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tow-truck place this morning, the owner-operator had declared himself “real busy” and asked Roman to call back after lunch. Then he’d hung up.
    Was 12:05 too soon to call back?
    And where the hell was Ashley? What was she playing at? What would happen to theirtruce when he left?
    “—wouldn’t believe the way she acted once that tambora drum came into the picture. First, she started lifting her feet, two at a time, like the ground was hot. My partner, Shari, said it was like Flossie had a demon inside her that needed out. But Shari’s people were revivalist types, so she saw a lot of that stuff at the tent revivals when she was a kid. Not with gators, of course—”
    The phone chirped another low-battery warning. Flossie took three quick steps toward the porch, and Roman clutched at the railing. Everything in his field of vision sharpened. The smell of warm, yeasty buttered rolls and swamp decay seemed to intensify.
    His palms tingled.
    “Just like that!” Don said. “She was dancing forward and backward just like that, and we were drumming up a storm—really good drumming, with all these layers interwoven, and kind of mystical, where you could fall into the rhythm and get lost there. So—”
    “She’s not dancing backward,” Roman said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “You said forward and backward, but she didn’t dance backward. She just lunged.” At me. And then I jumped like an idiot .
    In the ten years he’d been living in Florida, he’d never gotten used to alligators. Not that he ran into them much in Miami, but even the idea of them made his skin crawl. Probably a legacy of his landlocked upbringing—he just couldn’t accept ancient reptilian dinosaur monsters skulking around in the murk.
    Though Flossie here didn’t need to skulk. She could pick off a hippie anytime she pleased.
    And yet the hippies seemed blithely unconcerned, chowing down on salad and casserole while Roman’s brain flashed neon-red words like APEX PREDATOR in large capitals across the space behind his eyes and made him dizzy.
    He forced himself to loosen his grip on the railing.
    Don noticed. “You’re not afraid of her, are you?”
    “No.”
    “She’s just a baby!”
    The alligator staring at him from a spot just beyond the porch steps—eyes alert, jawhanging slightly open, poised to attack—had to weigh upwards of three hundred pounds. Roman didn’t know a lot about alligators, but he knew they came out of eggs.
    It had been a long time since that gnarly creature fit in an egg.
    “She could rip off my leg in about eight seconds.”
    “Yeah, but Flossie wouldn’t,” Don said. “We practically raised her.”
    “What, from birth?”
    “She washed up, what, ten years ago, Kirk?” Don asked.
    “Yeah, ten or so. She was just little then.”
    “You fed her scraps and all that?” Roman started to relax.
    “Well, no,” Kirk hedged. “We’re not allowed to do that. This is all part of the wildlife preserve, see, so we have to be strictly hands-off with the animals.”
    “So in what sense did you raise Flossie?”
    “She’s always hanging around, watching us,” Don said. “She likes us.”
    Roman met the alligator’s beady black eye again. If Flossie liked him, she had a strange way of showing it.
    His phone chirped three times fast, signaling the death of the battery.
    Flossie moved onto the porch with terrifying speed.
    Throwing himself backward, Roman tripped over one of Don’s horny feet and fell down, landing hard on his ass.

    “Jesus Christ !”
    Ashley knew that voice.
    Roman. Angry Roman.
    She rushed out onto the deck, where she encountered the improbable sight of Roman sprawled on the planks, brandishing his iPhone at a snapping, capering Flossie.
    “Nice,” Mitzi said breathlessly behind her.
    “She won’t really bite him, will she?” Ashley asked.
    “I don’t think so. She never has before. I think she’s trying to play with him.”
    “Yeah, well, the thing is, Roman doesn’t