Keyes was not sure where the creature went, but he warily scanned the stratosphere from a protective crouch. He decided the bat was welcome to the solitude of the cabin; he'd wait outside for Skip Wiley or whoever owned those cowboy boots.

The afternoon passed slowly through the binoculars. Keyes didn't lay eyes on another human being, and he found himself living up to his lie, watching the birds of the Everglades: cormorants, ospreys, grackles, red-shouldered hawks, even a pair of roseate spoonbills. Finding the birds was an amusing challenge but, once spotted, they did not exactly put on a breathtaking show. The fact was, most of the birds seemed to be watching him.

Keyes finally was forced to avail himself of the outhouse—an act of sheer courage—and he stopped on the way out to study the mysterious cowboy boots. They were Tony Lamas, size eleven, with no name inside. Keyes was careful not to move them.

As the sun dropped and a lemon twilight settled on the shack, Keyes knew it was decision time. Once darkness came, there was no getting out of the Glades without a beacon. He'd have to spend the night with no food, no water and, most critically, no bug repellent. December wasn't a prime mosquito season, but a horsefly already had extracted a chunk of Keyes's ankle to remind him that billions of other starving insects were waiting their turns.

And then there was Mel, who had warned him to have the canoe back at dusk, or else. Keyes imagined all the random damage that a man like Mel could do with his American Express card, and decided to call it a day.

He fitted the binoculars into the case and climbed into the canoe. He slipped the half-hitch over the piling and pushed off with both hands. As the canoe skimmed away from the cabin, Keyes rose to his knees and reached for the oar.

But the oar was gone.

It couldn'tbe. But it was.

Fore and aft, the bottom of the canoe was empty.

Keyes carefully turned around so he could see the cabin—it couldn't be more than twenty yards away. He needed to get back there, to get his feet on something solid. Then he'd try to figure out what the hell was going on.

He inched to the prow and found a comfortable position. With both hands Keyes began to paddle vigorously, fracturing the calm of the pond. Yet the canoe scarcely moved.

The boat was nestled firmly in a patch of hyacinth weeds. The fat green bulbs and fibrous stems clung to the hull and made it impossible to get up a head of steam. Keyes desperately needed something to hack the boat free.

The uneasiness in his gut started to feel a little like panic. He feared that he was being watched; that whoever owned the western boots had stolen the oar from the canoe, and that whoever had stolen the oar didn't want him to go.

"Skip!" Keyes shouted. "Skip, are you there?"

But the marsh swallowed his voice, and only the shrill cicadas replied.

Keyes decided it was vital not to abandon the canoe. He regarded himself a competent swimmer, but realized that this was not Lake Louise at scenic Camp Trailblazer—this was serious swamp. With no buddy system, unless you counted eels.

Keyes couldn't be sure how deep the tea-colored water was, but he knew the weeds would make swimming treacherous. He was scared of getting tangled underwater, or sucked down by the muck. True, it was only twenty yards to the cabin, but it was a nasty goddamn twenty yards.

He leaned across the bow and began ripping up the hyacinths and tossing them aside in sodden stringy slumps. Painstakingly Keyes labored to clear a channel for the stymied canoe, but night came too quickly. He tried again to paddle by hand; this time the canoe moved six, seven, maybe eight feet before the knotted lilies seized it.

Brian Keyes was stuck. Robbed of detail, the cabin became a blocky shape in the darkness; to the east, the dike formed a perfectly linear horizon. Keyes sat back on his heels, his hands dripping water down the gunwales. His face was damp, and gnats were starting to buzz in his ears and eyes. He wasn't thinking about Mel anymore. He was thinking that this could be the worst night of his life.

Overhead, nighthawks sliced the sky, gulping bugs, and a big owl hooted twice from a faraway oak. The wind was dead now, so Keyes could hear every secret rustling in the swamp, though he could see almost nothing. After an hour he stopped trying to see at all, and just imagined—imagined that the sharp splash near the dike was only a heron spearing a minnow; imagined that the creaking plank was just a wood rat exploring the empty cabin; imagined that the piercing wail that seemed to float forever across the Glades was only a bobcat ending a hunt.

Keyes lay down in the canoe and propped his head on the leather binocular case. Even the sky was blank, held starless by the high clouds. With some effort he managed to close his eyes and tune out the traffic of the wilderness.

He thought of Jenna and felt stupid: she'd done it to him again, with one lousy dinner. He was marooned out here because he'd listened to her, and because he'd enjoyed the improbable notion that she needed him. He should have known there'd be trouble; with Jenna, you could bank on it. Keyes imagined her at that moment, puttering around the kitchen making dinner, or doing those damn Jane Fonda leg-lifts on the living-room rug. If she were worried at all, it was about Skip Wiley, not him.

Wiley. Stealing the oar from the canoe was the sort of stunt Wiley would pull, Keyes thought. But why didn't I hear anything? Where could he be hiding? And what was he waiting for? For Christ's sake, the joke was over.

Keyes sat up slowly in the canoe, suddenly aware that the crickets and the nighthawks had fallen silent. The Everglades had become perfectly still.

Something was wrong.

Keyes knew, from watching Tarzan movies as a kid, that whenever the jungle became quiet, something terrible was about to happen. The cannibals were about to attack or the elephants were about to stampede or a leopard was about to get dinner—any of which seemed preferable to one of Skip Wiley's surprise visits. Keyes wished like hell that he'd brought the cane bough with him on board the canoe.

A shadow materialized on the porch of Wiley's cabin.

It was a man's form, erect but motionless. In the emptiness of the night Keyes could hear the man breathing. He also heard the frantic hammering of his own heart.

"Wiley?"

The figure didn't move. Featureless, it appeared to face him with folded arms.

"Skip, get me outta here, dammit." Keyes forced a laugh, brittle with fear. With bloodless knuckles he clutched the gunwales of the canoe. "Skip?"

The shadow on the porch stepped back until it filled the frame of the cabin door. Muscles knotting, Keyes peered at the mute figure. He felt a cool drop of sweat trickle down his spine, and he shuddered. He was ready to dive from the canoe at the first glint of a gun.

"Look, I don't know who you are, but I don't mean any harm," Keyes said.

Nothing from the specter.

"Please, wave your hand if you can hear me," Keyes implored.

To his astonishment, the pensive shadow raised its right hand and waved. Keyes smiled inwardly, thinking: At last, progress!—not realizing that the man's gesture was not a wave at all, but a signal.

Idiotically Keyes raised his own right hand in amiable reciprocation. He remained so transfixed by the figure at the cabin that he didn't see what he should have seen: a dark brown hand, bare and smooth, rising from the water and alighting on the starboard side of the canoe, precisely where his own hand had been.

When Keyes finally was distracted from the silent watcher, it was not by other sights or sounds, but by a paralyzing centrifugal sensation.

The canoe was spinning out from under him.

He was in the air.