But he didn’t. He kept taping, becoming more and more excited, until Bonnie Lamb could no longer bear it. When he asked her to operate the camera while he posed on an overturned station wagon, Bonnie nearly slugged him. She quit tagging after Max because she didn’t want to be seen with him. Her own husband.
In one gutted house she spotted an old woman, her mother’s age, stepping through splintered bedroom furniture. The woman was calling the name of a pet kitten, which had disappeared in the storm. Bonnie Lamb offered to help search. The cat didn’t turn up, but Bonnie did find the old woman’s wedding album, beneath a shattered mirror. Bonnie cleared the broken glass and retrieved the album, damp but not ruined. Bonnie opened it to the date of inscription: December 11, 1949. When the old woman saw the album, she broke down in Bonnie’s arms. With a twinge of shame, Bonnie glanced around to make sure that Max wasn’t secretly filming them. Then she began to cry, too.
Later, resolved to confront her husband, Bonnie Lamb went to find him. If he refused to put away that stupid camera, she would demand the keys to the rental car. It promised to be the first hard test of the new marriage.
Two hours passed with no sign of Max, and Bonnie’s anger dissolved into worry. The tale told by the boy with the broken bicycle ordinarily would have been comical, but Bonnie took it as further evidence of Max’s reckless obsession. He was afraid of animals, even hamsters, a condition he blamed on an unspecified childhood trauma; to boldly pursue a wild monkey was definitely out of character. On the other hand, Max loved that damn Handycam. More than once he’d reminded Bonnie that it had cost seven hundred dollars, mail order from Hong Kong. She could easily envision him chasing a seven-hundred-dollar investment down the street. She could even envision him strangling the monkey for it, if necessary.
Another squall came, and Bonnie cursed mildly under her breath. There wasn’t much left standing, in the way of shelter. She felt a shiver as the raindrops ran d’own her neck, and decided to return to the rental car and wait for Max there. Except she wasn’t sure where the car was parked-without street signs or mailboxes, every block of the destroyed subdivision looked the same. Bonnie Lamb was lost.
She saw the helicopters wheeling overhead, heard the chorus of sirens in the distance, yet on the streets of the neighborhood there were no policemen, no soldiers, no proper authority to which a missing husband could be reported. Exhausted, Bonnie sat on a curb. To keep dry, she tried to balance a large square of plywood over her head. A gust of wind got under the board and pulled Bonnie over backward; as she went down, a corner of the board struck her sharply on the forehead.
She lay there stunned for several moments, staring at the muddy sky, blinking the raindrops from her eyes. A man appeared, standing over her. He wore a small rifle slung on one shoulder.
“Let me help,” he said.
Bonnie Lamb allowed him to lift her from the wet grass. She noticed her blouse was soaked, and shyly folded her arms across her breasts. The man retrieved
the plywood board and braced it at a generous angle against a concrete utility pole. There he and Bonnie Lamb took shelter from the slashing rain.
The man was in his early thirties, with good shoulders and tanned, strong-looking arms. He had short brown hair, a sharp chin and friendly blue eyes. He wore Rockport hiking shoes, which gave Bonnie a sense of relief. She couldn’t imagine a psychopathic sex killer choosing Rockports.
“Do you live around here?” she asked.
The man shook his head. “Coral Gables.”
“Is the gun loaded?”
“Sort of,” the man said, without elaborating.
“My name is Bonnie.”
“I’m Augustine.”
“What are you doing out here?” she asked.
“Believe it or not,” he said, “I’m looking for my monkeys.”
Bonnie Lamb smiled. “What a coincidence.”
Max Lamb woke up with a headache that was about to get worse. He found himself stripped to his underwear and bound to a pine tree. The tall man with the glass eye, the man who’d snatched him off the street as if he were a wayward toddler, was thrashing and flopping in a leafy clearing by the campfire. When the impressive seizure ended, the kidnapper gathered himself in a lotus position. Max Lamb noticed a thick black collar around the man’s neck. In one hand he held a shiny cylinder that reminded Max of a remote control for a model car. The cylinder had a short rubber antenna and three colored buttons.