Although it was only three o'clock, the day was in the grip of a false twilight indistinguishable from the real one. The breeze at ground level was striving to match the wind that drove the clouds at higher alt.i.tudes; a thick fog poured in from the west, exhibiting none of the lazy motion with which fog usually advanced, swirling and churning, a molten flux that seemed to be trying to solder the earth to the thunder heads above.

When Clint had the recorder going again, Julie said, "Frank is that the end of it? When you woke Sat.u.r.day morning, were you wearing new clothes, with the paper bag full of money on the bed beside you?"

"No. Not then."

He raised his head, but he didn't look at her. He stared past her at the dreary day beyond the windows, though he seemed to be gazing at something much farther away than Newport Beach.

"Maybe it's never going to end." From the second flight bag out of which he had earlier withdrawn the b.l.o.o.d.y shirt and the sample of black sand, he produced a one-pint mason jar of the type used to store homecanned fruits and vegetables, with a st.u.r.dy, hinged gla.s.s lid that clamped on a rubber gasket. The jar was filled with what appeared to be rough, uncut, dully gleaming gems. Some were more polished than others; they sparkled, flared.

Frank released the lid, tipped the jar, and poured some of the contents onto the imitation blond-wood Formica desktop.

Julie leaned forward.

Bobby stepped in for a closer look.

The less irregular gems were round, oval, teardrop, or lozenge-shaped; some aspects of each stone were smoothly curved, and some were naturally beveled with lots of sharp edges. Other gems were lumpy, jagged, pocked. Several were as large as fat grapes, others as small as peas.

They were all red, though they varied in their degree of coloration.

They vigorously refracted the light, a pool of scarlet glitter on the pale surface of the desk; the gems marshaled the diffuse glow of the lamps through their prisms, and cast shimmering spears of crimson toward the ceiling and one wall, where the acoustic tiles and Sheetrock appeared to be marked by luminous wounds.

"Rubies?" Bobby asked.

"They don't look quite like rubies," Julie said.

"What are they, Frank?"

"I don't know. They might not even be valuable."

"Where'd you get them?"

"Sat.u.r.day night I couldn't sleep much at all. Just minutes at a time. I kept tossing and turning, popping awake again as soon as I dozed off.

Afraid to sleep. And I didn't nap Sunday afternoon. But by yesterday evening, I was so exhausted, I couldn't keep my eyes open any more. I slept in my clothes, and when I got up this morning, my pants pockets were filled with these things."

Julie plucked one of the more polished stones from the pile and held it to her right eye, looking through it toward the nearest lamp. Even in its raw state, the gem's color and clarity were exceptional. They might, as Frank implied, be only semiprecious, but she suspected that they were, in fact, of considerable value.

Bobby said, "Why're you keeping them in a mason jar?"

"Because I had to go buy one anyway to keep this, stuff.

From the flight bag he produced a larger, quart-size jar and placed it on the desk.

Julie turned to look at it and was so startled that she dropped the gem she had been examining. An insect, nearly as large as her hand, lay in that gla.s.s container. Though it had a tough sh.e.l.l like a beetle-midnight black with blood-red markings around the entire rim-the thing within that carapace more closely resembled a spider than a beetle. It had the st.u.r.dy, hairy legs of a tarantula.

"What the h.e.l.l?"

Bobby grimaced. He was mildly entromophobic. When he encountered any insect more formidable than a housefly, he called upon Julie to capture or kill it, while he watched from a distance.

"Is it alive?" Julie asked.

"Not now," Frank said.

Two forearms, like miniature lobster claws, extended from under the front of the thing's sh.e.l.l, one on each side of the head, though they differed from the appendages of a lobster in that the pincers were far more highly articulated than those of any common crustacean. They somewhat resembled a hand with four curved, chitinous segments, each jointed at the back, the edges were wickedly serrated.

"If that thing got hold of your finger," Bobby said, "It could snip it off. You say it was alive, Frank?"

"When I woke up this morning, it was crawling on my chest.

"Good G.o.d!" Bobby paled visibly.

"It was sluggish."

"Yeah? Well, it sure looks quick as a d.a.m.ned c.o.c.kroach "I think it was dying already," Frank said.

"I screamed brushed it off. It just lay there on its back, on the floor, kicking kinda feebly for a few seconds, then it was still. I stripped the case off one of the bed pillows, scooped the thing into it, knotted the top so it wouldn't crawl away if it was still alive. Then I discovered the gems in my pockets, so I bought two mason jars, one for the bug, and it hasn't moved since I put it in there, so I figure it's dead. You ever see anything like it?"

"No," Julie said.

"Thank G.o.d, no," Bobby agreed. He was not leaning over the jar for a closer look, as Julie was. In fact he had taken a step back from the desk, as if he thought the creepy-crawler might be able, in a wink, to cut its way through the gla.s.s.

Julie picked up the jar and turned it so she could look at the bug face-on. Its satin-black head was almost as big as a plum and half hidden under the carapace. Multifaceted, muddy yellow eyes were set high on the sides of the face, and under each of them was what appeared to be another eye, a third smaller than the one above it and reddish-blue. Queer patterns of tiny holes, half a dozen thumblike extrusions, and three cl.u.s.ters of silky-looking hairs marked the otherwise smooth, shiny surface of that hideous countenance. Its small mouth, open now, was a circular orifice in which she saw what appeared to be rings of tiny but sharp teeth.

Staring at the occupant of the jar, Frank said, "Whatever the h.e.l.l I'm mixed up in, it's a bad thing. It's a real bad thing, and I'm afraid."

Bobby twitched. In a thoughtful voice, speaking more to himself than to them, Bobby said, "Bad thing.

Putting the jar down, Julie said, "Frank, we'll take the case."

"All right!" Clint said, and switched off the recorder.

Turning away from the desk, heading toward the bathroom, Bobby said, "Julie, I need to see you alone for a moment."

For the third time they stepped into the bathroom together, closed the door behind them, and switched on the fan.

Bobby's face was grayish, like a highly detailed portrait done in pencil; even his freckles were colorless. His customarily merry blue eyes were not merry now.

He said, "Are you crazy? You told him we'll take the case."

Julie blinked in surprise.

"Isn't that what you wanted?"

"No."

"Ah. Then I guess I heard you wrong. Must be too much wax in my ears.

Solid as cement."

"He's probably a lunatic, dangerous."

"I'd better go to a doctor, have my ears professionally cleaned."

"This wild story he's made up is just-"

She held up one hand, halting him in mid-sentence- "It's real, Bobby. He didn't imagine that bug. What is that thing I've never even seen pictures of anything like it."

"What about the money? He must've stolen it."

"Frank's no thief."

"What-did G.o.d tell you that? Because there's no other way you could know. You only met Pollard little more than an hour ago."

"You're right," she said.

"G.o.d told me. And I always listen to G.o.d because if you don't listen to Him, then He's likely to visit a plague of teeming locusts on you or maybe set your house on fire with a lightning bolt. Listen, Frank's so lost, adrift, I feel sorry for him. Okay?"

He stared at her, chewing on his pale lower lip for a moment then finally said, "We work good together because we complement each other.

You're strong where I'm weak, and I'm strong where you're weak. In many ways we're not at all alike but we belong together because we fit like pieces of a puzzle.

"What's your point?"

"One way we're different but complementary is our motivation. This line of work suits me because I get a kick out of helping people wh.o.r.e in trouble through no fault of their own. I like to see good triumph.

Sounds like a comic-book hero, but it's the way I feel. You, on the other hand, are primarily motivated by a desire to stomp the bad guys.

Yeah, sure, I like to see the bad guys all crumpled and whimpering, too, but it is not as important to me as it is to you. And, of course, you're happy to help innocent people, but with you that's second to the stomping and crushing. Probably because you're still working out your rage over the murder of your mother."

"Bobby, if I want psychoa.n.a.lysis, I'll get it in a room when the primary piece of furniture is a couch-not a toilet."

Her mother had been taken hostage in a bank holdup when Julie was twelve. The two perpetrators had been high on amphetamines and low on common sense and compa.s.sion. Before it was all over, five of the six hostages were dead, and Julie's mother was not the lucky one.

Turning to the mirror, Bobby looked at her reflection, as if he was uncomfortable meeting her eyes directly.

"My point is-suddenly you're acting like me, and that's no good, that destroys our balance, disrupts the harmony of this relationship, and it's the harmony that has always kept us alive, successful and alive.

You want to take this case because you're fascinated, it excites your imagination, and because you'd like to help Frank, he's so pitiful.

Where's your usual outrage? I'll tell you where it is. You don't have any because, at this moment anyway, there's no one to elicit it, no bad guy. Okay, there's the guy he says chased him that night, but we don't even know if he's real or just a figment of Frank's fantasy. Without an obvious bad guy to focus your anger, I should have to drag you into this every step of the way, and that's what I was doing, but now you're doing the dragging, and that worries me. It doesn't feel right."

She let him ramble on, with their gazes locked in the mirror, and when at last he finished, she said, "No, that's not your point."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, everything you just said is smoke. What's really bothering you, Robert?"

His reflection tried to stare down her reflection.

She smiled.

"Come on. Tell me. We never keep secrets."

Bobby-in-the-mirror looked like some bad imitation of the real Bobby Dakota. The real Bobby, her Bobby, was full of fun and life and energy.

Bobby-in-the-mirror was gray-faced, almost grim; his vitality had been sapped by worry.

"Robert?" she prodded.

"You remember last Thursday when we woke?" he said. "The Santa Anas were blowing. We made love."

"I remember."

"And right after we'd made love... I had the strange, terrible feeling that I was going to lose you, that something out there in the wind was... coming to get you."

"You told me about it later that night, at Ozzie's, when we were talking about jukeboxes. But the windstorm ended, and nothing got me. Here I am."

"That same night, Thursday night, I had a nightmare, the most vivid d.a.m.n dream you can imagine." He told her about the little house on the beach, the jukebox standing in the san the thunderous inner voice-THE BAD THING IS COMING, THE BAD THING, BAD THING!-and about the corrosive sea that had swallowed both of them, dissolving the flesh and dragging their bones into lightless depths.

"It rock me. You can't conceive of how real it seemed. Sounds crazy but... that dream was almost more real than real life. I woke up, scared as bad as I've ever been. You were sleeping, and I didn't wake you. Didn't tell you about it later because I didn't see the point of worrying you and because -.. well, it seemed childish to put much stock in a dream. I haven't had the nigh mare again. But since then-Friday, Sat.u.r.day, yesterday I've had moments when a strange anxiety sort of shivered through me, and I think maybe some bad thing is coming to get you. And now, out there in the office, Frank said he's mixed up in a bad thing, a real bad thing, that's heavy, and right away I made the connection. Julie, maybe this guy is the bad thing I dreamed about.

Maybe we shouldn't take it.

She stared at Bobby-in-the-mirror for a moment, wondering how to rea.s.sure him. Finally she decided that, because the roles had reversed, she should deal with him as Bobby would deal with her in a similar situation. Bobby would not resolve to logic and reason-which were her tools-but would charm and humor her out of a funk.

Instead of responding directly to his concerns, she said, long as we're getting things off our chests, you know who bothers me? The way you sit on my desk sometimes while we're talking to a prospective client. With some clients, it might make sense for me to sit on the desk, wearing a short skirt, showing some leg, 'cause I have good legs, even if I say so myself But you never wear skirts, short or otherwise, and you don't have the gams for it, anyway."

"Who's talking about desks?"

"I am," she said, turning away from the mirror and looking at him directly.

"We leased a seven-room suite instead of an eight-room to save money, and by the time the rest of the staff was settled had only one office for ourselves, which seemed ok because There's plenty of room in there for two desks, but you say you don't want one. Desks are too formal for you. All you need is a couch to lie on while making calls, you say, yet when clients come in, you sit on my desk."

"Julie-"

"Formica is a hard, nearly impervious surface, but sooner or later you'll have spent so much time sitting on my desk, it'll be marked by a permanent imprint of your a.s.s -."

Because she wouldn't look at the mirror, he had to turn away from it, too, and face her.

"Didn't you hear what I said about the dream?"

"Now, don't get me wrong. You've got a cute a.s.s, Bobby, but I don't want the imprint on my desktop. Pencils will keep rolling into the depression. Dust will collect in it."

"What's going on here?"

"I want to warn you that I'm thinking of having the top of my desk wired, so I can electrify it with a flick of a switch. You sit on it then, and you'll know what a fly feels like when it settles on one of those electronic bug zappers."

"You're being difficult, Julie. Why're you being difficult?"