“Take a mulligan,” Lewis said with growing irritation. He rapped his knuckles on the roof. “First, you need to get back from the fence.”

“What fence?”

“I meant the junipers, sir.”

But he had said “fence.” “Maybe my ball went on the other side.” I extended a leg to dismount.

Lewis planted a big hiking boot in my way. The corners of his mouth bent into a frown. “Sir, please return to the path. I’ll look for your ball.”

“If you cost me this game, so help me.”

“You got a problem, talk to my supervisor.” He leaned close and sneered. “You rich, dopey assholes think the rules don’t apply. Well, you can stick it up…”

I lifted my sunglasses.

The pupils in his eyes dilated into circles the size of dimes. His face went slack and his jaw drooped. Saliva pooled over his lower lip.

I grabbed his collar and walked him back into the cab of his truck. Pushing him into the passenger seat, I turned his head and fanged him, drinking only enough to keep him docile and quiet. I savored his blood as if it were a chocolate truffle melting in my mouth.

I took his cap and left him doubled-over. I scooted behind the steering wheel and turned the truck toward the far end of the junipers. Driving close, I saw that they had overgrown a tall chain-link fence.

I reached the end of the junipers and paused. The tree line turned north. A cinder-block tower with dark windows overlooked the entrance.

“Unit 83,” a voice beckoned over the radio speaker. “Are you 10-6?”

Looking back to the hotel from this perspective, I appreciated the architectural sleight of hand used by the designers of the resort. The wings of the hotel curved away. The windows were carefully angled so that guests had splendid views of the grounds yet no one could see into the area defined by the perimeter of junipers.

The voice started again. “Unit 83, you still 10-6 with the wanderer nosing around the annex?”

Another voice hailed, this one stern. “Eight-three, you copy?”

I noticed the number 83 written on the radio console. They were asking for Lewis and the “wanderer” must be me. The annex was this secret building with all the antennas and security detail.

“Eight-three?” the first voice asked again.

If I replied, they would recognize that I was not Lewis. Under hypnosis, humans weren’t good at conversation, so I couldn’t expect him to answer convincingly.

“Eight-three, you there?”

I picked up the microphone and keyed the transmit button twice, radio shorthand for “I acknowledge.”

The stern voice returned. “Eight-three, this is tower one, when you’re called, respond immediately.”

Asshole. Again I clicked twice.

What was on the other side of the fence? I couldn’t risk getting closer to the entrance without being further challenged by the tower. If the measures here were sophisticated enough for the GPS transmitters to narc on the golf carts, then the fence was certainly wired to catch trespassers.

I returned to my cart and left Lewis conked out in the cab of his truck. I covered his face with the cap to make it look like he was dozing off.

I drove back to the pro shop, wondering: why so much secrecy?

The fenced area was well protected against human intruders. But what about a vampire? Let me find Goodman first. Then I’d come back and I’d find out.

A somber crowd accompanied me in the Savannah Airport. People stared apprehensively at the various monitors scattered throughout the concourse.

A commuter plane had crashed en route from Kansas City to Chicago. The news programs showed the crash site from a distance, a smoky black smudge rising behind a stand of trees. There were shots of ambulances and police cruisers parked along a road, and of the response team from the National Transportation Safety Board disembarking from a helicopter.

The news announcer described the doomed aircraft, a Raytheon Beech King 1900D twin turboprop, as its photo flashed to one side of the screen. The airliner belonged to a small regional service, Prairie Air. All on board the small commuter, the crew of three and sixteen passengers, were accounted for. No survivors.

Even I got a case of the nerves. Nothing like a plane crash to temper the romance of flying.

I remembered the Araneum’s message with the article about the charter plane that had gone down. That airplane had been a smaller Cessna Caravan, a completely different type from the Beech King 1900D. Were these two crashes related? Were aliens involved? How so? For what purposes?

If the aliens suspected that I was on their trail, how vulnerable was my airliner? The UFO in the gulf had stalled my Wave Runner and paralyzed me. Had they done the same thing to the Beech King and crew?

Our flight to Chicago was especially quiet, which made the groans and squeals coming from the belly of the Boeing 767 that much louder and more worrisome. The attendants did a brisk business keeping the adults, including me, medicated with alcohol.

While I killed off a trio of Smirnoff miniatures, I thought about how I would find Goodman. Okay, so he was in Chicago. What was I to do? Put his face on a milk carton? Go out to Wrigley Field and announce, “Has anyone seen Dan Goodman?”

I paid the extra five bucks to watch the TV display attached to the back of the seat in front of me. While I wanted to distract myself from thinking about a plane crash, I kept flipping back to news about the wreck anyway, partly out of morbid fascination and partly out of superstition that watching the news would protect me from a similar fate.

Every fifteen minutes, CNN kept showing the same clip, a fast-paced montage that implied detailed reporting. (The commercials were from Rizè-Blu.) First CNN showed the smoke above the crash site, then stock footage of passengers boarding a Beech King 1900D turboprop, emergency technicians donning hazmat suits, and finally police escorting grimfaced investigators past a barrier of orange cones and yellow tape.

About the sixth time the clip repeated, I had memorized the choreography and could pick out more of the details.

One. Like the way the smoke above the crash curled into the shape of a chicken head.

Two. In the stock footage, there were sixteen passengers on the Beech King (in appropriately politically correct demographics), eight men, eight women (wearing enormous shoulder pads), six of the group black, three Asian.

Three. The emergency techs slipping into the blue hazmat suits were two men (the dumpy guy in the foreground had a walrus mustache) and a muscular blonde who looked like she ran marathons while French-curling an anvil.

Four. A state trooper parted the way for two men to pass through the barrier and a gauntlet of onlookers. The clip showed the men from the back. Both wore dark windbreakers. The second man glanced to the right for an instant before the clip ended.

It was him.

The tousled mat of blond hair, a flat brow, the chiseled nose, a well-defined jaw with a fleshy pan on his dimpled chin, the tanned complexion.

Dan Goodman.

The image of his face sobered me right up. I waited anxiously for the clip to be shown again.

The sequence returned. Smoke. Airplane. Hazmat suits. Trooper. Second man turns his head.

Goodman.

As a vampire, I have a kundalini noir. And as a private detective, I also have an internal stink-o-meter. Right now that stink-o-meter jumped to the red zone.

Gilbert Odin had been killed by an alien blaster.

He gave me the name of his killer: Goodman.

One of Carmen’s chalices showed up dead from a blaster wound.

The man who had found the dead chalice was a dirty cop, now also dead, named Deputy Toller Johnson.

On Johnson’s body I found a business card for a golf pro named Dan Goodman.