Joe, wide-eyed, said, “Look, listen, just . . .”

“But I’m going to give you a head start,” she said. “I’ll count to five. See how far you can get.”

“This is crazy, you can’t—”

“One.”

“Sandra! Stop and think about what you’re—”

“Two.”

Joe glanced nervously to one side, then beyond Sandra, as though planning which was the best escape route.

“Three.”

He spun around a full one hundred and eighty degrees and bolted, but he didn’t get far. On his very first step, the toe of his right foot got caught under one of the pieces of broken fencing that the Cadillac had dragged through the yard.

Joe tripped.

His body pitched forward into the air. He threw both hands out in front to brace himself for his fall, but it turned out he wasn’t heading for the ground.

Joe was falling toward the left back corner of the Cadillac.

And its enormous, towering, chrome, dagger-like tailfin.

Joe tried to turn his body in midair to avoid it, but he was too slow. The side of his neck connected with the tailfin, and he struck it with enough force that the point went all the way through and came out the other side.

That was where he hung, impaled, and very dead, until teams of emergency responders swarmed the island later that night.

Fifty

It was nearly a month later when the body shop brought back Bruce’s Cadillac. He’d had it sent to a place on the mainland that specialized in restoring old cars, and luckily, this was not an operation that was particularly attentive to legitimate ownership. When they’d taken the car away on a flatbed truck, Bruce made no mention of the fact that it was not, technically speaking, his, or that the plates on it were not, in the strictest sense of the word, legit.

Mere trivialities.

Even before his release from the hospital he was scouting up good repair places. If it had only been the side of the vehicle, where the Arrival had plowed into him, it might not have been that big a job. But then he had to go and drive through half a dozen front yards and broadside that Arrival, then that son of a bitch Brandon Kyle put a bullet through the front windshield.

The repairs were going to take nearly half of Bruce’s savings. Oh well, you can’t take it with you.

He hoped Kyle spent the rest of his life in jail. And even though Massachusetts had outlawed capital punishment, there was still a chance the guy could be sentenced to death because the US government was pursuing various federal charges against him. It did have the death penalty, and if Uncle Sam wanted to fry his ass, they’d move him to another state to do it.