But where were the guard dogs?

The patrolman stepped back and scratched his chin. Tomorrow he'd stop by the trailer and ask the foreman what was going on.

As a warm breeze swept in, Officer Delinko noticed something fluttering at the top of the fence. It looked like a streamer from one of the survey stakes, but it wasn't. It was a ragged strip of green cloth.

The policeman wondered if somebody had gotten their shirt snagged on the wire mesh while climbing over the fence.

Officer Delinko stood on his tiptoes and retrieved the torn piece of fabric, which he carefully placed in one of his pockets. Then he got into his squad car and headed down East Oriole.

"Faster!" shouted Beatrice Leep.

"I can't," Roy panted as he ran behind her.

Beatrice was pedaling the bicycle she'd taken from the rack at Trace Middle. Mullet Fingers was slumped across the handlebars, barely conscious. He had become dizzy and fallen from the fence as they were hurrying to leave the construction site.

Roy could see that the boy was getting sicker from the infected dog bites. He needed a doctor right away.

"He won't go," Beatrice had declared.

"Then we've got to tell his mother."

"No way!" And off she'd ridden.

Now Roy was trying to keep her in sight. He didn't know where Beatrice was taking her stepbrother, and he had a feeling she didn't know, either.

"How's he doing?" Roy called out.

"Not good."

Roy heard a car and turned his head to look. Coming up behind them, barely two blocks away, was a police cruiser. Automatically Roy stopped in his tracks and began waving his arms. All he could think about was getting Mullet Fingers to the hospital, as soon as possible.

"What're you doing!" Beatrice Leep yelled at him.

Roy heard a clatter as the bicycle hit the pavement. He turned to see Beatrice bolting away, her stepbrother slung like a sack of oats over one shoulder. Without glancing back, she cut between two houses at the end of the block and disappeared.

Roy stood rooted in the center of the road. He had an important decision to make, and quickly. From one direction came the police car; running in the other direction were his two friends…

Well, the closest things to friends that he had in Coconut Cove.

Roy drew a deep breath and dashed after them. He heard a honk, but he kept going, hoping that the police officer wouldn't jump out and chase him on foot. Roy didn't think he'd done anything wrong, but he wondered if he could get in trouble for helping Mullet Fingers, a fugitive from the school system.

The kid was only trying to take care of some owls-how could that possibly be a crime? Roy thought.

Five minutes later, he found Beatrice Leep resting under a shady mahogany tree in a stranger's backyard. Her step-brother's head was cradled on her lap, his eyelids half-shut and his forehead glistening.

The deep bite wounds on his swollen arm were exposed, for the bandage had been pulled off (along with a sleeve of his green T-shirt) when he'd toppled from the fence.

Beatrice stroked the boy's cheeks and sadly looked up at Roy. "What are we gonna do now, cowgirl?"

Curly was done fooling around with attack dogs. And while he wasn't thrilled about spending nights at the trailer, it was the only surefire way to stop the delinquents-or whoever was sabotaging the construction site-from jumping the fence and going wild.

If something were to happen over the weekend that resulted in another delay of the Mother Paula's project, Curly would be fired as foreman. Chuck Muckle had been crystal-clear about that.

When Curly told his wife of his overnight guard duties, she received the news with no trace of annoyance or concern. Her mother was in town visiting, and the two of them had planned numerous shopping excursions for Saturday and Sunday. Curly's charming presence would not be missed.

Sullenly he packed a travel kit with his toothbrush, dental floss, razor, shaving cream, and a jumbo bottle of aspirin. He folded some clean work clothes and underwear into a carry bag and grabbed the pillow off his side of the bed. On his way out the door, his wife handed him two fat tuna sandwiches, one for dinner and one for breakfast.

"You be careful out there, Leroy," she said.

"Yeah, sure."

Upon returning to the construction site, Curly locked the gate behind him and high-stepped to the safety of the trailer. All afternoon he'd been fretting about those elusive cottonmouth moccasins, wondering why the reptile wrangler hadn't been able to find them.

How could so many snakes disappear all at once?

Curly was afraid that the moccasins were lurking nearby in some secret subterranean den, waiting for darkness before they slithered out to begin their deadly hunt.

"I'll be ready for 'em," Curly said aloud, in the hope of convincing himself.

Bolting the trailer door, he sat down in front of the portable television and turned on ESPN. The Devil Rays were playing the Orioles later in the evening, and Curly was looking forward to the ball game. For the time being, he was perfectly content to watch a soccer match being played in Quito, Ecuador-wherever that was.

He sat back and loosened his belt to accommodate the bulge in his waistband from the.38-caliber revolver he'd brought along for protection. He hadn't actually fired a gun since he had been in the Marines, which was thirty-one years ago, but he kept a pistol hidden at the house and remained confident of his abilities.

Anyway, how hard could it be to hit a big fat snake?

Just as Curly was polishing off his first tuna sandwich, a commercial for Mother Paula's All-American Pancake House came on the television. There, dressed up as kindly old Mother Paula herself, was none other than Kimberly Lou Dixon, the former Miss America runner-up. She was flipping flapjacks over a hot griddle and singing some sort of goofy song.

Although the makeup artists had done a darn good job, Curly could still tell that the old lady in the commercial was actually a much younger woman, and that she was pretty. Remembering what Chuck Muckle had told him about Kimberly Lou Dixon's new movie deal, Curly tried to picture her as the Queen of the Mutant Grasshoppers. Undoubtedly the special-effects department would give her six green legs and a pair of antennae, which Curly found intriguing to contemplate.

He wondered if he would be introduced personally to Kimberly Lou Dixon when she came to Coconut Cove to attend the groundbreaking ceremony for the new pancake house. The possibility wasn't so far-fetched, him being the supervising engineer of the project-the top guy in charge.

Curly had never met a movie star or a television actress or a Miss America or a Miss Anything. Was it okay to ask for an autograph? he wondered. Would she mind posing with him for a picture? And would she speak to him in her phony Mother Paula's voice, or as Kimberly Lou Dixon?

These were the questions knocking around inside Curly's head as the image on the TV screen dissolved to electric fuzz before his disbelieving eyes. Heatedly he banged a mayonnaise-smeared fist on the side of the television console, to no avail.

The cable had gone out in the middle of a Mother Paula's commercial! Not a good omen, Curly thought sourly.

He used many bad words to curse his rotten luck. It had been years since he'd gone a whole night without television, and he wasn't sure how else to amuse himself. There was no radio in the trailer, and the only reading material was a construction industry journal with boring articles about hurricane-resistant roof sheathing and anti-termite treatments for plywood.

Curly considered a quick trip to the minimart to rent some videos, but that would require crossing the property to reach his truck. With dusk approaching, he couldn't get up the nerve to venture outside-not with those deadly cottonmouths skulking around.