Bobby sighed. “I’ve done a lot of research for UCI into the backgrounds of prospective faculty members, so I know the academic world can be as competitive and vicious and dirty—dirtier—than either politics or show business. I’m not going to fight you on this. But we’ve got to reach an agreement about when you can go public with it. I don’t want you doing anything that would bring my client to the attention of the press until we’ve resolved his case and are sure he’s ... out of danger.”

“And when will that be?” Manfred asked.

Bobby shrugged. “A day or two. Maybe a week. I doubt it’ll drag on much longer than that.”

The entomologist and geneticist beamed at each other, obviously delighted. Manfred said, “That’s no problem at all. We’ll need much longer than that to finish studying the specimen, prepare our first paper for publication, and devise a strategy to deal with both the scientific community and the media.”

Bobby imagined that he heard one of the shallow drawers sliding open in the case behind him, forced outward by the weight of a vile torrent of giant, squirming Madagascar roaches.

“But I’ll take the three diamonds with me,” he said. “They’re quite valuable, and they belong to my client.”

Manfred and Gavenall hesitated, made a token protest, but quickly agreed. Clint took the stones and rewrapped them in the handkerchief. The scientists’ capitulation convinced Bobby there had been more than three diamonds in the bug, probably at least five, leaving them with two stones to support their thesis regarding the bug’s origins and purpose.

“We’ll want to meet your client, interview him,” Gavenall said.

“That’s up to him,” Bobby said.

“It’s essential. We must interview him.”

“That’s his decision,” Bobby said. “You’ve gotten most of what you wanted. Eventually he may agree, and then you’ll have everything you’re after. But don’t push it now.”

The round man nodded. “Fair enough. But tell me ... where did he find the thing?”

“He doesn’t remember. He has amnesia.” The drawer behind him was open now. He could hear the shells of the huge roaches clicking and scraping together as they poured out of confinement and down the front of the cabinet, swarming toward him. “We really, have to go,” he said. “We. don’t have another minute to spare.” He left the study quickly, trying not to look as if he was bolting for his life.

Clint followed him, as did the two scientists, and at the front door, Manfred said, “I’m going to sound as if I ought to be writing stories for some sensational tabloid, but if this is an alien artifact that came into your client’s hands, do you think he could’ve gotten it inside a ... well, a spaceship? Those people who claim to have been abducted and forced to undergo examinations aboard spaceships ... they always seem to go through a period of amnesia first, before learning the truth.”

“Those people are crackpots or frauds,” Gavenall said sharply. “We can’t let ourselves be associated with that sort of thing.” He frowned, and the frown deepened into a scowl, and he said, “Unless in this case it’s true.”

Looking back at them from the stoop, grateful to be outside, Bobby said, “Maybe it is. I’m at a point where I’ll believe anything till it’s disproved. But I’ll tell you this ... my feeling is that whatever is happening to my client is something a lot stranger than alien abduction.”

“A lot,” Clint agreed.

Without further elaboration, they went down the front walkway to the car. Bobby opened his door and stood for a moment, reluctant to get into Clint’s Chevy. The mild breeze washing down the Irvine hills felt so clean after the stale air in Manfred’s study.

He put one hand in his pocket, felt the three red diamonds, and said softly, “Bug shit.”

When he finally got into the car and slammed the door, he barely resisted the urge to reach under his shirt to determine if the things he still felt crawling on him were real.

Manfred and Gavenall stood on the front stoop, watching Bobby and Clint, as if half expecting their car to tip back on its rear bumper and shoot straight into the sky to rendezvous with some great glowing craft out of a Spielberg movie.

Clint drove two blocks, turned at the corner, and pulled to the curb as soon as they were out of sight. “Bobby, where in the hell did Frank get that thing?”

Bobby could only answer him with another question: “How many different places does he go when he teleports? The money, the red diamonds and the bug, the black sand-and how far away are some of those places? Really far away?”

“And who is he?” Clint asked.

“Frank Pollard from El Encanto Heights.”

“But I mean, who is that?” Clint thumped one fist against the steering wheel. “Who the hell is Frank Pollard from El Encanto?”

“I think what you really want to know is not who he is. More important ... what is he?”

44

BY SURPRISE Bobby came to visit.

Lunch was eaten before Bobby came. Dessert was still in Thomas’s mind. Not the taste of it. The memory. Vanilla ice cream, fresh strawberries. The way dessert made you feel.

He was alone in his room, sitting in his armchair, thinking about making a picture poem that would have the feeling of eating ice cream and strawberries, not the taste but the good feeling, so some day when you didn’t have any ice cream or strawberries, you could just look at the poem and get that same good feeling even without eating anything. Of course, you couldn’t use pictures of ice cream or strawberries in the poem, because that wouldn’t be a poem, that would be only saying how good ice cream and strawberries made you feel. A poem didn’t just say, it showed you and made you feel.

Then Bobby came through the door, and Thomas was so happy he forgot the poem, and they hugged. Somebody was with Bobby, but it wasn’t Julie, so Thomas was disappointed. He was embarrassed, too, because it turned out he’d met the person with Bobby a couple times before, over the years, but he didn’t remember him right away, which made him feel dumb. It was Clint. Thomas said the name to himself, over and over, so maybe he’d remember next time: Clint, Clint, Clint, Clint, Clint.

“Julie couldn’t come,” Bobby said, “she’s babysitting a client.”

Thomas wondered why a baby would ever need a private eye, but he didn’t ask. In TV only grownups needed private eyes, which were called private eyes because they looked out for you, though he wasn’t sure why they were called private. He also wondered how a baby could pay for a private eye, because he knew eyes like Bobby and Julie worked for money like everyone else, but babies didn’t work, they were too little to do anything. So where’d this one get the money to pay Bobby and Julie? He hoped they didn’t get cheated out of their money, they worked hard for it.

Bobby said, “She told me to tell you she loves you even more than she did yesterday, and she’ll love you even more tomorrow.”

They hugged again because this time Thomas was giving the hug to Bobby for Julie.

Clint asked if he could see the latest scrapbook of poems. He took it across the room and sat in Derek’s armchair, which was okay because Derek wasn’t in it, he was in the wreck room.

Bobby moved the chair from the worktable, putting it closer to the armchair that belonged to Thomas. He sat, and they talked about what a big blue day it was and how nice the flowers looked where they were all bright outside Thomas’s window.

For a while they talked about lots of things, and Bobby was funny—except when they talked about Julie, he changed. He was worried for Julie, you could tell. When he talked about her, he was like a good picture poem—he didn’t say his worry, but he showed it and made you feel it.

Thomas was already worried for Julie, so Bobby’s worry made him feel even worse, made him scared for her.

“We’ve got our hands full with the current case,” Bobby said, “so neither one of us might be able to visit again until this weekend or the first of the week.”

“Okay, sure,” Thomas said, and a big coldness rushed in from somewhere and filled him up. Each time Bobby mentioned the new case, the one with the baby, his picture poem of worry was even easier to read.

Thomas wondered if this was the case where they were going to meet up with the Bad Thing. He was pretty sure it was. He thought he should tell Bobby about the Bad Thing, but he couldn’t find a way. No matter how he told it, he’d sound like the dumbest dumb person who ever lived at The Home. It was better to wait until the danger was coming a lot nearer, then TV to Bobby a real hard warning that’d scare him into looking out for the Bad Thing and shooting it when he saw it. Bobby would pay attention to a TVed warning because he wouldn’t know where it came from, that it came from just a dumb person.

And Bobby could shoot, too, all private eyes could shoot because most days it was bad out there in the world, and you knew you were going to meet up with somebody who was going to shoot at you first or try to run you down with a car or stab you or strangle you or, once in a while, try to throw you off a building, or even Try To Make It Look Like Suicide, and since most good guys didn’t carry guns around with them, private eyes who watched over them had to be good shooters.

After a while Bobby had to go. Not to the bathroom but back to work. So they hugged again. And then Bobby and Clint were gone, and Thomas was alone.

He went to the window. Looked out. The day was good, better than night. But even with the sun pushing most darkness out past the edge of the world, and even with the rest of the darkness hiding from the sun behind trees and buildings, there was badness in the day. The Bad Thing hadn’t gone out past the edge of the world with the night. It was still there, somewhere in the day, you could tell.

Last night, when he got too close to the Bad Thing and it tried to grab him, he was so afraid, he pulled away quick like. He had a feeling the Bad Thing was trying to find out who he was and where he was, and then was going to come to The Home and eat him like it ate the little animals. So he pretty much made up his mind not to get real close to it again, stay far away, but now he couldn’t do that because of Julie and the baby. If Bobby, who never worried, was so worried for Julie, then Thomas needed to be even more worried for her than he was. And if Julie and Bobby thought the baby should be watched over, then Thomas had to worry about the baby, too, because what was important to Julie was important to him.

He reached out into the day.

It was there. Far away yet.

He didn’t get close.

He was scared.

But for Julie, for Bobby, for the baby, he’d have to stop being scared, get closer, and be sure he knew all the time where the Bad Thing was and whether it was coming this way.

45

JACKIE JAXX did not arrive at the offices of Dakota & Dakota until ten past four that Tuesday afternoon, a full hour after Bobby and Clint returned, and to Julie’s annoyance he spent half an hour creating an atmosphere that he found conducive to his work. He felt the room was too bright, so he closed the blinds on the large windows, though the approaching winter twilight and an incoming bank of clouds over the Pacific had already robbed the day of much of its light. He tried different arrangements with the three brass lamps, each of which was equipped with a three-way bulb, giving him what seemed an infinite number of combinations; he finally left one of them at seventy watts, one at thirty, and one off completely. He asked Frank to move from the sofa to one of the chairs, decided that wasn’t going to work, moved Julie’s big chair out from behind the desk and put him in that, then arranged four other chairs in a semicircle in front of it.

Julie suspected that Jackie could have worked effectively with the blinds open and all of the lamps on. He was a performer, however, even when off the stage, and he could not resist being theatrical.

In recent years magicians had forsaken fake show-biz monikers like The Great Blackwell and Harry Houdini in favor of names that at least seemed like real ones, but Jackie was a throwback. Just as Houdini’s real name was Erich Weiss, so Jackie had been baptized David Carver. Because he performed comic magic, he had avoided mysterious-sounding names. And because, since puberty, he had yearned to be part of the night-club and Vegas scene, he had chosen a new identity that, to him and those in his social circle, sounded like Nevada royalty. While other kids thought about being teachers, doctors, real-estate salesmen or auto mechanics, young Davey Carver had dreamed of being someone like Jackie Jaxx; now, God help him, he was living his dream.

Although he was currently between a one-week engagement in Reno and a stint as the opening act for Sammy Davis in Vegas, Jackie showed up not in blue jeans or an ordinary suit, but in an outfit he could have worn during performances: a black leisure suit with emerald-green piping on the lapels and cuffs of the jacket, a matching green shirt, and black patent-leather shoes. He was thirty-six years old, five feet eight, thin, cancerously tanned, with hair that he dyed ink-black and teeth that were unnaturally, ferociously white, thanks to the modern miracle of dental bonding.

Three years ago Dakota & Dakota had been hired by the Las Vegas hotel with which Jackie had a long-term contract, and charged with the sticky task of uncovering the identity of a blackmailer who was trying to extort most of the magician’s income. The case had many unexpected twists and turns, but by the time they reached the end, the thing that most surprised Julie was that she had gotten over her initial distaste for the magician and had come to sort of like him. Sort of.

Finally Jackie settled on the chair directly in front of Frank. “Julie, you and Clint sit to my right. Bobby, to my left, please.”

Julie saw no good reason why she couldn’t sit in whichever of the three chairs she chose, but she played along.

Half of Jackie’s Vegas act involved the hypnotizing and comic exploitation of audience members. His knowledge of hypnotic technique was so extensive, and his understanding of the functioning of the mind in a trance state was so profound, that he was frequently invited to participate in medical conferences with physicians, psychologists, and psychiatrists who were exploring practical uses of hypnosis. Perhaps they could have persuaded a psychiatrist to help them pierce Frank’s amnesia with hypnotic regression therapy. But it was doubtful that any doctor was as qualified for the task as Jackie Jaxx.

Besides, no matter what fantastic things Jackie learned about Frank, he could be counted on to keep his mouth shut. He owed a lot to Bobby and Julie, and in spite of his faults, he was a man who paid his debts and had at least a vestigial sense of loyalty that was rare in the me-me-me culture of show business.