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the bedroom. She thought it was a stunt designed to provoke a reaction. She told him it wasn’t funny, it was perverted. Then she moved to New York. A year or so later, for no particular reason, Augustine sent the woman one of his dividend checks from Paine Webber. She used the money to buy a Toyota Supra and sent Augustine a snapshot of herself, smiling and waving in the driver’s seat. Augustine wondered who’d taken the picture and what he’d thought of the new car.
    Augustine had no brothers and sisters, his mother was in Nevada and his father was in the slammer. The closest relative was his uncle Felix Mojack, the wildlife importer. As a boy, Augustine often visited his uncle’s small cluttered farm out in the boondocks. It was more fun than going to the zoo, because Felix let Augustine help with the animals. In particular, Felix encouraged his nephew to familiarize himself with exotic snakes, as Felix himself was phobic (and, it turned out, fatally incompetent) when it came to handling reptiles.
    After Augustine grew up, he saw less and less of his busy uncle. Progress conspired against Felix; development swept westward, and zoning regulations forced him to move his operation repeatedly. Nobody, it seemed, wished to build elementary schools or shopping malls within walking distance of caged jungle cats and wild cobras.The last time Felix Mojack was forced to relocate his animals, Augustine gave him ten thousand dollars for the move.
    At the time of Felix’s death, the farm inventory listed one male African lion, three cougars, a gelded Cape buffalo, two Kodiak bears, ninety-seven parrots and macaws, eight Nile crocodiles, forty-two turtles, seven hundred assorted lizards, ninety-three snakes (venomous and nonvenomous) and eighty-eight rhesus monkeys.
    The animals were kept on a nine-acre spread off Krome Avenue, not far from the federal prison. The day after the funeral, Augustine drove out to the place alone. He had a feeling that his uncle ran a loose operation, and a tour of the facility corroborated his suspicion. The fencing was buckled and rusty, the cages needed new hinges, and the concrete reptile pits hadn’t been drained and cleaned in months. In the tar-paper shed that Felix had used for an office, Augustine found paperwork confirming his uncle’s low regard for U.S. Customs regulations.
    It came as no surprise that Felix had been a smuggler; rather, Augustine was grateful that his uncle’s choice of contraband had been exotic birds and snakes, and not something else. Wildlife, however, presented its own unique challenges. While bales of marijuana required no feeding, bears and cougars did. Lean and hungry was a mild description of the illegal menagerie; Augustine was appalled by the condition of some of the animals and presumed their deterioration was a result of his uncle’s recent financial troubles. Fortunately, the two young Mexicans who worked for Felix Mojack graciously agreed to help out for a few days after his death. They stocked the freezers with raw meat for the large carnivores, bought boxloads of feed for the parrots and monkeys, and restocked on white mice and insects for the reptiles.
    Meanwhile Augustine scrambled to locate a buyer for the animals, somebody qualified to take good care of them. Augustine was so preoccupied with the task that he didn’t pay enough attention to news reports of a tropical storm intensifying in the Caribbean. Even when it bloomed into a hurricane, and Augustine saw the weather bulletin on television, he assumed it would do what most storms did in late summer—veer north, away from South Florida, on the prevailing Atlantic steering currents.
    Once it became clear that the hurricane would strike southern Dade County with a direct hit, Augustine had little time to act. Hewas grimly aware what sustained one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds would do to his dead uncle’s shabby farm. He spent the morning and afternoon on the telephone, trying to find a secure