job. All she missed was her six-figure salary.
Now Helen could barely make ends meet. She paid her rent in cash, a deal she made with her landlady, Margery.
Helen explained that her ex-husband was looking for her and she didn’t want to give him any way to trace her, which was mostly true. She left out the part about the court.
Helen did not want her name in any computers. She had no phone, no credit cards, no bank account, and no paycheck. Page Turner paid her in cash, too, another reason why she put up with him. The big chain bookstores wouldn’t do that. Lucky for her, Page had a slightly crooked streak.
Now that she was alone, the scene with Madame Muffy gave her the shivers. She wondered if the little fraud got a real look at the future and it was too much for her. Helen decided that was ridiculous, but she double-locked the front door and put the security bar in the sliding glass doors.
Then she settled into her turquoise Barcalounger with a new hardback mystery. That was the best perk of her job.
She could borrow books from the store, as long as she returned them in salable condition.
Thumbs, her six-toed cat, curled up beside her. Helen scratched his ears and he purred and kneaded her thigh with his giant paws. The big gray-and-white cat looked so much like a stuffed animal, Helen expected to find a tag on him.
Only his enormous feet spoiled the illusion. They were the size of catchers’ mitts.
Thumbs was supposed to be a descendant of Ernest Hemingway’s famously inbred six-toed cats. At least that’s what the guy who bought him in a Key West bar said. But the man lied a lot. Still, Thumbs did love to curl up with a good book.
The next thing Helen knew it was midnight, and she was awakened out of a sound sleep in the Barcalounger. The book was resting on her lap. Thumbs was in the bedroom, howling, loud, insistent howls. Something was wrong.
Helen threw down her book and ran into the bedroom.
Thumbs was pawing frantically at the sliding glass doors.
There were flying bugs, pale beige things with wings, outside the doors. No, wait, they were inside, crawling up the glass, and Thumbs was trying to stop them.
They were everywhere, coming through the crack in the sliding doors and crawling through the vents. They were squirming on the floor, squeezing through the jalousie glass, frying on the lightbulbs, flying at the pictures. They were crawling up the walls and across the ceiling.
Oh my god, they were in her bed. Hundreds, no, thousands of them. Helen wrapped her hand in a towel and tried to wipe the bugs off her spread, but there were more on her pillow. They were creeping through the fur of her teddy bear, blind, wormlike things. A chain of them dripped off the bear’s ear.
Helen ran to the closet and pulled out her vacuum cleaner. Shoeboxes and purses fell out with it, and were soon writhing with the awful insects.
She began vacuuming up the bugs. She sucked them off the ceiling and pulled them off the light. She vacuumed them off the floor and swept them off her bedspread. And still they kept coming, waves of blind, beige, winged worms, like something that crawled on corpses.
Now they were in her hair and down her blouse and crawling over her feet. Their wings came off and fluttered through the air. Their bodies squished and crackled under her sandals. They crawled blindly over her naked toes and up her legs. Helen brushed them off and kept vacuuming.
Thumbs was howling so loud he drowned out the vacuum’s scream. Then suddenly there was silence. The vacuum had stopped, clogged with insects. But still the blind beige things invaded her home, her bedroom, her bed, her body.
Helen could stand it no longer. She grabbed Thumbs, ran across the lawn, and pounded on her landlady’s door.
“What the hell is going on?” Margery Flax said, yanking open the jalousie door so hard the glass rattled. In one hand she had a screwdriver—the drink, not the tool. In the other she had a Marlboro. Both had contributed to her lived-in face. Margery was an interesting seventy-six.
“What are you doing on my doorstep with that cat?”
Margery bellowed. She was not a cat person, possibly because they did not come in the color she cared for. Margery loved purple. She was wearing a purple chenille robe, violet feathered mules with lavender sequins, and poppy-red toenail polish, which matched the bright red curlers in her gray hair.
“Bugs,” Helen said. “Hundreds of them. No, thousands.
Maybe millions. They’re flying and crawling all over my apartment. I tried to stop them, but they keep coming.
They’re on my walls. They’re in my bed and down my blouse. They’re horrible.”
Margery stubbed out the cigarette and took a deep gulp of her screwdriver. “What do they look like?” she said.
“They’re kind of wormlike. Beige with wings, except the wings fall off and they start crawling.”
Even now Helen felt them crawling on her. She looked down and saw one inside her shirt, on her bra.
“Here,” she said, and handed an indignant Thumbs to Margery. He extended his claws.
“That cat scratches me and you’re out of here,” Margery said.
Helen shook out her blouse and gingerly picked up the ugly beige insect.
Margery looked at it and took another drink. “Shit,” she said. “We’ve got termites.” She handed the cat back to Helen.
“But you can exterminate them, can’t you?”
“Depends. They can exterminate this building if there are too many. It could be the end of the Coronado. When they swarm like that, it means there are so many already, they’re moving on to find more food. I’ve seen it happen before, old buildings like this. They get so riddled with termites it would be cheaper to tear down the place than fix it. That’s what did in the Sunnystreet Motel.”
“Where’s that?” Helen said. She still felt itchy and crawly, but she couldn’t see any more bugs on her.
“Where that vacant lot is now.”
“The one with the sign ‘Luxury Condos Coming Soon’?”
Helen said.
“That’s it. The termite inspector ’s foot went right through the roof. That was the end of the place. Betty sold out to a developer and moved to Sarasota.”
The old buildings on the streets near the Coronado were disappearing to expensive high-rises. Soon the people who worked in the shops along Las Olas would not be able to live near their jobs. Helen felt a terrible pang of fear. She loved the Coronado. She didn’t want anything to happen to it. She’d never find a place like this again. She’d have to live in a hot shoebox along the highway.
“But what if we’re lucky?”
“Some luck,” Margery said with a snort that should have blown out her sinuses. “We’ll have to move out while they kill the termites.”
“You mean I’ll have to leave my apartment?” Thumbs let out an indignant yowl. Helen had been clutching him too tightly, hanging on to her cat to help her through the bad news.
“I mean we’ll all have to leave. Every last one of us. They pump the whole place full of poison gas. It’s the only way to kill the little bastards.”
Madame Muffy was right, Helen thought. Here was death and destruction. Now all they needed was murder.
Chapter 3
Helen woke up. She did not know where she was. She could not move her arm.
Her cat, Thumbs, gave an indignant yowl and hit her in the face with his tail. The ten-pound tom had been
