“None that I could see. I had only moonlight and starlight to go by and…” Something flashed in his memory.

Jack leaned closer. “What?”

“On its rear panel…I think I saw something that looked like a flower, but all black. At least it looked black in the moonlight. After that, I remember flashing lights and then I didn’t see anything until I woke up this morning.”

A sudden realization hit him like…like an onrushing truck. He looked at Jack and then at Anya.

“Someone tried to kill me.”

“Not necessarily,” Jack said. “From what you heard them say…’thank your lucky stars he’s still alive…that sounds like they didn’t want to kill you.”

He sensed that Jack didn’t believe a word of it, that he was just trying to make him feel better. But it wasn’t working.

“They wanted to hit my car. And I have a feeling they were going to feed me to that alligator.”

“Maybe you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

No…that didn’t wash. No question in Tom’s mind: Someone wanted him dead.

The thought sickened him. When he’d been in Korea, the NKs and the Chinese Reds had wanted him dead, but that was war, that was to be expected. This was Florida. He’d been here just a little over a year. He’d made a number of new friends but couldn’t imagine how he could have made an enemy.

Yet someone had tried to kill him.

Suddenly Tom felt exposed out here on Anya’s lawn. He wanted walls around him. He rose unsteadily from the chair.

“I think I’ll head home.”

“You okay?” Jack said.

“Yeah. Sure. I’ll just go inside and lie down. Excuse me, Anya.”

“Go, Tom,” she said. She was still in her recliner, the wet dog curled up on her lap. “You should rest.”

“I’ll come with you,” Jack said.

“That’s okay. I can find my own way.”

“That’s not the point,” his son said, rising and gripping his arm. “Come on. I’ll walk you back. I know how you feel.”

No, you don’t, Tom thought. And I hope you never do.

A good kid, Jack. No, not a kid. A man, and a pretty gutsy one at that, placing himself between a ferocious gator and the old folks with only a lightweight resin chair as a weapon. But Jack couldn’t know what it was like to fear for his life, to have someone wanting him dead. That took a war. It had been Tom’s great hope for his sons that neither would have to go to war as he did and know that kind of fear. And it had worked out. Both boys had been too young for Vietnam, and a volunteer army had been in place by the time the Gulf Wars rolled around.