“Blistering. Hundred one, hundred two, every day. No rain in sight. Things beginning to burn.”
“Summer.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
“Well, we're both having a great time. Louise is a dear and fun to be with, as always. Yesterday she spent all day photographing the colors of the walls. I had a good time just watching her. She's just endlessly curious, finds something beautiful to appreciate every time she turns around, and sometimes, literally, right under her feet.”
“You just tagged along.”
“I never just tag along. I carried her camera stuff for her, kept track of the rolls of film, dating and numbering them.”
“You kept track of the time and already had the place picked out where you'd eat your next meal.”
“Yep, you bet I did.”
Titus laughed.
“Well, you know Louise, ”Rita said. “She just follows her nose around all day, and when it occurs to her that she ought to eat she just wanders into any old place close by. Listen, ever since we both got sick that time in Barcelona I quit doing that with her. I've always got something checked out.”
“The way Louise pokes around in the back streets, I can't imagine you finding guidebook recommendations everywhere you go.”
“Nope, but I give the place a good look-over with my old nursing eye. If it doesn't pass muster, I make a good excuse and steer her to someplace that seems a little less threatening gastro-wise.”
“She doesn't mind.”
“No. She knows what I'm doing. We rather enjoy each other's eccentricities. As it happens, I like where she wanders, and she likes where I eat.”
They visited for a while, and as much as he wanted to keep her on the line, he really did feel guilty about waking her at this hour. After a few more minutes, he hung up. But he didn't drive away immediately. For a while he looked at the city.
A dozen years earlier, Titus Cain had been a far-from-home Texan, part of a team working for CERN, the Geneva-based physics laboratory, when researcher Tim Berners-Lee developed hypertext markup language, which had led to the conception of the World Wide Web.
Though he'd been just on the periphery of that new development, Titus saw the profound implications of what was happening as quickly as anyone else. He came back home and founded a tiny company that created software for specialized computers in biomedical engineering research. He marketed his company over the newly developing Internet, and while the World Wide Web was still in the early stages of its academic origins, Titus Cain was communicating with research laboratories on every continent, literally years ahead of other software developers. CaiText became the standard software provider for laser applications medical researchers all over the globe.
Growing his company held more attraction for Titus than creating the software itself, and he quickly moved out of the science of it and into the business. Soon he was living the familiar cliche of the successful young entrepreneur: His work became his social life, his play, and his family all rolled into one. Then one day he woke up and discovered that because of his work, he actually had none of the others.
He forced himself to take a two-month vacation, and then three months later he set off on another two- month trip. The time away from the grind was a revelation. He followed his curiosities all over the world, but he was uneasy and restless and didn't even know it.
All of that changed one sweltering September afternoon when his rafting party rounded a bend in a deep gorge of the Boquillas canyon of the Rio Grande and came upon another rafting group. There had been a serious accident. The guide was unconscious with a broken collarbone, and two members of the party were lying on a sandbar with injuries that hadn't yet been dealt with. Most of the members of the tour group seemed bewildered and at a loss, but the few who could still pull their rattled nerves together were taking orders from one person, a tall, calm, mud-spattered blonde who was ignoring the hand-wringing and tending to the injured.
It was his first glimpse of Margarita Street, a registered nurse from Houston who turned out to be the archetypal independent Texas girl.
That moment changed his life. Thank God.
It took him only fifteen minutes to get home, ten acres of woods and hillside on the eastern slope of the hills west of the river. The wrought-iron gates swung open for him, and he wound his way up to the house, twelve thousand square feet of native limestone and Italian tile. His home was big and comfortable, with sprawling porches and courtyards and half a dozen varieties of tall Texas oaks to shade it. Titus had spent more than he would ever admit to anyone to make sure that the house didn't appear ostentatious and to guarantee that the place would never be described as grand. It looked like a sturdy Texas ranch house, and that was that.
He parked the Rover under the pecan trees at the back of the house and was greeted by his two laid-back redbone hounds, who were pleased to see him but not frantic about it. He petted them both, gave them good, solid slaps on their shoulders, and then walked through the broad breezeways to the back lawn.
Looking forward to the smell of peaches, he headed down through a long allee of mountain laurels to the small orchard below the house, the two hounds sauntering along behind him, swinging their tails. It was the end of the peach season, and he picked a fat Harvester freestone. He started eating it as he continued on the path to a work site just over the shoulder of the hill, where stonemasons were building a reservoir to retain rainwater runoff from the buildings for irrigation.
It was nearly dark when he got back to the house. While he was feeding the two redbones, the security lights came on around the grounds and lighted his way back to the veranda.
He went into the kitchen, got a beer out of the refrigerator, and glanced out the kitchen window to the lights in the allee through which he had just walked. He saw a glimpse of something at the edge of the lights, almost something. Coyotes, probably. Shit. The damn things were getting braver and braver all the time, every year closer into town. But why weren't the hounds bawling?
He stepped outside to the deep veranda that stretched across the back of the house and turned the lights down to a mere glow. He sat at one of the wrought-iron tables and looked out to the courtyard that began at the edge of the veranda, and beyond that to the star jasmine hedges that dropped down toward the orchard.
He had taken another couple of sips when he noticed something missing. The fountain in the courtyard was silent. He could've sworn it was splashing when he'd walked past it earlier on his way down to the orchard with the dogs.
And where were the dogs? They ought to be here now, scratching, sniffing at his shoes, wanting to check out the beer he was holding. Had they taken off after the coyotes after all? If so, why didn't he hear them bellowing?
He was holding a mouthful of beer when he became aware of dimensions in the darkness of the courtyard, the shadows taking on the shape and bulk of substance as three figures emerged slowly from separate corners. He couldn't swallow. His heart rolled hugely and lost its rhythm.
The men moved a little closer without appearing to move their legs, magically, their positions staggered so that they were not aligned. He saw their weapons now, and just before he thought he was going to pass out, his heart kicked in again, and he swallowed the beer.
Chapter 5
At that moment a fourth man came through the laurel allee as if he'd been there all along and approached the courtyard from the side. He stepped into the pale light spilling off the veranda.
“Don't be alarmed, Mr. Titus Cain, ”he said with Spanishaccented English, “you are safe. Perfectly safe. Please, everything is fine.”
He stopped at the edge of the veranda as if awaiting permission to go farther. Of average height and weight, he was perhaps sixty-four, sixty-five, with wavy, gray-streaked hair. A narrow nose, long upper lip. Nice looking. He was wearing a dove gray suit and a white shirt with broad navy stripes, very English, no tie, the collar open, the suit coat buttoned.
