Smoke

there, dairy farms, shit like that, spread out. A lot of people rent summer places up there, a lot of New Yorkers have weekend places there. It's not the kind of territory I know, and it's not a place where I got any clout, and it's not a job for one guy anyway, no matter.'

Leethe considered this as he turned the little Perrier bottle around and around on its circle of water on the bar. 'You're saying,' he decided at last, 'that you want to hire somebody, or some several somebodies, to canvass the area, and you couldn't wait till tomorrow to talk to me because I have to approve the expense.'

'You got it in one.'

'I hired you,' Leethe pointed out, 'and all at once you're my partner. Now you're suggesting we should hire somebody else.'

'I see your problem,' Barney agreed, 'but let me reassure you.'

'I find it very unlikely, Barney,' Leethe said, 'that you could ever reassure me, on any subject, at any time.'

'Let me try, anyway. There's a bunch of private detective agencies—'

'My God. You're going to bring in Mike Hammer?'

'Not like in the movies,' Barney told him. Now he was getting impatient. 'In real life,' he explained, 'licensed private detectives do guard duty at small museums or private estates, they do industrial espionage to find out who's stealing the lawn mowers or the secrets or whatever, they repossess cars and boats and stuff that people don't make their payments on, but what they mostly do is find deadbeats. Skip-tracing is their real art, and they do it all on the phone, and they never ask why the customer wants to find so-and-so, they just do it. Mostly, they're little shops with three or four or five people, and that many phones, and the boss has the license, and he's a retired cop. They're all over the country, and they all have WATS lines so they don't care if they have to call Alaska or Florida or whatever, and in a situation like this I wouldn't even use a New York outfit. New York City, I mean. I'd use one from Boston, or maybe Albany or Syracuse, and all they know is they're looking for Margaret Briscoe, formerly of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and we believe for the summer she's somewhere in this area. So they'll charge me for the time — overcharge me, that's how they are — and a bonus when they find her, and in the meantime we sit back and wait.'

'How long?'

'Maybe a week, maybe less, maybe more.'

'Precision,' Leethe said, with another brief faux smile. 'How much will all this cost?'

'Under a grand.'

Leethe considered. He finished his Perrier. He said, 'And how much of that will be paid by my partner?'

Barney stared at him. He couldn't believe this guy. 'Are you feelin all right?' he demanded. 'Maybe it's past your bedtime. Lemme make it easy on you. Just nod your head if I got the okay to spend the grand.'

28

Sunday evening, they had a fire. They didn't need a fire, the Sunday of the last week in June, but if you're going to rent a house in the country, and if that house has a fireplace, and if it has a stack of firewood outside under a black plastic sheet against the back wall, it doesn't much matter if it's August, you've got to have a fire.

Also, as Freddie pointed out, 'You need more warmth in a room when you're naked.'

'You could put some clothes on, Freddie.'

'If I put on a shirt and pants,' he answered, accurately, 'you'll get upset unless I put on one of the heads and a pair of rubber gloves and then some socks and shoes and—'

'Okay, okay. We'll have a fire. Let me do it!' she cried, as a log started to fly all by itself across the room toward the fireplace.

This was long enough after dinner for Freddie to be completely invisible again, and there was still bluish-pink light to be seen through the windows in the sky outside, above the black soft masses of the trees. In the country, their patterns were changing, they were going to sleep earlier, waking up earlier, living an entirely different life. Call Me Tom had given them a list of nearby — if fifteen miles could be considered nearby — shops and stores, and they'd done their exploring, taking life easy, Freddie not even shoplifting, though in these country shops you hardly had to be invisible to walk out with half their stock. There were places in the little towns to rent videotapes, and the house had a big television set and a working VCR — even the clock in it worked, to show the advantage of renting from a scientist — so in the evenings they could watch movies, except tonight they were having a fire.

A nice one, too, if Peg did say so herself, having done the whole thing and then come back across the room to admire her handiwork. Sitting there on the deep sofa, lights out, rich sky colors in black-framed rectangles at the windows, snuggled against Freddie (it was okay if she didn't look), she gazed into the twisting flames and said, 'Freddie, this is pretty okay.'

'I kind of like it,' Freddie agreed.

'The only question—'

'I know.'

'What do you—'

'The cop.'

'That's it.'

'Here's the way I see it,' Freddie told her, adjusting his arm more comfortably around her (she didn't look). 'This cop, that you say his name is Barney something—

'That's what the lawyer called him.'

'It could still be true, though. Okay, Barney's a real cop, with all that power, and that was probably a real warrant he showed you, but what I think is, I think he isn't working as a cop. I think he's rented himself out to that lawyer—'

'The lawyer was the guy in charge,' Peg agreed, 'when they were at our place.'

'Right. And the lawyer's working for the doctors.'

'Do doctors have that kind of clout?' Peg asked. 'That they can get a lawyer that bosses cops around?'

'These aren't regular doctors,' Freddie pointed out. 'These are research doctors. Who knows who they got behind them? The CIA, maybe, or the Republican National Committee, or some oil sheik.'

'Scary people.'

'Which is why we want to stay away from them. Keep out of their sight.'

'Easy for you to say.'

'The question is,' Freddie said, ignoring that, 'what's gonna happen next with this cop and this lawyer?'

'They know we're up here someplace,' Peg reminded him. 'Someplace around the Rhinebeck railroad station.'

'Which I'm not worried about,' Freddie said, 'if the cop's working on his own. If he can send out a flyer on us, that's different. Then we might actually have to leave here.'

'Oh, Freddie! Don't even say it!'

'We still have to think it, Peg. We don't wanna be sitting here like this, cozy and romantic in front of the fire, and outside a SWAT team's surrounding the house.'

Peg stared at the darkening shapes of the windows, her eyes wide in the firelight. 'Oh, my God, Freddie, do you think it's possible?'

'Not this quick. Maybe not at all.'

'But — what are we gonna do?'

'I tell you what,' Freddie said. 'Tomorrow's Monday. If this Barney the cop is on official business, if he's after me because there's a warrant out on me or something, those doctors swore out something against me, though I doubt it, but if that's the case—'

'Yes? Yes?'

'By tomorrow,' Freddie said, 'they'll have the bulletin with my name on it at all the police stations around here, and the state trooper barracks, and all the rest of it. So I'll go to one of those places and have a look.'

'Freddie!' Peg said, and forgot, and looked at him — at the sofa, that is — then quickly looked at the fire again. 'Could you do that?'

'Peg, I can do anything. That's the upside of this business. I know there's problems and all that with this invisibility thing, but Peg, you know, when it comes right down to it, I can do anything I want.'