Dunk had them in a vise. Peter had to admit, begrudgingly, that it was sort of brilliant. But one piece didn’t fit.

“So he sends us a truck full of guns and ammo, then hijacks all our oil? It seems contradictory.”

“Maybe the guns came from somebody else.”

“That was bunker ammo. Only the trade has that stuff.”

Apgar shifted in his chair. “Well, here’s another piece to consider. First you’ve got Cousin’s Place going up in smoke, then there’s a rumor going around that one of Dunk’s women showed up in the city saying that something happened out there. A lot of shooting.”

“A power play by one of his guys, you mean.”

“Could be just gossip. And I don’t see how it fits, but it’s something to consider.”

“Where is she now?”

“The woman?” Apgar almost laughed. “Who the hell knows?”

The guns and the oil were connected, but how? It didn’t feel like Dunk; holding a city hostage was out of his league, and the Army now had enough weaponry to take the isthmus and put him out of business. It would be a slaughter on both sides—the causeway was a kill box—but once the dust settled, Dunk Withers would find himself either lying dead in a ditch with fifty holes in him or swinging from a rope.

So suppose, Peter thought, the oil wasn’t just a play. Suppose it was actually for something.

“What do we know about this boat of his?” he asked.

Apgar frowned. “Not a lot. Nobody from the outside has laid eyes on the damn thing in years.”

“But it’s big.”

“So folks say. You think that’s got something to do with it?”

“I don’t know what to think. But there’s something we’re missing. Have we spread that ammo around?”

“Not yet. It’s still in the armory.”

“Get it done. And let’s send a patrol to scout the isthmus. How long till we hear from Freeport?”

“A couple of hours.”

It was a little after three P.M. “Let’s get men on the perimeter. Tell them it’s a training exercise. And get some engineers on the gate. The thing hasn’t been closed in a decade.”

Apgar gave him a look of caution. “Folks will notice that.”

“Better safe than sorry. None of this makes sense to us, but it does to someone.”

“What about the isthmus? We don’t want to wait too long to get a plan in place.”

“I won’t. Write it up.”

Apgar rose. “I’ll get it on your desk within the hour.”

“That quick?”

“There’s only one way in. Not a lot to say.” He turned at the door. “This is completely fucked, I know, but maybe it’s the opportunity we’ve been waiting for.”

“That’s a way of looking at it.”

“I’m just glad it isn’t Chase sitting in that chair.”

He left Peter alone. Just five minutes, and the piles of paper on his desk now seemed completely trivial. He swiveled his chair to face the window. The day had begun with clear skies, but now the weather was turning. Low clouds hovered over the city, a heavy gray mass. A gust of wind tossed the treetops, followed by a flash, whitening the sky. As thunder rolled behind it, the first drops of rain, heavy and slow, tapped the glass.

Michael, he thought, what the hell are you up to?

* * *

43

Anthony Carter, Twelfth of Twelve, had just shut off the mower when he looked toward the patio and noticed that the tea had arrived.

So soon? Could it be noon again already? He angled his chin to the sky—an oppressive summer Houston sky, pale like something bleached. He removed his hankie and then his hat to mop the sweat from his forehead. A glass of tea would surely hit the spot.

Mrs. Wood, she knew that. Though of course it wasn’t Mrs. Wood who brought it. Carter couldn’t say just who it was. The same someone who delivered the flats of flowers and bags of mulch to the gate, who fixed his tools when they broke, who made time turn how it did in this place, every day a season, every season a year.

He pushed his mower to the shed, wiped it clean, and made his way to the patio. Amy was working in the dirt on the far side of the lawn. There was some ginger there, it grew like crazy, always needing cutting back, bordered by the beds where Mrs. Wood liked to put some summer color. Today it was three flats of cosmos, the pink ones that Miss Haley loved, picking them and putting them in her hair.

“Tea’s here,” Carter said.

Amy looked up. She was wearing a kerchief around her neck; there was dirt on her hands and face where she’d wiped the sweat away.

“You go ahead.” She batted a gnat from her face. “I want to get these in first.”

Carter sat and sipped the tea. Perfect as always, sweet but not too sweet, and the ice made a pleasant tinkling against the sides of the glass. From behind him, in the house, came the bright drifting notes of the girls’ playing. Sometimes it was Barbies or dress-ups. Sometimes they watched TV. Carter heard the same movies playing over and over—Shrek was one, and The Princess Bride—and he felt sorry for the two of them, Miss Haley and her sister, all alone and stuck inside the house, waiting for their mama to come home. But when Carter peeked in the windows, there was never anybody there; the inside and the outside were two different places, and the rooms were empty, not even any furniture to tell that people lived there.

He’d had some time to think on that. He’d thought about a lot of things. Such as, what this place exactly was. The best he could come up with was that it was a kind of waiting room, like at a doctor’s office. You bided your time, maybe flipping through a magazine, and then when your turn came, a voice would call your name and you’d go on to the next place, whatever that was. Amy called the garden “the world behind the world,” and that seemed right to Carter.