the tooth in a clean tissue and hid it in the bottom of her purse. Then she gargled from a small bottle of mouthwash.

"...Taking it rather hard," he was admonishing. "If you want to be a police reporter..."

"Don't talk just now," she ordered.

He touched her elbow and they walked to the zoo entrance. There, the whatever that had just roiled the floor of her mind stirred the sand one last time: Her legs tingled, and her heart fluttered in clustered beats. It was as if a cloud had briefly darkened the sun. She became dizzy as she stared up into the elaborate 19th Century scroll work atop the zoo entrance. Bridging several brick and marble pylons was the legend "Wallace Burtongale Memorial Zoological and Botanical Gardens of San Tomas." As she read the legend, its letters began to writhe and wiggle in her mind. A sickness knifed her gut. A knowing of death, a shock of dying. But whose dying, hers? Something, briefly, touched her mind. An elderly man with mussy gray hair and truthful eyes stood inside of her, his lined face shining and finally free of pain. Her inner self turned away in deep guilt and shame and helplessness. Had she helped kill him? What else was there in this deep internal nightmare? But there was no accu sation in the man's eyes, only an understanding she knew she did not deserve. He held out his hand as if she had something of his.

"Shane!" Perry was shaking her.

She held her head in both hands, but her mind was her own again and she let go. "I'll be okay," she said. The feeling had passed, but her legs felt weak.

"You're white as a sea shell," Perry said, looking alarmed.

"Let's go for that big story," she said, heading toward the neo-Egyptian ramparts, jackals, and sun disks, of the zoo portal.

Everywhere inside the zoo, there was evidence of construction (or reconstruction, Shane wasn't sure which). Small pickups carrying electrical or plumbing supplies crawled on the pebbly paths among the habitats of elephants, giraffes, and wildebeests. Ladders leaned against walls, canvases were thrown over benches, orange cones stood in odd places. Men and women in overalls moved purposefully. Vans were parked in odd places.

The domed hall of the main administration building rustled with footsteps and voices. A receptionist behind a mahogany lectern directed them down a long hallway. The walls were covered with huge panels showing prehistoric animals. Brontosaurus, ninety tons of him, yachted through a pond. Whatsasaurus shrilled fearfully as T. Rex made salad out of him. At the end of the building was another, smaller domed hall with a tiled floor. A large portal led out into a small parking lot fringed with tropical plants. The air inside the dome was pleasantly cool. There were several office doors, each with its brass name plate. One nameplate read "Dr. Wallace Burtongale VI, Ph.D., Curator." The next door was that of "Dr. Roger Chatfield, Ph.D., Assistant Curator." On this door, Perry knocked.

"Just a minute," a man's voice shouted. The door opened. Dr. Chatfield, a tallish tanned man in his thirties, wore khaki. "Please pardon the mess outside. We're doing some major remodeling." He was good-looking, but Shane did not like him. Too self-assured, with those serious eyebrows. Perry evidently knew Chatfield, for they shook hands like old friends. Perry introduced Shane.

With Chatfield was another man, tall, balding, about fifty. He wore a priest's black suit and white collar. He wore steel-rimmed glasses and an expensive gold watch. He waved a banana-sized cigar. Chatfield said: "Mr. Stein, Miss MacLemore, allow me to introduce you to a friend of the zoo and gardens. Bishop Donald Mulcahy."

Mulcahy jammed the cigar between his teeth and energetically seesawed their hands. He had to bend down to do so. "Pleased to meet you." He seemed more a hard, realistic businessman than a priest at first glance. "We're over in the cathedral basilica near the zoo." Mulcahy said, "Church and zoo are old friends."

"Mr. Stein and Miss MacLemore are from the newspaper. They've stopped by to see me about the Smith matter."

"Oh?" Mulcahy sucked thoughtfully on his cigar. A steel-wool tangle of smoke floated away from his changed face. "How interesting. Good, Roger, well, I won't keep you. Been nice visiting. Good day, Mr. Stein. Nice day, Miss MacLemore."

The bishop strode off. He left a shawl of smoke over one shoulder, and Shane was surprised that she sort of liked the smell. Probably not your nickel stogie. More than likely, from the looks of the bishop, a pampered and humidored delicacy. His smoke had a dry, rare essence that reminded her of the smell of money in bank lobbies.

Chatfield had a high-ceilinged office with book-lined walls and dark furniture. Shane and Perry sat in sturdy leather-padded chairs making a semicircle before Chatfield's desk. "Can I get you some coffee?" His gaze told her he was interested in her.

Perry nodded. "Please. Given the way the morning has gone."

"Black no sugar," Shane said, wanting to keep things straight-forward.

"Been a real bear, I take it," Chatfield said as he poured from a ceramic service. They sipped from thick souvenir cups Shane found pretty: A maroon panda climbed in green bamboo against a creamy off-white background. How nice, Shane thought, to be able to work in an office with greenish light filtering in overhead.

"It's Miss MacLemore's first day on the police beat, and already she's had to see a dead guy with his heart torn out and visit the scene of his murder."

Shane flushed, angry that he would be patronizing. If he mentioned anything about her barfing, he would get his head thumped. Chatfield hovered like a boy sitting on a fence rail. "Are you interested in police work, Shane?" Bright voice.

She nodded. "It's a killer."

Chatfield glowered a moment, then laughed. Perry said: "I tried to reach Wallace Burtongale all morning, but the secretary says he's unavailable for comment."

Chatfield said: "Maybe I can help you?"

Shane noticed photos all over his desk. A boy and a girl. Were they his? And the blonde with the mysterious smile and the sensuous eyes; his wife? Wow, Dr. Chatfield, you've done well. And now he was interested in Shane? Whoa, no lipstick of mine will find its way to this man's collar.

Perry said: "This guy just happened to get his ticker ripped out on your doorstep. Come on, Roger, why the zoo of all places to dump a body? The guy was a theologian. Was he on a religious quest? Remember, I'm giving Miss MacLemore the A-ticket tour of investigative journalism."

There was a sudden shaking, a droning that rattled windows and drowned out conversation. They looked up. Shane glimpsed the silvery fuselage of a military cargo plane modified with all sorts of antennas and listening dishes.

"Perry, we've had bodies dumped here over the years, you know that. All those transients living down in the woods behind the zoo, all the drugs... I had a call from Miss Polly"(the 90-year-old Burtongale matriarch with the world view of an Albanian dictator)"this morning. She wants to downplay speculation. There is absolutely no connection between the body and the zoo."

"Not that the zoo has anything to hide." The question tumbled from Shane's lips, laden with sarcasm that surprised her. She caught her breath and looked up into Perry's open-mouthed stare. "What about the dead bear?" she blurted.

Chatfield's brow wrinkled. "Andy," he said in wonderment. "I have no explanation," he said honestly. He shrugged. "As Miss Polly has often remarked, what this zoo is all about is the tourist dollar. What's good for the zoo is good for the town. Jobs, Miss MacLemore. I'm asking you and Mr. Stein not to overplay the zoo angle."

Before they left, Shane pulled the tissue from her pocket. "You are a biologist, right? Would you have any idea what this is? I found it near the zoo entrance." She gave him the tissue.

He unwrapped it with a puzzled face. "Why, it's a tooth." He held it up in the filtered light. "It's a human tooth. From an adult." He smelled it, ready to rumple his nose, then merely shrugged. "It's old." He handed it back to her. "It's some poor alcoholic vagrant's lost tooth." He smiled broadly. "You find all kinds of things at the zoo."

"Jeez Shane, it's not anything you did or said, but I kind of got the idea you were a bit frosty with him," Perry said when they were outside walking on the zoo grounds.

"You were just imagining things, Perr'. I was wondering, though, why you didn't pump him some more for a crisp story angle."

"Shane, there's no logical connection between the zoo and this guy's death. We're a family paper, not a tabloid."

"I'm sorry, Perry, I'm just trying to be gung ho here on my first and probably last day as temporary acting assistant police reporter."

"A little less picante please."

"Come on, I'll buy you a root beer at the souvenir shop."

Perry wiped his forehead in the noonday heat. Overhead, the silvery C-130 was doing slow circles over San Tomas Peninsula. "What do you suppose he's doing?" Perry said watching the plane.

She shrugged. "Probably just playing in the sunshine." They walked across the zoo grounds. "Don't you just love this?" "Let's take a short cut," Perry said. "I'll phone in a short piece to make the late afternoon edition." Perry led her along a narrow, grass-choked path hidden in the swarmy shade of ancient magnolia trees. Suddenly she felt again the numb feeling she'd felt outside the zoo. She put her hand to her forehead. Oh no, not again!

"Shane, what's the matter?"

"I- I'll be all right. It's just -- the heat, maybe."

"I hope so." Perry took her elbow and gently guided her along. Her mouth felt dry and her heart beat like a washtub full of shirts. The trees were swarmy with insects. Shade hung in the tree limbs like molasses. They came to an odd little structure. Its roof was of mission tile, pagoda-like in the curvature of its edges. On the northward side was a three-foot relief of the sun, rendered as having a kind of dreamy dimpled face. It was stippled with moss. The eyes seemed closed. Its smile was at once promising and ominous. Its rays were wiggly octopus limbs. The path ran in a broad circle around the Pagoda. There were several benches in the inner edge of the circle.

"Here," Perry said, "sit down."

"Thanks." She was taking quick, shallow breaths. Her skin felt cool, but was wet with perspiration.

"I'll go get you a soda. Stay here."

"No--" she grasped his sleeve.

"It's just a hundred feet away on the main drag," Perry said. "Some ice water maybe and then off to see the zoo nurse, huh?"

Before she could stop him he was gone. She clasped her hands between her knees and sat back. Startled, she leaned forward. The hot dry air raked her eyes, propelled by a breeze created in the shady canyons. There, was there someone standing in the smoky shade just past the utility house? She rubbed her eyes and stared. Frank! No, that's crazy. Frank is dead. Stop it, Shane. Maybe I need to see my shrink again. When she looked again, the figure was gone, replaced by wavering round leaves.

Something brushed by her leg and she started together, hands upraised, hair standing on edge, drawing in a breath as sharp as an inward scream.

"Sorry to disturb you, Miss." A heavyset, middle-aged black grounds keeper in overalls shifted a curved pipe from one corner of this mouth to the other. He wore leather work gloves and carried a whisk broom and dust scoop, both on long handles to prevent stooping. The pipe smelled woodsy. The Dark Feeling left her as abruptly as it had come over her.

"Oh, please, don't mind me," Shane said happily. "I was just staring.. at the.."

"That there's an interesting lookin' building, ain't it?" He whisked right and left, and the dust scoop jumped like a small dog at his feet, snapping up the flying dust and debris. Whisk, whisk, he went; snap snap went the dust scoop like a maddened poodle.

"That's a utility shed?"

"Yes ma'am. That there's the old central power and gas and water house. They shut it down to put in a whole new power line from the city. That shed there is going to be just a backup. Got a diesel generator in there in case the power goes down. Sorry I disturbed you."

"I'm kind of glad you did, Mr.--"

"Washington. J. W. Washington." He pulled off a dirty glove and shook her hand. His hand was dry and heavy, reassuring somehow, with thick smooth fingers and a fine little gold ring.

"Mary Shane MacLemore," she said, rising. She couldn't resist: "Not Roger Washington?"

He grinned. "My uncle." Whisk whisk, he went; snap snap went the dust scoop. "You be good now, hear?"

"Oh I will, Mr. Washington. I swear I'll try."

He seemed to hear the sass in her voice and gave a knowing little gurgle of a laugh as his broad back receded along the walk.

She took a deep breath and sat down. One part of her was tempted to run and find Perry as fast as she could. But another part of her wanted to hang on, to stay, to find out just what it was about this day and this place and about her. She had the deep, turbulent sense that someone or someThing was trying to communicate with her. And she had the more disturbing feeling that somehow she had changed. Perhaps because someone or someThing had somehow 'joined' her. Taken up residence in a dark and little-visited rear corridor of her mind.

"Shane!" Perry came running, holding a big cup in one hand and wet paper towels in the other. The dear!

"Thanks, Perry. I'm better now." She drank icewater while he held a cool towel to her forehead. "What men don't go through."

She did look back, on the way out. The sun on the pagoda was smiling to itself, perhaps filled with the taste and the memory of her fear. The eyes were still nearly closed, but in a manner that suggested they had been staring after her, and quickly shut when she turned to look.

Gilbert Burtongale stood inside the near-dark Pagoda and watched a blue glow reaching from the hidden places, under the oil tanks and engines, from the underground water tanks.

"Thank you," he whispered out loud to the unseeable demon-force growing under the ground and in his brain. He had always had something lurking in the back of his mind; every first-born male Burtongale did. The glow strengthened in the undefined darkness among tanks and equipment. Gilbert unlocked the Pagoda and pushed the door open a crack, holding his hand up and squinting in the sunlight. His breath caught. His heart missed a beat.

She! He peered out from his hiding place. Mary Shane sat on a bench facing the Pagoda, not twenty feet away. His heart missed a beat. Had she seen him? Was that why she had that pale, shocked look? Then some old blackie came along and talked with her. Now it was old blackies. Years ago it had been Frank MacLemore. She was not like other women. She was a thing of rare beauty. Look how her face lit up like a little sun as she laughed. Look how saucy that precious mouth was, how quick and bright those eyes. He longed to take her curls in his fingers and smell them deeply. She was a bad girl, wild, to run with Frank as she had. Why? when Gilbert had wealth, good family, everything. Once Frank had seen him looking at her, and one look told him what Frank told other men: Touch her, you die. Frank had been nobody to fool around with. Reluctantly, Gilbert had put her out of his mind. After the burglary and the murders in Chicago, Gilbert and Frank had parted ways; Frank had died; and Mar y Shane had gone to prison. Oh, look at her now. How her beautiful face caught the sun. How her knees tantalized from under the jeans skirt. How her firm thighs flattened slightly on the bench. He saw a flash of the blue mound of her panties... Another man came; another one of them! and Gilbert wanted to kill him. Gilbert, a card-carrying, weapon-bearing member of the master race, hated the scum who had taken over the country. It would not be long now. Once the ship had rebuilt itself, once the someThing was back in its Pilot seat!

She rose, and Gilbert longed to touch the firmness of her naked legs, the exquisite perfection of her rear end, the gentle and feminine curve of her back. Hungrily, Gilbert watched the cocky gracefulness of her movements. I deserve her, he told himself. His gaze followed her naked calves among hanging boughs. And soon she would be his.

"You really should get a checkup," Perry said on the way back to the newspaper office.

"I will, Perry. Now let's see if I get to stay on this story."

Jules Loomis, a while later, seemed surprised that she even asked. "Why of course." He relit his pipe, and she strained to smell the smoke. "Perry says you have a good investigative streak. He also feels you need to learn some diplomacy."

"I'm afraid that's never been my strong suit."

"It comes with time."

Shane spent the afternoon finishing up Balsamo and the other obits. Wiz seemed quiet.

"Are you mad that they are letting me work city?"

Wiz turned in her seat and bunched her long drab dress on her knees. Her fists were knots. Her eyes swam in fury. "I'm sorry, Shane. I have nothing against you or your opportunity. I don't think it's jealousy for a woman 15 years older to be passed up, with a degree no less, even if it is in early child care and psychology. I feel like I've just had a shoe put up my rear end and I'm damn mad." Wiz picked up her huge purse, swept possessions into it, and said: "Please do me a favor. Tell Jules I quit"(Shane took a shocked breath)"and I'll give him a call tomorrow morning." Wiz started to walk away, then turned and regarded Shane with a long, strange look. "Shane, be careful." Wiz's eyes and mouth worked with some repressed knowledge. "This Smith story, stay away from it. But good luck with the police beat."

After Wiz had left, Shane exhaled through rounded lips, and finally made the trip past Mart Willow's office to Jules'.

"She what?"

"She said she would talk to you about it tomorrow."

Jules waved his hand. "She'll calm down."

Kippy was in the pool when Shane got home. The apartment door was open and Mother sat in the shade. It was sweetly quiet when Shane, twirling sunglasses and clutching purse, jacket, and newspaper, walked in through the wooden gate.

"Hi Mom!" Kippy dog-paddled toward her, throwing off twirls of sun-jeweled water.

"Hi darling," she said. She tossed a life preserver and it was a near ringer around his neck but he caught it and threw it back.

"Hello, Mary Shane," Mother said.

"Hi, Mother." Shane bent to kiss her mother on the cheek.

"I had to tell those young people in and 1A and 4B to turn down their stereos. They were loud enough to be heard in the next county." She said this as though it were Shane's fault.

Shane shrugged and breezed into the house. "Can't help it, Mother." She threw purse and jacket down, then propped up the newspaper and fished a cola from the refrigerator. "Smith Murder Inquiry Continues," a front-page head informed. There was a picture of Smith, taken a few years earlier during a banquet. A pleasant-looking white-haired man. Somewhere in Wiz's obit it said his students had loved him.

"Come on, Mom!" Kippy yelled from the pool.

"I'll be right out," she hollered through the curtains over the sink. A fleeting pleasure crossed her mind, that this was her home. Hers and Kippy's. She had chosen THESE curtains over Mother's suggestions at the Fabric Store. That had been quite a few years ago now. She'd been in her early twenties, trying to cope with Kippy's cancer. She'd also been trying to cope with Frank MacLemore's death. In some ways it had seemed easier with Frank gone, an end to his drinking and abuse.

She stepped into the bedroom, slipping out of her dress. In the light afternoon breeze that stirred the curtains, she relished the coziness of the bedroom. Sure it was a bit rumpled, the bed not made but just peeled open to air out, but it was clean, and it was home. For a minute or two, absently still in heels, she dawdled in the closet entrance. She finished undressing, changed into her black bikini, and stepped into Kippy's room. The air was stuffy and she opened a window. His room had that Kippyness that she loved. It was a room steeped in twilight on the border between childhood and adolescence. The computer, stereo, football, and light weights (prescribed for his legs) suggested the beginnings of teendom. For all the rest, it was still the room of a child. There were stuffed animals with worn fur, model cars with fingerprints in the paint, balsa planes she had helped him build that had never flown well. There were marbles and pencils and baseball cards. Flags of the world in a San Tomas State University Grecians beer mug. And photos. Among them a tattered old black and white of Frank in his Navy uniform, holding Kippy as a baby, proud, and she standing behind Frank with a scrubbed teenage face and an unreadable expression somewhere between joy and sorrow.

"Catch!" She tossed the ball back and forth with Kippy, then cooled herself in the pool. Mother went inside to make dinner, puttering about Shane's kitchen with a hesitancy as though everything were in the wrong place and of the wrong sort. Supper ended up hamburgers, silver dollar fries, and brussels sprouts.

"Where did you get the brussels sprouts, Mother? Surely not in my apartment."

"I brought a few groceries just so you wouldn't starve." Mother added: "I'm going to wipe down all your dishes before I go home."

"No need to, honest." Mother was a pain, but during the hard times after Frank's death, she had been there every day to help out. Herself a widow--Shane's Dad had died in an airplane crash when she was Kippy's age--Mother had retired two years early from her job at the phone company to take care of Kippy while Shane tried her hand, first at school, later at work. The current arrangement was that Shane managed the apartment complex Mother had bought with the insurance money from Dad's settlement. She also paid Mother a small rent and covered her own utilities.

After a brief tangle of words, Mother agreed not to wipe all the dishes in the cupboard now, but sometime when Shane and Kippy were not home. After Mother had left, Shane did the remaining few dishes. Shane felt like there was a volcano inside her ready to explode. Kippy was watching Star Trek on t.v. "Did you do your homework?"

"No."

"Kippy, you're not supposed to turn on the t.v. until your homework is done."

"Oh Mom." The 'mom' was a moan. Sound of crutches clicking. Then silence.

Shane finished wiping the counter with a hand towel. "Have you got a lot?" Sometimes they would sit together and work on his fifth-grade grammar and arithmetic.

"I don't feel good." A truly, sincerely sad voice.

She swatted him with the hand towel. "Too many brussels sprouts, huh?"

"I think I'll lie down for a while."

Shane frowned as he went into his room and closed the door. "Can I get you something?" Worry crawled like worms.

No answer. A little while later, carrying milk and cookies in on a t.v. tray, she found him fast asleep dressed in socks and terrycloth bathrobe. His skin felt hot and dry, and she contemplated waking him later on to take his temperature. Maybe it was an oncoming flu bug. Sitting alone in the living room, she started to watch an old movie, then felt alone. Tears surprised her, dribbled down her cheeks, off her upper lip, between her fingers. She heard herself keening softly in the dark livingroom like an unearthly musical intrument.

Dr. Boutros called her at the office. "No need to upset you, Shane. Dr. Wendt agreed that what we saw is probably a cyst. I think Kippy should come in for another X-Ray in about a month."

"Then you don't think it's cancer?" she whispered.

"No, I wouldn't think so at this time."

"But you don't know for SURE?"

Pause. "Let's have another look in a month and see if has changed."

Jules stopped by. "Any word from Wiz?"

"Not a thing," Shane said. "And I'm swamped with obits." She was angry, because she'd been unable to go on the police beat with Perry.

"Hang in there," Jules said walking away.

J. W. Washington was making his rounds (whisk! whisk!, snap! snap!) of the zoo and he came to the Pagoda. There, in the shade, he remembered the little blonde he had briefly spoken with that morning, and he wished she'd come by again. She had the scrubbed, pure look of one of those models with snowy smile, mint blue eyes, and halo of caramel curls, that J.W. often noticed on his wife's knitting magazines. Hell with the smutty magazines, if you wanted to see beautiful women look at knitting magazine covers. Today, J.W. noticed a shiny new padlock on the Pagoda door. Now wasn't that odd? Just out of curiosity, J. W. set aside his whiskbroom and scooper, fingered his belt for his heavy ring of maintenance keys, and approached the Pagoda. It was just one of the zoo's utility sheds. Inside were some shovels, picks, mulchers, weeders, rolled hoses, and the like; J. W. could almost do a mental inventory. Plus there was an underground water reservoir, and an old heater that no longer worked, from a century ago. Funny thing too, he hadn't been in there since remodeling started months ago. The key (marked "P" in J. W.'s laborious script) did not work on the new lock.

A snarling face surrounded by wild hair floated around into J. W.'s vision. "What are you doing?" It was Gilbert.

J. W. switched his pipe from one corner of his mouth to the other. "I work here, young man."

Gilbert's face grew redder. "I know that, old fool. I asked what you think you're doing at that door."

J. W. moved his pipe again, amazed. "I wanted to look into the Pagoda. That okay with you?"

Gilbert slammed a hand against the steel door. "I got a private contract to do work in there, and I changed the lock. I don't want anyone fucking things up in there, got it?"

J. W. lifted his pipe away and nodded. "Okay, if you say so, sonny." He considered arguing, but knew enough about Gilbert not to bother. Whisk whisk, J.W.'s tools went, Snap snap!

That evening, when darkness swallowed the zoo, when the night air was still except for the weird honks and groans of the animals, the Pagoda door creaked open. Gilbert stepped out, switching a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. He locked up. Then he walked to the Insect Hall. The someThing, the Pilot, pressing inside, he walked inside, stood quietly for some moments. The display cases--containing spiders, some dead and pinned, others wriggling and alive--glowed dully in the moonlight. Gilbert opened the display case the Pilot urged him to. The spiders stirred to life. They crawled around, agitated in a dim glow from no certain source. One by one they began dropping to the floor, avoiding Gilbert, then scurried off in search of the someone who had been snooping at the Pagoda, threatening the ship...

J. W. Washington had mixed feelings about working overtime this evening as he finished his sandwich and milk in the car and listened to a ball game. The money would help; but he'd miss the wife and kids.

J.W. put on his headset and turned on the Dandy Dan Dundee radio talk show. They were talking about football, his favorite, so he turned up the volume. He had been a football fan since his daddy had sat him on his knee at Home Stadium. J.W. got the golf cart ready to check all the ivied areas to make sure the sprinklers were fanning evenly. Then he'd empty all the trash cans in the main zoo office building with its cupola dome. He'd do the sprinklers first, because then he could listen to Dandy Dan Dundee talking about football. He'd save the trash in Admin 1 & 2 for last, because the buffer man came in at nine and they'd have coffee together and shoot the breeze for 15, 20 minutes.

J.W. Washington's earspeaker whispered a cheer of fifty thousand voices as the commentator revisited one of last fall's premier games. It was cool and pleasant in the zoo, with a little night moisture creeping in from the sea on three sides of San Tomas Peninsula. The park lights shed a yellowish glow. All street lights in San Tomas were sodium vapor by arrangement with the university observatory, to prevent fogging the night sky for the great telescopes peering into deep space.

J.W. drove his golf-style cart along Major Way, slowly checking the sprinklers. Here and there he got out to make an adjustment. Now he found a spot that was more difficult, in an island of ivy in the middle of Major Way. He found a sprinkler that had gone awry, shooting water over the pebbly drive instead of the ivy. No way to reach the sprinkler from the roadway without getting soaked. Gingerly, he stepped into the thick ivy, first one foot, then the other, waving his arms to keep his balance. To avoid being drenched, he crawled on his hands and knees toward the errant sprinkler. His fingers felt about under the ivy. Delicately, he marched his fingertips back and forth trying to assess a situation he could not see. He grunted heavily, trying to get comfortable lying on his side, for he was a heavy man, and no longer young. He felt a trickling sensation on his neck and brushed something away with his free hand. Glancing at his hand, he saw that the wetness was sweat, and he wiped his chin with the back of his hand. Then he concentrated again, closing his eyes, following his fingertips as they explored. First, there was the buried copper line. Then a brass fitting where it came out of the ground. Then the line became PVC plastic. He traced it to a PVC elbow that carried the water up into the sprinkler; and there was the problem... There, he could feel it with his fingers. The two screws, holding fast the strut that supported the brass sprinkler head upright, had come loose.

But he had the wrong screwdriver. Darn! He rose, avoiding the spray of errant water, and tip-toed out of the ivy to the road. Brushing his overalls off, he rummaged in the tool chest until he found just the right cross-tip screwdriver for phillips head screws. Then he tiptoed back under the sprinkler, and, sitting on his knees, reached down with both hands into the ivy to try and blindly get the tip of the screwdriver into the head of the screw.

He felt an itching sensation on his back.

He freed one hand to swat over his shoulder without really looking.

The itch went away.

He put the hand back into the ivy. Sweat dribbled from his face, twirling, glittering down into the ivy. With his fingertips, he guided the screwdriver to the screw. As he did so, he felt something brush against his right cheek. At the same time, an odd tingling sensation coursed throughout his body, coming from his hands. An electric jolt, a stinging sensation. His first thought was that he had somehow encountered a short between the water pipe and some hidden electrical line, of which there were plenty in the zoo's antiquated construction. The tingling raced up his arms into his shoulders. Sweat exploded from his forehead. He felt a stinging pain in his hands. At the same time, something brushed against his right cheek. In his peripheral vision, he saw a furry black something with many waving legs rounding the curve from his shoulder to his face. Tarantula! In a moment of frozen shock, he looked directly into its glittering black face, saw its parted clamps ready to tear his skin. With a scream of pain and terror, he rose to his feet and brought his hands up to brush the thing away. He found that his hands and his sleeves were coated with spiders of all sizes and descriptions. They were biting, stinging, sawing through his skin. He uttered a choking cry as a hairy body tried to push between his lips. Already, the world had a darker, narrower focus as he staggered through the ivy. His shirt and pants tingled here and there as multiple legs ran quickly over his skin. He tried to beat them down with his hands, his elbows. He fell to the ground, rolling. Felt the squishiness. Lay on his back. His breath came in short, painful honks. His heart beat loudly, intently, as though ready to tear a hole in his chest. He saw, dimly, a man standing in the roadway. "Help me!" he cried out. The man was far away, but J. W. saw it was Gilbert Burtongale. Grinning.

A blanket of tarantulas covered J.W.'s face, and he closed his eyes. Thought about football. About taking his sons to the ballgames next fall. Sure. They would go to a game. Why was he lying here feeling so woozy? At the ballpark? Hot dogs?

He was walking.

Huh? Walking down a long hallway of some kind. He looked at his hands and they were bright blue. Nearby, a young girl in a long skirt. Her long hair and skin were bright blue. She carried a blanket-wrapped bundle in her arms. "Hello. My name is Teresa. Did you die today too?"

J.W. looked at his hands again. "What did you say?"

"Don't you know? We died today."

J.W. hesitated. In the corridor ahead waves were breaking on a beach.

"Don't be afraid," she said. "We feel fine now."

They held hands and walked through the waves. Down into the sea. Fish swam around them. And through them. "You see?" she said. "Nothing to be afraid of. This little guy died today too." She opened the blanket, revealing a blue baby. The baby opened its eyes and smiled at J.W. "His name is Theodore. He fell out a window, but he's all better now." Ahead, too far to make out clearly, a gateway seemed ablaze with rippling sheets of fire. Just then some cold blue person walked reluctantly into the fire, pushed along by dark moving shapes.

In the morning, over breakfast, Kippy told her: "You had one of those screamers again last night."

"Huh?" She stopped in mid-croissant and blushed. For years, about once a month, maybe two or three times during times of extreme tension, she had some nightmare whose contents were a closed, sealed secret. She might wake up screaming, sitting up in panic; or sleep through and have Kippy tell her she had awakened him. "Sorry," was all she could offer, but he seemed used to it.

Shane dropped Kippy off at St. Andrew's School. She watched until his mop of thick brown hair disappeared among other heads on the playground, then drove to work. Jules called her into his office. "Bad news. Wiz called early this morning and said she won't be back."

"No!"

"I'm sorry, Shane. It will take a few days, maybe a week or so, but we'll get a replacement. Meanwhile I'm afraid you're going to have to woman the obit desk all by yourself. When we get a new person you'll have to train him or her also."

"Damn."

"Yeah. I can empathize. I'll give you the freedom to help Perry in anyway you want, as long as it doesn't interfere with obits. I'm making you his assistant, and damn Mart Willow."

"That does make me feel a little better. Just give me a chance, that's all I ask." She thought, I will find a big story and write it down and be Hemingway and it will be good.

"Hey, there's more good news. Chatfield called from the zoo yesterday afternoon. Very impressed with you. Says he wouldn't mind helping you put together some color about the zoo. Want to do some stories?"

She took a moment to answer, remembering her mixed feelings about Chatfield. "Well, maybe..."

Perry stopped by to offer condolences about Wiz quitting.

"Great timing," she remarked as the copy girl brought a stack of death notices needing phoned accuracy checks.

"A little less chili pepper please," Perry said. He sat on the edge of the desk and cracked an apple. "Did you know there was another death at the zoo last night?"

"No."

"Yes. One of the maintenance men. They found him lying in the street, bitten up by spiders. I was just on the phone with the M.E. He says the stings caused a heart attack." Perry rapped a knuckle on the desk. "Well, assistant, I gotta run. Can't wait for you to get out there on the police beat."

Shane got to work. Doing Obits alone was like rowing a leaky boat. The faster you rowed, the more water got in. Or so it seemed. She arranged the piles of paper on her desk and tried to get organized. With the rhythm of cooperation between herself and Wiz gone, she felt overwhelmed. Each morning, ten or twenty death notices arrived, of which probably three to six required obituary newspaper articles. In other words, she had to write about twenty pages of meticulous articles every day before the two p.m. deadline. Woe if a name were misspelled, an address wrong, or a surviving relative not mentioned! Often, a death notice or obituary article required telephone time, checking details. Shane had been doing obits for nearly five years now, and it gave her a strangely serene overview of life and death. Sometimes she felt like a secretary to St. Peter or whoever unlocked the pearly gates. People died suddenly or from long illnesses or were murdered. People died young or old or in the prime of life. For example, one of the obits today was on a 13 year old girl named Teresa Avila who had died of leukemia. Another was on a little baby named Theodore Grant, who had fallen from a third-story window; with a name like that, he might have grown up to be a great lawyer, maybe even a president. How sad life could be. But she had her Kippy.

The obituary notice on the zoo employee who had died last night was phoned in by a relative late that morning.

"Would you repeat that name?"

"Washington. J.W. Washington."

She nearly dropped the phone. "I was just speaking with him yesterday!" Shane and the shaken relative exchanged observations about life, death, fate, and coincidence for several minutes more. Whisk, Whisk, she thought sadly. Snap, snap.

"Going to lunch?" Perry asked a while later.

"Is it that time? My God it's noon. Perry would you be a sweetie and bring me a sandwich?"

He was, and he did. They ate together in the hall on a windowsill. "Perry, I've been doing obits for a couple of years," she said as egg salad fell out of her mouth and she used her fingertips to stuff it back in. "It seems to me I've done several obits on zoo people the past year." He merely shrugged. Still chewing, she hurried back to her desk. The clock was ticking. With every minute the 2 p.m. deadline loomed closer.

Ann Temple, Shane's girlfriend from school days, called at ten after two. "Hey Rat Breath." Ann and Shane long ago had exchanged special secret names. Ann's son Jeremy was a grade further along than Kippy at St. Andrew's.

"Yo Beagle Face," Shane said weakly, sitting back in her typing chair after having made the deadline by thirty seconds.

"Want to go out for steak dinner at Pepper's Steak House this evening?"

"Great idea," Shane said. "Let's make an evening of it." With that to look forward to, she brightened. She started playing with the computer while she ate the remaining half of her sandwich and lukewarm coffee. Suppose, she thought, I wanted to know how many people have died around the zoo during the last year or two, how would I look that up? Shane sat at the glowing screen. The keys clicked as she tried different things to access the information. At five, after calling Ann Temple to pick up Kippy, Shane was still working on the computer system. She saw Mart Willow walk into his office with (ugh) Gilbert Burtongale. Mart (bigger ugh) was Gilbert's uncle, and no doubt Gilbert was here to hit him up for some money again. The whole staff knew that Gilbert would yell his head off if he didn't get his way. The ancient woman, Polly Burtongale, made sure Gilbert always had his way.

As Shane pondered the computer screen, someone sang "He-e-l-l-l-o-o-o" right into her face and she nearly fainted. Gilbert. She stared at him, paralyzed.

He smiled charmingly. "I just keep running into you everywhere. I saw you at the zoo the other day, and now here." He looked at her closely. A Dark Feeling came over her. Don't you remember anything? his mouth said.

She shook. Words would not come out of her mouth.

His face looked luminous, as though she were shining on him. He licked his lips. His eyes flicked over her skin with the speed of knives, as though carving off little bits of beauty here and there. He licked his lips. "We are meant for each other."

She raised half her upper lip, exposing (she hoped) TEETH.

He raised his fingers. "Such pretty curls."

She brushed his hand away. "I have work to do."

"I'm sorry. Here I am, disturbing you while you do-- what?"

"DEATH NOTICES," she said, trying to put a hint into it.

"You remember my name?"

She wished either he were gone or she could melt through a crack to get away.

"Gilbert," he said. "Gilbert Burtongale. I am going to own all this one day."

She turned away. Her fingers clicked on the keyboard. Her cheeks, as she stared at the screen, were hot points. She heard the swash of his clothing as he rose.

At 5:30, Mart Willow, Jules Loomis, and the staff all trooped past carrying their satchels and jackets, giving her surprised looks. Jules said, "they must be dying like flies out there." He passed her with a fond gaze.

The system prompted her through a series of menus. She tapped out the commands that would make the computer search through all the obituary articles for the past year, noting any that had the word 'zoo' in them, and print on the screen before her the names of the dead person(s). She waited while the cursor blinked on a dark screen. She was unsure this would lead anywhere.

"Processing..." the machine silently displayed. Still the cursor blinked. "Please wait..."

Then, making her sit up suddenly, the name "Washington, J.W." was displayed. My God, she thought, it's picking it up. It's reading through the articles backwards, of course, and Washington was just entered today.

Folly, she thought. Probably just a blind alley. There might be one or two more, but probably nothing to interest anyone. "Smith, Johnathan," the system displayed after "Washington, J.W." Her leg rocked rapidly forward and backward, a nervous habit of old. No more names, no more names, no more names, her mind repeated hypnotically as she tried to check her frustration.

Then the names winked into a column, one by slow one:

			Appleworth, Mary  
			Jenkins, Ken  
			Andino, Rosario  
			End of Search.

"Holy Moses," she said. "It worked." Then the deeper implication struck her. "Six dead ones in the past year!"

Ann Temple brought her son Jeremy to Shane's apartment that evening. Kippy and Jeremy were astronauts in a computer game, shooting each other between the planets of an alien sun.

"We're going out!" Shane and Ann said. "Keep the door locked!"

"Okay," they singsonged disinterestedly, bleary eyes hooked on Captain Colorado, Space Hero.

At Pepper's Steak House, a billboard in the form of a giant menu advertised today's specials. Behind the billboard menu sprawled Pepper's: heavy beams smothered in ivy; lead-paned windows sauteed in shadows. Ann said: "Used to be Long Tom's."

"I remember." Shane looked up at the crossed salt and pepper shakers. "We met Frank MacLemore and Attila here when we were 18 years old."

"Can you imagine?" Ann said. "Knowing what we know now?"

Inside the restaurant, burgundy light glowed among oddly placed wooden pylons. Shane remembered that in its earliest incarnation this place had been an inexpensive family seafood restaurant. She even remembered now, surprised at deeper layers of memory under fading images of her wild late teen years, that her parents had brought her here as a little girl.

"Shane?"

She felt Ann tugging at her sleeve. A cocktail waitress's airbrushed smile glowed white in the darkness. "Would you like cocktails while you wait?" the waitress said in a heightened voice, as though it were the second or third time she said it. Shane ordered wine. In the lounge, they sat on bar stools.

Ann sighed deeply. "We gotta lighten up here, Lull. What is this kinda glow you have tonight?"

Shane could still see his pale young face, scruffed up with beard shadow, as he leaned toward her. They had been eyeing each other for about an hour. She could still see the hunger in his dark eyes as he inched toward her in the crowd. She remembered how her stomach had fluttered. She had not really cared that much for him at first. Until it had been too late. Once those love hormones started to circulate, it was Niagara wreathed in shattered water like smoke.

"We can always go somewhere else," Ann suggested.

"What? Oh no, it's okay. I haven't been here in a long time, but I don't want to have to leave anywhere because of old memories. C'mon, let's live it up." She raised her wine glass.

Ann raised hers, and they clinked glasses. Ann told about some software her company had just bought, and how she was enjoying using it in her accounting job.

"And I am going to write The Big Story," Shane said.

"I'm very excited for you. It's time you had some luck. You're intelligent, well-spoken..."

Shane interrupted: "...Have a nice ass."

"That too." Ann sniggered. She had a nice ass too, according to various sources over the years. She and Ann made quite a pair. They clinked glasses again. The hostess escorted them to the dining room. There, over flickering candles and mauve tablecloths, they ordered steak dinners.

"My parents brought me here once when I was small," Shane said.

"Wow, that's a priceless memory," Ann said.

Shane's father had died when she was ten. She grew silent, not wanting to drag the conversation into a sad valley. She kept the rest of the memory to herself. It was a sunny, semisweet piece of grayware, for her father had been killed in a plane crash over the ocean less than a month after that long ago dinner. Shane's troubles--with her mother, with herself, even with Kippy--had grown out of that tragedy.

The dinners came, and Shane and Ann ate hungrily. Shane was drinking her second glass of wine and feeling giddy. She remembered that long-ago day with her parents as though it were yesterday: It was a Sunday afternoon late. Time seemed to stand still. A big bar of sunlight leaned in through the window. My Dad was telling jokes and Mother was telling him to be careful I might understand but I was already laughing. Funny thing is they were clean jokes. Mother just didn't get them. Like this duck walks in the cosmetics store and points to the lipsticks. Says I'll take this one and that one and that one." Dad pointed at his nose. "And just put them on my bill."

Shane ate mechanically. She stared at the far table, her gaze truncated again and again by hustling waitresses. She tried to unravel time in her mind. She tried to remember first the lost world of Long Tom's, where in the haze of adolescent anger she'd seen herself as a Cortez in the jungles of newly discovered sexuality. Plunging deeper through the tunnel of memory--ah, there it was, the lump of pain surrounding Dad's death that had changed her life forever--and further back...to that place over there. How had it been? Not drab and dark like now or angry-smoky like the Long Tom's days... but simple, tidy, lit with light, secure, reasonable. Checkered table cloths a little girl would like, baby blue on white, with lacy frills. A fly circling over ketchup grown black and tacky on a wrinkled Spike's Family Diner menu... So that was the old name, Spike's Family Diner. She wanted to ask Ann if she remembered, but a half-chewed mouthful of steak was stuck in the corner of her mouth, laying a numbing choke-hold on the muscle there. The thing about Daddy was his eyebrows. They wobbled up and down when he told jokes. Funny, she had forgotten how fat he was. No not fat, just big and square with lots of extra flesh, but everything neatly tucked inside a clean shirt and a gray suit with wide lapels. He had pudgy white hands clasped under his belly. She hadn't realized how soft his fingers looked, as though soaked for hours in soapy water. But his eyebrows! How they moved up and down when he talked. His lips glistened wetly. His teeth glittered like pebbles. His tongue...

Shane put her fork down. She rose slowly. She took the napkin from her lap and meant to leave it on the chair but she felt it brush against her calf as it fell to the ground. A waitress excused herself and Shane nodded, barely noting the annoyed face.

"Shane. Shane! Shane?" she heard Ann's voice somewhere far away. All clinking forks fell silent. The laughing, talking, rustling of menus stopped, even a distant pounding jukebox fell silent.

"Daddy?" She stopped right before his table, pretty much where she'd sat that afternoon long ago, and looked up at him. Way up. His eyebrows waggled up and down. He bored into her with laughing eyes. His cheekbones glittered as though they had been made of glaze, like a doll's. His padded shoulders and chest heaved, no, bounced up and down. He reared his head back with laughter. Mother looked away, embarrassed. He slapped his soft white fingers on the table and turned toward Mother to see if she got the joke. Shane took a hesitant step forward. She reached out.

"Shane!"

Her heart pounded like an engine gone wild.

Closer, closer...

The eyes... ...the eyes... ...were empty as the black of space, devoid of feeling, drained of emotion... There was no speck of love in those eyes... The white fingers...

...fingers of death. The white powder of the undertakers was on them. Powder flaked and crumbled from the dark prune-like fingertips. Powder caked and piled up in the laugh lines at the edges of the face. Ceramic filled in the face shattered and torn open in the airplane crash. The lips, the cheeks, the nose, eaten by fish, glittered now, a glass mask. But the eyes, oh the lovelessness in the eyes was what finally told her this was not her Daddy, this was nobody who had ever loved her, and she felt a Dark Feeling.

"Shane, are you okay?" Ann stood beside her, an arm around her. The man in the checkered suit stared at her, puzzled. He had a coarse, kindly red face with droopy furrows.

Ann led her back to their table. "You were like in outer space there for a few minutes. I was like whoo-aa, where's this woman gone to? Welcome back."

"Thanks," Shane said. "I feel better now."

"Can I finish my steak or do you want to leave?"

"If all these people will stop staring." Shane picked at her food. The music picked up. Forks knives and spoons restarted their randomizations. Laughter and talk ballooned under the wood rafters. "Ann, I think I'm cracking up."

Eyebrow. "Oh?"

"I thought I saw my Dad sitting over there."

Fork. "Oh well, you were remembering." Mouth.

"Yes, but it was so real. It was like a nightmare, only I wasn't asleep."

Chewing. "You're under a lot of stress."

"I'll say. Look, maybe I'm really losing my marbles. You'd... you and Jeremy would look in on Kippy sometimes if I weren't here anymore, wouldn't you?"

Choke. "Shane! What ever are you talking about." Ann drank half her water. "Shane, maybe you are under a lot of stress, but I don't think you're cracking up. I've known you too long. Well, unless you've changed somehow the past few years, and I don't feel that. I remember how nervous you used to be when Frank and Attila were out drinking."

Attila had been Ann's boyfriend, Frank's favorite biker buddy. Shane could picture Frank and Attila, tangled in a bloody ball of flesh and torn clothing, pale dead faces staring out from the mangled steel of Attila's chopped Harley. She cringed, hoping this would not bring on another vivid illusion. But it didn't.

"So far this has been one really WEIRD evening," Ann said as they sat in her car outside. "You ARE going to be OKAY, aren't you?"

Shane touched her head with both hands. "I'm going to call my shrink."

"I think that's a good idea, Shane."

"I thought I was done with him years ago, but here I am again. Fucked up as always. Ann--?" She turned toward her friend. "You were with me years ago. What happened?"

Ann's face was dark and hard.

Shane gripped her friend's arm. "Please, if you know anything, tell me."

Ann looked like a different person, carved from stone. "It's just as well you don't remember."

Next day, obits was a bitch as usual. She made her deadline and then called the M.E. No autopsies had been done on the four zoo employees; dead end. In the morgue, she slid microfiche sheets through the light and magnifying lens one by one: Washington, J.W.; Appleworth, Mary; Jenkins, Ken; and Andino, Rosario; but there was no listing for any of the names. Should there have been? She read her hard copies of the obits over again. Jenkins had been 49, Andino 53, and Appleworth 27. In fact, J. W. Washington had been 57. One thing they all had in common was that they had not died of old age.

She called the zoo. Dr. Chatfield expressed delight to hear from her. She asked: "I was going over some obits, and I noticed that six zoo employees died during the past year, suddenly, in the prime of life. Do you feel there might be a connection? Maybe an environmental hazard?"

"Coincidence, Miss MacLemore. Pure and simple."

"It's a mortality rate like Waterloo."

"You're not planning to do a sensational expose, are you?"

"No, but even if I were it would not get past the editorial staff."

"I will be happy to escort you around the zoo if you'd like to do a nice series on some of the animals. The paper does it like clockwork about every three years, and it's time."

"Thanks, I appreciate that." She thought, hanging up, well, maybe some little stories might get me in the back door; but right now I think I might have a big story. She started contacting next of kin. Mary Appleworth's widower, John, a garage mechanic, was sympathetic but not very helpful. "I've got three kids, and it's all I can do to make ends meet. There is some insurance money due, and I was told by the lawyer to say nothing or I might lose the money. Sorry." He hung up.

Rosemary Jenkins, widow of Jenkins, blubbered a little bit. "They were pretty forceful."

"Who, Mrs. Jenkins?"

"The lawyers. They told me I'd have to keep my mouth shut or I could be sued and lose the insurance money."

Bulloney, Shane thought. "What's the name of the insurance firm?" But Mrs. Jenkins had hung up.

Jesus Andino, widower of Rosario Andino, hung up after providing the name of the law firm.

J.W. Washington's widow was too hysterical to make sense, so a sister spoke for her: "Yeah, there were lawyers in and out, you can be sure. They were talking a lot of money, but they said we got to be very careful who we talk to, or the insurance might not pay up. Who did you say you work for?"

Shane hung up.

The law firm was Kane, King, Kahn. Shane looked their number up in the phone book.

"Burtongale Building," a receptionist answered.

Instantly, Shane knew where the law firm was; in that twelve story brick office tower, nearly a century old, owned of course by the family it was named after. "Please connect me with Kane, King, Kahn."

"They have separate lines, Miss. Which one do you wish to speak with?"

Shane thought fast. "The one that's married to a Burtongale."

The receptionist said innocently. "That would be King. Just a moment please."

Amazing. The Burtongale family seemed to overflow with women, and the men they brought in all occupied points of power in San Tomas. She wondered who King was married to.

A woman answered. "Janet King."

Well, swallow my words. A cousin of Gilbert Burtongale, Shane happened to know. "Ms. King, I have a friend who recently passed away at the zoo, an employee named J. W. Washington. I was wondering if you were handling the case."

"Yes, I am," snapped Ms. King. "What is your interest in the matter?" Ms. King sounded like a thorough bitch.

"I was also stung by the spiders, but I didn't die. I lost the use of my left arm though, and I would like to sue."

A big long sigh. "Very well, Miss..."

"Chang. Phoebe Chang. Just out of curiosity, who is the insurance carrier?"

Hesitation. "American Canoga Insurance. Why?"

"Just wondering."

"I see. How soon can you come see us, Miss Chang?"

"How about this afternoon?"

"Fine." Sound of pencil scratching on paper. "Two o'clock?"

"Oh yes, that's fine."

"Do you know where we are located? Can you find us?"

"Yes, of course. Unless my condition gets worse. You know, blindness. Further paralysis. But I'll call in that case." Shane hung up. Tapped her pencil, staring at the phone. Then called Information to get number and address of American Canoga Insurance. Shane called the number.

"Burtongale Building," the familiar receptionist said.

Shane hung up.

She raced into Jules's office and closed the door. He looked up, puffing on a fresh pipe and raising quizzical brows. "Jules! I think I'm onto a major story. There has been a string of deaths at the zoo, and I think they are being hushed up by the Burtongale family."

Jules listened patiently. "Shane, you can be a great reporter some day. There's one more thing you need to prove."

"What's that?"

"The common sense to realize that you work for the Burtongales and they will fire you if you so much as put a word of this on paper. Now go on, tag along with Perry and stay out of trouble."

But Perry had left for the afternoon and Shane was too frustrated to stay at her desk and get ready for the next day's obits. On a whim, she called the information operator in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and asked for the phone number of Whitbread Baptist Seminary. She spoke with a Dr. Philomel Crosby, Professor of Bible Studies. Mr. Crosby was a young man, and taken with her voice. "I'm fishing for a story," she told him. "The man died here, and it was all so sudden that we buried him without much of a story."

"Well," Dr. Crosby said, "we will miss Dr. Smith. He was something of a firebrand, to be sure."

"What do you mean, a firebrand?"

"Well, in his later years he became more and more taken up--some would say obsessed--with the idea of making Christianity as concrete as, say, science or mathematics. He wanted to PROVE"(she could hear the ringing of Crosby's voice in some church rafter)"that God and Satan are real."

"And this brought him to San Tomas?" she asked.

"It's a rather odd story."

"Try me."

"Dr. Smith was here a long time, and he did a lot for the seminary. One of the many legacies he left us was his Museum of Satan. If you're ever out this way, you should stop by and see it."

"What is in this museum?"

"Things of God and things of the Devil. Ordinary folks may scoff, Miss MacLemore, but good Christians take the Word of God quite literally. When he says there is a Hell, you better believe there is. But the good news is, when he says there is a Heaven, YOU better BELIEVE there is a heaven!"(how the rafters rang!)"In this museum, Miss MacLemore, the good Dr. Smith was gathering artifacts from around the world. Voodoo dolls from Africa, evil statues from several ancient empires, a Satanic Bible from England...well, you get the idea."

"You're putting me on."

"Absolutely not."

"This would make a lurid story, if a person wanted to--"

He said sharply: "We have had requests like that, but we stay away from them."

"I work," she said, biting her tongue, "for a legitimate newspaper. All I am looking for is a little background. So what does this museum have to do with why Smith was in San Tomas?"

"We have kept this out of the papers, Miss MacLemore, but Dr. Smith believed the devil lives in the San Tomas Zoo. How ironic that he died there the way he did. To bring Satan out of hiding, he took with him one of the artifacts in his museum: a wooden statuette of a West African rain devil. That's a demon who makes the animals in the jungle go into the villages and kill people. His reasoning was that if he could prove there is Satan, then there must be God. He was on a divine mission, Miss MacLemore, and maybe it was Satan who tore his heart out because he got too close to the truth."

"Thank you," Shane said. Another story Jules would quash if I even mentioned it to him.

"Did you want the correct spelling on my name?" Dr. Crosby asked.

"No." She let the receiver slip quietly into its cradle. The image of a rainy jungle, and beasts coming out to kill people, haunted her.

Saturday evening, Shane and Ann got together at Crank's. Shane parked in the brightly lit, most fashionable part of Canoga Avenue. Several blocks over, the age-green copper spires of the Burtongale Building taunted her, lit by spotlights and flying a large American flag. Ann said: "C'mon, let's make eyes and have eyes made at us." Crank's was a popular dress-up bar along Canoga Avenue. They walked up granite steps to a warm oak doorway piped with shining brass tubes. Husky blond men with Crank's logo T-shirts and suspenders checked ID. "That's a nice start," Ann whispered to Shane while glancing back at a muscular bicep. A thin man in a business suit, too old and not right, said something charming to Shane. She raked him with The Icy Look, and the glitter went out of his smile, like a neon light with a rock through it.

"Not too crowded," Ann said. They found a small table set into the wall. A waitress in mini-tux, tray held high, took their orders of house white.

Shane thumped Anne's back. "Good choice, Beagle Face. Glad we decided to dress up."

"Thanks, Rat Breath. Good to party a little again."

"You call this partying? Geez, I would never have imagined, when I was chainsmoking Camels and swilling beer with Frank and the boys, that in ten years I'd be sitting in a place like this wondering if I should sip Chablis or Burgundy." Everything was mirrors, but cool because the light had an understated bluish brightness that made faces and hands appear fluorescent. Brass tubing arced among graceful potted palms. The mirrors, coated with art-deco figures in white latex, gave an impression of boundless space. Trippy space, pounded by heavy speakers extruding a thick paste of metal-sounding music. Crank's was hip, and hip meant music without deafness. Talk, however aerated, was in. So was Looking.

"That one," Ann said, pointing. "There. No, there."

Shane finally saw him, a man with a nice smile who seemed entranced by his heavy blonde companion, listening to her every word. "Nice," Shane said. "He doesn't look scroungy, so probably no drugs. Trim, so he must work out. Isn't swilling his drink, hasn't scratched his balls."

Shane and Ann clinked glasses. The clinking caught the eyes of the man with the blonde, and a look of startled speculation crossed his upper face, changing the eyes, while the smile remained frozen. Watch it," Shane said. "He's a faker. He's seen you."

Ann was smiling across the room, nodding.

"Oh Jesus. I knew something was going to happen tonight. Fast work there, Beagle-Face."

Ann put her glass down with a knowing, secret smile. "I just enjoy the game a little bit. Try myself to see if I'm rusty."

"I'm going to the ladies' room," Shane said.

"Wish me luck. Hey whattaya know. He's telling her he must go to the bathroom." She pulled in her chin and made a deep Transylvanian voice: "Dahlink, I must go shake my hose."

Shane laughed, escaping before the guy glided in like a black and white fish, angling slightly toward Ann with an expressionless look at Shane. What a feat, Shane thought, he should be in a circus. How can a person present two different faces to two different persons at the same time? He curved in like a dolphin, fins laid back and relaxed as in a dancer's bow. With one side of his face he looked suggestively into Ann's eyes while with the other side of his face he sized up Shane.

She picked up her purse and threaded her way through the crowd. That was when she saw Lt. Vic Lara of the San Tomas Police, whom she had met at the morgue, and her breath caught. Lara's eyes started at her toes and moved up to her curls, like pencils shading in a drawing. There was a warm, cocky twinkle to his eye, and his chin moved back in a smile. "Haven't we met somewhere before?"

"Maybe."

"Let me buy you a drink," Lara said.

"I'm with a friend."

"Now are you cold or just shy?"

"Oh why not?" Shane said.

"Great." He held the chair for her. Glasses came: wine for her, scotch for him.

"So we meet again," she said feeling witless. His eyes, when he looked at her a certain way, reminded her of old pain and she wished he'd quit doing that.

He moved a toothpick around on his lips. "I was kind of surprised to see you're on the police beat. Gets pretty gory."

"I quickly noticed that somehow. How do you deal with it every day, Lieutenant?"

"Vic. Call me Vic. Hey, do I get the feeling I'm being interviewed?"

She folded her hands on the table. "Do reporters make you nervous?"

He slapped his forehead. "Reporters. Naw. Pretty girls. Women who are sure of themselves and stare into your soul. Like you."

She laughed. "Very theatrical. Must be the Latin blood."

"Now there you've hit it right on the head. I'm Mexican-Puerto Rican." He made sawing motions with his forearms. "Salsa, baby. Sabe?"

"I like a little salsa now and then. Say if you trashed that toothpick I probably could see into your soul."

The toothpick sailed away in an arc. He opened his mouth wide.

She looked in. "Well, you have a lot of fillings..."

He snapped his mouth shut. "What are you, a dentist now?"

She laughed. "Just a struggling obituary writer."

He placed his hands over hers. "I was going to ask you for your phone number."

"You presume greatly, Lt. Lara. Here, I have something in my purse that I want to show you." She placed it before him.

"A tooth?" Vic asked, regarding the object.

She said: "I found it outside the zoo." There was a ringing in her ears, a rush of blood, and she wasn't sure why she was doing this.

"Oh?" He placed a new toothpick carefully in the "o" of his lips while his eyes appraised her. Again, that feeling scraped her soul. What was it Vic Lara did to her? He looked at the tooth but did not touch it. "Now why did you pick up this old thing? Isn't it better to let old things lie where they are?"

"You too, huh?"

"Wait," he said raising a hand as though he were cleaving a pound of truth. "Why were you wandering around outside the zoo?" His eyes looked surprised and interested.

"I wasn't wandering," she said, "I was throwing up."

He stared.

"I was grossed out by the smell of Smith's blood."

"You're going to be police reporter. Get used to it."

"I'm working on it, Vic. I'm with you here, aren't I?"

He stopped laughing. "You could do worse."

She whacked him. "I know. Stop treating me like a sister, will you?"

He reached for her hand. "Okay." He helicoptered close with puckered lips.

She felt starved and wanted to take him home to bed but she put her finger over his lips. "First things first, Vic."

He sat back. "All right, tell me exactly where you found this tooth."

"About a thousand feet from the entrance. On a bald spot of sand and scrub."

He nodded. "And?"

She looked at the tooth, confused. "I thought it might be important. A man murdered a thousand feet away. How on earth does an adult tooth..." She looked up, suddenly at a loss.

"You said murdered. This is getting very interesting." He yawned, still not touching the tooth.

"Blow it out your ear," she said. She swept the tooth into her purse and rummaged for the list of names. "I had something else to show you. I was going to call you. At work. Business only." She showed him her piece of paper. "I did some checking and found out that these people have died suddenly while working at the zoo during the past year."

He took the list and this time, his jaws genuinely slid apart. "How did you do this?"

Ann waved to her from a distance.

"Excuse me a minute." She hurried to Ann's side. "What trouble are you getting in now? And where's the shark man?"

"Oh, him. He was going to drive his wife home and then..."

"Wife! I had a feeling."

"And then he was going to come back for me. I told him to take a hike."

"Can you wait just a few minutes? I met a policeman I know and I want to ask him some questions about a case."

Ann laughed outright. Then she frowned. "You're serious. You, Mary Shane MacLemore, are meeting with a cop to discuss a case."

"A murder. Hang in, I'll just see Vic for a few minutes."

"Oh, Vic is it now?" Ann ribbed.

When she returned to the bar, Lara was leaning his chin on his hand and looking down at the piece of paper. "Shane..." He swallowed hard. "This is classified police information. Where did you get it?"

"I looked things up."

"This is very sensitive information."

"For whom? The Burtongales?"

"Shane, I'm impressed."

"Oh?" She sipped her wine, secretly gratified that he was impressed with her research. Hell, she was.

He took her hand and squeezed it with just enough force to hurt.

"Ouch, Vic."

"Honey, don't look any further into this matter, okay? Please." He leaned close and she could smell the smoke and scotch on his breath. He glanced down at her hand and when he saw that he had hurt it he cradled it like a wounded bird in both of his hard hands and blew on it.

She got chills up and down her back. Her hair tingled on the nape of her neck. She pulled her hands away and hid them under the table, sealed over by her breasts. "Vic, I need a break. If I want to make it as a reporter, I need a big story. I'm not going to back away from this."

There was theater on his face as his gaze bounced from wall to wall as if trying to catch something elusive. "Madre. This woman cannot let things rest when I tell her."

"I am NOT one of your giggly little mujeres, Vic."

"So much I gather. With a name like a cowboy, nothing surprises me."

She ran through her standard explanation about her name, knowing it by rote so well that she knew when to stop for breaths. "My Mother was Doris Shane and my Daddy was Wayne Lull. I was baptized Mary Lull. Daddy thought that was so awful he stuck in Mother's maiden name, so I became Mary Shane Lull. I dropped the Mary; and I've kept my married (widowed) name, so now I'm Shane MacLemore, and I like it that way."

He made a face. "Why not Martha? That's a nice name. Or Linda? You know Linda means beautiful?" He leaned close.

She leaned her face close to his. "You know Shane means mysterious, sensuous, and intriguing?"

He closed his eyes. "I could easily be convinced." He opened his eyes.

She gathered her purse. "Thanks for the drink."

"The number," he said.

"Oh yes." She tore a deposit slip from her bank book.

"Maybe we can work together," he said, folding the slip very carefully. "Maybe we can get our arms around this situation."

Wiz felt a quiet fury. Bishop Donald Mulcahy stood with his back to her, overlooking the basilica gardens as night fell. He started to light a fresh cigar but dropped the silver lighter, which thudded softly into the rug between his black shoes. Wiz's glasses slipped down along her nose. "For the last time, Bishop, I want to know if you'll get an exorcist."

"No!" He whirled and faced her. His steel rims glinted.

"I happen to know you've had an exorcist here for years. Why is it such a secret?"

The bishop rolled his gaze upward. "I don't care to debate theology with you this evening."

"Because you are just plain scared shitless?"

"I am scared. Yes. Scared to roll the Church back into the Middle Ages, back to a time when people were afraid to set foot out the door at night for fear there was a demon behind every rock."

Gotcha. "Isn't that how it is today, bishop?"

"Yes, yes, very clever of you, but don't you see the demons today are human, just as they were in the Middle Ages."

Darn, turned it around. "Please!"

"Miss Chickowitz, I cannot offer my support."

"That does it." Feeling bloody anger beating in her ears, Wiz pushed her glasses up for the third or fourth time. "People have died because of that thing in the zoo. I won't let this go on." Ignoring the last glimpse of him, darkly shaking his head, she stormed down the carpeted halls of the chancery and out the front door with a bang.

She found Jules Loomis still waiting in his car in the shadows of an ancient oak tree. He was just attempting to relight his pipe as Wiz threw herself into the passenger seat and pulled the door shut with a thump. "He said no."

Jules got the pipe going and the car filled with smoke. Wiz opened her window and made coughing noises and fanning motions. He said sorry and put the pipe face-down in the ashtray. He drove away slowly. "We figured that's what he'd say, didn't we?"

She shot back: "I was willing to give him a chance to listen."

"Are you sure you don't want to just tell the authorities what you think?"

"The authorities? That's the Burtongale family in this town. No thanks!" The growing night slid past, cool and deep with vegetal scents. Trees sighed in the wind, their dry leaves sweeping almost at ground level as though helping the roots look for water. Wiz waved briefly toward Jules after getting out. The dully gleaming sides of the Bronco, the shimmering opacity of the windshield, were a cipher. As she approached the service entrance of the zoo, she heard him start the engine and drive away.

A threat loomed, and a command between the ancient stones with a crackle like forked tongues of lightning: Kill the angry one. Send our Spirit into the night. Let it find what it needs to tear the soul from the angry one. High up in the cat house, a jaguar named Lilly stirred in her sleep. She padded out of her cave to listen. To try and sense what it was that had disturbed her. She slurped water from her pond. Stifling a cry of pain and rage, she felt as though something were tearing her apart into three pieces from inside.

Three shadowy jaguars pranced meaningfully toward the high walls. As their matrix rolled over, dying, the three copies of her sailed through the air in a fifty foot leap and landed on the street outside. Snarling. Tails twitching. Three black jaguars sliced through the darkness, searching. Their lean backs flowed with muscularity. Their loose, hungry bellies swayed with each leap, each jumping thump. Somewhere an owl hooted. The three cats ignored it, listening intently, smelling the air. Their eyes floated warily, drinking in the crazy light that was neither night nor day and charged them to manic pitch. Their tails flicked like whips. Their paws thudded imperceptibly, avoiding dry leaves and twigs that might crackle and give them away. Their cat faces turned from side to side, seeking...

No looking back now, Wiz thought. Dressed in dark clothing, she clung to the shadows under the trees. Until she came to small utility door. Glancing right and left over her shoulder, she used a stolen (the White Witches had connections) key and let herself into the loading area of the supply warehouse. Quickly, a blur, she faded among the trees.

She grasped the iron crucifix in the sash of her skirt, willing any stray evil spirits to confront her. Thus far, the night did not answer. Determinedly she reached under her belt and squeezed the contents of the small bag she carried: A gold coin, a silver coin, a smooth round pebble, a match, a vial of water, several chicken bones and feathers, a matchbox filled with the ashes of a small sandalwood cross burned on an east-facing hillside during a full moon.

She felt her feet carry her on silent night wings, like the messenger Mercury for whom the silver coin in her pouch was meant. From a small container she scooped a witches' paste which she rubbed on the tip of her tongue, leaving echo tastes of licorice and mint.

Paths crackled as her toes barely touched the ground. She felt the White Magic and Divine Power sweep her along toward a great combat. She felt full of Jesus and the other gods. She felt drunk with righteousness.

Wiz felt danger and spread her arms. Let it find her. She grasped the crucifix in one hand and the small pouch of fetish items in the other. This was her plan: To summon the demon, then banish him from this place forever!

Wiz stopped. Had there been a thump, a crackle, like cats landing after a jump? She heard only the wind. But that was her signal to begin the combat. She began her ritual, drawing with chalk on the street. The chalk broke, and she barked her hand on biting gravel. On her knees, she sucked the scrape wound, tasting blood. So much the better! Wind whipped at her scarf. Her uncombed gray-brown hair blew around her head. She brushed it out of her eyes as she resumed drawing with a salvaged piece of chalk: The moon at the left hand of the crucified, the sun in His face, a star on His right hand. That would be the star of Bethlehem. It would also be a minor solar emblem for Amon.

She began to pray: "Our Father Who art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name..." As she prayed she continued her drawings. The wind threw up a faint dust that hovered like a cloud filled with saffron light. Leaves, sticks, twigs were stirring, as if trying to arrange and rearrange themselves on the chalk markings. She huffed breathlessly, bending over the Sun.

She noticed that four demons were at hand. Three huge black cats leapt into the clearing, six forelegs extended all at once in a magnificent troika. And a ...man, swathed in a wind-roiled cloak... Knowing that the combat was about to be joined, Wiz laughed as they circled around. This was good already. She felt the power inside her. She was ten, twenty feet tall, holding her arms out like one crucified. The three jaguars and the man seemed separate but equal parts of a greater whole, a stage play of doom closing noiselessly in on her. Their silence was so eerie she was sure they were an illusion. She hunched down again to finish her Pentagram which would be a Star of David with a circle on the inside. As she did so, she performed the Rally. "Michael the Archangel, and all the hosts of Heaven, we summon you to protect us from Satan and all the evil spirits who roam the world, seeking the ruin of souls."

The black cats circled warily, two to one side, one to the other. Surely this man must be Satan or some very important devil. Then surely her spells were working! Elated, Wiz ignored the demons, knowing the devil liked to play with illusions. "Lord Satan, Dark Hand of Night, you are summoned to send forth your demons and evil spirits that are afflicting this place so that they may be defeated and cast out."

The cats leapt close like dancers.

Her heart was pounding so strongly it made her ribs shudder. She dropped the chalk and clutched her chest. But then wasn't this exactly what the King of Demons wanted? Staggering slightly, she bent over to pick up the chalk. The ritual must not be interrupted. She fell to her hands and knees, weakened by waves of darkness and nausea that filled her brain, alternating with more colorful waves of mauve, dull brass, wine red...

She tried to utter a cry, but it was stifled by several great weights hitting her all at once. Pain filled her, and she struggled to turn over onto her back, to sit up. She tried to wave an arm to fend them off. The arm was gripped painfully, torn back and forth in bone-jarring slashing motions. She smelled a rankness of spit and licked cat hair.

There was salvation at hand. There was a light that fell out of space. There was an explosion and the Book of Revelations opened before her. She cried soundlessly, reaching with a hand that wasn't there. She heard a tearing sound, and only dimly realized it was the sound of her own flesh.

She hovered in the air, safe now, and watched three black jaguars mulling over several dark bundles of rags. She was safe now, and could rest at last.

One by one, the cats winked out of existence. But the man put on rubber gloves. Why rubber gloves?

But Wiz was past curiosity, and turned away...

...rolling like a cork swollen in water...

...splashes...then darkness...

She was walking... down a long corridor... into ?a ship. Her hands, as she looked at them, turned bright blue. Ahead of her, one or two other bright blue persons walked toward...

"Hello," said a blue man with a nice smile. "My name is Freddy with a y. What's yours?"

...Several dark shapes loomed near a doorway shimmering with something like heat or fire. One by one, they pushed the numbly walking humans into the flames...

W E A R E S A F E N O W, the pilot signaled Gilbert.

Wallace Burtongale hurried out of the shadows carrying a machete and some bags.

Gilbert lit a cigarette and knelt by the body. Squinting, smoke in his eyes, he began by hacking up her arms. "The Pilot was in my head."

Wallace touched his son. "This has to end."

Gilbert hacked at her legs. The cigarette wobbled. "There are enough pieces now. It will happen soon. The ship will fly again. We will be free."

"What about this nosy little female reporter?" Wallace asked.

Gilbert looked up. He flicked his cigarette. "She's special," he said. "I get her last, as my prize."

Wallace expressionlessly held open a bag, and Gilbert threw in a foot.

A strangled cry awakened Roger Chatfield in his bedroom in his house a block from the zoo, and he wasn't sure if it was his own or someone else's cry.

It almost sounded like a big cat. Or a woman smoker.

He lay for some seconds in darkness, holding the sheet close to his chin, and groggily teetered between sleep and wakefulness. On the sleep side, he grasped questioningly after the fleeting after-image of... something... cats. The dream picture glared at him, then wrinkled into distortions like the folds in a curtain, then fell apart like dust in a sunbeam.

But it was four a.m.

No sunbeams.

He swung out of bed, rubbed his head, and then staggered off in t-shirt and boxer shorts to check on Rudy and Elisa.

The hardwood floor of 501 Lilac, one of the Burtongale family houses, was cold and unkind to his feet. He curled his toes up and walked on the balls of his feet. Never, he had vowed, would a man who had dug in the scorpion-infested sands of the Negev, who had used a shovel to fight off bandits swooping in on camels in the night, who had stepped into the throne-chamber of a dead king, never would such a man purchase slippers at the mall.

Elisa, 13, slept peacefully. Her hands and feet looked big and unfeminine, like the paws of a puppy that was still to grow. But her skin, even in the banana glow of the streetlight outside, looked smooth like honey. Her long mahogany hair lay like an open fan on the pillow. Her relaxed face presented ambiguous suggestions, from round infant cheeks to bony adolescent jaw to mature, hollowing eyes.

Rudy, 9, was also asleep. Perhaps the cry in the night had been his, for Rudy had always been a restless sleeper, and increasingly so in recent months. Whereas Elisa could almost climb out of bed in the morning and fold the sheets over and the bed was still made, Rudy managed to rumple up his sheets. Sometimes in his sleep, he even managed to pull the fitted sheet from under the mattress corners. He now lay on the bare mattress. He gripped his pillow against his chest with his fists. His head was upturned and his mouth was slightly open as though he were pushing himself up from a dream of drowning.

Gently, Chatfield covered his son with a blanket. He propped the boy into a more comfortable position with his head on the pillow. As he did so, the vacuous faintly alarmed cast of Rudy's cheeks changed to one of sleepy satisfaction. Nuzzling, he smacked his lips and settled into a deeper sleep.

Outside, a bird chittered in a bush.

Chatfield touched Rudy's blond crewcut and then stole softly out of the room.

Kippy dawdled over his breakfast. "You screamed again last night," he said with a mouthful of cornflakes.

"I'm sorry, I can't help it. Come on, we've got to get going," Shane urged. Feeling lazy and immobile, she bit off a piece of sugared and buttered raisin bread toast with one hand while twiddling a pencil in the other.

"You know, Mom, Fred Civitelli has been taking piano since he was six and now he's going to start a rock band. Can I take guitar lessons?"

She shrugged. "I'll tell you as soon as I finish balancing my checkbook."

The phone rang. It was Howard Berger. Her stomach twisted. "Shane, how have you been." He had a clear, intelligent voice, now with mixed shades of hesitation and desire.

"Fine, Howard. How's your cat?" She tried to remember its name, a beautiful Angora with silky white fur and a pretty little face filled with feline and female expressions.

He laughed. "Bitty? Oh, she's ... around. She was trying to avoid another cat and bumped into a rose thorn and got an abscess, so that just cost me a hundred bucks at the vet's. How's Kippy?"

"Fine." To think she had been intimate with this man. She hated his game: he seemed to always think of the two in parallel, his cat and her son. He seemed to be signalling, look, here's how well I take care of my cat, just marry me and you'll see how well I'll take care of...

"I called because I know it's time for his physical."

Damn you, Howard, she thought. "He's... fine. He's sitting right here and we're having breakfast."

Chastened, he said: "I figured you would be. I don't want to bother you at work, and you don't seem to return my calls."

"I can't talk right now, Howard."

"I understand." His voice thickened. "All right. Okay. Look. Here's the deal. Here's what I think. I'm going to ask you if you'd like to meet me for lunch."

"Thanks, Howard, but we've been around and around on this, and I don't want to hurt your feelings, but the answer is still no."

"All right, Shane. I'm going to cast off. Thanks."

Quickly she hung the phone up.

"Howard?" Kippy said.

She tore off another bite of toast, picked up the pencil, looked at the checkbook, and threw the pencil down.

"He's creepy," Kippy said.

"Thanks, Kippy. I needed that."

"I'm just trying to keep you out of trouble, Mom. If you marry someone, I've got to either leave home or live with the guy, so I've got a personal interest."

"I promised you, Kippy, I would never bring a man in this house that you don't feel comfortable with. Now put the lid on and get the lead out and get ready for school or no t.v. tonight. Move!"

On the way to St. Andrew's Grammar School, they stopped for gas at a corner station. Kippy went inside to buy cupcakes. Shane paid, then went outside to pump gas.

The pump was slow. The numbers dribbled by, and she looked at her watch. Kippy was taking a long time. A blue van was parked at the next pump island. She hooked the pump handle on automatic and sauntered back, craning her neck to peer around the van.

The windows were opaque. Vague figures moved inside. Shane frowned, unable to locate her son's silhouette.

The pump clicked on, spilling numbers, and she kept an eye on it. She kept the other eye on the broad picture window.

No Kippy. How long could it take to buy cupcakes?

Click... click... click... went the pump. At last, the amount she had paid for. The pump slowed. It stopped. She pulled it out, replaced it on its holder, replaced the cap on her gas tank...

The van was still there. She dodged around it and between two cars.

Just then Kippy came out with his cupcakes.

Her heart sank. Gilbert Burtongale was with him, tall and wild-haired. Gilbert's eyes were filled with a crazed light veiled by friendliness.

"Hi Mom," Kippy said. He had just eaten one cupcake.

"Oh ho!" Gilbert exclaimed, seeing her.

Shane was furious. "Kippy, come on, we've got to hurry."

"Lady Luck strikes again!" Gilbert exulted.

This was no coincidence. He must have been following her. Men had done that before. Followed her around, seeking the excuse to casually fall into conversation. She could see it from his glance. "In the car," she commanded Kippy.

Gilbert stuck his hands in his jeans and shuffled up close, looking down at her, smiling. He said softly: "Come on, Mary, don't be hard on me."

"My name is not Mary."

"All I want is a chance. Think of all I can give you."

She wiped the back of her hand against her forehead, feeling faint, feeling perhaps the onset of the Dark Feeling. She meant to say something piquant, but words jammed in her throat and she whirled, running back to the car.

"...least talk to me!" he was hollering with the first underlines of annoyance. His eyes moved from clever to maybe hurt. She popped the clutch and roared out of the station.

"Did I do something wrong?" Kippy asked.

She shook her head. "No. No you didn't. I'm sorry I yelled at you. I think that man has been following us. He scares me."

"He does?" Kippy, mouth full of cupcake, turned his head. "Hey look. He's getting into that blue van."

"Yeah. So?"

"That van was parked on the corner by our apartment the other day. I know because he has a zoo decal on the rear bumper. Jeremy and I both noticed it. It's the panda one, the only one missing in my collection."

"Chalk marks," Roger Chatfield repeated in the morning as he strode into his office at the zoo.

"Yes, I thought I should catch you as you came in." Wallace Burtongale III poured coffee from the silver service. He was a short, pot-bellied man of sixty, with watery blue eyes and a ring of white hair around a burned red spot. His mouth curved down sourly. An aggressive Burtongale chin added vinegar. "Don't know the details yet. Someone broke into the zoo last night and drew weird symbols on the street near the pagoda." He yawned.

Chatfield threw his worn leather briefcase under his desk and sat down. He steepled his fingers and looked through them as if they were a gunsight. "Any dead theologians this time?"

Wallace shook his head. "Thank God, no. No bodies." Two lumps. Plop, plop. Wallace stirred. "This time however, it's inside the zoo. You know what that means. We cannot allow any snooping around. We can't get caught up in any scandal."

"Isn't that kind of paranoid?" Chatfield asked.

"No," Burtongale said. Relations between Chatfield and his boss had been deteriorating for reasons Chatfield could not put his finger on. Chatfield surreptitiously slid his upper middle desk drawer open an inch and just with the tips of his fingers touched the thick kraft parcel he kept there for just such moments. It felt bulky and reassuring to the touch.

"Those are my and Miss Polly's explicit feelings, especially if that police reporter and nosy young woman come around again."

Roger sat back and laughed. "Wallace, they're from your paper. You own it. You own them. So squash the story. Isn't that what we always do?"

Wallace sat down wheezily before the desk. "I'm afraid there is one more piece of bad news, Roger. It's your favorite cat Lilly. The Peruvian jaguar."

Chatfield laid his hands on his desk, palms down, and sat upright. "No."

"I'm afraid so. The cat keepers found her dead this morning. No sign of struggle, poisoning, anything." Chatfield felt sick. Five years of work down the drain, the breeding project... "I'm sorry, Roger. I knew you'd take it hard."

Twenty minutes later, when Chatfield saw the cat, he closed his eyes. "Ouch." He felt as though he'd been hit. The cat had been a special breeder on loan from Peru. There was a whole wall of baby pictures of her, with her keepers, in the cat house.

"Call the vet," he said thickly.

"Already did," said a handler. "She's on her way to pick Lilly up for necropsy. Do you want us to, um, let you know--?"

"I'll be in my office." A tear stung each eye, and he brushed them away. He knelt down. The cat lay stretched out as if running, on her side, stiff with rigor mortis. The muzzle was slightly open and the tongue hung out, turned toward the ground. Her eyes were open. Faint wind stirred the tips of black hair. Back in his office, Chatfield put his face in his hands and thought about the future. "Dr. Chatfield," the secretary said over the intercom, "Are you back? I have someone on the line and I was just about to tell her to call back another time."

"I'll take it." He rose, slammed the door shut, and landed back in his chair. Disgustedly, he pressed the intercom button.

There was a pause. Then: "Hello?"

A familiar voice. Sweet somehow. Like a sour candy. "Yes," he prodded.

"Dr. Chatfield?"

He slowly began to smile. "Yes, how are you."

"Oh fine. How did you know it was me?"

He sat back feeling a flood of warmth. "Somehow I just did."

"That's nice," the MacLemore woman said with a surprised tone, pleased at being remembered. "I had a note from Jules Loomis that you wanted someone to do some color on the zoo."

"Yes, that was my suggestion. Suppose we meet over lunch."

Flustered. "I, well, yes, that would, I'm buried in, er, articles here, but..."

"What about tomorrow? My day here is rather full."

"Let's plan on it, unless something comes up."

"Thanks, Miss MacLemore. I'll look forward to it."

Funny woman, he thought pressing the button. She had hung up without another word. The room shook again as that pesky military plane murmured in low and thundered overhead before resuming its circling high up over San Tomas Peninsula.

Ears burning, Shane hung up the phone. There was something about Roger Chatfield she did not like, but she wasn't sure what it was that bothered her.

By eleven, most of the work was in. She had fifteen funeral notices and six articles. Of the articles, two were major stories (as obits went). The big one was Freddy Shaw (with a y), a city councilman. As Shane typed the formal, unimaginative notices and articles, her mind wandered in various directions. What was life? What was reality? Why did some people live to be ninety years old, and others only ninety days or nine years? She had nearly lost Kippy. She HAD lost Frank. Now these other obits. You became philosophical; doing obits was an overview, a final checkpoint on life.

The phone rang. Vic Lara. "Oh hi," she said, hearing that little spin on the i in hi that told her she was interested in him.

"I was wondering if we could meet for dinner."

"Not this evening. I have a doctor's appointment."

He pressed: "This is my only evening off. What do you say I take you dancing."

"We-e-ll..." She wanted to go slow.

"Say yes."

She laughed. "Yes."

"Great. Crank's? What time?"

"Crank's will be fine," she said still laughing. She was glad he made her laugh.

"Okay--I'll pick you up at your..."

"I'll meet you at Crank's in the bar," she interrupted to keep a distance. "Nine." She wrote herself a note just to be sure and resumed her work with a pleasant hum.

The phone rang. It was Sister St. Cyr. Shane was surprised; usually communication was by a note left in Kippy's lunch box. "Miss MacLemore, nothing big. You forgot to send ten dollars for Kippy's class trip next month. It was due today."

"Oh, sorry. I can bring it by on my lunch hour."

"Tomorrow will be fine," Sister said.

"No really. How is Kippy doing?" she asked.

Sister hesitated. "Well, I am a little concerned. Not worried now," she quickly amended. "Nothing dramatic, but his attention seems to be wandering. He got C's on three quizzes, and that's not like him."

"Do we need a conference?"

"Oh, not at all." Sister St. Cyr had a pleasant laugh. She told parents to remember her name was as Sister Sincere.

A short while later, eating an apple, Shane wandered into the front yard at St. Andrew's. Stark light fell into the Victorian jumble of tomato-colored brick and almond-colored marble set behind a garden of trees and ferns. She had attended grammar school here. Alone in the courtyard, she stopped and looked up at the shuttered windows. The Dark Feeling swooped down over her -- no, welled up from inside of her -- and she dropped her apple. She reeled dizzily, sitting down on a low wall. I W A N T T O T O U C H Y O U... something inside of her said drooling. Marble gargoyles gazed down at her from leaded drain spouts. Horned goats, hissing serpents, grinning devils leered down at her.

Go away, she screamed inside. Go away! She looked down the tunnels of her blood, into the chamber of her brains, through the eggwhites of her eyeballs. Get out of my fucking life!

I H A V E W A I T E D S O L O N G ... it said, but then drew away. Abruptly she felt okay again. She brushed off her apple, but saw a worm in it and threw it away in disgust. She walked down a dark corridor that smelled of floor wax and books. She paid the ten dollars to the school cashier, a chubby volunteer with a merry smile. As she left, she paused and looked back. Somehow oozing through the pores of the brick, children's cries reached her. She walked back. A Virgin of creamy nougat smiled down. Shane walked a little further and rounded the corner. Now the cries were plain. She looked down a slight incline past the school and saw milling blue uniforms on the playground. There was a constant semaphore of white through the leaves, the boys' shirts and the girls' blouses.

She resisted the impulse to wave, yell his name. Instead she kept to the shade under the trees so as not to be seen. There: around the basketball court. Shirts had the ball. Whack, whack, whack, went the ball as the shirt tapped it on the asphalt and decided on an opening.

Alone on the side lines at mid-court stood Kippy wearing no shirt. He was firmly planted on one crutch, leaving the other hand free...

Flurry of shirts and skins. Ball moved rapidly. Basket.

Kippy yelled "Yeah!" and waved a fist. His teammates pranced by and one by one slapped his upheld hand.

Shane waved her fist and whispered, "Yeah!" With a feeling of relief, she hurried to her car. Lunch hour was over (she'd forgotten to eat) but no matter. That was one healthy boy out there, yelling his lungs raw.

Having met her deadline, Shane gave Jules the high sign. He nodded, and she sloshed out into the drizzle. First stop, the public library, the information desk. "Hi. I seem to remember seeing, somewhere in the halls, a marble scroll or something that reads Burtongale Room." The young librarian called over an older lady whose kindly eyes swam like pickled eggs behind thick lenses. "Yes," the older woman said, "years and years ago when they built this building, there was a plan to have a room for Burtongale memorabilia and books. They practically paid for this library, I'm sure you know. Then, who knows, nothing ever came of it. The room is now part of the stacks, and off-limits. If I remember correctly, we keep magazines in it."

"But why the change of plans?" Shane asked.

The older woman shrugged. "I think they decided to keep all their books up in the mansion. They have a family museum up there, I'm told."

Shane went to a pay phone and looked up the number.

A woman answered (refined, cheery, British...). "This is Camilla Strather."

"I was wondering about the Burtongale Family Museum," Shane said. "The library told me it's at the family mansion."

"Yes, it is, but it hasn't been open to the public in at least twenty years, and I don't anticipate that it will be. Miss Polly is very firm on that. Are you a scholar?"

"No, just nosy." Shane hung up.

Shane and Kippy ate pizza that evening. "Sister Sincere called me at work today. She was a little concerned."

"About what?"

"I'm not sure. You're daydreaming in class? You got low grades on quizzes?"

He chewed slowly and stared at her. "I got C's on some minor tests." His tone was clipped and tense.

She asked: "Are you spending too much time on that computer and not enough in your books?"

"No, Mom"(same tone she took with her own mother)"I didn't study because I had a headache. And she said the quizzes don't count if you get a better grade on the tests. You can substitute..."

"Okay, okay," she said. She knew she'd better chop this off before he felt confronted. "I'm just asking." She bit into her own slice. She pictured her mother's face: The boy needs a man in his life. Mentally, she threw a baseball at her mother's image to dunk it in a carnival pool.

Before her bedroom mirror, getting ready for her visit to the shrink, she noticed Kippy through a crack in the door. Who was this grinning, masculine, almost coarse young guy sitting on her couch watching football? What about the homework? She pulled on her nylons.

"Where are you going?"

"I'm going to visit the doctor."

"That sure is a lot of fancy make-up and stuff for a doctor."

"Okay, Sherlock, so I'm meeting a friend afterward and we may go dancing afterward and I'll call you, okay?"

He looked at the TV, not answering.

She sighed deeply. Sometimes having a child was like having a parent. In some insane microcosmic crumb of thought she entertained and then resisted the idea of going out looking plain (which might give the shrink food for stark modern drama) and then dressing in the car behind a gas station as she'd done during her adolescence. Come on, Shane, she thought.

She checked herself in the mirror. She wore a gray wool suit with mid-calf skirt; dark blue hose; navy heels and strapless purse with attached gray leather gloves; tapioca silk blouse with pearl necklace and silk MacLemore tartan kerchief. I must go out more, she thought. Light make-up. Her face was a good one, an agency had told her once, but sorry no models under 5'8. They had put her on a waiting list for faces, though (and called her for three auditions but nothing had come of them).

Dr. Stanislaus welcomed her into his leather-padded study. She remembered where to sit: An indirectly lit alcove containing an office chair and writing table (stark) facing a couch (comfortable). Green plants, a microphone hanging from the ceiling, and a coffee table. Dr. Stanislaus brought her file to the writing table. He was a short stocky man wearing mocassins, brown corduroy trousers, and a lime colored bulky-knit sweater. His gray hair rose in a crew cut. He had a pudgy face with hints of coldness, though his brown eyes caressed disarmingly. "I haven't seen you in five years."

"I think I am losing my mind."

He did not seem fazed. "Why?"

"My son tells me I scream at night. Also, I think there is something inside my brain."

"What kind of a thing?"

"I'm not sure. A kind of presence. A Dark Feeling that comes over me sometimes."

"How often does this happen?"

"Once, maybe twice a day. Are you going to laugh at me?"

"No. I don't want to scare you, but it could be something serious like a tumor. Otherwise--"

"Otherwise, I'm nuts?"

"You are undoubtedly under a lot of stress."

"You can say that again."

"Let's talk a little. How is your son?"

"There is a blip on his x-ray, but otherwise he's fine."

"A blip?"

"It may not be anything."

"You were married to an abusive man. He was tough, he gave the world the finger which you wanted to do. You told me that you would try to find a better man..." He paused. "Have you?" She shook her head. "You also felt tremendous guilt because of your son's condition, which medically was not your fault. You were going to put guilt behind you." She smiled, fleetingly. "You were going to look for the one thing you really, deep down in your deepest heart, wanted, and that was a decent man who would be nice to you and your son. You were not going to get all turned on by some biker, but you were also not going to go for the newspaper and slippers type." He grinned as he read from his notes, and she remembered offering him the analogy: You were not going to go for either a Doberman Pinscher type, nor a Pierre Poodle type of man, but for a sort of a gruff, working dog guy like maybe a Labrador." He looked up. "What kind of men have you met?"

"I just broke up with a man named Howard Berger."

"Did you end it?"

"Yes."

"And?"

"He was stifling me. Possessive, jealous, insecure. He was a poodle." She added: "Kippy didn't like him either."

"I see. Well, you're probably right. He sounds like a poodle. So your search continues?" She nodded. "You are dressed up. Are you going out?"

"Yes."

"With a Lab?"

She thought hard, trying fit different dogs' heads and personalities on Vic Lara. "He's a cop. A wolf maybe."

"You used to dislike authority figures, especially cops."

"That was then. I've become an authority figure myself. Over one boy, anyway."

He looked at his watch. "Tell me about the wolf next time. You'll get a thorough physical tomorrow morning to determine if your problem has a medical reason." He wrote out an appointment slip. "This is important. They'll see you right away."

She felt her emotions slowly welling up. "I have been getting these Dark Feelings. And seeing dead people. I saw my hus-... my ex-husband at the zoo. And I saw my father in a restaurant." She told him the stories. "But I think it's like some outside voice or not a voice, a feeling, trying to play with my mind and not being entirely successful."

"Are you in trouble at work?"

"Yes."

"We have a lot to talk about then."

"Yes. Doctor--"

"Yes?"

"I feel like a cork about to pop out of a bottle. Maybe I'm trying to remember something horrible and I can't, because it scares me terribly, but I have to..."

He regarded her with a carefully stony face. A troubled light haunted his eyes. "Can you remember anything at all?" His pencil was poised to write.

She asked: "Is there something you know that I should remember?"

He said nothing. The pencil remained poised. It was quiet in the room. A clock ticked. Finally he put the pencil down. Shane's chest tightened. A Dark Feeling welled up. It made her feel numb. She fumbled in her purse. "There is something I want to give you." She rose, and, as if walking through water, placed the tooth on the table before him. "Please take it for me."

He stared at the tooth. "Where did you find it?"

"In front of the zoo."

"Do you remember where exactly?"

"Near the entrance." The words came from deep inside Shane. "Please. I want to give it to someone in authority."

He took a small envelope from his desk and slipped the tooth inside. "I will save it for you. We will talk about it some more."

At Crank's, Vic Lara leaned grinning against the bar. Music thumped and young bodies writhed. He dropped his toothpick. She ducked her shoulders and snapped her fingers. "You want to put your arms around the situation?"

"All ri-i-ight." He signaled the bartender for two more of something and then led her by the hand out to the dance floor. There they oozed to a slow tune. She liked all the songs and they danced hard to the fast songs. After about two hours and as many margaritas, they left Crank's. Outside in the cool drizzle, under the glass ceiling of a bus stop, they sat on a bench. "You've got me puffing," he said.

"You ain't seen nothin' yet, honey."

"Who-o-o-o," he said with sly conviction.

She snapped her fingers and rocked. "Blowing off steam!"

"Are you about fed up with this police beat?"

"Yes and no." She folded her hands between her knees, looked down. "Derailed for now. Back on obits since Wiz quit."

"She quit?" His light brightened. "Where did she go?"

"I have no idea. She was mad because Jules let me go out on the police beat with Perry. I've wanted to be a writer for a long time, Vic. I deserve a break. I have published some articles here and there in different little magazines. Poem entitled Touch My Flower (Ignite!) in a lit mag. Coupla recipes in a San Francisco Polish-Italian newsletter."

He looked away. "We could still work together."

She gave him a sidelong look, hiding her suspicions. "Yeah, but not on this zoo deaths story, right?"

"Right."

She was interested in him but also: "I figured knowing you wouldn't hurt."

"How's your tooth?" he asked.

"I gave it to my shrink."

"I'm glad to hear that," he said sincerely. He added: "Do you remember anything?"

"What do you mean?

"Years ago."

She felt blood rushing in her ears. Pain. Blocked.

"Sorry. Nevermind." Rain drops pattered on the glass walls, making ads soggy. His eyes danced about as though following a complicated outline. His eyes grew large, glistening, and his jaws worked as though he were hungry. "You look beautiful tonight."

"Whoa," she said with new energy. "Down boy." She turned her face up to catch the cool wind on her throat. The smell of rain was delicious. She shook out her curls with both hands.

He lit a Camel, clicking the Zippo with macho smoothness. Orange light flickered on his facial bones and crevaces like London during the Blitz. "There's a lot of undertow, Shane."

"Undertone?" She laughed, not understanding.

"Undertow. The water runs deep in this town. It's my business to know what goes on. This town is like dark water. It's cold underneath. There are things that go on that nobody would believe if you wrote them in a book. People who ordinarily wouldn't give you the time of day call you because they need you but they only tell you half the truth. Putting all the half truths together, you make quite a picture of San Tomas. Of the Human Animal."

"Vic, you sound like a newsreel."

"Sorry. I'm trying to tell you something."

"What?"

"I'm not so good with the words, but here goes. I think you're okay and maybe a little something could work out between me and you. You know, dancing, dinner... I make pretty good dough and I could show you a good time. Watch out for you."

"I really do appreciate that." She wondered if he were more of a Lab or a Pinscher. Poodle, no way. Only one way to find out. Go for it. "I think you're okay too, Vic."

"Want to go for a walk?" he asked.

"In the rain?"

"That's no rain. That's mist, drizzle." He ran to his car and came back with an umbrella. "For the faint of heart."

"That's what I like, a gentleman."

They walked together arm in arm. Along deserted streets curving down to the sea. There, at Catamaran Beach, breakers curled and crashed making the sidewalk shudder. "Storm out there," he said pinching his lapels together.

She huddled against him, glad for the excuse. His surfaces felt like knotty wood and twisted cable, lean and hard. He wrapped his arms around her and sought her mouth with his. She smelled old beer and sour cigarette smoke on his breath but it didn't matter just then. She'd find a way to diplo--

His hands stroked her back and buttocks, grasping handfuls of her, roughly. She pushed away, but he pulled her back. He opened his mouth like a wolf pup, in a snarl of hunger. She stood on tiptoe and thrust her tongue in, seeking his. He groaned with satisfaction and their tongues wrestled deliciously.

It rained briefly, seething in the crowns of California fan palms lining the shore. Fog horns moaned like distant dinosaurs. Over and over again, the sidewalk shuddered under the sledge hammers of the sea. Wind blew paper, leaves, loose objects. A cardboard sign did somersaults through street puddles, coming to rest flat against a dark restaurant window.

His hand began to explore between her thighs when she decided enough for the first night.

In the car, windshield hit by scattershot water, he said: "It'll be nice. You'll get stories Perry couldn't dream of."

"I'll have to get on the City Room staff first."

"Yeah, well there's time."

She thought about this with interest. She had not really thought the implications through. "You're gonna tell me stuff you don't tell Perry?"

"Yeah," he said flicking a glance at her, "Well, you don't think I take Perry to Catamaran Beach to make out, do you?"

She laughed. "You're wicked."

The rain had let up by the time she was in her own car, driving home. She felt tingly.

"...Storm front from the Rockies is passing, leaving some showers through the night. Expect gusty winds, gray skies, occasional showers for the next three to four days..."

It occurred to her that she'd forgotten to mention the incident with Gilbert to Vic. Oh well, next time...

Kippy had finished his homework. He'd left it on the kitchen table for her to see. She checked and found that he'd done each math problem correctly. He'd left her a funny little note with a heart at the bottom: "Decided I better buckle down. My headache is gone. Please check my homework. (heart) Kippy."

She tiptoed in his room, covered his bare shoulder with a quilt. Touching his hair lightly, she bent over and kissed him.

This morning was her physical. She told Jules she'd be late but that she'd work doubly hard to beat the deadline.

Shane, wearing only panties and a cloth hospital gown, read magazines and waited through her physical at a private clinic overlooking the ocean. She got to sit outside between tests, shaded by an awning. The nurse practicioner noted that she had dark circles under her eyes. At first Shane was impatient. Then realized that this was what rest really meant, and how little of it she'd had in a long time. She remembered some long ago yoga lessons and breathed deeply in and out. She tried to sit as relaxed as possible. And to explore her mind.

The ocean rumbled with a slow pulse beat. The day was hazy, and the sun exploded its light as if it were the filament inside a milky incandescent bulb. The moon and the earth were like a heart beating, and the ocean tumbled through its phases like squirts in an artery.

The Cold Thing resided in the pebbly beach somewhere between a cortex (!where was high school biology when you needed it?) and a medulla, or was that an isthmus and some islets? She stubbed a toe of thought into the midafternoon tide pool of her consciousness. This was a motherly place with boulders of love and rocks of concern; the biting coral of girlishness lay far out on a reef. There were smooth river rocks every woman's soul flowed around: recipes, hurts, candle-making, ducks on a shower curtain, nagging mother, lost father... There! its shadow rippled on the fine sand, like the head of an eel: Inscrutable, reptilian, feigning sleep while it dreamt of killing.

"Were you sleeping?"

Shane opened her eyes. "What?" The white-clad technician handed her her medical file to carry to the next station. "You're done with X-ray, Miss MacLemore. You can go on to blood work now." The eyes softened. "Your X-rays look good, I'll just tell you off the record. The CAT scan is normal, but the doctor will call your doctor. It's lovely here, isn't it? Were you sleeping?"

"I may have dozed off a bit. It's so peaceful." But the Cold Thing lurked, and nobody would believe her if she told them. She rose and trudged along the sandy sidewalk, enjoying the warmth under her naked feet. As long as the Cold Thing slept-- or was busy elsewhere-- no Dark Feelings, no pain from it.

She got to work at eleven and found that the entire resentful city room of reporters and editors had been pounding away at obits most of the morning. That was like ten people at least, she thought with grim satisfaction.

Jules sidled by. He wasn't carrying his pipe and he had a funny dark look. "You heard from Wiz?"

She shook her head. "Not word one." She indicated with her chin the humongous pile of obits. "Christ, Jules, are they all out there dying by the truckloads?

"I hope not."

"Have you found another Obit Queen yet?"

He leaned forward and placed his finger under his nose. "Shhh. I'm interviewing a guy tomorrow afternoon. You'll sit in, okay? Two o'clock. If we like him, we hire him."

"Oh Jules. That would be so wonderful."

"I thought you'd like that." He started to leave. "If you hear from Wiz, I want to know."

The Chatfield guy called and canceled, saying things had come up and it would be at least a week before he could really give her the zoo tour. But he promised to give her good color.

So instead she met Ann Temple for lunch at a French patiserie while outside it was just plain gray. Shane had a baked patty shell with steaming lemon-mushroom filling.

Ann spooned hot onion soup. "How's old flashy eyes?"

"The cop?" Shane licked her fork. "I went out with him last night."

"No."

"Yep. Had a good time."

"Is he as slick as he looks?"

"Stopped him at thigh one."

"Play that one slow."

Shane sighed luxuriously. "Well, I don't know what I want to do. He could be a little weird, I don't know. I'll see how it goes. But I intend to have some fun."

She spent the early afternoon digging through the back areas of the newspaper morgue, trying to find old scrapbooks maybe, or fiche, anything to learn more about the Burtongale family.

Dead ends. All roads led to the Burtongale family, and all doors were closed. She could not go to Jules; she could not even leave her name with anyone for fear she would, as Jules put it, make more enemies. She went back to the newspaper, discouraged, and puttered around, cleaning up.

The phone rang.

"Miss MacLemore?" A man's voice. Nothing familiar about it. Very nondescript; grammatically correct at least; fortyish; possibly an authority figure. "Or should I say, Miss Chang?"

Oh chips she thought. Her stomach did a hiccup.

"You want to find out about the Burtongale family."

"I'm trying to do research for a story, okay? Who are you?"

"I could be a friend; help you; would you like that?"

She sat forward, tense and scared. "I'm not sure."

"Try me." (What was that echo she heard?)

"What do I need to do?"

"There is a restaurant right next door to the police station. I think you should feel quite safe there."

"When?"

"Let's say, five forty five."

She would have Kippy with her; Ann could not pick him up; she frowned... "Okay, let's do it." She could send him into the police station to sit with Vic, maybe.

"Just ask for Mr. Vecci. That's V, e, c, c, i. That's me."

Heartbreaker has been published by Clocktower Fiction and is sold (for money) under another title. To read another 3/4 of Heartbreaker click on link: Heartbreaker