"I'm afraid so. My situation has taken a turn for the worse."

Carrie said, "That's why I came."

Winder led her back to the living room, where they sat between two large cardboard boxes. The only light was the amber glow from the stereo receiver; Carrie Lanier could barely hear the music from the speakers.

"Where's your girlfriend?" she asked.

"Moved out."

"I'm sorry." She paused; then, peering at him: "Is that a beret?"

"Panties," Joe Winder said. "Can you believe it – that's all she left me. Cheap ones, too. The mail-order crap she sold over the phone." He pulled the underwear off his head to show her the shoddy stitching.

"You've had a rough time," said Carrie Lanier. "I didn't know she'd moved out."

"Yeah, well, I'm doing just fine. Adjusting beautifully to the single life. Sitting here in a dark apartment with a gun in my lap and underpants on my head."

Carrie squeezed his arm. "Joe, are you on drugs?"

"Nope," he said. "Pretty amazing, isn't it?"

"I think you should come home with me."

"Why?"

"Because bad things will happen if you stay here."

"Ah." Winder scooped the bullets off the windowsill and fed them into the gun clip. "You must be talking about Pedro Luz."

"It's all over the Magic Kingdom," Carrie said, "about the reasons you were fired."

"Mr. X doesn't kill his former employees, does he?"

She leaned closer. "It's no joke. The word is, you're number one on Pedro's list."

"So that's the word."

"Joe, I get around. Spend the day in a raccoon suit, people forget there's a real person inside. I might as well be invisible – the stuff I pick up, you wouldn't believe."

The spy wore a tail! "And now you hear Pedro's irritated."

"I got it from two of the other guards on lunch break. They were doing blow behind the Magic Mansion."

Winder was struck by how wonderful Carrie looked, her eyes all serious in the amber light. Impulsively he kissed her on the cheek. "Don't worry about me," he said. "You can go home."

"You aren't listening."

"Yes, I – "

"No, you aren't." Her tone was one of motherly disapproval. "I warned you about this before. About sticking your nose where it doesn't belong."

"You did, yes."

"Last time you were lucky. You truly were."

"I suppose so." Joe Winder felt oppressively tired. Suddenly the handgun weighed a ton. He slid it across the carpet so forcefully that it banged into the baseboard of the opposite wall.

Carrie Lanier told him to hurry and pack some clothes.

"I can't leave," he said. "Nina might call."

"Joe, it's not just Pedro you've got to worry about. It's the police."

Winder's chin dropped to his chest. "Already?"

"Mr. X swore out a warrant this afternoon," Carrie said. "I heard it from his secretary."

Francis Kingsbury's secretary was a regular visitor to The Catacombs, where she was conducting an athletic love affair with the actor who portrayed Bartholomew, the most shy and bookish of Uncle Ely's Elves.

Carrie said, "She mentioned something about destruction of private property."

"There was an incident," Joe Winder acknowledged, "but no shots were fired."

Under his supervision, the two bulldozers had torn down the three-dimensional billboard that proclaimed the future home of the Falcon Trace Golf and Country Club. The bulldozers also had demolished the air-conditioned double-wide trailer (complete with beer cooler and billiard table) that served as an on-site office for the construction company. They had even wrecked the Port-O-Lets, trapping one of the foremen with his anniversary issue of Hustler magazine.

Afterwards Joe Winder had encouraged the bulldozer operators to remove their clothing, which he'd wadded in the neck of the gas tanks. Then – after borrowing the smartass driver's cigarette lighter – Joe Winder had suggested that the men aim their powerful machines toward the Atlantic Ocean, engage the forward gear and swiftly exit the cabs. Later he had proposed a friendly wager on which of the dozers would blow first.

"They spotted the flames all the way from Homestead Air Base," Carrie Lanier reported. "Channel 7 showed up in a helicopter, so Kingsbury made Chelsea write up a press release."

"A freak construction accident, no doubt."

"Good guess. I've got a Xerox in my purse."

"No thanks." Joe Winder wasn't in the mood for Chelsea's golden lies. He stood up and stretched; joints and sockets popped in protest. Lights began to flash blue, green and red on the bare wall, and Winder assumed it was fatigue playing tricks with his vision.

He squinted strenuously, and the lights disappeared. When he opened his eyes, the lights were still strobing. "Shit, here we go." Winder went to the window and peeked through the curtain.

"How many?" Carrie asked.

"Two cops, one car."

"Is there another way out?"

"Sure," he said.

They heard the tired footsteps on the front walk, the deep murmur of conversation, the crinkle of paper. In the crack beneath the door they saw the yellow flicker of flashlight as the policemen examined the warrant one more time, probably double-checking the address.

Winder picked up the semi-automatic and arranged it in his waistband. Carrie Lanier followed him to the kitchen, where they slipped out the back door just as the cops got serious with their knocking. Once outside, in the pale blue moonlight, she deftly grabbed the gun from Joe Winder's trousers and put it in her handbag.

"In case you go stupid on me," she whispered.

"No chance of that," he said. "None at all."

TWENTY

A thin coil of copper dangled by a string from Carrie Lanier's rearview mirror. Joe Winder asked if it was some type of hieroglyphic emblem.

"It's an IUD," said Carrie, without taking her eyes off the road. "A reminder of my ex-husband."

"I like it." Winder tried to beef up the compliment. "It's better than fuzzy dice."

"He wanted to have babies," Carrie explained, shooting into the left lane and passing a cement truck. "A baby boy and a baby girl. House with a white picket fence and big backyard. Snapper riding mower. Golden retriever named Champ. He had it all planned."

Joe Winder said, "Sounds pretty good, except for the golden. Give me a Lab any day."

"Well, he wanted to get me pregnant," Carrie went on. "Every night, it was like a big routine. So I'd say sure, Roddy, whatever you want, let's make a baby. I never told him about wearing the loop. And every month he'd want to know. "Did we do it, sweetie? Is there a zygote?" And I'd say "Sorry, honey, guess we'd better try harder.""

"Roddy was his name? That's a bad sign right there."

"He was a screamer, all right."

"What happened?" Winder asked. "Is he still around?"

"No, he's not." Carrie hit the intersection at Highway 1 without touching the brakes, and merged neatly into the northbound traffic. She said, "Roddy's up at Eglin doing a little time."

"Which means he's either a drug dealer or a crooked lawyer."

"Both," she said. "Last month he sent a Polaroid of him with a tennis trophy. He said he can't wait to get out and start trying for a family again."

"The boy's not well."

"It's all Oedipal, that's my theory." Carrie nodded at the IUD and said, "I keep it there to remind myself that you can't be too careful when it comes to men. Here's Roddy with his Stanford diploma and his fancy European car and his heavy downtown law firm, everything in the whole world going for him. Turns out he's nothing but a dipshit, and a dumb dipshit to boot."

Winder said she'd been smart to take precautions.

"Yeah, well, I had my career to consider." Carrie turned a corner into a trailer park, and coasted the car to the end of a narrow gravel lane. "Home sweet home," she said. "Be sure to lock your door. This is not a wonderful neighborhood."