Donny squatted down and peered into the hole. What he saw was a bigger space than he expected. A little cubed steel cave buried in the ground, big enough for a small work crew. Sticking out of one wall was something like a pilot light. A flare. That was lit. And around the flame were three raccoons. In the weird light, they seemed the size of seventh graders.

Even weirder, Donny could have sworn they were cooking food on sticks.

But as he rubbed his eyes to make sure it wasn’t the mushrooms, one of them noticed Donny, snarled, and screamed at him.

Those eyes stayed with him as he ran, trying to find the lights of the boats. The eyes, and the heads, which he could swear looked bigger than any raccoons he had ever seen.

48

Donny’s head was clear by the time the sun began to work its way up over the ragged skyline. It was Sunday, and his case wasn’t as dead as he had thought. But if he wasn’t on his way back to Dallas by the time the sun started to go back down, it would be.

Donny looked around to gather his bearings. It wasn’t hard to figure out where he was. On the river, way uptown, looking at the opposite bank and wondering if he could swim it. He also wasn’t far from Joyce’s. And Joyce had information he needed, and other things to answer for.

He cut in from the river along one of the side streets that fronted the park. Some of the houses were still occupied, and Donny saw an old woman out tending her wild garden.

He found the backside of the fence that surrounded Joyce’s place, the high fence that had kept the animals inside the zoo. The gate was locked, with a triple chain, which was odd in a community where all doors were usually open. He looked for Joyce or Sig back in there where the house was. But the only sign of people he saw was a truck, an old pickup. That was an even weirder thing to see, in the city that had banned cars. The french-fry smell told him it was one of those biodiesel conversions. It had an oversized camper top in the bed and a cargo trailer at the hitch.