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With some effort, Tex creased his face into a smile sufficiently polite to satisfy the most critical acquaintance, and pushed away the sudden hope a nice big bus would hit Jaqlyn as he crossed the street, or even a ten-ton truck.

Unfortunately buses or ten-ton trucks are rarely there when you need them, and Jaqlyn reached the other side of the street unscathed.

He was a suave and handsome man in his early thirties, with perfectly coiffed hair, immaculately cut polo shirt, and sporting those boyish good looks that make women swoon and men suppress a sudden urge to smack them on the head with a blunt object.

“Tex, am I glad to see you!” said Jaqlyn, showing no indication of harboring the kind of rancor and resentment that Tex was harboring towards him. “I wanted to invite you to our garden party next Saturday. You and Marge simply have to join us.”

“Garden party?” asked Tex, that same stilted smile still plastered across his features. Normally he was a garrulous and jovial man who smiled easily and often, but lately a careworn expression had supplanted his customary happy demeanor.

“Yeah, we actually wanted to do it the week we arrived, but you know how it is. Getting the house ready, setting up my office, soliciting patients, we kept postponing, and it was only last week that Francine reminded me three months have gone by since we came to Hampton Cove and we haven’t eveninvited our new friends and neighbors yet!”

“Three months,” said Tex, nodding. “Has it really only been that long?”

“Yeah, it seems much longer, doesn’t it?”

“Much, much longer,” said Tex. More like three years. Or thirty.

“Say, I just saw Mrs. Baumgartner. Didn’t she use to be one of your patients?”

“She was.” One of his most faithful patients, in fact. Once upon a time Ida Baumgartner couldn’t be dislodged from his office with a wrecking ball.

“She’s been having trouble walking lately. Pain in her left ankle. She told me you attributed it to a slight sprain—nothing to worry about. But just to be on the safe side I sent her to a radiologist. Turns out she had a hairline fracture of the tibia. So I had to put her in a cast.” He grinned. “She wasn’t happy about it, let me tell you, Tex. Ha ha ha.”

“A fracture?” asked Tex, taken aback.

Jaqlyn shrugged.“Anyone could have missed it, Tex, so don’t beat yourself up about it.” He gave the older doctor a light slap on the back. “Francine mailed the invitations yesterday. So talk to your wife and RSVP us as soon as possible, will you?”

“Will do,” said Tex automatically, his mind filled with thoughts of Ida Baumgartner’s tibia and how he could have possibly missed that fracture.

“See you, buddy,” said Jaqlyn chummily, and darted across the street again.

“Yeah,” said Tex quietly. “See you.”

And as he resumed his short trek home, he wondered if ten-ton truck drivers advertised their services in theHampton Cove Gazette.

[Êàðòèíêà: img_3]

In her office at theGazette, Odelia Poole was just finishing up an article on the capture by the Mexican police of well-known criminals Johnny Carew and Jerry Vale. If at that moment her father would have asked her to contract a ten-ton truck driver for the direct purpose of committing vehicular manslaughter on his colleague Jaqlyn Jones, she would have strongly advised him against this particular scheme. But since her father had merely entertained the thought and not actually acted upon it, she continued putting fingers to keyboard until her article had reached its happy conclusion.

Happy for Capital First Bank, the bank Johnny Carew and Jerry Vale had robbed, though perhaps not all that happy for the two bank robbers in question. The criminal element rarely enjoys being collared and thrown into the slammer.

A tap on the doorjamb made Odelia look up, and she perceived she’d been joined by her editor Dan Goory. The white-bearded man who to many looked like a contemporary of Methuselah, was smiling. “Hard at work as usual. Really, Odelia, you are a marvel.”

“Just earning my weekly stipend,” she said, and leaned back. “They finally caught Johnny Carew and Jerry Vale.”

“The crooks who worked for your mother?”

She grimaced, as if a thumbtack had suddenly been introduced to her buttocks. She was a caring and loving young woman, and the thought that her mother had been duped by the two gangsters she’d so unselfishly taken under her wing still stung.

Marge Poole ran the local library, and in that capacity had accepted a request from Johnny and Jerry’s parole officer to allow the two men to spend their community service in the library’s employ. Instead of giving of their best to serve the community, though, they’d dug a tunnel to the neighboring Capital First Bank, and had burgled a number of safe-deposit boxes. Not exactly a nice way torepay their debt to society.

“I have a new job for you,” said Dan now. “What do you know about Soul Science?”

“The name sounds familiar. I’m going to say… Silicon Valley startup?”