Synopsis

Dr. Dan Trix and Elaine Newman are attending a musical event in a church. Then the pulpit explodes. Had Trix and Elaine been sitting in their assigned seats, they would be as dead as the pastor. A preacher on a hunting trip is killed by a stray bullet. Students at a local Catholic university are shot to death. Christian bloggers and pundits are suggesting this is an attack; a religious war has begun on U.S. soil. Trix had no idea that discovering opioids in the dead pastor’s office would lead he and Lester to Gdansk, Poland to learn that they may have two lethal problems, not just one.

Chapter 1.

The sound of sirens didn’t alarm me at first.

Sirens are usually white noise, as are Jake Brakes, barely muffled tricked-out Hondas, the occasional impatient car horn, rap music through after-market speakers and open windows. University Parkway in Sarasota isn’t exactly a stone’s throw away, more like a solid five iron. So if the wind is blowing toward the Parkway, the fountain is spraying in the pond behind the house, the ceramic Buddha frog is spitting water into our swimming pool, and the birds are regaling one another, you have to listen to hear it.

I was sitting on the lanai, reading a review in WSJ of a $2.4 million Bugatti Veyron Super Sport thinking owning that car would be like buying a German shepherd then keeping it in the bathroom, when the siren caught my attention. An EMS vehicle had pulled off the Parkway onto the quarter-mile access road to Black Forest Country Club.

Black Forest CC is sufficiently distant from either local or private schools that it attracts few working couples with school-age kids. Two-thirds of the homes are owned by northerners and foreigners who escape their winter igloos for the golf courses, biking trails and beaches of Florida. The remaining third live here permanently, maybe half of those in the latter stages of their careers. The retired occupy themselves by complaining about the Federal Reserve when the market retreats and the conditions of the greens when their putts go astray. The sound of an EMS siren is not a complete anomaly in the community. Which is why it’s often white noise.

Usually it gets a little softer, as our home is close to the front gate and the destination is normally somewhere farther down the two-mile road to the back gate. This time it got a little louder.

We had been fully moved in−and I pause here. I felt as though we had been fully moved in for six or was it seven months. Elaine rearranged and added and subtracted with sufficient rapidity that it was possible for me to walk into a given room and wonder if I was in the right house.

During those several months we had met most of the neighbors. It was a short street, some twenty-five houses. The demographics in the larger community applied to Naughty Pines; half were snowbirds, a few were foreigners, and the rest of us waved politely to one another when we set out the recyclables on Tuesday evening.

The permanent residents on our street were still in the workforce mending broken bones, managing client investment accounts, acquiring attractive clusters of rental units, facilitating a new-acquisition integration into a major aerospace company, or leading the charge at a major philanthropic foundation.

That last one was Elaine. These people weren’t of an age where body parts commonly cease to function without warning. They were, however, in positions of responsibility and therefore susceptible to the ravages of stress. Stress isn’t age related.

It was quite possible that a weekend handyman had fallen off a ladder but my first thought was a heart attack. It’s that stress thing.

I laid the paper aside and wandered to the front door. I had spent the day in front of the computer wondering if I should reallocate some of my index funds from foreign to domestic, from intermediate-term bonds to equities, from money market to broad index funds, or various combinations of the above. In the end, all I did was wonder.

Experience has shown that whenever I try to manage my market expectations, it’s a certainty a monkey with a dart could do as well. Nay, better. I’m always pleased then when, after an exhausting day of wondering, I have done nothing more than wonder.

Business casual in my home office is somewhat more casual than in Elaine’s foundation office. My requisite couture is that t-shirt with the curious hole in the sleeve that I fully intend to throw away after a couple more wearings, and the shorts that really haven’t faded that much and will definitely be thrown out with the t-shirt.

The same way a parent counsels a well-loved child who has erred through ignorance and not through malice, Elaine explained to me that inside the castle, with no expectation of visitors, I could wear whatever suited my mood. However, we all live with dreams, with expectations, with objects of adulation and respect. It simply wouldn’t be fair to the peasants for the knight to cross the bridge with a rusted breastplate, rivets missing from his gauntlet, dented and missing bars in his visor, his plume tattered and askew. Take away from them the image, the expectation, and those who have little would then have so much less. We have obligations, she confided.

I detoured into the bedroom, then walked out the front door in a nice aloha shirt and pressed shorts.

Peasants?

The EMS vehicle had turned onto our street and headed our way.

The guy to our left was an engineer who had never found a home project that he couldn’t do better than a professional. Put in new windows, re-screen the pool cage, jackhammer the tile and put wood floors in the study, he was the guy. He had no more fear of a ten-foot ladder than a model does six-inch spikes. Maybe he had finally cut the green wire when it should have been the red.

The fellow on our right was a consultant to east coast union pension funds. His normal vocal volume was loud. If you are going to deal with union guys, you gotta look like a union guy. He was an XXL. Scotch and steak were his idea of health food. Maybe his heart finally disagreed.

Both houses across the street were empty; one family snowbirds from the Midwest, the other still in England.

The vehicle turned off the siren and braked as it passed. Then it backed into our driveway.

We were a new neighborhood, a new street. Depending on which GPS system you have in your car, sometimes you find us, sometimes you call and we give subsequent directions. Probably inaccurate GPS.

Then it occurred to me, I know these EMS people do takeaway, but maybe they also deliver.

Could something have happened to Elaine?

I hustled down the steps toward the vehicle. The driver hopped out, jogged to the back. “Is this 8146 Naughty Pines Lane?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Is this the Trix-Newman residence?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t want to get this one wrong,” he said, then threw open the doors.

“Surprise!” Elaine said.

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