THE PRIVATE EYE

by Albert E. Cowdrey

In our last issue, Albert Cowdrey took us deep into outer space. His new story stays closer to home, but in its own way, it’s just as far out. Mr. Cowdrey notes that inhabitants of southern Louisiana will immediately recognize the (late) model for Sheriff Chew, but the rest of the story is pure invention.
Or so he would like us to believe.

Sometimes fame comes unexpectedly, to unexpected people. That was certainly the case with Jimmy John (JJ) Link.

JJ’s hometown of Bougalou, Louisiana, was once the obscurest of hamlets—so quiet that when he was six, and the first stoplight appeared at the intersection of Main Street and Huey Long Avenue, he’d sit on the curb all day to watch the colors change. But then on- and off-ramps were built to nearby Interstate 12, truck stops appeared on both Main and Huey, and the air brakes and shifting gears of the big rigs hissed and gnashed at all hours. A few more years, and hurricane refugees swarmed into the Parish of St. Genevieve from the squashier regions to the south, bringing with them casinos, hookers, meth labs, battered-women shelters, fast-food outlets, and the inevitable Wal-Mart.

Urban culture had reached Bougalou, and everybody was affected in one way or another. JJ’s Daddy copped a FEMA contract and profitably filled his Ox-Bow Trailer Park with formaldehyde gas chambers housing the homeless. JJ’s Mama ran off with an Atlas Van Lines driver, severely traumatizing her son, who was already a practicing eccentric but became more so after her desertion. JJ dropped out of college and began to hang around the new casino, the Shore-Win, where he was amazed to discover that he could read the face of a card while looking at the back. He cleaned the clocks of several men older and richer than himself, used his winnings to buy a big shiny Winnebago that he parked at the Ox-Bow, and began making plans to leave the parish and see the world.

Meanwhile Bougalou’s social elite had formed a krewe called Fortuna, and in 2008 gave the town’s first carnival ball on Lundi Gras, or Fat Monday, in the lobby of the Delta National Bank. Well-to-do men with red faces and large hands rented formal attire from a new shop called Tux for Bucks, while their ladies bought flashy gowns from Clothes for Does. The bank’s CEO, T. Christian Rapp, reigned as King, and his newly acquired Internet bride Marsha (who resembled Dolly Parton in her heyday) as Queen. The Bayou Stompers provided zydeco music until the wee hours of Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, when the most durable revelers took off with a screech of tires and headed for New Orleans.

They were still nursing hangovers on Ash Wednesday when news began to spread of a crime never before seen in Bougalou. JJ was dressing to visit the casino when his Daddy burst into the Winnebago to tell him that Rapp’s twelve-year-old daughter Sarah had been abducted and was being held for ransom.

“But don’t you worry none,” he assured his son. “Big Russ’ll take care of it.”

* * * *

He was referring to Sheriff Russell Chew, a 300-pound Chinese-American whose wide form, sharply pressed uniforms, and brushed-back white hair embodied law and order in the Parish of St. Genevieve.

Between killing deer in and out of season and having his wife convert them into andouille, a kind of Cajun sausage he much preferred to sweet-and-sour anything, Sheriff Chew rode herd on the urbanization crisis. Though every year the crime statistics shot up, people reelected him again and again, saying, “Just think what things’d be like if we didn’t have Big Russ!” When the local media (meaning the weekly Bougalou Bulletin) harassed him about the number of murders, he growled, “Ah’m just an ole slant-eyed country boy doin’ his best.” People loved that line. Whatever Sheriff Chew’s faults, such as incompetence and rampant corruption, he was not politically correct.

But now folks expected him to solve Sarah’s kidnapping, do it quick, and if possible kill the kidnapper to make sure no slick lawyer from New Orleans or Baton Rouge got the sucker off. For the first time in his long tenure, Sheriff Chew had to produce results in a major case. That was expecting rather a lot, and a week went by with no visible results, while Sarah’s parents—after posting a reward on their own—barraged him with demands for action.

That same week JJ had a personal disaster that brought him his first taste of fame. In a letter to the editor of the Bulletin, he complained that the Shore-Win Casino had banned him on a charge of card counting, when in fact he merely had ESP, and was that fair? The editor was a relative—second cousin to the husband of JJ’s Daddy’s half-niece—and for that reason the letter appeared on the Op-Ed Page under the headline Has ESP, Says Banned Bougalouan. There Big Russ noted it. And reached for his phone.

It was ten in the morning. JJ was in the Winnebago, wallowing in his bunk and comforting himself for the casino fiasco in a manner that was habitual with him. Cursing softly, he wiped a fragrant film of Aloe Vera Thick ‘n’ Creamy Skin Lotion from his right hand, flipped his bleating phone open, and heard an unmistakable gravelly voice ask, “That you, JJ?”

“Yes, suh,” he replied.

JJ’s education had ended after three semesters at the University of South Louisiana (Sorrento), whose acronym USLS was pronounced “useless” by its graduates. Yet he was no fool. Knowing where the power lay in St. Genevieve, he added still more subserviently, “What can Ah do for you, suh?”

“Come on down and see me,” the sheriff growled. “Maybe you can he’p me out. Like the Latinos say, Ah got me a problema, so to speak.”

Since the Rapp case had been the town’s sole topic for a week, JJ was able to review the basic story while cleaning up and dressing. Every afternoon a chauffeur driving the family’s enormous SUV picked Sarah up at the door of St. Mary’s Academy to take her to ballet or riding class. On Ash Wednesday the familiar vehicle arrived, she parleyed for a few moments with the driver—a dim figure wearing a billed cap—then obligingly got in. And that was it. No more Sarah. The chauffeur, an elderly black man named William Wood who’d been with Mr. Rapp approximately since the dawn of time, was found lying in the banker’s vast garage between the Cad and the BMW with a concussion and no memory of who had slugged him. A gardener named Alferd (sic) W. Finch was missing, and hence presumed to be the kidnapper.

Later on, the Bulletin reported that Mr. Rapp had paid a substantial ransom by wire transfer to a numbered account in a Cayman Islands bank, whence it vanished into cyberspace. But the information he’d purchased about his daughter’s whereabouts turned out to be false. Sarah remained missing, and the FBI—which by now had been called in—assumed that the banker was being set up for additional payments. Or that Sarah was already dead. Or both.

In short, the situation was more than a problema: it was an impending disaster. Though baffled as to how he could help, JJ hastened to the grim redbrick building that housed police headquarters in front and the jail in back. He entered the sheriff’s opulent office—with its broad desk, draped flags, bronze plaques, framed photos of Chew with dead beasts and live notables, and an autographed pre-incarceration portrait of former Gov. Edwin Edwards—and listened with a sinking heart as the sheriff informed him that his mystic powers were the last hope for finding Sarah Rapp alive.

“You got you a talent, JJ, and it’s time you used it for somethin’ worthwhile, stead of just knockin’ down,” said Big Russ (whose whole life had been devoted to knocking down).

“Suh, Ah never done nothin’ like this before,” JJ protested. The sheriff cut him no slack.

“Well, Ah think you better do it now,” he said, fixing the younger man with a basilisk gaze.

He assigned JJ a small office filled with battered green metal furniture. Across the hall on a folding chair he planted a deputy named Wade Garmish, who’d missed a career in an SS Death’s-Head Unit solely by being born too late, and in the wrong country. Garmish had orders to keep JJ where he was until he came up with something useful.

For the best part of an hour, balancing precariously on a busted swivel chair that dumped him twice before he got the hang of it, JJ tried to figure how on God’s Earth he could go about finding Sarah. After all, being able to spot a king of hearts through the bicycle pattern on the back of a playing card had nothing whatever to do with locating a missing twelve-year-old. Fortunately, he spent a great part of his existence watching the Sci Fi Channel, with its eclectic cargo of starships, aliens, ghosts, zombies, vampires, and werewolves, and sometime or other had seen a story about a psychic who found missing persons by fondling clothing, shoes, etc. that were saturated with their aura.

Hmm, thought JJ. He rose cautiously and opened the door. Deputy Garmish raised his eyes from a copy of Penthouse and gave him the sort of glance a hammerhead shark bestows on a human leg.

“Ah need somethin’ that was close to Sarah,” JJ told him. “Say a piece of her clothes.”

“So’s you can jack off with it, Ah guess,” said Garmish, a remark that for him was practically a bon mot.

“Maybe,” JJ suggested, “Ah should talk to the sheriff. Maybe he can get me what Ah need.”

Wade growled—literally: like Grrr—but rose and lurched away, the size-twelve feet he used for treading on suspects thundering upon the linoleum-coated plywood floor. An hour passed during which JJ lay on the desk in his office leafing through Penthouse and wishing he had a tube of Aloe Vera with him. Then the door crashed open.

“Sarah’s Mama, she thinks you’re crazy as hayull,” said Garmish, slamming a cardboard box down on the floor. (Meaning, of course, Sarah’s stepmother, her own mother being with Jesus.)

The deputy snatched back his magazine and stomped out again. JJ went through the box slowly and carefully, fondling an array of pathetic child’s attire, no less pathetic because the little dresses and whatnot had been expensively purchased in Houston and New Orleans at upscale shops for fashionable pre-teens. Every item had been meticulously cleaned, and not one emitted the slightest frisson. Then at the very bottom of the box he found a teddy bear—a surprisingly old and beat-up bear. Maybe a favorite that Sarah just couldn’t sleep without? He touched Teddy and—wow! It was like touching a live wire.

He balanced on the swivel chair and held Teddy against his chest with both hands. He’d never felt such intense longing. Somewhere Sarah was alive but in fear, maybe in the dark—yeah, he felt certain she was in the dark—terrified, needing her security bear as never before. Intermittently fear gave way to rage, when she thought about Alferd W. Finch. The son of a bitch, back when he was weeding rose beds and gaining her confidence, had often given her flowers. “They nearly as pretty as you are, Honey,” he’d say—she remembered that. Remembered with hatred. And this little lady, JJ realized, knew how to hate.

Yet Alferd hadn’t acted alone. That was something JJ hadn’t known until now. As soon as he and Sarah were well away from the school, they stopped and a bulky ski-masked man entered the SUV. He smelled of Brut and tobacco and he overpowered her, wrapped her in a rug, laid her on the floor, and sat with his feet upon her. There she lay for a long, long time, maybe hours. The rug was stifling hot and dusty—JJ sneezed half a dozen times, so vivid were her memories—and eventually Sarah had been obliged to pee on herself. She’d felt such embarrassment and rage that if she’d been telekinetic both her kidnappers would have been vaporized, as they richly deserved to be.

Eventually Alferd stopped in a wilderness area, unwrapped her, and gave her a drink of iced tea while the accomplice stood guard. She darted several glances at the guy in the mask, enough to memorize the fact that he was short and wide and his Nike knockoffs were also short and wide, as if they contained the feet of a very large duck. Then—the tea must have had some kind of drug in it—she fell into a deep sleep, and woke some unknowable amount of time later lying on hard wooden planks in the dark. Feeling around, she touched a plastic bottle of water and a loaf of bread. She thought she was in a cabinet—she could feel the lid over her head. It was hot and stuffy in there, and the only fresh air seeped in through a flexible hose. From time to time she either slept or passed out; her head ached unbearably; she began to fear she’d die by slow suffocation.

JJ was fearing it too. This was not the first time he’d been inside somebody else’s head. That strange experience had been happening at unpredictable moments since he was maybe four or five. But being in the dark prison with Sarah was different by several orders of magnitude. In the first place it was agonizing, and in the second place her life depended on him. Yet he couldn’t tell where she was, because she didn’t know herself.

In his distress JJ unbalanced himself and the chair deposited him on the floor again. He scrambled up, still holding Teddy, and began to stumble around the room, bouncing off the walls and banging into the old green furniture, totally disoriented and completely at a loss.

And then he noticed something. The intensity of Sarah’s anguish wasn’t exactly the same everywhere in the office. Near the north wall the sensation was a tad stronger, near the south wall a bit less. It was like playing one of those children’s games where somebody says, “You’re getting warm; you’re getting cold.”

Hah!

He exited the office. Deputy Garmish was absent from his post—toilet, probably, since the Penthouse had vanished too. JJ headed down the hall, found an outside door, and started weaving in and out among the big gleaming cruisers in the parking lot. The sensation fluctuated more noticeably. No doubt about it now—Teddy wasn’t just a lightning rod for Sarah’s emotions, he was a compass pointing to her whereabouts.

JJ slammed his way back inside and barged into the big office where Sheriff Chew sat conferring with half a dozen sleazy-looking characters who collectively formed St. Genevieve’s governing Police Jury. JJ didn’t care. Clutching Teddy to his breastbone, he gasped, “Ah need me a driver. Ah think Ah can lead you to Sarah Rapp.”

He’d never seen a 300-pound man move so fast.

The rest of the story soon became famous throughout St. Genevieve and even beyond. How the sheriff dragged Deputy Garmish out of the john and ordered him to fire up a growler. How the three of them took off, with JJ still gripping Teddy. How Garmish essayed one scornful remark, only to be met with Chew’s rejoinder, “Shut yore friggin’ mouth and drive.”

How they wended in and out among the tangle of narrow blacktop roads crisscrossing St. Genevieve Parish, JJ muttering, “Left here. Right there.” How they wound up facing the Dry Branch Dump. How they were all temporarily baffled, until the sheriff—his small, slanted hunter’s eyes darting over the ground—spotted a nearly invisible trail circling the dump with SUV tracks in the mud.

How JJ tumbled, Garmish leaped, and Chew rolled out of the police car. How they followed the tracks into possibly the most godforsaken bit of scrub forest in the Western world. How they fought their way through thickets of thorny vines and brush and found, projecting from a patch of disturbed and sunken earth, a piece of garden hose marking Sarah’s grave. How a backhoe hastily summoned by the sheriff unearthed the little girl lying inside her coffin—a stout packing crate—still alive, though just barely.

The rest of the story unfolded while Sarah, holding Teddy to her heart, recovered in a Baton Rouge hospital. The SUV tracks led to blacktopped LA 1313 and vanished from sight. An APB was already out on the vehicle, sightings of which had been reported from Nome to Patagonia, so there was nothing more to be done along that line. Then a fisherman idly floating in a pirogue on nearby Lake Bocage—one of the oxbow lakes left behind when the ever-restless Mississippi changed its course sometime in the Pleistocene Epoch—noted unusual activity in a school of croakers. He paddled closer and found the well-named fish flickering in and out of a submerged SUV, where they’d been lunching off what remained of Alferd W. Finch.

A week later the parish coroner reported that the corpse had lost its eyes and hair, but as compensation had acquired a 9 mm slug that lingered in the gooey remnants of its brainstem. The phrase “execution style” leaped to the lips of a dozen TV talking heads, as did the obvious follow-up question: Who was Alferd’s homicidal accomplice?

Wade Garmish gave JJ his thoughts about this loose end during a confidential chat at headquarters. How, the deputy asked, did JJ know where to find Sarah? Obviously, because he was the accomplice. Then why did he lead the sheriff to her? To grab the reward money as well as the ransom. JJ was beginning to wonder uneasily where this line of thought was leading, when he detected in the deputy’s tobacco-colored eyes a glint of—was it possible?—admiration.

Laying a heavy hand upon his shoulder, Wade said, “JJ, you fuller of shit than a constipated pig. But Ah gotta tell you, son—you are some smart. Now, next time you decide to pull a job, you lemme in on it, okay? But no bullet in the back of the head, okay? Ah ain’t no Alfie Finch, and Ah ain’t a-goin’ out that way.”

JJ left headquarters thinking, So that’s what’s wrong with fan clubs. You never know who might join.

* * * *

One morning a week or two later, he was home in the locked Winnebago, lolling on his bunk with Aloe Vera and a clean towel beside him, when his Daddy used a key JJ’d unwisely given him to enter unannounced. Noting with a frown what his son was up to, he said, “JJ, you drop that damn thing of yours rat now and put on some pants and come in the office. The FBI wants to talk with you.”

JJ was unhappy over the intrusion, and not only because he had to finish what he was doing in a hurry. He’d intended that very day to take off, both to see the country and to escape the consequences of fame.

All he really wanted from the world, he now realized, was privacy so that he could do what he, uh, did privately. But ever since he found Sarah, people just wouldn’t let him alone. Sheriff Chew’s story of the small-town mystic who’d helped him save a kidnapped child had proved irresistible to the media. The Times-Picayune and the Baton Rouge Advocate had written JJ up. Bloggers debated ESP on the Net. Sarah’s dad, though he noticeably avoided shaking JJ’s hand, gave him fulsome thanks and a five-thousand-dollar check at a ceremony in Sheriff Chew’s office, while a young black man hefting an enormous camera recorded the scene for Channel 4 News. Sarah’s stepmama bestowed a raspberry kiss upon him, and Sarah—a solemn young lady with a pale face, neatly divided brown hair, and large Madonna eyes—took his rejected hand in both of hers, saying in a clear, cool voice from which almost all traces of the local accent had been laundered out, “Thank you so much for saving my life, Mr. JJ.”

Later, when the camera was gone, she added confidentially, “You’re just like I pictured you when I was in that awful box. I felt you in there with me, and I knew you’d help”—a fantasy that he found touching.

The reward check gave him the means of escaping. JJ figured that he could stop and gamble at Indian casinos from time to time, cautiously replenishing his assets by winning just a little money, but not enough to get himself banned (or scalped). It seemed like a good plan, but now the damn-blam FBI wanted him. Sighing deeply, he washed his hands, got decent, and appeared as commanded in the trailer park office.

The federal agent was as neat and anonymous as he’d expected, but much shorter. JJ reckoned that if he happened to be standing on a corner when a fire truck pulled up, he’d be in real danger of having hoses inserted into his ears. This nubbin of authority displayed his ID and introduced himself as Agent Hickey.

“You are James John Link?” he inquired, peering with small round brown eyes, which diligent training at the FBI Academy had rendered almost perfectly expressionless, like well-worn pennies.

“No, suh. Mah official name is Jimmy John. People most generally call me JJ.”

Agent Hickey frowned. Nobody was supposed to be named Jimmy John officially. “The media have reported that you gave Sheriff Chew valuable assistance in the discovery and recovery of Sarah Louellen Rapp. Is that correct?”

“Uh ... rat.”

“I’ve spoken at some length to Miss Rapp, and her description of Finch’s accomplice—we call him Suspect Alpha—doesn’t match you.” His gaze flickered over JJ’s lank knobby frame and long narrow feet. He frowned. “What I’d like you to tell me is this: Exactly how did you know where the victim had been buried?”

JJ felt the jaws of a trap beginning to close because, just like at the casino, he knew too much for his own good. Voice trembling a bit, he proceeded to lay the truth on Agent Hickey who, of course, did not believe him.

“I must tell you, Mr. Link—” that seemed more formal, and therefore better, than saying Jimmy John “—you’ve just handed me the biggest load of hogwash I’ve encountered since the last time I attended a session of the U.S. Senate. You better think of something more likely to convince a rational man, or accept the fact that you’re a person of interest in the abduction of Sarah Rapp.”

“Ah spose you tryin’ to scare me.”

“Yes,” said Hickey, obviously believing he’d done a good job of it, in which he was dead right. So JJ blurted, “Spose Ah he’p you find Suspect Alpha—would that git me off the hook?”

“I’m not authorized to make any deals, Mr. Link. However, your cooperation with the authorities may well be viewed positively by the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Orleans. Exactly how,” he continued (the man loved the word exactly), “do you propose to help us?”

“Bring me somethin’ belonged to Suspect Alpha, somethin’ he had some kind of connection with, and Ah’ll lead you to him.”

Hickey looked at him like a medical researcher gazing at a lipid-coated virus, then—tightly smiling—drew out of his right-hand coat pocket a small tape-wrapped package and placed it on the table.

“There’s an object inside this, Mr. Link. Since you have preternatural powers, you won’t need me to tell you what it is.”

Feeling he’d just been called when bluffing with four hearts, JJ reluctantly touched the box, and—wow! Messages began to tickle his fingertips. Surely he couldn’t have done this even a week ago? Yet now he knew—didn’t just think but knew—that the object was ... hard ... cool ... round ... hollow ... smooth.

“It’s a ring,” he said, and didn’t need ESP to pick up Hickey’s reaction. “Not a weddin’ ring. Too big. An athaletic ring? Oh Lord, it’s a Useless ring, one of those things they give the jocks after a good season.”

Hickey cleared his throat. “That’s a rather remarkable trick,” he admitted.

JJ ignored him. The ring’s owner was bothered. Knew he’d lost it, but didn’t know where. Surely not at the ... the excavation? JJ felt his stab of fear.

“So,” he murmured. “Where was it at—buried in the mud at the bottom of the hole? Maybe y’awl went over the crime scene with a metal detector, and that was how you found it?”

This time Hickey merely stared. Talking mostly to himself, JJ continued teasing the story out of the flickering wi-fi messages that he alone could snatch from the firmament. His drawl became thicker with excitement.

“He uh, uh, uh, uh, took it off when they was wrasslin’ the box into the hole. He put the ring in his shirt pocket. He must of bent over—he don’t remember this, he’s guessin’ too—and it fell out, and they dropped the box on top of it. Then they went to grab Sarah, and in all the excitement he forgot about the ring until after he’d done Alferd in. Finally he remembered and looked in his pocket, and it wasn’t there. Now he’d give his left nut to find it again, and that’s the reason for the pull Ah’m feelin’.”

Hickey sat there with his small round eyes as blank as the two worn buttons with which Teddy gazed at the world. Then abruptly he surrendered.

“Can you take me to him?” he whispered. “I have to tell you, Mr. Link, the Bureau’s up a tree in this case. There’s nothing to go on except this ring, and it hasn’t led us anywhere. Mr. Rapp’s a prominent Republican contributor, and we’ve got the Governor, two congresspersons and a particularly nasty Senator on our backs.”

At last understanding the reason for this whole charade, JJ replied coolly, “Well, suh, Ah guess Ah can try.”

* * * *

In the agent’s bland tan Ford, Hickey took the box from JJ, opened it with a penknife, and extracted the ring—a garish lump of gold-washed pewter and blue bottle glass encircled by the proud words USLS 2005 Champoins. (JJ figured the misspelling had gone undetected because the athletes to a man were functionally illiterate, and the coach nearly so.)

“Put it on,” Hickey said. “This is unofficial, of course, but if you lose it, I’ll shoot you. Now: which way do we go?”

“Thataway,” said JJ, deliberately playing the rustic, and pointed down Huey toward the I-12 on-ramps.

While they drove, Hickey filled him in on the crucial clue. “That ring went to sixteen guys on the basketball team in ‘05, after they won the championship of whatever piss-ant league they play in.”

JJ nodded. “The Cottonblossom League. That was the year our guys beat Hattiesburg Tech, 107-106. Ah seen it on TV. There was a big fight on the court and twelve people got tasered. It was a great game.”

“Sounds like it,” Hickey said dryly. “Well, we’ve tracked down fifteen of the athletes, including a couple who are in jail for drug-related offenses. We headed out to pick up the sixteenth guy, only to learn that a tree fell on him during Hurricane Katrina. His mother states that the ring was not recovered with the body, so a looter stole it off the corpse. Another dead end.”

He sounded bitter.

The interstate consisted of two concrete ribbons with clumps of trees in the median and clotted traffic surging east toward Florida and west toward California. JJ indicated the eastbound side, and Hickey inserted the Ford into a gap between two roaring double tractor-trailers with the contemptuous ease of a man trained to conduct high-speed chases. Exits flicked past—Hammond, Pontchatoula, Madisonville, Covington, Mandeville—with the glories of Slidell yet to come. They whisked by shopping centers, Best Buy after Best Buy, Petco after Petco, the endless ‘burbs of the White Homeland, safely separated by twenty-five-mile-wide Lake Pontchartrain from black-and-tan New Orleans to the south.

“Off next exit,” JJ commanded, happy to issue orders to the FBI.

Here urban traffic clogged what had been a back road as recently as JJ’s teen years. Behind a thin screen of surviving trees, gated communities with names like Forestview and Bois de Boulogne appeared, each inhabited by tract houses of daunting similarity. JJ ran down his window and sniffed the rich odor of toasting Bunny Bread. The ring was buzzing like a captive bumblebee.

Signs appeared at roadside directing those who were lost—and, more important, those who were willing to lose—to the Shore-Win Casino. To JJ, this was familiar territory, and he ordered Hickey to turn onto an arrow-straight four-lane ribbon of concrete that went slashing across the marshlands to the lake’s verge, where a faux riverboat lay moored. Hickey steered into a spacious parking lot, half full even at noonday, and a uniformed rent-a-cop directed him to a vacant slot.

Inside the riverboat, all was flash and glitter from banks of slot and video poker machines where pensioners were depositing their Social Security checks a dollar at a time. The ceiling winked with multicolored stars, and crude murals portrayed Rhett Butlers in white suits gambling their way to fortune while hoop-skirted Scarletts looked on admiringly. Neon signs directed the thirsty to the Bourbon Street Bar and the hungry to a seafood buffet called We Got Crabs. In the center of the casino a plastic oak tree dripped plastic moss.

JJ looked around and sighed. He felt like Adam gazing back at the Garden from which he’d been banned forever. As if in answer to his thought, a broad-shouldered man in a short-sleeved shirt and blue bowtie approached. He had black fur on his muscular forearms, a button mike stuck in one ear, and a palm-sized electronic box of some sort filling his breast pocket. He took JJ by the elbow.

“Out,” he said succinctly.

“Look at this,” said Hickey, slipping the leather folder with his credentials out of his pocket. The bouncer glanced down and released JJ.

“This man’s not here to gamble,” Hickey assured him in a voice so soft that not even the closest players, who were probably hard of hearing anyhow, could have listened in. “He’s assisting our inquiries in a case that involves kidnapping and murder. I assume you wouldn’t want to be charged with obstructing the Bureau.”

“You better talk to the boss,” said the bouncer, inclining his head slightly to the left. He and Hickey moved to a door overlooked by security cameras; it opened noiselessly, they passed inside, and the door closed behind them.

Meanwhile JJ circulated, guided by the throbbing of the ring. At this time of day, the action was slow but by no means dead; the roulette wheel lay immobile, but on three tables dice were bounding like frisky terriers across fields of green felt. Beyond the plastic oak tree one blackjack table was in use. The dealer’s name tag said Phil; the sole player was a fat man displaying two fives and a deuce.

“Hit me,” said the fat man, and JJ—seeing what was coming—almost groaned aloud. The dealer flicked the guy a ten, and he busted out with twenty-two. He slipped off his chair, grunted, “You try the goddamn game,” and waddled away in the direction of the bar.

Phil paused in the act of sweeping the gambler’s chips into a slot and stared transfixed at the ring, which responded by biting JJ’s finger like a sand fly. He took the warm naugahyde seat and he and Phil looked at each other.

“I seen you on TV,” said the dealer. He had a flat, nasal Midwestern accent. “You’re the guy found that kid.”

He was wide and pudgy. He smelled of Brut. His fingers were nicotine-stained. JJ couldn’t see his feet behind the half-moon table but felt pretty sure that they resembled a duck’s. So this was the guy who’d buried a little girl alive! JJ didn’t usually approve of torture, but decided to make an exception for Phil.

“Ah seen you admirin’ my ring,” was his opener. “Don’t look like much, does it? But it’s worth a lot.”

“Oh yeah? How much you think it’s worth?”

“About ten K.”

Phil’s eyes bulged. Maybe this was his first experience at being on the wrong end of extortion. JJ began to enjoy himself. “But I don’t suppose you’d want it,” he went on.

Phil, trying to sound casual, said, “I used to have a ring that was sort of like it. When I lost it, people noticed. Nobody looks at a dealer’s face, but everybody watches his hands. ‘Where’s your big ring, Phil?’ they say.”

JJ nodded. “Ah guess if they ever knew where this one was found at, they might connect the dots. Maybe you better think about buyin’ it, after all.”

“I don’t have ten K.”

“Sure you do. With this job, you could skim that money inside a week.”

“Only if I wanted to end up in the crab cage. We gotta chef puts his soft-shells in there to fatten up. Most generally he feeds ‘em spoiled chicken, but crabs ain’t particular eaters. They’ll take anything, including me.”

“Come on,” said JJ, lowering his voice confidentially. “Ah know you got all that money out of old man R—”

Suddenly he stopped. Gasped. He’d caught a glimpse into Phil’s mind. “Damn blam. So she’s the one that got it. Go and tell Marsha Rapp you need a loan.”

Phil looked scared. “Jesus,” he whispered. “So you can do what they said on TV. Look, I don’t have a chance of getting it out of her. She paid me two K and I took the one she gave Alferd, making three. I already spent most of it. Her husband’s got the big bundle, and she’s prob’ly on her way to meet him right now.”

“Rapp had his own daughter kidnapped?”

Now Phil looked disgusted. “And here I thought you really had ESP! No, butthead, her husband. He lives in Grunj, Croatia, where she comes from. It’s a town where all they do is raise goats and work Internet scams. He runs a bunch of these beautiful-Third-World-gals-hot-to-marry websites and peddles her off to the best offer. She marries the guy, figures out how to bleed him, finds local talent to do the dirty work, and her husband—guy named Slivovitch—manages the money transfers so nobody, not the FBI, not nobody, can trace where it goes to. He’s a computer genius.

“Take a card,” Phil added, flipping one across the table. “While we talk, we better look busy.”

“Hit me,” said JJ, without glancing at the seven-spot. “Sounds like you really got to know her, she told you all that. Hit me again.”

“That was after I begun to poke her. We met over this exact table and I seen right away she was too much woman for a needle-dick like old man Rapp. Well, you know how some women babble when you screw ‘em.”

As a matter of fact, JJ didn’t. But he did know cards—front and back. “Hit me,” he said again and again until he had seven-six-trey-deuce. “One more time.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” Phil hit him with another deuce.

“Son of a bitch,” he said with dawning respect. “Five Card Charlie. If we was playin’, you’da won.”

“Ah do it almost every time,” said JJ. “That’s why they banned me. Look, Phil, there’s no percentage for me turning you in. But since Ah can’t gamble no more, Ah need the money. So you figure out a way to get it, every damn penny, or you in deep shitsky, son.”

He slid off the stool, thinking, That’ll make the bastard sweat. Hickey was still among the missing, so JJ wandered outside and stood on the deck where he could watch the gangway, just in case Phil tried to run for it. In the parking lot he could see the rent-a-cop sitting on a folding chair, asleep in the shadow of a big SUV. He was wondering whether to go and wake him up, when a soft voice spoke in his ear.

“We gonna walk,” said Phil, “around the deck to the other side. When we get there, you gonna gimme that ring.”

JJ did not need ESP to know the nature of the hard object jabbing his ribs. “You can’t shoot me out here in public,” he protested as they moved to the starboard side of the Shore-Win. “Somebody’ll hear you.”

“A gambler wouldn’t hear nothing if I shot the guys both sides of him,” Phil said. “That’s how they are. And the house staff, they all watching the players and each other. Now gimme the goddamn ring. I’m on break, so I don’t have all day.”

JJ twisted the ring, pretending it was tight on his finger. He was trying to read Phil’s mind, trying to find out whether the dealer actually would kill him right out here in the sight of God and everybody. What he picked up was only the threatening phrase crab cage.

He looked for help and found none. The lake stretched away, glimmering, to a leaden horizon. He wished he’d waited for Hickey. He wished he’d recognized that Phil had nothing to lose by killing him. He wished he’d gone to see the country when he had the chance. Squinching his eyes shut, JJ pulled off the ring, ready to throw it into shallow water where the FBI might be able to find it again. He knew Phil would shoot him if he did, but JJ had a strong feeling that for him, death was—so to speak—in the cards anyway.

Then he heard a dull sound, like whump! The dealer staggered, sagged against him, slipped to the deck. The gun clattered on the boards. JJ took an enormous breath. Hickey at last! The Federal Bureau of Investigation! The U.S. Cavalry! Weak with relief, he spun around.

Sarah Rapp was standing there beside an aged black man—leather face, blue chauffeur’s uniform, billed cap over cottony hair—who was holding a tire iron and gazing down at the man sprawled on the deck.

“See how you like having a concussion, sucker,” said William Wood.

* * * *

After handing Phil and the ring over to Hickey, JJ and his two saviors rode back to Bougalou in the Rapps’ big new SUV, headed for Sheriff Chew’s office to make formal statements. Sarah revealed they’d encounter the bigamist Marsha there, because she was under arrest.

“How’d you know she was in on it?” asked JJ. “And hey, how’d you find me?”

“The same way you found me,” replied Sarah. “I never liked Marsha. You know how girls usually are about stepmothers, especially stepmothers with big bazooms. And when I was lying in that box thinking, suddenly it came to me that she was back of it all. I’ve always had a little ESP, not like yours, but there in the dark it started really developing because that was the only way I could reach the outside world. Today I found Marsha in her walk-in closet packing her bags, and I knew right off she was just about to run. So I locked her in and called the sheriff and told him to come and arrest her.”

“And he did what you told him to?”

“He always does what the Rapps tell him to,” Sarah answered with cool self-assurance. “Marsha was screaming and banging on the closet door, so I lied and said I’d let her out if she told me who the man with the duck feet was, and she said he was a blackjack dealer at the Shore-Win. Suddenly I had this feeling that you were walking right into terrible danger from the same man, so I left her in the closet still screaming and called William and we took off without waiting for the law. You know, Mr. JJ, back when you saved my life, I fell in love with you.”

“You did?”

“It’s the most tremendous experience of my life, up to now, anyway. Tell me, how old are you?”

He looked uneasily at the Lolita seated beside him. Her dark eyes were luminous, intense, and he had no difficulty at all in seeing the steely willfulness that lay behind them. He mumbled, “Twenty-four.”

“We won’t be able to marry for a while,” she said thoughtfully. “But in six years I’ll be eighteen and you’ll be, um, thirty. That’s really old. But it’s okay, I like older men. So we’ll get married then, and have a bunch of children.”

JJ croaked, “Children??”

“It’s our duty to the gene pool,” Sarah informed him. “I got the idea from the Sci Fi Channel. I mean, how many people can there be with a gift like ours? I think it’ll be terribly interesting to breed a super race, don’t you?”

“Uh—”

“Daddy won’t like it, of course,” she went on, musing. “He’ll want me to marry some dreary old lawyer or doctor or something. But if he makes trouble I’ll just remind him how he married Marsha off the Internet for her big bazoom and almost got me killed. That ought to shut him up.”

Solemnly she took JJ’s hand and held it with both of hers. “I could marry at sixteen with Daddy’s permission, but I don’t think we ought to rush into things, do you? I’ll probably be quite silly then, because of all the hormones, and you’re too mature to like that. Anyway, I want to have some sexual experience before I marry, and I think boys my own age will be fine for learning the ropes. Virginity is so silly, don’t you think? I mean, once you’re nubile.”

Even through his shock, JJ heard William chuckle, up in the driver’s seat. Apparently Sarah’s managing ways were an old story to him. For the rest of the journey they rode in silence, with Sarah’s firm, strong young hands holding JJ’s limp one.

At the sheriff’s office, a final surprise awaited them. Glowering like a giant enraged Foo Dog, Sheriff Russell Chew informed them that Marsha had escaped. “Ah sent that ass—that butt—’scuse me, Miss Rapp. Ah sent Wade Garmish to pick her up, and near as Ah can figure, she conned him into runnin’ off with her instead.”

“Interpol will track them down,” promised Hickey, bustling in. His prisoner was safely in the grip of several of his larger colleagues, ready to face both local and federal charges whenever he woke up from the bashing William had given him.

“You feds can have first crack at them kidnappers,” growled Big Russ, “just so’s Ah git Wade all to myself. There’s a little thing they used to do in China Ah want to try on him. It’s kind of like waterboarding, only slower, and it hurts more.”

Out in the parking lot, among the police cruisers, Sarah told JJ au revoir. William had the SUV purring and sat at the wheel, waiting for her.

“Good-bye for now, JJ,” she said, skipping the mister for the first time and giving him a chaste peck on the cheek. “I have to go to my ballet class. I’m supposed to get up en pointe today, and it’s hard but terribly exciting. Just remember our plans for the future, and don’t go wasting yourself on other women in the meantime. I wouldn’t like that a bit.”

When they’d gone, JJ stood looking after them for a long, long time. Wait six years for a bossy pre-teen to grow up, so he could spend the rest of his life begetting and rearing paranormal children? In a daze he set off walking toward the Ox-Bow Trailer Park. Then he began to run.

* * * *

Two weeks later, JJ sat down in his dust-caked Winnebago in a mobile-home park outside Flagstaff, Arizona, to write a note to Sarah. It worried him that he’d left without saying good-bye, and he didn’t want her to grieve for him.

Dear Sarah, he wrote, crossed that out and wrote Dear Miss Rapp, crossed that out, chose a new piece of notepaper and wrote, Dear Miss Sarah, I am alright and hope you are alright too. I am seeing the country for the first time and there is sure a lot of it. I hope you enjoy learning to toe dance as it is a nice thing for nice young ladies to be able to do. Personally I have never been sure which foot of mine is the left one, ha ha. I hope you grow up and meet a nice young doctor or lawyer and marry him. As for me, I have met a nice young lady name of Vera and we will get married in Reno. Wishing you all the best always I am, Sincerely yours, Jimmy John (JJ) Link.

He walked down to the gate of the mobile-home park and dropped the letter into a mailbox. It was a splendid evening, with a vast desert moon rising in a fluorescent sky. For a time he lingered, feeling vaguely romantic and a bit lost. He decided to phone Daddy as soon as he had a permanent address and ask him to send the Bulletin, so he could follow Sarah’s doings on the Society Page and return to Bougalou once she was safely wed. Traveling was educational, but he’d come to realize he was basically a homebody.

He felt good, having a plan. Tomorrow he’d visit an Indian casino to replenish his money supply, but as for tonight—well, tonight he had a date with Vera. Smiling, he turned and headed back to the Winnebago.

Three days later, Sarah read JJ’s note while William was driving her to the riding stable where Empress, her favorite mare, awaited her.

“He thinks!” was all she said before crumpling the note and throwing it out the window. William knew that tone of voice and said nothing, but drove on in silence, his eyes fixed on the road ahead.