“Goddamn it,”Vasco said, stepping on the brakes. He was driving around the back road to park behind the surgicenter. The plan was for Dr. Manuel Cajal to come out of the surgicenter, slip into the Hummer, do the biopsies, and go out again. Nobody sees it, nobody’s the wiser.

But now the back road was blocked. Two backhoes, digging some big trench. No way across, and no other road. A hundred yards from the surgicenter.

“Damn, damn, damn,” he said.

“Take it easy, Vasco,” Dolly said. “It’s no big deal. If the road is blocked, we just walk to the center, go in the rear door, and do it there.”

“Everyone will see us walking through the resort.”

“So what? We’re just visitors. Besides, everybody at this place is completely self-absorbed. They have no time to think about us. And if they did, and if they decided to call someone-which they never would-the procedure’d be finished before the call was finished. Manuel can do it faster in there than out here.”

“I don’t like it.” Vasco looked around, stared at the road, then at the spa grounds. But she was right. It was a quick walk through the garden. He turned to the kid. “Listen,” he said. “This is how it is. We’re going to take a walk. You just be quiet. And everything will be fine.”

“What’re you going to do?” he said. “To me.”

“Nothing. Just take a little blood.”

“Are there needles?”

“Just a little one, like at the doctor’s.”

He turned to Dolly. “Okay, call Manuel. Tell him we’re coming. And let’s get going.”

Jamie had been diligently taught to yell and scream and kick if anyone ever tried to kidnap him, and he had done those things when they first grabbed him, but now he was very frightened, and he was afraid they would hurt him if he made any trouble. So he walked quietly along the path of the garden, with the woman keeping her hand on his shoulder and the big mean guy walking on the other side, wearing a cowboy hat so his ear wouldn’t show.

They passed people in bathrobes, women mostly, chatting and laughing, but nobody really looked at them. They walked on through another garden area, and then he heard a voice say, “I say, do you need help with your homework?”

He was so startled he stopped. He looked up.

It was a bird. A sort of gray-colored bird.

“Are you a friend of Evan?” the bird said.

“No,” he said.

“You’re the same size as he is. What’s eleven take away nine?”

Jamie was so surprised, he just stared.

“Let’s go, dear,” Dolly said. “It’s just a bird.”

“Justa bird!” the bird said. “Who are you calling abird?”

“You really talk a lot,” Jamie said.

“And you don’t,” the bird said. “Who are these people? Why are they holding you?”

“We’re not holding him,” Dolly said.

“You gentlemen aren’t really trying to kill my son, are you?” the bird said.

“Ah Christ,” Vasco said.

“Ah Christ,” the bird said, exactly duplicating his voice. “What’s your name?”

“Let’s get going,” Vasco said.

“My name is Jamie,” Jamie said.

“Hello, Jamie. I’m Gerard,” the bird said.

“Hello, Gerard.”

“All right,” Vasco said. “Let’s get a move on here.”

“That depends on who’s in the saddle,” Gerard said.

“Dolly,” Vasco said, “we have to keep to our schedule.”

“Well, a boy’s best friend is his mother,” the bird said, in an odd voice.

“Do you know my mother?” Jamie said.

“No, son,” Dolly said. “He doesn’t. He’s just saying things he’s already heard before.”

“Your story didn’t sound quite right,” Gerard said. And in a different voice: “Oh, that’s too bad, you got a better one?”

But now the grown-ups were pushing Jamie forward. He didn’t think he could stay longer, and he didn’t want to make a scene. “Bye, Gerard,” he said.

“Bye, Jamie.”

They walked on for a while. Jamie said, “He was funny.”

“Yes he was, dear,” Dolly said, keeping her hand firmly on his shoulder.

Coming into the gardens, Alex first passed the swimming pool area. It was the quietest swimming pool she had ever seen-no splashing, no noise. People lay in the sun like corpses. There was a cabinet stacked with towels and bathrobes. Alex took a bathrobe and draped it over her shoulder, covering the towel-wrapped shotgun.

“How do you know these things?” Henry said, watching her. He was nervous. Walking with her while she carried that gun, and knowing she intended to use it. He didn’t know if the bearded guy was armed, but chances were that he was.

“Law school,” she said, laughing.

Dave walked a couple of steps behind them. Henry turned and said, “Keep up, Dave.”

“Okay…”

They rounded a corner, passed beneath an adobe archway, came into another secluded garden. The air here was cool, and the path shaded. A little brook ran alongside the path.

They heard a voice say, “Mellow greetings, ukie dukie.”

Henry looked up. “What was that?”

“Me.”

Henry said, “It’s a bird.”

“Excuse me,” the bird said, “my name is Gerard.”

Alex said, “Oh, a talking parrot.”

The parrot said, “My name is Jamie. Hello, Jamie, I’m Gerard. Hello, Gerard.”

Alex froze, stared. “That’s Jamie!”

“Do you know my mother?” the bird said, sounding exactly like Jamie’s voice.

“Jamie!” Alex started to shout in the garden. “Jamie!Jamie! ”

And in the distance, she heard, “Mom!”

Dave took off, running forward. Henry looked at Alex, who stood very still. She dropped the towel and the robe to the ground and methodically loaded the shotgun. She pulled the action bar back and forward, making achung chung! sound. Then she turned to Henry.

“Let’s go.” She was very cool. The gun was cradled in her arm. “You may want to walk behind me.”

“Uh, okay.”

She started walking. “Jamie!”

“Mom!”

She walked faster.

They couldn’t have been more than twenty feet from the back door to the surgicenter-maybe three, four good paces, no more than that-when the whole thing started.

And Vasco Borden was pissed. His trusted assistant just melting right before his eyes. The kid cries “Mom!” and she lets go of him. She just stands there. Like she was stunned.

“Hold on to him, damn it,” he said. “What are you doing?”

She didn’t answer.

“Mom! Mom!”

Exactly what I was worried about, he thought. He had an eight-year-old kid screaming for his mother, and all these women in bathrobes walking around. If they weren’t looking at him and the kid before, they sure as hell were now-pointing and talking. Vasco appeared completely out of place, six-four and bearded, dressed entirely in black, with a black cowboy hat he had to pull down low because his damn ear had been bitten off. He knew he looked like a bad guy in a bad cowboy movie. His woman wasn’t helping; she wasn’t soothing the kid or leading him forward, and any minute he knew that kid would turn and bolt.

Vasco needed to get control here. He started to reach for his gun, but now more women were coming out of rooms on all sides-hell, a whole damn yoga class was emptying into the garden to look, to see why some kid was hollering for his mother.

And there he was, the man in black.

He was screwed.

“Dolly,” he snapped, “goddamn it, pull yourself together. We have to take this young man into the surgicenter here-”

Vasco never finished the sentence, because a dark shape came streaking toward him, leapt into the air, swung from a tree branch about eight feet high, and-right about the time he realized it was that black kid again, that hairy kid, the one that bit off his ear-the black kid slammed into him, hard as a big rock smashing him full on the chest, and Vasco stumbled backward over some rose bushes and went down on his ass, legs up in the air.

And that was it.

The kid bolted, shrieking for his mom. And Dolly suddenly starts acting like she doesn’t know him, and he’s cut and scratched, dragging himself out of the rose bushes with no help from her. Can’t work up any dignity getting up to your feet with your ass full of thorns. And there’s at least a hundred people watching him. And any minute, security guards.

And the black monkey-looking kid is gone. Can’t see him anywhere.

Vasco realizes that he’s got to get out of there. It’s finished; it’s a fucking disaster. Dolly is still frozen like the fucking Statue of Liberty, so he starts pushing her, yelling at her to get moving, that they have to leave. All the other women in the garden start booing and hissing. Some old broad in a leotard screams, “Testosterone poisoning!” And the others are yelling, “Leave her alone!” “Creep!” “Abuser!” He wants to yell back, “She works for me!” but of course, she doesn’t anymore. She’s dazed and bewildered. And by now the leotard broads are screaming for the police.

So it’s only going to get worse.

Dolly is so slow; she might be sleepwalking. Vasco has to get out. He pushes past her, moving through the garden at a half-trot, his only thought now to get away, get out of this place. In the next garden he sees the kid standing with some guy, and in front of the two of them he sees the broad Alex, and she’s holding a fucking sawed-off twelve-gauge like she knows how to use it-hand on the stock, hand on the action-and she says, “If I ever see your face again, I’ll blow it off, asshole.”

Vasco doesn’t answer, just keeps moving past her, and the next thing he knows, there’s a fucking explosion, and ahead of him the bushes along the path just blast away in a green cloud of fluttering petals and leaves and dirt. So of course he stops. Right there. And he turns, slowly, keeping his hands away from his body.

She says, “Did you fucking hear what I said to you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says. Always polite to a lady with a gun. Especially if she’s upset. Now the crowd is huge; they’re three or four deep, chattering like birds, craning to get a look at what is happening. But this broad’s not going to let it go.

She yells at him: “What’d I say to you?”

“You said if you saw me again, you’d kill me.”

“That’s right,” she says. “And I will. You touch me or my son again, and I will fucking kill you.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says. He feels the red rushing into his face. Anger, humiliation, rage.

“You can go now,” she says, moving the barrel ever so slightly. She knows what she is doing. A lawyer who goes to the shooting range. The worst kind.