Body Surfing

thingy hooked up to my dad.”
    Relax, Jasper. It’s only been an hour. He’s probably still trying to wake him up .
    “Yeah, you’re probably right.” But he couldn’t hide his growing nervousness.
    He’d been idly flipping the pages while he spoke. Two things happened now. First a photograph on the inside back flap flashed before his eyes, a hundred-year-old sepia-tinted print of the author of the book in his hands. And then there was the faint click of a car door being closed in the driveway in front of the house.
    “Oh no.”
    What? Michaela said. What is it, Jasper?
    She saw what was on the page first, and then she saw what was in Jasper’s mind.
    Oh God, she said. We’re fucked .

11
    W hen Q. pulled into the Van Arsdales’ driveway, he found two cars there: Jasper’s dad’s pickup and another he assumed belonged to Mr. Van Arsdale’s girlfriend. He’d heard stories about Cakes from Jasper—mostly pejorative ones, which he tended not to believe, but he still didn’t need a bystander.
    “Shit.”
    He looked at the strange device in the passenger seat. A clay jar holding a cellphone connected by a wire to a hundred-thousand-dollar tiara. He shook his head. If this worked, he deserved the Nobel for good guessing. And if it didn’t work…well, if it didn’t work, Q. doubted he’d be around to receive even a booby prize. Leo wasn’t going to let him get away this time. There was no Dr. Thomas or Ileana to bail him out.
    The lights were off in the house, but according to Ileana’s watch it was after four in the morning, so that wasn’t unusual. Assuming the watch actually told time, that is. Before she let him take her to the hospital yesterday, she’d shown him how to twist the clasp on the handle to release a poison dart through the watch’s knob. The darts were spring-loaded, she explained. You had to keep the watch tightly wound or they wouldn’t shoot out. When you shot one dart, you rotated the crystal to set up another and wound the knob to tighten the spring. There were six darts concealed in the body of thewatch. The first five contained curare, the last strychnine—itself poisonous, but also useful as an antidote to the curare, should Q. accidentally inject himself. Q. had put the watch in his pocket but Ileana insisted he wear it. “Remember, Q. The demons like to get close to you. And if they do that, this could be the only thing that saves your life.”
    Now, in the car, Q. couldn’t help but laugh. Solomon jars and watches that shot poison darts. It was all too much. But he made sure the watch was tightly wound before he got out of the car. He left the jar in the passenger seat however. Left the gun in the glove compartment too. If he succeeded in drugging Jasper’s dad—and Cakes, assuming she was there—he could come back for both of them.
    He decided he wouldn’t knock. Better to just wake them up and plead some kind of desperation. He’d been wrestling with his story all the way over here and hadn’t come up with anything that sounded even remotely plausible. He thought the best thing he could do was cry and maybe get the sympathy vote. Q. wasn’t much of an actor, but he figured it would be pretty easy to work himself up, given everything that had happened, and everything that still might.
    The front door was unlocked, and he eased it open. The first thing he noticed was a faint light coming in the open place where the back door should have been, and which appeared to have been ripped off its hinges. A breeze gusted through the open door and Q. got a strong whiff of that nasty apple shit Jasper’s dad swilled like Gatorade. For a moment he thought all that had happened was that Mr. Van Arsdale had done something in a drunken fit.
    Then he turned the light on.
    “Man, this can’t be good.”
    Debris was scattered all over the kitchen floor, through which tracked hundreds of dog prints. Copious amounts of flour, sugar, and milk had been trampled into a gritty paste studded with an assortment of leftovers—chunks of meat and wilted vegetables mostly—and broken dishes, and over it all hung the sharp tang of apple brandy. Q. saw that the dog, Hunter or Hitler, some kind of German name, he never could remember, had not only knocked the back door off itshinges, but had managed to get the refrigerator open as well. He’d ripped out all the shelves and torn everything in there to shreds. He’d pawed and gnawed open the cabinet doors as well, and not just the