“If that thing got hold of your finger,” Bobby said, “I bet it could snip it off. You say it was alive, Frank?”

“When I woke up this morning, it was crawling on my chest.”

“Good God!” Bobby paled visibly.

“It was sluggish.”

“Yeah? Well, it sure looks quick as a damned cockroach.”

“I think it was dying already,” Frank said. “I screamed, brushed it off. It just lay there on its back, on the floor, kicking kinda feebly for a few seconds, then it was still. I stripped the case off one of the bed pillows, scooped the thing into it, knotted the top so it wouldn’t crawl away if it was still alive. Then I discovered the gems in my pockets, so I bought two mason jars, one for the bug, and it hasn’t moved since I put it in there, so I figure it’s dead. You ever see anything like it?”

“No,” Julie said.

“Thank God, no,” Bobby agreed. He was not leaning over the jar for a closer look, as Julie was. In fact he had taken a step back from the desk, as if he thought the creepy-crawler might be able, in a wink, to cut its way through the glass.

Julie picked up the jar and turned it so she could look at the bug face-on. Its satin-black head was almost as big as a plum and half hidden under the carapace. Multifaceted, muddy yellow eyes were set high on the sides of the face, and under each of them was what appeared to be another eye, a third smaller than the one above it and reddish-blue. Queer patterns of tiny holes, half a dozen thornlike extrusions, and three clusters of silky-looking hairs marked the otherwise smooth, shiny surface of that hideous countenance. Its small mouth, open now. was a circular orifice in which she saw what appeared to be rings of tiny but sharp teeth.

Staring at the occupant of the jar, Frank said, “Whatever the hell I’m mixed up in, it’s a bad thing. It’s a real bad thing, and I’m afraid.”

Bobby twitched. In a thoughtful voice, speaking more to himself than to them, Bobby said, “Bad thing....”

Putting the jar down, Julie said, “Frank, we’ll take the case.”

“All right!” Clint said, and switched off the recorder.

Turning away from the desk, heading toward the bathroom, Bobby said, “Julie, I need to see you alone for a moment.”

For the third time they stepped into the bathroom together, closed the door behind them, and switched on the fan.

Bobby’s face was grayish, like a highly detailed portrait done in pencil; even his freckles were colorless. His customarily merry blue eyes were not merry now.

He said, “Are you crazy? You told him we’ll take the case.”

Julie blinked in surprise. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“No.”

“Ah. Then I guess I heard you wrong. Must be too much wax in my ears. Solid as cement.”

“He’s probably a lunatic, dangerous.”

“I’d better go to a doctor, have my ears professionally cleaned.”

“This wild story he’s made up is just—”

She held up one hand, halting him in midsentence. “Get real, Bobby. He didn’t imagine that bug. What is that thing? I’ve never even seen pictures of anything like it.”

“What about the money? He must’ve stolen it.”

“Frank’s no thief.”

“What—did God tell you that? Because there’s no other way you could know. You only met Pollard little more than an hour ago.”

“You’re right,” she said. “God told me. And I always listen to God because if you don’t listen to Him, then He’s likely to visit a plague of teeming locusts on you or maybe set your hair on fire with a lightning bolt. Listen, Frank’s so lost, adrift, I feel sorry for him. Okay?”

He stared at her, chewing on his pale lower lip for a moment, then finally said, “We work good together because we complement each other. You’re strong where I’m weak, and I’m strong where you’re weak. In many ways we’re not at all alike, but we belong together because we fit like pieces of a puzzle.”

“What’s your point?”

“One way we’re different but complementary is our motivation. This line of work suits me because I get a kick out of helping people who’re in trouble through no fault of their own. I like to see good triumph. Sounds like a comic-book hero, but it’s the way I feel. You, on the other hand, are primarily motivated by a desire to stomp the bad guys. Yeah, sure, I like to see the bad guys all crumpled and whimpering, too, but it’s not as important to me as it is to you. And, of course, you’re happy to help innocent people, but with you that’s secondary to the stomping and crushing. Probably because you’re still working out your rage over the murder of your mother.”

“Bobby, if I want psychoanalysis, I’ll get it in a room where the primary piece of furniture is a couch—not a toilet.”

Her mother had been taken hostage in a bank holdup when Julie was twelve. The two perpetrators had been high on amphetamines and low on common sense and compassion. Before it was all over, five of the six hostages were dead, and Julie’s mother was not the lucky one.

Turning to the mirror, Bobby looked at her reflection, as if he was uncomfortable meeting her eyes directly. “My point is—suddenly you’re acting like me, and that’s no good, that destroys our balance, disrupts the harmony of this relationship, and it’s the harmony that has always kept us alive, successful and alive. You want to take this case because you’re fascinated, it excites your imagination, and because you’d like to help Frank, he’s so pitiful. Where’s your usual outrage? I’ll tell you where it is. You don’t have any because, at this moment anyway, there’s no one to elicit it, no bad guy. Okay, there’s the guy he says chased him that night, but we don’t even know if he’s real or just a figment of Frank’s fantasy. Without an obvious bad guy to focus your anger, I should have to drag you into this every step of the way, and that’s what I was doing, but now you’re doing the dragging, and that worries me. It doesn’t feel right.”

She let him ramble on, with their gazes locked in the mirror, and when at last he finished, she said, “No, that’s not your point.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, everything you just said is smoke. What’s really bothering you, Robert?”

His reflection tried to stare down her reflection.

She smiled. “Come on. Tell me. We never keep secrets.”

Bobby-in-the-mirror looked like some bad imitation of the real Bobby Dakota. The real Bobby, her Bobby, was full of fun and life and energy. Bobby-in-the-mirror was gray-faced, almost grim; his vitality had been sapped by worry.

“Robert?” she prodded.

“You remember last Thursday when we woke?” he said. “The Santa Anas were blowing. We made love.”

“I remember.”

“And right after we’d made love ... I had the strange, terrible feeling that I was going to lose you, that something out there in the wind was ... coming to get you.”

“You told me about it later that night, at Ozzie’s, when we were talking about jukeboxes. But the windstorm ended, and nothing got me. Here I am.”

“That same night, Thursday night, I had a nightmare, the most vivid damn dream you can imagine.” He told her about the little house on the beach, the jukebox standing in the sand, the thunderous inner voice—THE BAD THING IS COMING, THE BAD THING, BAD THING!—and about the corrosive sea that had swallowed both of them, dissolving their flesh and dragging their bones into lightless depths. “It rocked me. You can’t conceive of how real it seemed. Sounds crazy but ... that dream was almost more real than real life. I woke up, scared as bad as I’ve ever been. You were sleeping, and I didn’t wake you. Didn’t tell you about it later because I didn’t see the point of worrying you and because ... well, it seems childish to put much stock in a dream. I haven’t had the nightmare again. But since then—Friday, Saturday, yesterday—I’ve had moments when a strange anxiety sort of shivers through me, and I think maybe some bad thing is coming to get you. And now, out there in the office, Frank said he was mixed up in a bad thing, a real bad thing, that’s how he put it, and right away I made the connection. Julie, maybe this case is the bad thing I dreamed about. Maybe we shouldn’t take it.”

She stared at Bobby-in-the-mirror for a moment, wondering how to reassure him. Finally she decided that, because their roles had reversed, she should deal with him as Bobby would deal with her in a similar situation. Bobby would not resort to logic and reason—which were her tools—but would charm and humor her out of a funk.

Instead of responding directly to his concerns, she said, “As long as we’re getting things off our chests, you know what bothers me? The way you sit on my desk sometimes when we’re talking to a prospective client. With some clients, it might make sense for me to sit on the desk, wearing a short skirt, showing some leg, ’cause I have good legs, even if I say so myself. But you never wear skirts, short or otherwise, and you don’t have the gams for it, anyway.”

“Who’s talking about desks?”

“I am,” she said, turning away from the mirror and looking at him directly. “We leased a seven-room suite instead of eight, to save money, and by the time the rest of the staff was set up, we had only one office for ourselves, which seemed okay. There’s plenty of room in there for two desks, but you say you don’t want one. Desks are too formal for you. All you need is a couch to lie on while making calls, you say, yet when clients come in, you sit on my desk.”

“Julie—”

“Formica is a hard, nearly impervious surface, but sooner or later you’ll have spent so much time sitting on my desk, it’ll be marked by a permanent imprint of your ass.”

Because she wouldn’t look at the mirror, he had to turn away from it, too, and face her. “Didn’t you hear what I said about the dream?”

“Now, don’t get me wrong. You’ve got a cute ass, Bobby, but I don’t want the imprint on my desktop. Pencils will keep rolling into the depression. Dust will collect in it.”

“What’s going on here?”

“I want to warn you that I’m thinking of having the top of my desk wired, so I can electrify it with a flick of a switch. You sit on it then, and you’ll know what a fly feels like when it settles on one of those electronic bug zappers.”

“You’re being difficult, Julie. Why’re you being difficult?”

“Frustration. I haven’t gotten to stomp or crush any bad guys lately. Makes me irritable.”

He said, “Hey, wait a minute. You’re not being difficult.”

“Of course I’m not.”

“You’re being me!”

“Exactly.” She kissed his right cheek and patted his left. “Now, let’s go back out there and take the case.”

She opened the door and stepped out of the bathroom.

With some amusement, Bobby said, “I’ll be damned,” and followed her into the office.

Frank Pollard was talking quietly with Clint, but he fell silent and looked up hopefully as they entered.

Shadows clung to the corners like monks to their cloisters, and for some reason the amber glow from the three lamps reminded her of the scintillant and mysterious light of serried votive candles in a church.

The puddle of scarlet gems still glimmered on the desk.

The bug was still in a death crouch in the mason jar.

“Did Clint explain our fee schedule?” she asked Pollard.

“Yes.”

“Okay. In addition, we’ll need ten thousand dollars as an advance against expenses.”

Outside, lightning scarred the bellies of the clouds. The bruised sky ruptured, and cold rain spattered against the windows.

26

VIOLET HAD been awake for more than an hour, and during most of that time she had been a hawk, swooping high on the wind, darting down now and then to make a swift kill. The open sky was nearly as real to her as it was to the bird that she had invaded. She glided on thermal currents, the air offering little resistance to the sleek fore edges of her wings, with only the lowering gray clouds above, and the whole huddled world below.

She was also aware of the shadowy bedroom in which her body and a portion of her mind remained. Violet and Verbina usually slept during the day, for to sleep away the night was to waste the best of times. They shared a room on the second floor, one king-size bed, never more than an arm’s reach from each other, though usually entwined. That Monday afternoon, Verbina was still asleep, naked, on her belly, with her head turned away from her sister, occasionally mumbling wordlessly into her pillow. Her warm flank pressed against Violet. Even while Violet was with the hawk, she was aware of her twin’s body heat, smooth skin, slow rhythmic breathing, sleepy murmurings, and distinct scent. She smelled the dust in the room, too, and the stale odor of the long unwashed sheets—and the cats, of course.

She not only smelled the cats, which slept upon the bed and the surrounding floor or lay lazily licking themselves, but lived in each of them. While a part of her consciousness remained in her own pale flesh and a part soared with the feathered predator, other aspects of her held tenancy in each of the cats, twenty-five of them now that poor Samantha was gone. Simultaneously Violet experienced the world through her own senses, through those of the hawk, and through the fifty eyes and twenty-five noses and fifty ears and hundred paws and twenty-five tongues of the pack. She could smell her own body odor not merely through her own nose but through the noses of all the cats: the faint soapy residue of last night’s bath; the pleasantly lingering tang of lemon-scented shampoo; the staleness that always followed sleep; halitosis ripe with the vapor ghosts of the raw eggs and onions and raw liver that she had eaten that morning before going to bed with the rising sun. Each member of the pack had a sharper olfactory sense than she did, and each perceived her scent differently from the way she did; they found her natural fragrance strange yet comforting, intriguing yet familiar.

She could smell, see, hear, and feel herself through her sister’s senses, as well, for she was always inextricably linked with Verbina. At will, she could swiftly enter or disengage from the minds of other lifeforms, but Verbina was the only other person with whom she could join in that way. It was a permanent link, which they had shared since birth, and though Violet could disengage from the hawk or the cats whenever she wished, she could never disengage from her twin. Likewise, she could control the minds of animals as well as inhabit them, but she was not able to control her sister. Their link was not that of puppet-master and puppet, but special and sacred.