Wild Card

of its entire body, and there was a wide viewing screen in back that cast a strange bluish-gray light upon the features of the spotter who carried it, giving him the look of a ghostly apparition. Jarvis had noticed these things — the glow especially — and come to realize that the device was a heat-reader akin to those aboard the helicopters scouring the island for him. The friend who had told him of the nightbirds, an aircraft cleaner he’d linked up with at Los Rayos’s employee compound, had described this machinery one night when rum had turned his mouth to chattering, and Jarvis hadn’t forgotten his words: Their picture’s all gray an’ not green, an’ the lenses can do more’n pierce the black’a night. They can see the natural aura’a heat that come off the skin’a everyt’ing alive, see the vapor that leave yah mout’ when ya breath, even see the shape’a yer ass on a chair yah been warmin’ a full quarter hour after yah ’ave lifted yerself off it.

Jarvis Lenard had stood with his heart pounding against his ribs as the spotter paused ahead of the others in line behind him, and swept the heat-reader first from side to side, and then up toward the treetops. Last, he’d bent and aimed its lens toward the ground… and that was when Jarvis had taken the opportunity to flee, scampering back to the cave entrance before the man could straighten, or resume moving forward with his team. Still hanging out of his pants, he’d dropped onto his stomach, wriggled in under his brush cover, hurried to replace whatever foliage he’d disturbed, and scampered through the claustrophobic, rough-walled tube of rock, which narrowed like a periwinkle shell toward the back to end in a tight, angling notch where he’d finally hunkered down in dread.

Squatted on his heels in that little sideways cut now, Jarvis took a deep breath, another, and then a third, making an effort to slow his racing heartbeat. But his throat had tightened with fear, and only thin snatches of air seemed to reach his lungs, and the hard throbbing in his rib cage did not ease up. He continued to pull in breath after breath, regardless, understanding he must try to be calm… must try mightily to remain still and silent if he was to have any chance of avoiding capture, however easier it might be said than done. From what he could hear, his stalkers had gotten to within a few paces of the cave entrance and stopped again. To its left, as it seemed to him. Had they come this far into the woods because they had picked up his trail? Or was it plain, fickle chance that had brought them here?

Jarvis Lenard could not know. Yet he did know that the side of the cave where they had now made their second halt was the same side he’d chosen for taking care of his business, and that the spot of a puddle he’d left there could madly enough do him in. For it had struck him that a device able to read a man’s lingering body heat on a seat cushion would also detect the warmth of his freshly released urine. And if it were to meet the notice of those who sought him, acting like to a beacon, glowing on the face of that viewscreen as though the pecker that had peed it had been flooded with radioactivity…

Jarvis had a moment when he was gripped by a suicidal urge to laugh aloud at that thought — or rather cough out an anxiety-fraught mockery of laughter. But he managed to suppress it, refusing to yield to crazed hysteria. The Sunglasses might take him, yes, they might. He was determined not to serve himself up to them on a platter, though.

Two or three minutes went by with the slowness of as many hours. Jarvis could still hear shuffling footsteps outside. And the chop of machete blades. He had no way to see past the vegetation he’d piled in front of the cave entrance to keep it from sight, but sadly the opposite wouldn’t be true of the instrument in the spotter’s hand. Its lens did not see objects for what they were, not really. Instead it would sense only the heat that escaped them. Leaves and branches would give off no warmth, or very little compared to what was coming from Jarvis, and would be a poor excuse for a barrier. To his understanding, incomplete as it might be, a man’s body heat would appear to burn a white-hot hole through the fold of brush on that evil device’s monitor.

Same as my piss would seem to be burnin’ like an atomic spill, Jarvis thought with a humor that was far more subdued — but no less grim — than the spasm of crazed mirth that had just come so close to pushing him around the corner into lunacy.

If there was anything that might work to his favor and protect him from the searching electronic eye, he supposed it was his having scurried away to hide in the notch, with its wall of thick, solid rock separating it from the forward length of the cave. The question then would be whether the eye was keen enough to penetrate that wall should it be turned in its direction, although Jarvis would be glad never to learn the answer… as if what he wanted mattered at all.

He lowered his head between his knees and took another series of breaths to quiet his nerves. For the present he could only wait like a hunted animal in its burrow, hoping it was only a fluke that had brought these bloodhounds close, and that they would pass as suddenly as they’d appeared without sniffing out any trace of him.

Waiting. Hoping. Words for the desperate, true, Jarvis thought.

He would gladly take them on himself.

A scared, desperate man, he would take them on without argument, and take as well the uncertainty that was their constant companion, if it meant he could elude his pursuers yet another night, and stay free to worry about the next day when it came.

SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CALIFORNIA

Julia Gordian broke out of her nightmare with a start, her eyes snapping open in the darkness, her mouth gasping in air, her right hand going to her throat. Her other arm jerked up at her side with a stiff, violent movement that tossed her blanket partway off the bed.

She’d been awakened by the trailing end of a moan that she instantly realized had come from her own lips.

Shaking hard, Julia drew herself to a sitting position. Then she let her fingers slide from her neck, covered her face with both hands, and stayed like that for several minutes. When she at last raised her head from her palms, they were left wet with perspiration and tears.

She took a while longer to collect herself and then reached down for her blanket, thinking the sounds that had torn out of her must have been pretty awful, wondering if they’d been loud enough for her father to hear them. Probably not, she decided; the guest room was on the other side of the house. And though he wouldn’t have admitted it, Dad seemed tired from standing on a ladder with those heavy abstracts. And then the drive, and her laying the rest of that stuff on him. With even a shred of luck he’d still be sound asleep.

Julia wiped her stinging eyes. That other stuff, she thought. Just something incidental she’d wanted to mention. Uh-huh, sure.

Let her go. Let her go now. Let her go, it’s finished…

She took in another breath. The words from her dream clung to her. Those words, and the fearful sensation of the combat knife against her throat, held to her throat in the Killer’s grip. And then the images returned: Tom Ricci standing in the entrance to that room in Big Sur, the door he’d kicked open flung back from the splintered jamb.

Let her go, it’s finished… You do her, I do you, what’s the point?

Ricci again. His eyes on the Killer over the outthrust gun in his hands, the gun targeted on the Killer’s heart.

In Julia’s nightmare, the Killer had been as faceless as he’d been nameless. Wait, maybe not exactly. His features had been constantly changing. One moment they’d been average, even bland. Then atrociously cruel and monstrous. Like in her actual recollections of those black days, she couldn’t quite fix on them.

A year now of trying to remember the Killer’s face, and she couldn’t do it.

But Tom Ricci’s—

His face, eyes, voice — they would return with absolute clarity in her memory and dreams.

You can make it on your own now. Go. It’ll be all right.

Those words… he’d spoken those words to her after persuading the Killer to lower his knife from her throat and slice the ropes that had bound her wrists and ankles to her chair, a straight-backed wooden chair on which she’d been forced to sit until she lost most of her circulation. When Julia lifted her arms, they’d been cramped and stiff as boards. Her legs were worse, so numb at first she had been unable to feel them. And then the painful tingles as she stood up and blood began flowing to them. Trying to take her first step toward Ricci, she had almost toppled over.

And Ricci had steadied her with one hand. Keeping his gun on the Killer with the other, or so she assumed. That was one of the blanks her mind had filled in for her, not because she’d had any awareness of it at the time, but because it had to have happened that way.