“Never mind what’s up. The four of us are going to have a little fun.”

He’d already had his cake. Opened Barbara’s present. Made himself known. The last thing people would be thinking was Where’s Neal Nash?

And Barbara…Barbara understood impulse better than most.

Less than ten minutes later Neal was behind the wheel of his Jaguar, parked behind the hangar, tapping his fingers to an inaudible beat on the steering wheel, waiting for his friends.

“A hunting party,” he said. “That’s what it’s called on a night like this. That’s what you call it when a party goes hunting.”

12

“You can’t leave your own party,” Harvey said, drenched and happy.

The four men sat in the idling Jaguar. Roger blew smoke out a slit in the window.

Neal cleared his throat.

“You know what I really wanna do for my birthday?”

“You wanna go hunting,” Saul said.

“I wanna go hunting.”

Cautious excitement brewed in the car; the honor of being inside Neal Nash’s inner circle always came with a holding of breath.

“Sure, Neal,” Harvey said. “Where do you want to go?”

“The West Fields,” he said. “Let’s shoot us a deer. A pheasant. Something I can take home and stuff. A birthday bird. We could be back in an hour. This party will still be going. Hell…it ought to still be going tomorrow.”

“Right on,” Roger said. “I’m game.”

“Don’t say that,” Neal said, “or I’m liable to shoot you.”

Then he started the car.

Roger, Harvey, and Saul had been to Africa with Neal. They’d tracked elephants and leopards. They’d stood up in one another’s weddings. They knew him as well as anyone would. And yet none mentioned the strange route he took to the West Fields.

Perhaps he was avoiding the Goblin Police.

As they barreled down dirt roads, Harvey, drunk, imagined they might surprise a kid getting his first hand job: Here come four sixty-year-olds, falling out of a Jaguar, looking to shoot the first thing they see.

The grass framing the roads, so Goblin green during the day, looked transparent in the Jaguar lights. As if every blade of grass were a tiny mirror, reflecting the gushing Goblin sky.

“Where are we going again?” Saul asked at last. The first to question where the night was leading.

But Neal didn’t answer. As the roar of the engine rose to meet the roar of the sky, the Jaguar howled like a living animal, as if, finally, the hunters had been swallowed by the beast.

13

The Jaguar didn’t handle well in the rain and, with Nash visibly drunk, Saul started to worry. The car was hydroplaning and Neal took some of the turns far too tight. Roger was nearly passed out in the passenger seat and Harvey stared dumbly out the window.

But Saul wanted to know what was making him so nervous.