“This salt water ain’t doing your undercarriage any good, hon,” he said.

[16] “It’s my undercarriage,” Dak said.

“Whatever,” the guy said, and belched. Then he sort of passed out.

I say “sort of” because he never went to sleep. He passed into an alcoholic fog where he wasn’t really connecting with what was happening. He was docile as a baby, and in the morning he wouldn’t remember a thing. Right now he’d blow a perfect ten on the lush-o-meter.

There’s a good chance we saved his life. The tide could have easily taken him out to sea where he’d drown without ever waking up.

“What’s your name, dude?” Dak was asking him.

“This dude is down for the count, my friend,” I said. “We’d better get him out of here before the crabs eat him.”

“Drag him back in the dunes?” Alicia suggested.

“Worse than crabs back in the dunes,” Dak said. “Passed-out guy could get raped back there in the dunes.”

“He’d never know it,” Alicia said.

“Maybe a certain soreness in the morning…” Dak rubbed his ass, and we all laughed. Okay, so it wasn’t so funny. I felt a little silly with relief. You think about it, you realize how your whole life can change in two seconds. We could have been gathered around a dead or dying man.

Kelly might almost have been reading my thoughts.

“We nearly killed him, don’t you think we ought to try to take him home?”

“And have him blow chunks all over my upholstery? Let him fight off the fairies his own self.”

“Gin doesn’t come in chunks,” Alicia said. She showed us an empty bottle of Tanqueray she had stumbled over.

“Yeah? Say he ate one of those World Famous Astroburgers an hour ago.” Dak nodded toward the bar in the distance.

“Pretty good gin for a wino.”

“He’s not a wino. He hasn’t been sleeping in back alleys. Look at his clothes.”

It was true, the sneakers sold for well over a hundred dollars a pair, and they looked new. The shirt and pants were expensive labels, too.

[17] “And he don’t drink wine, either,” Dak said. “So what’s that make him? A gin-o? Whatever, it don’t make his vomit any sweeter.”

“So, we gonna take him home or not?”

“Where’s home?” Kelly asked.

We all looked down at him again. He was still smiling, humming something I didn’t recognize. A wavelet hit him and eddied around our feet, then sucked a little deeper hole under him as it ran back out. That must have been how his legs got buried. An hour from now he’d be under the sand, somebody else’s problem. But none of us wanted that.

So I reached down and grabbed the side of his pants and pulled him up a bit, then fished his wallet out of his hip pocket.

It was hand-tooled leather and fairly thick. The first thing I saw was the corner of a hundred-dollar bill sticking out. I opened it and pulled out a wad of cash. I thrust it out to Dak, who looked startled and took it. He counted it.

“Eight hundred big ones,” he said.

“So take out a taxi fee and let’s get him home.”

He handed the cash back to me. “What’s eating you, anyway?”

I didn’t really know. Part of it was that I sure could have used the money. Who would know? Certainly not this whacked-out jerk, lying there pissed out of his mind.

You’d know, Manuel, Mom said. She had this annoying habit of speaking just as loudly when she wasn’t there as when she was.

“We’ll just dump him in the back,” I said. “I’ll ride with him. He barfs, I’ll clean it up.” Dak waved it away, and I looked at the wallet again. Visa, MasterCard, American Express, all platinum, all made out to one Travis Broussard.

“Cajun,” Kelly said, peering over my shoulder.

“Huh?”

“The name,” she explained. “There’s some Cajun families from the Florida panhandle, I think.” I didn’t know what difference that made, unless he lived in the panhandle. That would be too far to drive him. I found the driver’s license, and as I pulled it from its pocket another card fell to the sand. Alicia picked it up. I pointed out the address on the license to Dak and Kelly.

[18] “Is that far from here?”

“Forty-five minutes, maybe half an hour this time of night. Out in the boonies, though. Don’t look at me that way. I’ll take the dude. Won’t even charge him for my gasoline.”

Alicia whistled under her breath. “Look at this,” she said. “The guy’s an astronaut.”

“Let me see that,” Dak said, and grabbed the card. Then Alicia played keep-away with her flashlight for a moment until Dak and I overpowered her.

“This expired three years ago,” Dak said. But before that it had been a gate pass to the Kennedy Space Center, and identified Broussard as a colonel and a chief pilot in the NASA VentureStar program.

THE QUICKEST WAY from the beach to Rancho Broussard involved twenty miles or so on the Florida Autopike. Dak eased Blue Thunder onto the ramp and allowed the Pike computer to interrogate his precious baby. There are several things about the Autopike that just rub Dak the wrong way. The most basic is simply that he hates to surrender control of his rig. “You go driving, you should have at least one hand on the wheel, like God intended.”

I didn’t argue with him on that one. There was still something profoundly creepy about cars that steered themselves, at least to folks like me and my mother. We could barely afford the thirty-year-old Mercury that Dak and I were always rescuing from a one-way trip to the junkyard. That Merk was not Pike-adaptable without spending about ten times what the old wreck was worth. Poor folks like us ride the Autopike about as often as we take the ballistic Orient Express to Tokyo.

The other thing Dak hates about the Pike is… well, let’s face it, nobody likes to get passed, right? Nobody our age, anyway, and for sure nobody driving a rig as gaudy as Blue Thunder. But ol’ Blue was built for power, not for speed. We were banished into the D lane, the outer one for vehicles that cruise at about eighty-five or ninety. What [20] we call the “blue hair” lane, for all the old ladies in their well-preserved Caddies and Buicks. Now you can see them by the thousands in the D lane, going places they were too timid to drive to before the Pike opened. It’s a drag to be tucked in among them while you watch the soccer moms in their minivans pass you in the last lanes.

Dak pulled into one of the brightly lit authorization booths. Kelly and I scrambled out of the bed and set Colonel Broussard on his feet. He needed support, but he could stand. We shoved him into the narrow backseat as the Pike computer checked some eighty or ninety roadworthiness items every time you entered, from airbag sensors to tire pressure. We hopped in behind him.

“Is this my car?” Broussard asked.

“Just take it easy, sir,” Kelly said. “We’ll have you home soon.”

“Okay.”

“If he barfs in my car, man…”

“Please state your destination,” the computer said. Dak told it the exit number, and the computer told him what the fare would be.

“Do not attempt to leave the vehicle while it is in motion.” I heard the doors click as the computer locked them.

“Do not attempt to steer the vehicle until you are told it is safe.” I could see Dak idly spinning the disconnected steering wheel.

“Do not unbuckle your safety belts at any time. The next rest wayside is thirty minutes away, so if you need to use the facilities, press the rest button on your Autopike Control Console now.”

“I’ll just piss in a Mason jar,” Dak said.

“Don’t miss,” said the computer. “You’re due for an oil change in five hundred miles. Your left front tire is showing some uneven wear. And all that salt and sand isn’t doing your undercarriage any good.”

“That’s what I said!” Colonel Broussard shouted.