"No." She stirred a heaping spoon of Bustelo into the cup and brought it over with the sugar. "I think I know. But I could never prove it."

"Gracias. Who?"

She looked around. The two customers had left and Jose was buried in his tabloid. She lowered her voice. "You're no Boy Scout, are you, Pepe? I mean, you know how the world works."

"As much as anybody, 1 suppose."

"We have to pay protection, to keep the cafe from getting gang-banged. Is that shocking?"

"No. Sad, but no."

"There's a slimeball comes in here at noon today, every first of the month, to pick up his five hundred bucks. He calls himself 'Mr. Smith,' but everybody knows he's w.i.l.l.y Joe Capra."

"He did it?"

She nodded. "Or at least knows who did it. He's made that pretty clear."

"And you can't go to the police?"

She shook her head wordlessly for a moment, and then knuckled at tears, her mouth in a tight scowl.

Pepe He handed her the napkin that she'd just handed him. "The b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

She pressed it to her eyes. "I, maybe I should. But what I'm afraid of, I go to the police, they pick him up, he gets off. And a week or a month or a year later, I'll have another accident. During which, w.i.l.l.y Joe will be in church or talking to the Lions Club or something."

"The devil never forgets a face. People like him eventually get what they deserve."

"No." She balled up the napkin and stuck it in her pocket. "This is the real world, remember?"

Pepe poured sugar into his coffee and stirred it slowly. "Nothing people like you or me could do.

Shoot the b.a.s.t.a.r.d, we wind up choosing the door."

"Instead of getting a medal." She wiped the clean counter in front of him. "You want something to eat with that?"

"No, thanks. Just had breakfast." He'd skipped it, actually, needing to lose a few pounds. He only had one suitcase of clothes, and wanted them to last another couple of months. The kilt and trousers were getting tight around the waist, and suspenders had gone out of fashion last year.

He drank the coffee fast enough to get a little buzz. It would be nice if he could do something about this w.i.l.l.y Joe character.

He allowed himself an adolescent fantasy about Sara's grat.i.tude. But that sort of thing wasn't reallyin his job description.

He put a ten under the saucer and waved adios to Sara and her partner. Not for the first time, he wondered whether they had something going. Their mutual affection was obvious.

Her body would be unusual. But that could be an attraction.

In that erotic frame of mind, he stepped out of the cafe and stopped dead in his tracks, paralyzed by a woman. She was dressed like any other student, jeans and halter and sun hat. But she had a cla.s.sic chiseled beauty and perfect carriage, and she radiated s.e.x.

Gabrielle It barely registered that the handsome Cuban took one look at her and stood like a deer caught in headlights. Whenever she walked through campus she was caressed by eyes. Did any of them ever recognize her from the films? Not likely. She'd only had face parts twice.

She hated physics, but couldn't put it off any longer. She had to take a chemistry elective next semester, and the only ones she could take required physics.

So they were doing fluid dynamics today. A doctor does need to know about fluids. In her other persona, she knew plenty about them. s.e.m.e.n stings your eyes and makes your eyelashes look as if s.e.m.e.n has dried on them. But it was better than the fake stuff Harry sometimes squirted on her. Soap solution and glycerine and some white powder. It stung the eyes even worse, and made you smell like a cheap wh.o.r.ehouse.

That was one of her father's favorite observations: You smell like a cheap wh.o.r.ehouse. Just before she left home, she was able to make the obvious rejoinder: You would know, Dad, wouldn't you?

Someday she'd have to find a cheap wh.o.r.ehouse and go in for a sniff.

One nice thing about physics was the building, air-conditioned to the max. She went through the door and it was like walking into a refrigerator. She put her books and hat down on a table and patted the sweat from her face and hair with a handkerchief.

A carefully beautiful woman walked in and gave her a familiar look: appraisal, hostility, neutrality.

Blue cancer tattoo on her cheek, Dr. Whittier.

Deedee "Oh, hi. You're in 101."

The beautiful girl nodded. "Gabrielle Campins."

She put the name and the face together. Pre-med, having trouble with the math. "See you there."

Trying to act normal just after learning you killed a man. Killed him by blackmailing him into illegal activity. Directed against a friend and colleague.

The door to Rory's office was open. On impulse, she tapped and stepped through the little entryway. Rory looked up from a journal.

"Hi, Rory. You ready for His Holiness?"

Aurora "His a.s.s-holiness. Ready as I'll ever be." They had a meeting with Reverend Kale and some of his minions tomorrow. "I heard about Ybor Lopez. I'm sorry."

Deedee trembled for a moment and a chill ran down her back.

Could there have been something between them? The phone chimed, saved by the bell.

"Gotta teach," Deedee said, voice quavering. "See you later."

"Hasta luego." She picked up the phone.It was Marya Washington. Could they come by in twenty or thirty minutes? Rory said sure, and put the "Do Not Disturb the b.i.t.c.h" sign on her office door. How much of an article could she read in twenty minutes?

She actually got through the first page of an Astrophysical Review article by a friend at Texas, who had found a consistent correlation between galactic lat.i.tude and duration of one cla.s.s of short-term gamma-ray bursters. That could imply local origin; at least not extragalactic. Or hopeful mathematics, anyhow.

Security called up and she took the sign off her door, and ushered in the young woman and her "crew," one man shepherding three cameras. "So welcome to Gainesville, Marya. How's New York?"

"G.o.d, don't ask. It's a miracle we got out." A two-day blizzard had just stopped. "We were able to get an old chopper into JFK this morning. Otherwise we'd still be in traffic. If you can call something 'traffic' that doesn't move."

The cameraman suggested where to place the cameras and Marya nodded. "I know there aren't any revelations," she said, "but do you have anything new? Or that I can pretend is new?"

"Any time now," the cameraman said. "Just be natural, ma'am; we'll edit later."

"Well, Marya ... this isn't new exactly; it's from last week. But I'm not sure anybody got the whole story."

"You mean the bounce-back from the thing."

"Exactly." How to phrase this diplomatically? "You reported it, and so did others. But it was more important than you gave it credit for being."

She smiled. "Okay. Words of one syllable?"

"We sent them a message and they sent it back. Can I say 'message'?"

"So far so good.'

"It came back with absolutely no distortion. We couldn't do that. Period."

Marya shut her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Yeah, right. I remember." She waggled a hand in front of one of the cameras. "Off the record, Rory, we couldn't really punch that up."

"They intercepted a signal that was 'way blue-shifted, in a relativistically accelerated frame of reference. They recorded it and re-broadcast it with exactly compensating distortion. The signal we got back was absolutely the same as the one we'd sent."

Marya laughed and shook her head. "Jesus, Rory. Would you come join the world for a minute?

The real world?"

"Okay." Rory smiled, too. "So you couldn't 'punch it up.' "

"Look. It's worse than that. We have to think of counter story. We run your version and three out of six tabloids are on us like clothes from Kmart. 'We got exactly the same signal.' So where do you think they'll say it came from? Outer s.p.a.ce?"

"Of course it came from outer s.p.a.ce."

"No way in h.e.l.l. It came from you."

"What?"

"You're trying to stay in the spotlight. So you generate a story."

"G.o.d, can you fear yourself? That's so ridiculous."

"It's not, Dr. Bell," the cameraman said. "People want to think conspiracy. Want to be on the inside.

You can sell any G.o.dd.a.m.n thing if it's against the establishment."

"I'm the establishment?"

"You're authority," Marya said. "Bobby's right. Best way for you to get that story out would have been to let somebody else announce it and you hotly deny it."Rory realized she was standing, and sat down. "It's so Alice in Wonderland. So what do we do?"

"Just what we've done here. We didn't punch it up, so when we repeat it next week, it's backstory.

It's routine, so it must be true."

"That's when people point out how important it is," Bobby said. "Do it all the time, in politics."

"As if I, or we, didn't understand how important it was at the time."

"You don't have to go that far," Marya said. "Just don't punch it up for now, and later it'll look like you've been cautious. Conservative."

"Okay. You're the boss."

Marya smiled and nodded to the cameraman. "Good evening. It's exactly one month since the discovery of the Coming, and so we've left the blizzards of New York to revisit Dr. Aurora Bell at the University of Florida ... "

Marya The interview went pretty well, though they had to ask Rory to repeat some things in simpler and simpler terms. They got out by ten, though; only fifteen minutes later than they'd expected.

And about two minutes late on the parking meter. Marya saw the big white tow truck from half a block away, checked her watch, and broke into a run.

It was a heavy-duty floater with a bed big enough to hold a large pa.s.senger car. It could park parallel to a car and, using a kind of built-in forklift, pick it straight up and haul it aboard in no time.

Marya got to him just as he was raising the car. He was a young black man. Her intuition weighed charm versus indignation as she ran up to the driver's-side window. "I'm sorry, mister. I got held up just a minute or two."

The man looked down at her wearily. "You're gonna get held up, you oughta park on campus. Park on the street and I get the call soon as your time's up, automatically. You didn't know that."

"No. I'm from New York."

"Well, enjoy the sunshine. You can pick up your car at the police lot anytime after twelve. Bring four hundred bucks and be prepared to spend a couple hours."

"Oh." She smiled. "The press card on the windshield doesn't ... "

He gave a little start of recognition. "No, Miz Washington. n.o.body escapes the wrath of the Gainesville Police Department."

The cameraman had caught up with her. "Couldn't we just pay the fine here, and be on our way?"

"What, is that the way they do it in New York?"

"No," he said. "In New York we pay a little extra."

"Like five instead of four," Marya said. She folded up a single bill and offered it.

The driver looked up and down the street, and then pushed forward on a big lever between the seats, and the car eased back down to the ground. He took the bill and slipped it into his shirt pocket.

He picked up a wand from the dashboard. "Give me dispatch."

Rabin Sergeant Rabin walked up to the dispatcher's desk. The woman was grinning and shaking her head while she talked. "Yeah, some of those meters. It's a crime. Hasta luego." She took off her headset and tossed it on the desk. "Those tow-truck guys make more than the mayor."

"You know it. Got a gun for me?"

"Down here." She opened a drawer and lifted out a white box labeled evidence. "What's the story?"He opened the box and took out the pistol. "Murder weapon, probably. Tossed in Lake Alice."

Bright chrome revolver, maybe fifty years old. "Some kids in a biology cla.s.s saw it in the shallows and fished it out."

He pointed at the short barrel, a duller metal, slightly rusted. "This is cute. Forensics says it's a homemade barrel, smooth bore, a little bigger than the .44 Magnum bullet."

"So you couldn't trace it?"

"Maybe, but it doesn't make sense. We find a .44 bullet in somebody that doesn't show any trace of rifling, we know it came from this gun."

"Have a body?"