Running Hot

to her own amazement, she had seized it. Time to start living in the now.

    TWENTY MINUTES LATER she emerged from the post office and walked quickly toward her car. An SUV painted camouflage green and brown wheeled into the parking lot. The door popped open. A spry-looking senior citizen climbed out. Her bubble of steel-gray hair was partially covered by a billed cap. She wore military-style fatigues and heavy black boots. Her eyes were shielded by a pair of mirrored sunglasses. The utility belt around her waist was studded with various and assorted implements including binoculars, a flashlight and a high-tech camera.
    The look was Arizona Snow’s day uniform. At night when she went out on her endless reconnaissance patrols of Eclipse Bay, she switched to black trousers and pants and added a set of night-vision goggles to her ensemble.
    “ ’Mornin’, Grace,” Arizona called. “Heard you’re fixin’ to go on a little vacation.”
    Grace smiled. Arizona Snow was Eclipse Bay’s resident eccentric. She must have been in her early eighties but aside from some trouble with arthritis she showed no signs of slowing down. Her commitment to protecting the town from some mysterious, unnamed conspiracy that, as far as anyone knew existed only in her mind, never wavered.
    “News travels fast,” Grace said, coming to a halt a short distance from Arizona.
    “Not everything you hear around here is accurate,” Arizona muttered ominously. She took a notebook and pen out of one of the half-dozen pockets that festooned her fatigues. Flipping the notebook open, she clicked her pen. “Goin’ to Hawaii, eh?”
    “That’s right.”
    Arizona made a note. “Return date?”
    “Well, I’m not sure yet. I probably won’t be gone long, though. A couple of days, maybe three at the most. Why?”
    Arizona looked up, shaking her head at the naive question. “I need to know when you’ll be back so I can alert the chief in case you don’t return on time.”
    Grace was touched. Arizona had taken a keen interest in her right from the start and had been happy to rent the cottage to her. As a rule, Arizona viewed every outsider in town with acute suspicion. But with Grace she had assumed an air of comradely understanding. It was as if she had concluded that the two of them had unspoken secrets in common.
    That assumption was probably not too far from the truth, Grace thought. One thing she had discovered in the past few months was that, although Arizona had lived in Eclipse Bay for several years, no one seemed to recall exactly when she had moved into town and no one seemed to know where she had come from.
    There were rumors about her, the most dramatic being that she had once worked for a mysterious government intelligence agency. The theory was that she had either resigned or been forced to retire when she became permanently lost in her own strange world.
    “I’m afraid we’ll have to leave my return date open,” Grace said gently.
    “Understood.” Arizona snapped the notebook closed and looked around, making certain there was no one in the vicinity who might be eavesdropping.
    Satisfied that they had privacy, she edged a little closer, respectful, as always, of the distance that Grace preferred to keep between herself and others. Arizona was one of the few people Grace had met who seemed to sense intuitively that she did not like to be touched. The leather gloves offered a degree of protection but they were by no means foolproof. Touching the wrong individual, however fleetingly, could be an ordeal.
    “So, the agency is finally sending you out on a field assignment,” Arizona said in low tones. “You be careful now, honey. From what I can tell, you’re an analyst, not a trained operative. I’ll bet your experience has all been at a desk with a computer. I hope they’re supplying some muscle to keep an eye on you.”
    The irony of the situation made Grace smile. Arizona filtered everything through her skewed view of the world. Because of that, she was the only person in Eclipse Bay who had come close to guessing the truth. If Arizona ever found out that the Arcane Society existed and that it was a secretive, centuries-old organization devoted to research and study of the paranormal, she would have no problem weaving it into her own worldview.
    “Don’t worry about me,” Grace said. “I’ll have a partner.”
    “Someone with field experience.” Arizona nodded, satisfied. “Excellent. You tell him I said to take