Warming lights were clipped to two of the four sides, illuminating a tall, irregular mound arising from the floor at the center of the cube, and looking somewhat like the spired castle of a Disney princess. In one corner of the floor was a dish of water. In another was a mound of what looked like a mix of wood pieces and sawdust.
Then he stopped and caught his breath. The surface of the castle was moving.
“Get it?” Joey asked proudly. “The mice aren’t my pets. They’re the
“Pet what?” Lou asked, his voice breaking between the words.
He remained fixed to where he was standing, unable to advance as he struggled to sort out what he was seeing.
“Termites,” Joey said simply. “Beautiful, aren’t they?”
“Termites?”
Lou could see them now-a sheet of constant motion coating virtually the entire castle. He managed a couple of baby steps toward them.
“Joey, I’m not any kind of a bug expert, but I do know that termites eat wood, not mice.”
Lou tried with minimal success to tie the bizarre scene to the events surrounding Joey’s nearly amputated thumb, and the other strange behaviors he’d observed since coming to Kings Ridge.
“You watch and then tell me what these guys can and cannot eat,” Joey said.
He removed his arm from the sling and used it to hold the animal container while he removed one of the mice by its tail and set it in a mason jar with a cotton ball on the bottom. The other mouse he placed in the wire cage.
“I have to knock this fellow out first,” Joey said. “The termites won’t eat them if they’re dead, and I don’t want them to feel any pain.”
Lou watched, transfixed, as Joey poured a bit of liquid onto the cotton ball.
In seconds, the mouse was on its side.
Joey used a long forceps to pick up the limp animal. Then he removed the rubber stopper from the Lucite access tube, set the mouse inside, and nudged it onto the small trapdoor with a thin stick, all the while, softly whistling the theme from
Then, after giving Lou a final look at the ingenious setup, the cook pushed down the lever opening the trapdoor.
Instantly, the lower third of the princess’s castle flowed like lava onto the inert mouse, covering every millimeter of it. There was a loud clicking noise that reminded Lou of rain pelting against a tin roof.
More insects-huge heads with black pinchers and yellow bodies-poured or flew around it. The clicking sounds intensified as the swarm became more frenzied. The animal corpse, for surely it was already that, was now encased in a ball of clamoring insects at least three inches around, each trying to burrow down onto the meal. Then, just as quickly as the termites advanced, they began to retreat back to and into the mound. The clicking decreased in volume until it could no longer be heard.
Lou circled the table, never once averting his gaze from the frightening diorama. He expected he’d see the remains of the meal, mauled and bloody.
But there was not any blood to be seen.
What Lou witnessed instead, was nothing.
There was no mouse left at all.
CHAPTER 24
Lou felt leagues better the moment he set foot inside Cap’s Stick and Move. One good whiff of stale gym air with its distinctive blend of sweat, cheap aftershave, and bleach, and he felt he was home. But he still could not forget Joey Alderson’s astonishing termites. Before heading over to the gym, he had made a quick search of the Internet, but could find no entomological evidence that such creatures existed.
Only they did.
The image and hideous clicking of that amber-colored swarm totally consuming a mouse in a matter of seconds would stay with him indefinitely. Lou wrote down the name and number of Oliver Humphries at Temple University in Philadelphia, listed as one of the experts in the field of termite entomology. If time allowed, he might give the man a call.
Joey was extremely excited at Lou’s stunned reaction to his pets, and offered to drop another mouse into the Lucite habitat. Lou politely begged off an encore, but did ask where he had come up with the bugs.
“I can’t show you today,” Joey had said, a broad smile creasing his boyish face. “But come back on the weekend, and I’ll take you there. I think you’ll be pretty amazed.”
“I’m pretty amazed right now,” Lou had said, “and a bit horrified, too.”
Lou concentrated on the young fighters chasing their dreams, and Joey’s nightmare bugs gradually receded toward the back of his consciousness. As always, the gym was a sanctuary for his brain. The grunts, soft thud of boxing gloves, and rhythmic skip of jump ropes across the cement floor were symphonic.
After changing quickly in the locker room, Lou slipped on his bag gloves and got to work on the heavy bag. Cap was in the ring nearby, training a young fighter who had pretty decent moves. Lou started off with a set of straight jabs, remembering what his mentor had told him about not telegraphing the punch by leaning forward. Then he switched over to a rapid-fire combination set that included a mix of jab-cross, jab-hook, and jab-hook-hook punches. By minute five of his ten-minute set, he was sweating profusely and feeling almost airborne. He tried to focus on his punching technique, but then a surprising thing happened.
He found himself thinking about Renee.
Steve was a decent-enough guy, Lou convinced himself as he walloped the bag with his hardest punch yet. Maybe he was a little dull and set in his ways, but at least he had a big heart and good intentions. Besides, Lou knew sparks were not a guarantee of a successful marriage. Heck, he’d given Renee enough of them to start a matrimonial forest fire, and look where that got him.
Lou had come to believe that Renee loved a solid 95 percent of him during their eight years of marriage. It was that remaining 5 percent, the addict who lied about his drug and alcohol use, that Renee could not endure. As in many failed marriages, she discovered Lou’s unacceptable 5 percent only after she had said, “I do.” As a recommended part of his recovery, he had done his best to make amends to her. Now, all he could do was to support her in her marriage and continue to push that 5 percent further and further from his life. When the time was right, someone would show up who could help him get over her.
Lou slammed the bag a few more times, then stepped aside when Cap came over and hit the bag with a beautiful sequence of jabs. He seemed to be exerting little effort, but his punches sounded like gunshots. Throughout the remarkable barrage, he continued smiling.
“Where you been?” Cap asked as he unleashed an uppercut that would have put a full-grown gorilla on its back.
“Long story,” Lou said.
“Well, you might want to make it a short one,” Cap said without sounding the least bit winded. “I just got a call from the street that there are two guys lurking outside the gym, snapping pictures of this place, your building, and what I think is your car. What have you been up to?”
Lou felt as if he’d just been on the receiving end of one of Cap’s punches.
“I guess stirring somebody’s pot,” Lou said, wrapping his arm around the swinging bag like they were dancing
