Red auras floated through the brush like a string of glowing balloons. The auras belonged to police agents advancing closer, now about two hundred meters away. No time to go through the wallet. I stuffed it inside the satchel.

The agents called to one another. There was no doubt this was a drug war; they were as well-armed as infantrymen and very trigger-happy. Laser pointers from their guns traced before them, like glowing red feelers probing the shadows of the brush.

Except for the bag of money slung over my shoulder, I stood naked with my dork hanging in the sea breeze. I crouched to hide behind a bush. To escape the island, I had to get to my boat, which was moored in a swampy inlet behind me, about a hundred meters away. The agents were fifty meters away and moving closer. I could slip into the brush and make it to the boat except…my wallet and ID remained in the pile of clothes I had stashed when I had transmutated into a wolf. Damn.

The clothes were to my left, somewhere within a grove of palmettos and saw grass. The agents hadn’t reached the spot yet. I counted fifteen red auras, clumped into groups of three. One group turned in my direction.

“The grass here is trampled,” an agent said. The optic tubes of his night-vision goggles gave him a lobster-face. “And I see shoe prints.”

Despite his night-vision goggles, I had the advantage with my vampire eyes. But they had the advantage of numbers and guns.

“The copter nailed one of the assholes around here,” a companion added.

The first agent stopped. “Hold on. There’s another set of prints. Someone barefoot.”

I glanced at my naked feet. Those were my prints.

These agents were no more than twenty meters away. A laser pointer swung toward me. The red line quivered across the branches and leaves above my head. Careful. Steel-jacketed lead slugs could hack my flesh as effectively as silver bullets.

If they were looking for a barefoot suspect, I’d give them one. I lay on my back next to Johnson and shut my eyes.

Brush scraped against fabric. I smelled perspiration from the agent, and hot oil and burned ammunition from his recently fired gun.

A strong light played over my face, making the insides of my eyelids glow. “Here’s the second guy.”

Boots scuffed the earth by my head. “Son of a bitch is naked.”

“You noticed?” Another man’s voice. “You feds got a real grasp of the obvious.” A gloved hand touched my shoulder. “Don’t see a mark on him.”

The first man said, “Don’t recognize him from our list of suspects. Maybe he’s got ID in that bag or shoved up his ass.”

His breath and the odor of a menthol cigarette puffed against my face.

I opened my eyes.

He crouched beside me. His nose was inches from mine. I hit him full-force with vampire hypnosis.

His aura flared like a match. His pupils dilated and his expression went slack. He fell on his ass. The submachine gun slipped from his grasp and clattered to the ground.

The other two agents stepped back. I rotated on my heels, zinging upward in the classic vampire fashion.

“What the f-” one gasped and then froze when I zapped him.

His companion jerked an M-16 to his shoulder. I locked onto his gaze and instantly hypnotized him as well.

Their jaws drooped and they stood slump-shouldered. Hypnosis would hold them long enough for me to escape.

Another group of agents moved toward where my clothes were stashed. I had to act fast.

The palm trees grew close together, the fronds overlapping. I sprinted for the nearest tree and hustled up the trunk, where I leaped to the next tree. From that tree I bounded to the next.

“What was that?” An agent turned on the flashlight attached to his submachine gun and panned the cluster of fronds where I had been. I kept still.

“The wind. I don’t know.”

“Wind, hell, let’s see what jumps out.” The agent shouldered his submachine gun and opened fire. The bullets chopped the tree and tattered palm fronds whipped through the air. He quit shooting and examined the gnarled tree with the light from his gun. He turned off the light and lowered his weapon.

An agent at the far end of the line halted at the spot where my clothes were. He yelled, “I found something.”

Better hurry. I leaped from tree to tree, nimble as a monkey, silent as a bat.

Three agents clustered around my clothes. I jumped and landed beside them.

Startled, they turned toward me. First snatching my clothes, I shook my nakedness and taunted, “Wooga, wooga, wooga.” No need to hypnotize them; I wanted them to panic.

Pie-eyed with surprise, they opened fire and shouted into their radios. By then I was back up the tree, my clothes tucked under one arm and the satchel of money swinging from my shoulder.

I bounded to the next group and repeated my “wooga” introduction. They started shooting. Bullets clipped the brush in every direction. The other groups opened fire and, within a minute, they were gunning for one another and yelling:

“Watch out. We got one wacked on meth.”

“Shoot the bastard. Drop him.”

The helicopter returned. Its searchlight probed the ground and held for a moment on the outline of an agent huddled among the palmettos and bushes.

“Police. Police,” he shouted, panicked like he was about to shit his pants. “Don’t shoot.”

I ran through the brush toward where my boat was moored in the bog. I stepped through the muck and tossed the satchel and my clothes into the boat. I cast loose and climbed aboard. The helicopter and the confused shooting masked my starting of the Evinrude. I kept the throttle cracked enough to quietly back out from under the overhanging vines and cypress moss and into the surf. I pointed the bow to the dark sea and, with the muffled outboard churning the water, slipped away.

I wasn’t worried about what the agents would report. That a naked Tarzan whacked on meth jumped from tree to tree?

My path to the island had been to follow Johnson, and now I had to guess a reverse course. An hour northwest at moderate speed, then turn northeast until I returned to the Keys. The compass ball mounted to the windshield didn’t move. I tapped the plastic housing, to free the compass. The cheap housing broke apart and the compass ball fell to the deck.

What now? I found the Big Dipper and fixed the North Star to keep myself oriented. Sooner or later I should run into one of the islands in the Keys.

What did I have to show for tonight’s work? My best lead was dead, a crooked deputy shot and killed by his fellow cops.

I pulled Johnson’s wallet from the satchel. Maybe I’d find something. I went through his wallet. Monroe County Sheriff Office ID. Credit cards. Gift cards and coupons. After I read each one and decided that it added nothing to my investigation, I tossed it overboard.

Just as I was about to fling one business card away, I stopped and read it again. The card belonged to a hotel resort in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Along the bottom was the name of the resident golf pro. I remembered Odin’s enigmatic clue: Goodman.

Now I knew where I could find a Goodman. The golf pro. His name was Dan Goodman.