"Joe. Joe Winder."

"Joe, I can't believe they did this to you."

Winder raised his head. "Who?" he said. "Who did this to me?"

NINE

Carrie Lanier pulled off Joe Winder's shoes and said, "You want me to call your girlfriend?"

Winder said no, don't bother. "She'll be home in a couple hours."

"What does she do? What kind of work?"

"She talks dirty," said Joe Winder, "on the phone."

Carrie sat on the edge of the bed. She put a hand on his forehead and felt for fever.

He said, "Thanks for cleaning me up."

"It's all right. You want more ginger ale?"

"No, but there's some Darvocets in the medicine cabinet."

"I think Advils will do just fine."

Winder grunted unhappily. "Look at me. You ever see a face like this on an Advil commercial?"

She brought him one lousy Darvocet and he swallowed it dry. He felt worse than he could remember ever feeling, and it wasn't only the pain. It was anger, too.

"So who beat me up?" he said.

"I don't know," said Carrie Lanier. "I imagine it was somebody from the park. I imagine you stuck your nose where it doesn't belong."

"I didn't," Joe Winder said, "not yet."

He felt her rise from the bed, and soon heard her moving around the apartment. He called her name and she came back to the bedroom, sitting in the same indentation on the mattress.

"I was looking for something to bandage those ribs."

"That's okay," said Winder. "It only hurts when I breathe."

Carrie said, "Maybe I don't need to tell you this, but the Amazing Kingdom is not what it seems. It's not fun and games, there's a ton of money at stake."

"You mean it's a scam?"

"Hey, everything's a scam when you get down to it." Her voice softened. "All I'm saying is, stick to your job. I know it's boring as hell, but stick to it anyway. You shouldn't go poking around."

Joe Winder said, "My poking days are over."

"Then what were you doing out there tonight?"

"Meeting someone at the bridge. What about you?"

"I had a free-lance gig," Carrie said. "A birthday party up in South Miami. Mummy and Daddy wanted Junior to meet Robbie Raccoon in person. What the heck, it was an easy five hundred. And you should've seen the house. Or should I say mansion."

Floating, Joe Winder said: "What do you have to do at these parties?"

"Dance with the kiddies. Waggle my coon tail. Juggle marshmallows, whatever. And pose for pictures, of course. Everybody wants a picture."

She touched his brow again. "You're still hot. Maybe I ought to call your girlfriend at work."

"Don't do that," said Joe Winder, "please." He didn't want Carrie to hook up with Miriam by accident. Miriam and her hot-tub "blow-jobs."

"This is important," he said. "Did you see anyone else on the road out there? Like maybe a circus-type person."

"You're not well," said Carrie Lanier.

"No, I mean it. Big guy with a beard. Flowers on his head." It sounded so ridiculous, maybe he'd hallucinated the whole thing.

"That's not a circus person you're describing. That's Jesus. Or maybe Jerry Garcia."

"Whatever," Joe Winder said. "Did you see anybody on the road? That's all I'm asking."

"Nope," Carrie said. "I really ought to be on my way. What'd you decide about calling the cops?"

"Not a good idea," said Winder. "Especially with Dr. Koocher still missing. Maybe the bad guys'll call back."

"The creeps who did this to you?" Carrie sounded incredulous. "I don't think so, Joe."

She didn't say anything for several moments. Joe Winder tried to read her expression but she had turned away.

"How much does she make, your girlfriend, talking sexy on the phone?"

"Not much. Two hundred a week, sometimes two fifty. They get a bonus for selling videos. And panties, too. Twenty bucks a pair. They buy 'em wholesale from Zayre's."

"Two fifty, that stinks," said Carrie Lanier. "But, hey, I've been there. You do what you have to."

"Nina's got no complaints," said Joe Winder. "She says there's a creative component to every job; the trick is finding it."

Carrie turned around, glowing. "She's absolutely right, your girlfriend is. You know what I did before I got my SAG card? I worked in a cough-drop factory. Wrapping the lozenges in foil, one at a time. The only way I kept from going crazy – each cough drop, I'd make a point to wrap it differently from the others. One I'd do in squares, the next I'd do in a triangle, the one after that I'd fold into a rhombus or something. Believe me, it got to be a challenge, especially at thirty lozenges per minute. That was our quota, or else we got docked."

Joe Winder said the first dumb thing that popped into his brain. "I wonder if Nina has a quota."

"She sounds like she's doing just fine," Carrie said. "Listen, Joe, I think you ought to know. There's a rumor going around about the rat doctor. Supposedly they found a note."

"Yeah?"

"You know what kind of note I mean. The bad kind. Good-bye, cruel world, and all that. Supposedly they found it in his desk at the lab."

Joe Winder said, "What exactly did it say, this supposed note?"

"I don't know all the details." Carrie Lanier stood up to go. "Get some rest. It's just a rumor."

"Give me another pill, and sit down for a second."

"Nope, I can't."

"Get me another goddamn pill!"

"Go to sleep, Joe."

By eight the next morning, a crowd had gathered beneath the Card Sound Bridge to see the dead man hanging from the center span. From a distance it looked like a wax dummy with an elongated neck. Up close it looked much different.

The crowd was made up mostly of tourist families on their way down to the Florida Keys. They parked haphazardly on the shoulder of the road and clambered down to where the police cars and marine patrols were positioned, blue lights flashing in that insistent syncopation of emergency. A few of the tourist husbands took out portable video cameras to record the excitement, but the best vantage was from the decks of the yachts and sleek sailboats that had Cropped anchor in the channel near the bridge. The mast of one of the sloops had snagged on the hanging dead man and torn off his trousers as the vessel had passed through the bridge at dawn. By now everyone had noticed that the corpse wore no underwear.

A man from the Dade County Medical Examiner's Office stood on the jetty and looked up at the dead body swinging in the breeze, forty feet over the water. Standing next to the man from the medical examiner's was FBI Agent Billy Hawkins, who was asking lots of questions that the man from the medical examiner's didn't answer. He was keenly aware that the FBI held absolutely no authority in this matter.

"I was on my way to the park," Agent Hawkins was saying, "and I couldn't help but notice."

With cool politeness, the man from the medical examiner's office said: "Not much we can tell you at the moment. Except he's definitely dead, that much is obvious." The coroner knew that most FBI agents went their whole careers without ever setting eyes on an actual corpse. The way Billy Hawkins was staring, he hadn't seen many.

"The poor bastard has no pants," the agent observed. "What do you make of that?"

"Sunburned testicles is what I make of that. If we don't haul him down soon."

Agent Hawkins nodded seriously. He gave the coroner a card. The feds, they loved to hand out cards.

The man from the medical examiner's played along. "I'll call if anything turns up," he lied. The FBI man said thanks and headed back toward his car; he was easy to track – a blocky gray suit moving through a bright sea of Hawaiian prints and Day-Glo surfer shorts. A dog in a flower bed.

The amused coroner soon was joined by an equally amused trooper from the Florida Highway Patrol.