He heard no breath or scuffling from inside, just a ticking sound, dry and faint and syncopated. It could have been a wind-up clock, a timer, just possibly, for a bomb. Waiting suddenly seemed a bad idea.
Stubbs braced his trigger hand and pivoted, facing full into the living room, and screaming "Freeze!"
His eye detected motion and he aimed his gun at a ghostly white chihuahua spinning in futile little pirouettes, its paws making tiny ticking tap-dance sounds against the tiled floor. Blind, the dog yet turned its milky eyes toward the barrel of the cop's revolver, its dry nose sniffing for a friend.
Stubbs plucked his wet shirt from his skin and looked around. The phone was pulled out of the wall. There were some magazines and a yellow Walkman on the floor right near the dog. Those were the only signs of a struggle.
He checked the bedrooms, the bathrooms, the closets. Nothing. He gave the dog a bowl of water and a scratch behind the ears, and left.
Next they drove to Markov's house.
The house was closed up tight. Stubbs parked in the shade of the porte cochere and went up to the front door. He listened, heard silence. He knocked and rang the bell, sang out, "Open up. Police." Even to himself, the challenge sounded thin.
There was no response and he decided to do some peeping. He stepped back around the shrubbery and soon found Aaron's footprints, still clearly etched in the moist soil of the beds. He retraced the other man's journey past the dining room, the master suite, down the long and narrow guest wing to where the lab was. He stopped where Aaron's steps had stalled and blurred and doubled back, and he peered intently through the slats of the not quite snug-fitting blinds.
He saw a small guest bedroom.
There was a Murphy bed, complete with fancy spread and flounce. A small nightstand held a reading lamp. There was even a book on the stand. There was no sign whatsoever of a lab.
Stubbs stood there for a moment. His shirt was soaked and sun was clawing at his neck. Suddenly it seemed like he had been away from Whitehead Street for far too long, and at the bottom of his stomach there formed a pulsing knot that had the weight and bitterness of a big mistake.
He ran across the lawn to his unmarked car and headed back to town.
The banyan tree had clustered trunks all squeezed together like organ pipes, and it threw a blanket of shade that covered a quarter acre. Once Pineapple had settled into that lake of shadow, he could keep the same position for hours at a time, only slightly shifting his butt against the curb so that his legs wouldn't fall asleep. He was sitting there, insignificant and loyal, when a blue Camaro came popping and growling down the street and parked outside the Mangrove Arms.
He watched. The driver got out without bothering to turn the motor off. He had big shoulders and narrow eyes and wore just suspenders, not a shirt. Then two older men stepped out. One of them was thin and brittle, a sick and sour pallor on his crescent face. The other was fat and sweaty. He was the man who'd brought the red wagon back into the mangroves, the man with the limestone dust on his expensive shoes.
The three of them hesitated just a moment by the car, then they headed toward the front porch steps. There was something in the stiff and sneaky way they walked that Piney didn't like. He waited for them to vanish through the picket gate, then, without bothering to stand, he slid his butt along the curb, closer to the entryway, and he watched and listened as he twirled his PARKING sign.
Bert the Shirt rolled over on the floor a couple times, until he collided with a heavy cardboard box that he could brace himself against. Straining so hard that he felt it in his bowels, he jerked and shimmied to something like a sitting position, and then he coughed and took a rest. When he had his breath back, he looked at Sam—the wild hair, the pin- wheel eyes, the blotchy trousers. He said to him, "You look like hell."
Sam smiled at that. "And you look like a broken puppet. Like someone got your strings all twisted."
Hellish music hammered through from the shop, acid light streamed from the single naked bulb. Sam made a great effort to arch his back, pointed with his chin at the piles of T-shirts, the dusty floor. He went on, "What a way for it to end, huh, Bert?"
"It ends," said Bert, with just a suggestion of a shrug. "What's the difference how?"
Sam thought that over for a while. The music changed to some insane disco cha-cha.
Bert continued, "Somethin' that y'oughta know."
"Lotta things I oughta know."
"Your Walkman," said the Shirt. "It picked up a conversation."
There was a pause, then Sam Katz sat bolt upright on his stool, moved so briskly that the stool's feet chattered on the floor. He'd almost forgotten about the Walkman. All that fooling with the tape machine, the hearing aid, it seemed a long, long time ago. "It worked?" he said at last