21

I’ve been shot at before. Never vicariously, mind you, but I have been shot at. So there’s nothing new to me in hearing the bang of a gun or feeling a bullet whiz by the ear, barely a millimeter to spare before van Gogh syndrome sets in. Doesn’t make it any easier each time it happens, but there’s nothing new in the experience itself.

Seeing yourself shot is a different matter entirely—the blood, the wound, the sheer ickiness of it all—and watching Ernie take a bullet that was meant for me has got me unnerved enough to get good and toasted on the flight back to LA. But the stewardesses are out of condiments, and though mustard seeds have in the past sufficed in a pinch, I refuse to suck on one-ounce plastic packets of Gulden’s just to get a rush. I’m one of only a few dinos on the plane, too, so such an action would probably net me a lot of discomforting stares.

Then there’s the safety factor. I don’t know for sure that the shooter was acting alone, and I don’t want to do anything to alert any Progressive hit man to my presence inside Kala’s costume in case he’s also flying the friendly skies this afternoon. Someone in the Progressive organization has decided that my continued existence is no longer required, and it’s the direct threat that rankles me more than anything else. If you’re going to try to kill me, at least have the balls to do it face-to-face, the old-fashioned way. Then again, I’m the last dino who should talk about having balls right now.

It is with thoughts of Circe, of the Progressives, of the trouble at hand weighing heavily on my mind that I fall into an uneasy slumber. When I wake, the plane is landing in Los Angeles; the pilot announces it’s a quarter past eight, and I set my watch accordingly. Westwood is twenty minutes away—everything is twenty minutes away if you play it right—but by the time I get my Lincoln out of the U-Park lot, argue with the attendant as to the exact number of days my automobile spent in their substandard facility, and eventually burst through the gate, cracking off a chunk of wooden barrier with my front bumper, it’s already nearing nine.

No time to take a quick drive by the office, which is not such a problem since I’m not anxious to meet up with Minsky. It’s not that I feel guilty about taking his money and not doing a whiff of work on his missing Mussolini case, but I don’t have the time to explain anything to the little tyke just now, let alone why I’m guised up like a geisha. With my luck, he’d kiss first and ask questions later.

Anyway, I’ll dissolve into the maddening crowd up in Hollywood, which is just what I need right now. Anonymity with a supermodel figure doesn’t come easy in any town, but in LA you’ve got a fighting chance of being outshone by the next ingenue off the bus.

On the way in, I punch up my voice mail on the car phone and take a listen. Three messages. Number one: Friday, 4:15 P.M. Minsky, calling to check up on our progress a scant half-day after he sent us on the mission to find his floozy, as if he doesn’t trust us to get the job done in a timely fashion. The nerve. His high-pitched warble floats through the air—“and when you find her, bring her in to the cops, throw the book at her, but get the Mussolini first, get the Mussolini—” The last thing I need is a Minsky migraine, so I punch number three, erase, and move on with my life.

Number two: Jules, nine o’clock yesterday evening. Worried that I haven’t given her a call. I’ve already taken care of that concern. Skip and erase.

Number three: Dr. Beauregard, today at 10:00 A.M. Aha, now here’s a call I’ve been waiting for. “Vincent, I’m in town helping out another family,” he drawls, “a sad case, really, a boy who got himself all mixed up with some humans, believe it or not—and I thought you might be having some more questions for me. I’d be glad to oblige, of course . . .” He goes on in that big, charming, Southern way of his, eventually getting around to giving me the name and number of the hotel he’s staying at; it’s the Nikko, a Japanese-run establishment just on the other side of Beverly Hills.

A quick return call, and I’m instantly put through to the doctor’s room.

No rings, just an answer. “Where were we?”

That doesn’t sound like Bo. “I’m sorry,” I say hastily. “I must have the wrong room—”

“Vincent?” says Dr. B., and now I can hear the drawl, the syrupy inflections. “Is that you, son?”

“Oh, hey—I didn’t—you sounded different—”

“I was talking to my grandkids. We got cut off. Glad y’all are back in town.”

It takes five minutes to run through my story, omitting the more graphic details but generally making clear to the doctor that I need some answers, and I need them quickly. “I may need help identifying another deprogrammer, one who may be siphoning information to the Progressives. And there’s more. Much more, I think.”

“Are you sure?” asks Bo. “That would be highly unethical of any practitioner—”

“We’re way beyond ethics, doc. You know a bunch of the others in the field, right, their human guises?”

“Of course, son. If you get me a picture, I’m sure I can identify the man for y’all.”

Dr. Beauregard agrees to meet me at a private location, and I suggest a nightclub I know near his hotel. “I need someplace dark,” I say. “I think I’m in danger.”

“I would not be surprised,” says Bo, and this doesn’t do anything to assuage my anxiety. “We will be as careful as possible.” We set an eleven o’clock meeting time, which gives me an hour or so to get up to Hollywood, squirm out of this costume and into a new one, and soak up whatever information Jules has managed to squeeze out of this town.

“Darling,” she cries as I slink my way into the Wax Museum workroom, her eyes roving over my new curves in appreciation and delight, “you’ve come over to the winning team! I’m so proud of you. . . .”

“Zip it,” I tell her, hoping that there’s no blush-action veins in Kala’s mask. “Last time I came in for work, you made a copy of my guise, right?”

“Down to that cute little navel of yours.”

“Could ya get it for me?”

“Why? You look fabulous, darling!”

“Jules—”

“We could use you in the new show. I’m trying to get us booked into Vegas. You could do a hula number. . . .”

Finally, she disappears into a back room and, after a few minutes of rustling around, reemerges with a spare Vincent Rubio draped over her arm.

“How was Hawaii?” she asks as I begin to undress.

“Sticky. And a little bloody, but I don’t have time to go into it.”

“Where’s Ernie?”

“That’s the bloody part.” I give a quick five-minute rundown of the events, Jules working up a head of steam with every passing detail, and by the time I’m done, she’s pacing the workroom, doing Indy 500 laps around the surgical tables. Meanwhile, I’ve reguised and chosen a nice slacks outfit from the racks of clothing she’s got stashed in one of the many workroom closets.

“I knew something was up with them,” Jules is saying, voice rising. “I knew it—”

“No time for an ego check. Tell me what you found.”

“What didn’t I find? I’ve got newspaper reports, I’ve got eyewitness accounts, I’ve got spectroscopic photoanalysis—”

“Let’s start there. Can you show me?”

Jules’s computer system is state of the art, but for me, it’s art of the abstract variety. Folks these days go cruising around the Internet, bouncing from information to information; the closest I’ve ever come to surfing was that blond-haired dude who tried to pick me up back on the beach.

“Watch this window over here,” Jules is saying, her long fingers slapping away at the keyboard like Elton John playing “The Bitch Is Back.” When he had that charity auction, by the way, and sold off all of his more lavish costumes, a buddy of mine got a great deal on this Turkish guise that Elton—a Hadrosaur, according to my friend—would use to walk the streets in relative anonymity.

“I scanned in the photos you gave me,” Jules is saying, continuing to type as she speaks, “and ran them through a few programs I use to show my clients how the plastic surgery I perform on their guises will meld with the substructure below. You wouldn’t believe how many clients I have who simply can’t understand that no matter how much liposuction I perform, a Brontosaur is never going to have the same waistline as a Coelo. Work with what you have, I tell them. Everyone can be fabulous.”

“Very life affirming,” I say. “Back to the computer.”

“Okay, so I scanned in the photos, one by one, and checked each for an underlying structure.” As she speaks, a series of images—the photos I had given her earlier—pop up on the screen. I pull up a wooden crate stamped noses, swedish and take a seat.

Happy families, reunited with their loved ones. Mothers, fathers, siblings, an ex-Progressive grinning out at the camera, and next to him or her, in every picture, an extra reveler, often a deprogrammer, smiling along, arm around his newest success story. Jules has already circled the key element in each photo, and I watch as the computer eliminates all the irrelevant information and hones in on the sweet cream filling.

Photographs whirl around the screen, enlarging and shrinking themselves, superimposing one shot of a deprogrammer atop another. Nothing looks different to me, but Jules is yesing and aha-ing under her breath, clearly impressed—either with whatever she’s finding or with her own investigative skills. I’ve been known to high-five myself after a good case, but self-gratification only goes so far.

After a scant few minutes, Jules pushes back from her desk, the chair scooting backward on its casters and clunking into a stack of raw guise flesh behind it. With a flourish, she points to the screen, at the same six pictures that have been up there all along, and declares proudly, “There you go.”

Should I be impressed? Should I have any idea what’s going on?

Jules notices my confusion and relishes the opportunity to explicate her findings in detail. “Diplodoci, all of ’em. See that slight bulge where the neck joins the back? The indentation at the stomach?” No, but I have a feeling if she takes the time to tell me exactly how she can detect dino lineage beneath the human skin, I’ll be late for Armageddon, let alone my eleven o’clock meeting with Bo. “Maybe not the third and the fifth,” she continues, “ ’cause it’s tough to tell with that big costume head—but the rest of these characters are definitely from Diplodod stock.”

Does this indicate, perhaps, the presence of a race-based cadre within the Progressives? A group of isolated Diplodoci preying on the others, bending them to their will? Premature assumption, perhaps, but it’s what I’ve got to go on.

“Thanks,” I begin—

But Jules won’t let me go. “That ain’t all, honey. Keep your tush right there, and I’ll show you what else I dragged out of the pits.”

Jules digs into another nearby box, this one purportedly filled with eyelashes, korean but actually empty except for a file folder and some stapled pages. “I cross-referenced every Progressive who left the organization and died soon afterward with the amount of time they’d been in the organization. Did the same with those kids who left the Progressives and didn’t die. Any guesses as to what I found?”

“Nothing?”

“Everything. Let’s look at Rupert for a sec. How long was he in the group?”

I shrug. “Three, four years, they thought. Give or take.”

“Fine. Four years, and he’s dead. Same with the girl down in Long Beach—she was in for six.”

I must be missing the point, because Jules’s eyes are twinkling, and I don’t think it’s due to one of her special New Year’s–themed contact lenses. “We knew that already. If you leave the Progressives, you bite it.”

“Wrong. I found a lot of kids who left the group and are hunky-dory to this very day. The difference is they got out early.”

Jules flips me the papers, and I scan through her information. The trend continues. Four or more years equals death. Two or less equals life. There’s not a lot of data for those in the middle, so it’s hard to judge exactly where the line between assassination and live-and-let-live actually is, but it’s not necessary to confirm my theory: Rupert knew too much.

During his rise up the Progressive ladder, Rupert became privy to more and more information, and by the time we’d cold-cocked him and dragged him back to Westwood, he was too infused with intimate intelligence, too much of a liability to leave dangling out in the real world. You’ve got two choices when your fine-knit sweater is snagged on a loose bit of wood: you can delicately sew the string back into the weave or cut it off at the base. The Progressives went the easy route.

It must have been the same for the others, which at least means that the cult isn’t indiscriminately killing off their errant members; it’s just killing off those who can blab about what they’re up to—the guns, the brainwashing, the foreign coin jumping from hand to hand.

“This is great,” I tell her as I stand, brush a spare nose off my shirt sleeve, and prepare to head back down to mid-city. “Circumstantial, but great. The Council will be interested, I know that much.”

But as I head for the door, papers in hand, ready to meet Bo, get his opinion on the situation, and then hightail it to Council headquarters and bring the roof down on the Progressives’ miscreant noggins, Jules reaches out an arm to stop me. “One more thing,” she says. “And it might not make much of a difference—”

“Everything makes a difference.”

“They’re not the only ones who went away. The Progressives, I mean.” I’m not following her, and she must be able to tell. “I was checking through the papers,” she clarifies, “looking at the days around when Rupert and the others died, and for every twenty-something Progressive that bit it, there was another one, someone not in the group, that disappeared that same day, usually nearby.”

“Same age?”

“Right around there. Rupert said bye-bye on a Thursday—previous day, some kid named Blish—a T-Rex, only twentyeight—vanished. Middle of the night. Not that weird by itself, but it happened over and over again. Strange enough for twenty-somethings to be dropping off like that—”

“And stranger still that they’re doing it in pairs.” Suicide pacts? Assassination clones? Most information focuses investigations; this is only fragmenting it more.

Jules leads me to the door, her hand reassuringly on my back as she gives me a short little hug, pleads with me to be careful, and opens the double deadbolts. “Any idea what all this means?” she asks me. “The photos, the obits, all of it?”

“Got a hunch,” I tell her as I check my watch and notice that I’m running a good fifteen minutes behind schedule, “but there’s no time to explain. I’m late for my dinner date.” And then, just because I know it will tickle her to the bone, I elaborate: “He’s a doctor.”

* * *

 

La Brea Avenue, while not mired in gridlock, is still stop-and-go, even at this time of night. It takes a full half-hour to travel three miles, and as I near Wilshire, I can make out the problem: construction. A whole mess of it. And, of course, the city workers, who by all rights should be serving me tea and crumpets as part of their public-servant duties, are instead sitting on their massive mammal behinds, eating doughnuts and sucking down gallons of black coffee. Meanwhile, the rest of us are forced to breathe each others’ exhaust due to their inability to get any project done on time and under budget.

The traffic ahead suddenly clears out, and a horn blast from behind spurs my foot toward the gas pedal. I pull away with a lurch, the catcalls and laughter of the construction workers trailing behind. Some part of me is itching for a fight, a full-scale battle to do away with all the human nonsense that gets in the way of our daily lives. I’ll get a freakin’ army, I want to yell out. I’ll go rustle up some of those dinos from the jungle and then we’ll see who eats the final doughnut, Mister Homo sapiens, master of the food chain.

The Tar Pit Club isn’t one of your more private locales; it’s a rocking joint in the Miracle Mile part of town, just east of Beverly Hills and just west of some areas you don’t want to be in too late at night. There’s a five-dollar cover charge and a no-drink minimum, so the place is usually packed with dinos and humans of all shapes and sizes flailing away to whatever the music craze of the moment happens to be.

Tonight there’s a live ska band jamming out some backbeat rhythms, and the club is filled with Beverly Hills teenagers, desperately hip, whatever the cost. Dancing consists mostly of bouncing up and down, occasionally in couples, but mostly as a group. This isn’t how we did it when I was a kid, but I’m sure I looked pretty stupid back then, too.

I told Bo to meet me at a booth in the back-left corner of the club—my usual spot whenever I abandon my solitude for the evening and make the drive out here to mid-city—and sure enough, the doctor is waiting there patiently when I arrive, dressed nattily in a big-shouldered blue suit, the kind plantation owners wore in the wintertime back before the Civil War up and took the market out of cotton. Sliding into the booth, I begin to apologize for my late arrival—

“Y’all aren’t that late,” he assures me. “I just got here myself. Traffic ain’t so bad at eleven at night, but it’s still a mite worse than in Nashville.”

“Nashville?” I ask. “I thought you said you were from Memphis.”

“Memphis is my home now,” he explains after a short pause. “Nashville’s where I grew up.”

“Ah. Got it. You want some basil?” I motion for the waitress, but Bo reaches out and puts my arm down.

“No herbs,” he tells me. “I’m driving. Now, let’s get down to business—did you bring the photographs?”

I slide the pages across the table into the doctor’s eager hands. “I had a spectroscopic analysis done,” I say, proud to pronounce the words properly and evincing at least a glancing idea of what they mean, “and I’ve been told that the dinos beneath those costumes are Diplodoci.”

Bo laughs and tosses the pages on the table. “Hell, I coulda told you that, son. You didn’t need a fancy analysis.”

Sure, tell me now. “How can you tell?”

Dr. Beauregard isolates three of the pictures and spreads them out across the desk. Pointing to the deprogrammer in each—one with a mustache, one with a beard, one somewhere in between—he shakes his head and smirks, “I did a fellowship with that one. In these three pictures here, he’s wearing his usual guise, just with different accessories. Think he goes clean-shaven normally. . . .”

That’s it—Dr. B. has the information I’m looking for. “So you know him.”

“I know him well. His name’s Carter—Brian Carter, I believe—and the man is a specialist in field paleontology.”

“He’s a human?” I ask.

“He’s a fossil-placer,” explains Dr. B.

So that’s how he hooked up with Circe—they travel in the same business circles. She must have contacted Carter and convinced him to help out with her plan to keep a tight rein on the Progressive organization.

“Brilliant fellow,” Bo muses.

“A brilliant fellow who’s also connected to the Progressives,” I point out. “Did you tell this Carter fellow anything about your contact with Rupert?”

Bo turns away slightly, avoiding my gaze. “I—I may have mentioned I was coming out to Los Angeles for some fieldwork. . . . May have mentioned Rupert’s name, but . . . professional courtesy, a case study, y’all understand—”

I could be harsh on the guy, tell him that his lack of doctorpatient confidentiality may have cost a young T-Rex his life, but there’s no point in flogging past indiscretions. If Samuel is at the bottom of Rupert’s disappearance, then he’ll be the one to pay in the end. “What about these other ones?” I ask, shoving the other photos into his field of view.

“Don’t recognize the costumes, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s Carter going with a black-market guise. Boy never had a real fondness for the rules.”

This Carter, then, is the key to the whole ugly mess. He’s the one who’s been telling the cult where their lapsed members are located, and he’s the one figuring out ways to bump them off in secret. But if I can locate this fellow in human guise and apply the Vincent Rubio interrogation method (read: lots of pain, little mercy), I may very well be able to find out exactly what happened to Rupert and the others, stop whatever insidious plan Circe and her cadre have been cooking up for years now, bring down the Progressive organization, turn them all in to the honchos up at the Southern California Council, and get this case wrapped up by the end of the evening so that I might return home for a solid week of frolicking in the produce section of Ralphs.

“I don’t suppose you’d know where to find him?” I ask Bo. He’s already been more than helpful in every possible way, but I have a tendency to run favors into the ground. “Carter, I mean.”

He’s about to shake his head, ready to give me a “no” answer, when I see a little buzzer going off behind those eyes. “Actually,” he says, rising higher in the seat, his excitement growing along with mine, “last I heard, he was sponsoring a dig right near here, down in the Tar Pits.”

I’m pretty sure he’s talking about the Pits themselves, not the nightclub we’re presently in, though the sound system would indeed make this a good lecture hall. Ten blocks to the west of us is the George C. Page Museum of Natural Discoveries, a twenty-thousand-square-foot structure dedicated to the La Brea Tar Pits, the large black morass on which it is situated. There isn’t a bona-fide dino bone anywhere near the Tar Pit confines, but within this LA landmark, scientists have found a wealth of Ice Age material, everything from saber-toothed tiger bones to woolly mammoths to old, discarded condoms—the nearby park contributes to much of the nonfossil material—and the excavation shelters erected during the halcyon Eisenhower years now serve as stops along many a visitor’s tour of the area.

“Can you tell me exactly where he’s been leading the digs?” I ask. “Which site?” There are ten or twelve of the shallow basements, and if I can narrow down the information, it will keep me from having to break and enter a dozen times this evening. No chance that Carter is at the park now, but at the very least, I might be able to break into some files or pick up an errant scent.

“I think it’s site seven,” says Bo. “But I’m not sure. Tell you what: I’m all done up for the night, and this sounds like more fun than watching pay-per-view back at the hotel. I’ll come along.”

I’m grateful for the company—missing Ernie’s presence at my side after only seven hours, like an amputee with nothing but a ghost limb—but I can’t put the doctor in what might possibly be harm’s way. And even if I find this Carter before the Progressives find me, and even if the only pain incurred is strictly on Carter’s side of the equation, Dr. Beauregard doesn’t need to know the rumpled details of a PI’s life. Better if I run the interrogation solo.

“Thanks, doc,” I start out, “but there’s . . . there are elements to my job—”

“That ain’t a problem—”

“Messy elements,” I clarify. “Unsavory elements.”

“You think I ain’t seen it all?” he interrupts. Leaning forward, pride in his profession, in his status, riding on every word, he confides in me, “I deprogrammed some of the Manson kids, son.”

* * *

 

The Tar Pits—a mixture of tar and water, actually—run right next to Wilshire Boulevard along the Miracle Mile, separated from the busy street by only a thin chain-link fence that wouldn’t keep out even the laziest vandal. Not that anyone’s interested in diving in for a swim, of course, but if they choose to, we’ll only know about it in twenty thousand years or so when they dredge up the bodies and prop them up for display.

It’s an odd mix of entertainment and education here in the Tar Pits, where on a sunny summer day, the temperature can climb to over a hundred degrees and the resultant Glacier Bay stench can carry for miles. For example, the local curator must have thought the Tar Pits were too bland to attract the proper amount of attention—who wants to look at an oil spill all day?—so in order to spruce the place up, the George C. Page Museum has erected life-sized statues of woolly mammoths and mastodons inside the Pits themselves, depicted in a realistic life-and-death struggle with the imprisoning tar. On a small island of granite poking up from the center of the pit, a concrete baby mastodon watches its mother being sucked under the surface. There’s even a hidden sound system bleating out the elephant calls of death and pain; it’s a morbid little display, really, but the tourists ooh and aah at it from a raised viewing station just outside the museum walkway.

Not many tourists here ‘round midnight, though. A few of the local homeless, pushing their shopping carts and singing their songs and arguing with the manhole covers, a Russian gentleman who swears that our fortunes can be accurately predicted by his cat, nothing out of the ordinary. Bo and I park in an empty lot and trot across a new stretch of sod; they’ve just finished a refurbishment of the area, and though it’s a lot greener now, there’s not much else to show for two years’ worth of construction.

“So,” Dr. B. asks as we walk, “what else y’all been figuring out on these Progressives?”

“A lot. Nothing. Everything. I’ve seen more than I’m supposed to, I know that much—dinosaurs running wild, reverted back to some primal version of themselves. A storage hut full of weapons—”

“Guns?” he asks incredulously.

“Rifles, pistols, bazookas, you name it.” Okay, technically, I didn’t see any bazookas, but it’s the kind of minor exaggeration that can make a story more interesting, so I go with it. “They have something planned—something international, I believe.”

“I’ve been studying the Progressives for years,” he says, “but I never heard anything like this.”

“Believe it, doc. I plan on filing about six hundred motions with every Council I can find once this is all over with. Hell or high water, the Progressives are going down.”

No response from Bo; I hope I haven’t worried him with my John Wayne side. I can be pretty intimidating sometimes.

We arrive at the excavation site, just a hole in the ground surrounded by more wire-link fence; a metal staircase leads down into the viewing area overlooking the pit. It’s impossible to tell if the small room is currently occupied—note previous comment on used condoms—but I take the chance of being the interruptus in some unlucky couple’s coitus and descend, Bo right behind me.

A single lightbulb hangs from a wire in the center of this three-walled room, and I flick it on, illuminating the decrepit viewing area with a burst of harsh white light. To my left, right, and behind me are ten-foot-high metal walls, the steel floor beneath littered with soda cans and beer bottles. Strangely, the smells of the tar aren’t as strong down here, perhaps because the constant shade keeps the sun from baking the stench into the air.

Where the fourth wall should be, there’s nothing but a guard rail and a plaque, and beneath it, the pit itself. excavation 7, reads the sign. opened july 12, 1959. Squinting into the darkness of the pit down below, I can make out a heap of tar, but nothing in the way of fossils or mummified creatures.

“Pretty boring place for a lecture,” I say. “I thought it would be more . . . open.”

Bo is beside me, also gazing into the pit; he picks up a pebble and drops it down, watching it thunk onto the surface ten feet below. The pebble does not sink; it simply sits on top of the black goop and waits to be sucked under. Death by delay. It’s like waiting in line at the DMV, only it smells better down here.

Dr. Beauregard leans back against the far wall. “These places . . . they’re very isolated, aren’t they?”

“From what I can tell. Hey, you know if that Carter guy lives in the area?”

I’ve put him off guard—Bo flusters. “I—I don’t know—”

My cell phone is out in a heartbeat—I’m the fastest draw in the west when it comes to mobile communications—and I’m dialing Dan’s home number. I’m sick and tired of being routed and rerouted every time I call his LAPD office, so, hopefully, I’ll get through this time. “I’m calling Dan—Sergeant Patterson,” I tell Dr. B. “You wanna talk to him, say hi?”

“No—no, you feel free . . .”

Two rings, and a real, honest-to-goodness voice—“Yello . . .?”

“Praise the Lord, he’s home,” I say into the phone. “You are one hard Bronto to get in touch with.”

Instantly contrite, Dan is apologizing all over the place for not speaking with me earlier. “I tried over the weekend,” he says, “but you weren’t answering, and I didn’t want to leave a message—”

“Forget about it,” I tell him. “Let you off the hook if you do me a favor.”

“Anything.”

“I need the address, priors, and whatever you got on some guy named Brian Carter. A doctor, I think.”

“Sure, no problem. What’s up?”

“Just a little investigation,” I say, giving a wink to Bo. He does not wink back. I turn, staring into the tar pits as I speak. “I’m out here with the deprogrammer you turned me on to.”

“Huh?”

“Dr. B. Bo. Beaumont Beauregard.” How many times does he want me to say the name for him?

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Vincent.”

I sigh loudly, then carefully explain, worried for my friend’s failing memory. “When I called you, back about three weeks ago, I asked you to recommend a cult deprogrammer—”

“And I said I’d get back to you, I know, I know. But that’s why I’m apologizing—I kept forgetting to tell you, I don’t know anyone who can help.”

“What? No, no, I got a call from the doctor, and he said that you—”

“This Dr. Beauregard you’re talking about . . .” says Dan, “I have no idea who he is. I’ve never heard of him in my life—”

It’s right about then that the pain begins, a bursting pressure starting in my sinuses, traveling through my nose and up into my head—my entire body suddenly stuffed full to bursting with every imaginable scent: carnivals and Cracker Jacks, carburetors and cola, a cavalcade of smells wracking every muscle, every ligament—

I can barely turn around, vision dimming, the viewing area fading, dissolving away, that prehistoric jungle quickly vibrating into place—Dr. Beauregard, standing in front of me, here but not here, carefully taking the cellular phone out of my hands—Dan’s voice, calling in the distance, “Vincent, can you hear me? Vincent, hello, are you still there?”—an ancient oak blasting up from the ground, plants popping into existence, mosquitoes the size of eagles materializing, laughing, and flapping away—Dr. Beauregard tossing the phone into the tar pits below—a strange, content smile spreading across his wide, kind face—and I’m wondering if the phone is still on, if Dan is still talking, if my cellular company is going to charge me for the extra minutes—

Another sudden burst of scent, and now I can smell the herbs forcing it along, the basil and cilantro spreading into every pore of my body, my nostrils the gateway to this wonderful, horrible experience—and soon there’s nothing else except for me, Dr. Beauregard, a single metal rail, and a prehistoric world alive with a billion natural specimens running wild, running free.

A push on my chest, a trip, a stumble, and I’m over the railing and falling backward, floating on a cloud before I come to a landing in something wet, something sticky. Dr. Beauregard is so far away now, high above me, and he’s looking down, waving to me, waving bye-bye, bye-bye.

“Goodbye, Mr. Rubio,” says the good doctor. “Give my regards to the ancestors.”

I will, Bo. I will . . .