“They’re not here yet,” Bobby assured me as he took the two pizza-shop boxes from the back of the Explorer. “It’s early for them.”
“Monkeys are usually eating at this hour,” I said. “Then a little dancing.”
“Maybe they won’t even come at all tonight,” Sasha hoped.
“They’ll come,” I said.
“Yeah. They’ll come,” Bobby agreed.
Bobby went inside with our dinner. Orson stayed close by his side, not out of fear that the murderous troop might be among the dunes even now but, in his role as food cop, to guard against the unfair distribution of the pizza.
Sasha removed two plastic shopping bags from the Explorer. They contained the fire extinguishers that she’d purchased at Crown Hardware.
She closed the tailgate and used the remote on her key chain to lock the doors. Since Bobby’s Jeep occupied his one-car garage, we were leaving the Explorer in front of the cottage.
When Sasha turned to me, the wind made a glorious banner of her lustrous mahogany hair, and her skin glowed softly, as if the moon had managed to press one exquisite beam through the clotted clouds to caress her face. She seemed larger than life, an elemental spirit.
“What?” she said, unable to interpret my stare.
“You’re so beautiful. Like a wind goddess drawing the storm to you.”
“You’re so full of shit,” she said, but she smiled.
“It’s one of my most charming qualities.”
A sand devil did a dervish dance around us, spitting grit in our faces, and we hurried into the house.
Bobby was waiting inside, where the lights were dialed down to a comfortable murk. He locked the front door behind us.
Looking around at the large panes of glass, Sasha said, “I sure wish we could nail some plywood over these.”
“This is my house,” Bobby said. “I’m not going to board up the windows, hunker down, and live like a prisoner just because of some damn monkeys.”
To Sasha, I said, “As long as I’ve known him, this amazing dude hasn’t been intimidated by monkeys.”
“Never,” Bobby agreed. “And I’m not starting now.”
“Let’s at least draw the blinds,” Sasha said.
I shook my head. “Bad idea. That’ll just make them suspicious. If they can watch us, and if we don’t appear to be lying in wait for them, they’ll be less cautious.”
Sasha took the two fire extinguishers from their boxes and clipped the plastic presale guards from the triggers. They were ten-pound, marine-type models, easy to handle. She put one in a corner of the kitchen where it couldn’t be seen from the windows, and tucked the second beside one of the sofas in the living room.
While Sasha dealt with the extinguishers, Bobby and I sat in the candlelit kitchen, boxes of ammunition in our laps, working below table level in case the monkey mafia showed up while we were at work. Sasha had purchased three extra magazines for the Glock and three speedloaders for her revolver, and we snapped cartridges into them.
“After I left here last night,” I said, “I visited Roosevelt Frost.”
Bobby looked at me from under his eyebrows. “He and Orson have a broly chat?”
“Roosevelt tried. Orson wasn’t having any of it. But there was this cat named Mungojerrie.”
“Of course,” he said drily.
“The cat said the people at Wyvern wanted me to walk away from this, just move on.”
“You talk to the cat personally?”
“No. Roosevelt passed the message to me.”
“Of course.”
“According to the cat, I was going to get a warning. If I didn’t stop Nancying this, they’d kill my friends one by one until I did.”
“They’ll blow me away to warn you off?”
“Their idea, not mine.”
“They can’t just kill you? They think they need kryptonite?”
“They revere me, Roosevelt says.”
“Well, who doesn’t?” Even after the monkeys, he remained dubious about this issue of anthropomorphizing animal behavior. But he sure had cranked down the volume of his sarcasm.
“Right after I left the
I told Bobby about Lewis Stevenson, and he said, “He was going to kill Orson?”
From his guard post where he stared up at the pizza boxes on the counter, Orson whined as if to confirm my account.
“So,” Bobby said, “you shot the sheriff.”
“He was the chief of police.”
“You shot the sheriff,” Bobby insisted.
A lot of years ago, he had been a radical Eric Clapton junkie, so I knew why he liked it better this way. “All right. I shot the sheriff — but I did not shoot the deputy.”
“I can’t let you out of my sight.”
He finished with the speedloaders and tucked them into the dump pouch that Sasha had also purchased.
“Bitchin’ shirt,” I said.
Bobby was wearing a rare long-sleeve Hawaiian shirt featuring a spectacular, colorful mural of a tropical festival: oranges, reds, and greens.
He said, “Kamehameha Garment Company, from about 1950.”
Having dealt with the fire extinguishers, Sasha came into the kitchen and switched on one of the two ovens to warm up the pizza.
To Bobby, I said, “Then I set the patrol car on fire to destroy the evidence.”
“What’s on the pizza?” he asked Sasha.
“Pepperoni on one, sausage and onions on the other.”
“Bobby’s wearing a used shirt,” I told her.
“Antique,” Bobby amended.
“Anyway, after I blew up the patrol car, I went over to St. Bernadette’s and let myself in.”
“Breaking and entering?”
“Unlocked window.”
“So it’s just criminal trespass,” he said.
As I finished loading the spare magazines for the Glock, I said, “Used shirt, antique shirt — seems like the same thing to me.”
“One’s cheap,” Sasha explained, “and the other isn’t.”
“One’s art,” Bobby said. He held out the leather holder with the speedloaders. “Here’s your dump pouch.”
Sasha took it from him and snapped it onto her belt.
I said, “Father Tom’s sister was an associate of my mother’s.”
Bobby said, “Mad-scientist-blow-up-the-world type?”
“No explosives are involved. But, yeah, and now she’s infected.”
“Infected.” He grimaced. “Do we really have to get into this?”
“Yeah. But it’s way complex. Genetics.”
“Big-brain stuff. Boring.”
“Not this time.”
Far out to sea, bright arteries of lightning pulsed in the sky and a low throb of thunder followed.
Sasha had also purchased a cartridge belt designed for duck hunters and skeet shooters, and Bobby began to stuff shotgun shells into the leather loops.
