* * *
Way past midnight, I pulled the BMW into the parking lot of a motel near the ocean outside Savannah. It was very late, and the city was buttoned down for the night. At first I was too wired to sleep, so I walked to the beach and sat on the sand. Greg insisted on following, so I made him wrap a towel around his head and a bedspread from one of the two motel beds around his body. It was late enough and dark enough that I figured no one was likely to spot him, and anyone who did would just see a very tall, very thin man wrapped in a blanket against the slightly chilly evening.
I called R.C. and asked him to reach out to some of our police friends and see if there were any recent increases in missing-person reports in St. Pete or Tampa. As usual, he had nothing to say. I knew I’d hear from him when he had any information he felt we needed to discuss.
For a few minutes I tried to figure out just what was going on, what Jim was doing for the aliens, but after a while I finally accepted the simple fact that in the end the answer did not matter because it would not change what I had to do, that the details of whatever was going on would not stop me or change my mission. The sooner I found Jim, the sooner all of it ended. Time and again I’ve found myself in situations where I was desperate to understand the why of it all, the reasons for everything that was going on, and every single time I ended up having to act without all the knowledge I wanted. You learned what you could, but in the end, whether you understood everything or not, you did what you should.
I gave myself over to the sound of the waves. Growing up on the Gulf side of Florida, I had always found waves to be a special prize, a treat nature brought only when a storm disturbed the normal flatness of the Gulf of Mexico. That this treat was almost always available in the Atlantic was something I had never learned to take for granted, and waves never failed to calm and center me. When I realized my chin had hit my chest for the second time, I clung to the drowsiness and the calm and headed back to the motel, Greg in tow.
We slept well but still got a reasonably early start. We rolled into St. Pete late in the afternoon of a beautiful, cloud-free day. I was itchy for activity, an animal corralled in too tight a space for too long. We stayed on the freeway until we hit the middle of town, then I exited and parked in a lot near Haslam’s, one of the city’s few surviving private bookstores. I called R.C. to see what he had found. This time, after I identified myself, he spoke.
“The old Woodlawn community center.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s now a warehouse for the county. The truck is parked under cover out back. It’s him.”
R.C. knew it was my play and he was backup, so I was sure he wouldn’t go in before me.
“Thanks. I’m on the way.” I started to hang up but realized he should have hung up first and hadn’t. “What?”
“He’s not this stupid. He kept the truck. He came here. He’s expecting you.”
It didn’t change a thing, but I was still embarrassed for not realizing it earlier. “Yeah.”
“I’m here,” R.C. said, and then the phone went dead. I smiled; for R.C., that was a positively tender moment.
“Do you know where James Peterson is?” Greg asked.
“I think so,” I said.
“Then drive me there,” Greg said, “and we will take him and the materials we require.” Greg stuck the upper arm on each side into his suit and withdrew in each one of the bagel-sized weapon disks. “Your job will then be done.”
“No. I have to go there to be sure. If he is there, I’ll need a little time alone with him to learn where the materials are. Then he’s yours.” I pointed at the weapons. “You’ve got the firepower to take us both. A little time won’t hurt you, and it might make the difference between getting back the materials and having Jim leave them where someone else—maybe others from your guild—could find them.”