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I got home. I walked across my small yard, part rock and part weed, and climbed up the three cement steps. I wasn’t inside long enough to sit when I heard a pounding on the door. It was a loud, frantic pounding, sounding like a gang of bikers trying to get into a room filled with beer and teenaged girls. I figured it had to be Nicky.
I opened the door. Nicky Cameron roared past me, nearly five feet of non-stop energy. “Bloody fucking hell, Billy! Where have you been, eh?” He spun and fixed me with his gigantic eyes.
“Hello, Nicky,” I said. “What’s up?”
Even as I spoke he was cocking his head to one side and then, almost faster than I could follow with my tired eyes, he circled around me, sniffing. “Well, well,” he said. “Well well well well well. Lumbered again, eh Billy? What’d they cop you for this time, mate? Loitering?”
“Drunk and disorderly. How did you guess?”
He stood squarely in front of me, hands on his hips and feet planted wide. “Guess. Guess!? Is that what you think, Billy? That this is guesswork I do? Oh, mate, you bloody fucking wrong me.” He tapped his nose with a finger. “The Beak knows all, Billy.”
I shook my head, tired and cranky but intrigued. “You’re saying you smelled it on me.”
He winked. “That and your chart. You see, mate, your rising sign right now is on a cusp. This means change, trouble with authority—there’s lots of water in there too, mate, travel and conflict over water. And a snake. I haven’t figured that bit out yet.”
“I’m sure you will, Nicky.”
“’Course I will, mate. I’m working a new chart for you now. That’s not the point—”
“So there’s a point to this?”
“Too right there’s a point. I came by last night to warn you. Soon as I started your chart and saw—oh.” He stopped suddenly as something else occurred to him and looked thoughtful. I didn’t feel like hearing his thoughts. I was suddenly too tired, too fed up with everything, and all I wanted was a shower. I pushed past him.
“Billy, lad, slow down, hang on a bit.” He grabbed my arm. “Nancy was here last night.”
I blinked. “Okay.”
“She went in empty-handed and came out with a couple of bags of stuff. I didn’t figure she was absconding with the silver or I’d have stopped her.”
“You were probably right. Her silver’s better than mine. What did the bags look like?”
He shrugged. “One of ’em was that bright red fishing tournament th
ing. You know.”
I knew. I remembered the bag well. I had given it to Nancy and she had used it to carry some personal stuff over to my house. It had been in my closet for six months. If she took it now, then—
I closed my eyes and leaned against the wall, exhausted and feeling slightly sick. It was over. Nancy had moved her stuff out. She was slamming the door shut on any chance I had of working things out with her.
Sun Tzu was wrong.
Chapter Three
The next few days were hard. Nancy would not see me. She didn’t answer her phone and she wasn’t home when I went over. Just before I went out to the hospital to lie down in front of her car, something pulled me back and I decided to let her alone for a while. Let her cool down, think things out, get over her anger.
But the waiting, the not knowing, took its toll on me. I stayed up late and watched too much television. I let my personal routines slide. And eventually the Key West New Age Emotional Rescue Committee kicked into high gear to rescue me from myself.
The K.W.N.A.E.R.C. consists of one person: Nicky Cameron. He’s the Executive Administrative Board as well as the Chief Field Operative. He monitored carefully, and when my aura finally drooped into an unhealthy color he swooped in.
Nicky, just a bottle cap taller than five feet, looks at the world through a pair of enormous, pale brown eyes. They are set under a rapidly retreating hairline, above a large hooked nose and a receding chin.
Taken one feature at a time he was a lost cause. But there was so much energy pouring out of those eyes that nobody ever noticed he was an ugly dwarf. I have seen fashion models well over six feet tall fall helplessly into Nicky’s eyes and follow him around with a soft and devoted look. He ran the New Age store in town and was probably the Keys’ greatest expert on aroma therapy, past life regression, channeling, crystal healing, and astrology, although I was never sure he really believed all that stuff.
He was also the Keys’ greatest expert on beer. I couldn’t remember ever seeing him without at least one in his hand.
Nicky found things for me to do. He took me to parties where I drank too much and, too often, found myself goggling at odd-looking strangers from a corner where the light was too harsh and all the angles seemed slightly off.
I became his summer project. And at the end of that first week, it worked. I got so sick of his non-stop cheerfulness that I snuck away and pedaled over to check on my boat.
