“No, that’s okay.” He didn’t need to consult the yellow pages — he knew there wouldn’t be any such ad. Charlotte — Marilyn — had seen what was meant only for her. Like she said, he caught on fast.
Dallas took Buster out on the leash and spent the next several days trying to follow the very faint trace of the drifting gate, wandering through neighborhoods in Miramar, Miami Gardens, and Opa-Locka. By Tuesday, Dallas tried skirting the Miami River along a jogging/skating path that gave him a good view of Miami Beach across the water. They’d been out walking for nearly an hour, with Buster catching occasional whiffs of spots where the gate had lingered and moved on.
Suddenly Buster took off at a run, dragging Dallas after him. The leash was wrenched with a slap out of his fingers. “Hey!”
Buster disappeared down a residential street, across a back yard, and into a copse of willow. Dallas caught up with him in seconds. “What the hell—” The dog cowered between his feet, teeth bared and snarling.
Dallas swallowed hard. Buster must have smelled something dangerous, something deadly. Dallas grabbed the leash. “C’mon, I know the neighborhood.” Of course he did. His parents lived in it.
He ran across yards, between houses, and ended up in a small wooded park, its circular boundary marked by chest-high holly hedges. In the center of the park grew half a dozen centennial oaks with branches so wide you could stand on them. In the tallest tree, a weathered clubhouse hid among its upper forks, a few climbing slats still nailed to its gnarled trunk.
Dallas huffed, grabbing the dog around the middle and wedging it up under his arm. He jumped and caught the highest slat, scrabbling with his feet onto the lowest fork, and worked his way up into the canopy of dark green leaves. The tree house had no door, and Dallas flung himself and Buster through the entrance and onto the rough plywood flooring. He lay gasping, listening for pursuit but heard nothing. Finally Dallas sat up and took stock of their refuge. It looked remarkably the way it had when he’d played in it as a kid.
Buster was peering down through the doorway at the ground below, snarling.
Dallas pulled up his T-shirt and wiped sweat out of his eyes. He chanced a look out the door just in time to spot a jogger coming into the park. In tank top and shorts, he looked harmless enough. Buster was shaking all over, pressed against Dallas’ leg. The dog emitted a low growl but Dallas grabbed his snout. “Shhh!” He flattened himself against the floorboards and took another furtive look.
The jogger had stopped on the sidewalk leading into the park and stood wiping his face. Perfectly normal behavior for a runner. Nothing to see. Until he walked slowly to the center of the small grassy area near the oaks and stood perfectly still, head raised slightly, as if listening. He faced east, then west, with a questing behavior much like a bird dog seeking its prey after the fowl has plunged out of sight into the reeds of a marsh. Dallas crouched against the wall of the tree house, hardly daring to breathe. Against him, Buster shivered in silent terror. Dallas had no doubt the jogger was someone, or something, to be feared.
The stranger below took his own sweet time, but eventually moved on across the park and back out to the street. Dallas let his breath out and then called Charlotte.
“I think we narrowly missed your friend,” he said in a whisper. “If Buster hadn’t taken off like a streak I don’t know what would have happened.”
“Be very careful coming home,” she warned. “We can’t have you leading anyone to the house.”
“Roger that.” Dallas disconnected the call.
He sat in silence for awhile, just listening to the breeze off the river rustling the tops of the oaks and palms. Occasionally Buster sniffed the breeze, but he seemed to no longer find any threat hiding there.
Buster walked to the door, his dog nails clicking on the boards of the tree house. Dallas picked him up. “If you don’t smell the guy anymore let’s get out of here.” The first thing he wanted to do when they got home was get some better details about the assassin, something he’d failed to do when Gurtz’s situation was first explained to him.
Charlotte called around five-thirty to say she was on her way and would bring Cuban take-out home with her.
A brief thunderstorm broke overhead and rained just enough to make everything steamy. Dallas and Buster sat on the back deck, listening to rain drip off the trees and shrubbery, while legions of frogs sang their rain-conjuring songs. The sound of Charlotte’s Grand Cherokee pulling up under the carport some time later brought him back to the fact that his stomach was chewing on itself. He went inside and found Charlotte unloading Cuban sandwiches onto the kitchen table. “Help yourself,” she said.
Dallas took a wrapped sandwich from the bag and sat down across the room, as far away from her as he could get. They ate in silence until Charlotte got up and poured herself a glass of burgundy.
“You’re awfully quiet.”
“Just thinking.”
Charlotte put down her glass. “That was a close call you had today.”
“No shit.”
More silence. Finally Charlotte got up and stretched. She headed out into the living room and Dallas followed.
“Can I…talk to Gurtz? I mean, physically?” He could feel the blood beating a tattoo against his temples.
Charlotte cocked her head. “All right, but you have to promise you won’t run out the door.”
“I won’t run.” Since that first terrifying day, the alien hadn’t showed itself outside its host, in the interest of keeping him employed, Dallas assumed. Now that he felt reasonably sure Gurtz wasn’t about to abduct him for medical experiments on some distant planet, he wanted to see, as clearly as possible, the creature he was contracted to help and ask those nagging questions.
Gurtz slowly lifted out of Charlotte’s body. Dallas was shaking but kept his eyes riveted to the ungainly form partially coalescing in front of him. Seven feet tall, for sure, maybe more. Dallas was holding his breath. There was the moray eel head, which he now saw had two slightly protruding perfectly round eyes with a tiny red pupil in the center. The eyes seemed to move independently of each other, one giving Dallas the once over and the other angled toward the doorway, like a chameleon he’d once kept in a terrarium back in his college days. But Gurtz wasn’t a chameleon, or an eel. What had he called himself? Gultranz.
The Gultranz sorcerer stepped away from his host, who remained frozen in mid-step, and Dallas took a good look. Although partially transparent, it was still a terrifying sight. The alien was bipedal but also had a long thick tail that it leaned back on for balance. Dallas licked his dry lips. He’d seen a kangaroo do that once at the Miami Zoo. The creature’s skin was luminescing greens and blues and ochres. From the front of the mouth, a cluster of prominent upper and lower serrated teeth jutted at a bucktoothed angle. As the hinged jaw moved, Dallas saw double rows of triangular shredding teeth. Sharp as razors, he was willing to bet. A flesh eater.
“You don’t look much like a Little Grey,” Dallas croaked out.
“What’s that?” Gurtz’s voice was raspier than he remembered.
“You know, Little Greys, alien abductions… medical experiments?”
“Is that a DC comic? I might like it.” The Gultranz stood to his full height and stretched his long thin arms out from his sides, flexing his three-fingered hands as if unwinding the kinks. Dallas noted uneasily the suckerlike pads on each digit. The creature took a step forward.
“Don’t!” Dallas skipped backwards.
“Seen enough? I can’t hold this form too long outside the host.”
“Yes! Please go back in.” He was hyperventilating.
Charlotte shuddered and settled stiffly onto the couch. “Gurtz wants to know your story.”