The FBI agents put Phoebe in between them walking over to her front door, and one went in and did a quick sweep of her place while the second kept her on the stoop — in the wind and the rain — long enough to make sure they didn’t have any surprises waiting for them inside.

Then they got her inside. “This place is a defense nightmare,” the first agent muttered to his partner. “Two sliding glass doors; only two windows, and both of those face the front; that damned skylight. And the people with the end units have second-story balconies that connect directly to the roof, so they could step from the balcony onto the roof and walk across the roof to any other unit in the building. The floor plan is all cut up, and the patio privacy fence shields both sliding glass doors from the sidewalk.”

They both paused and stared off into space for an instant at exactly the same time, and Phoebe almost got spooked. “Copy that,” one of them said, and Phoebe looked harder at them and finally saw the tiny earbud and wire each wore.

“Our team across the street says they have the best possible view of your patio,” one of the agents said.

She ought to remember their names. They’d told her, but they’d done it right in the middle of her finding out she couldn’t stay with Alan, that Alan couldn’t come with her, and that to help the FBI capture Michael she was going to have to go back into her place and act as live bait. They were tall, they dressed the same, they had the same short haircuts and square-jawed all-American G-man looks that spoke of plenty of exercise and ferocious attention to detail.

They were clearly competent. Focused. They established their watch posts — one in the unused upstairs bedroom, which had the window and gave the only halfway decent view of the patio and traffic outside the townhouse, and one in the loft at the top of the stairs, which gave the best possible view of the front door, the ground-floor window, and the sliding glass door in the living room.

They couldn’t see her room. But the only access to her room was the sliding glass door, and they’d already established that its new locks were good ones and that no one would be coming in that way with anything less than a sledgehammer. Which they would hear.

They spent a few minutes reassuring her. Two agents stationed in the townhouse next door waited for any chance that Michael would reappear there. Two agents in the place across the green had a clear view of the front of her house, while her two agents had the vulnerable spots on the inside covered. Men were stationed around the parking lot, watching for anyone using Michael’s space or anyone coming to any of the townhouses in her unit. Police were looking out for red Porsches driven by men who might match Michael’s description.

“Just do what you would usually do at this time of night,” the agent whose name she couldn’t remember told her. “He’s not likely to try anything in the middle of this storm, anyway. So try to relax.”

Phoebe thought about the cost of the new locks on her doors and about the fact that she’d gotten in almost no phone time for the last few days and didn’t yet have the rent covered, either. She sat at the table and got out her cards and tried to ignore the storm screaming overhead — and the fact that she felt completely exposed sitting at her table.

The agents faded upstairs and assumed their posts.

She wasn’t alone. But not being alone didn’t seem to be helping her feel any better.

Her skin was crawling, and she couldn’t bear to sit still. She had the awful feeling that she and the FBI and the local police were missing something. That Michael wasn’t going to just walk into this trap. That he was going to avoid it and still get through to her.

She couldn’t affect anything Michael might do. All she could do was help the FBI as they’d asked her to. And all they’d asked of her was that she do what she would normally do at this time of night.

Which was read cards.

She had half a hurricane pounding on her windows and whistling over her roof — and from what the agent said, it would be that way for at least the next three or four hours and maybe a lot longer, because the storm was large and moving slowly.

So she shuffled her Universal Waite deck and took a deep breath. Had to calm herself or she was going to give awful readings.

Took the Motherpeace deck next and shuffled. The cards were slippery. Lively. Some nights they just lay there, but right at that moment they seemed to be humming with energy.

She ran through four of the seven shuffles, and a card popped out of the deck and slid across the table, faceup.

The Three of Discs.

She frowned at it. The Three of Discs was usually a positive energy card — it meant “working together to accomplish something worthwhile.” And she could have read it that way easily enough. To see it as her and the FBI and no doubt Brig and the police, all working together to put Michael behind bars.

But that wasn’t the sort of energy she was getting from it. She wasn’t getting anything positive, anything good.

She looked at the image on the card carefully. Three women, two of them on a ladder and one on the ground, all of them lugging adobe bricks to build a wall. Above them, three discs. The background was bright yellow, the atmosphere was cheerful.

But something was wrong.

Phoebe kept staring at the card, while the hairs on the back of her neck stood up and the air around her got colder and colder.

The wall. That was clear enough. That was her protection. Locks. Bars. The FBI agents upstairs. The people in the other townhouses. Obvious.

Something about the picture was not right. Was bad. A warning. She’d looked at the damned card for years, and she knew it by heart. Yet now something about it was giving her the creeps. Icy air blew on the back of her neck, and she had a knot in her gut and the crawling suspicion that this was a warning. And she wasn’t getting it.

And then she saw it.

Well, she’d seen it ten thousand times before, but the usual meaning of the card was friendly and upbeat, and in that context what she’d seen had been only decorative.

Not in this context.

There was a hole in the wall. A big one. A you-could-sling-a-galloping-herd-of-moose-through-this-hole kind of hole — built right into the wall. Built right into the structure. No one was looking at it, but all three women could see it. It made the wall worthless for defense.

And the cold and the card and her fear told her that this was her confirmation. Her validation. That there was something she and everyone else had missed. A hole in their wall. A breach in their defenses that was so big and so obvious they were looking right past it. Thinking it was supposed to be there.

You have to get out of here.

Phoebe couldn’t be sure if that whisper was her thinking or if Chick was giving her a warning.

But either way, Phoebe believed it. She couldn’t stay in the townhouse. Something was wrong. Horribly wrong.

She decided not to do any readings. Money for the locks, money for the rent — it would just have to wait. Her averages would take a hit too, but this was big.

She couldn’t just walk next door, though. The FBI had told her to stay put. That they had everything covered.

She made her way up the stairs, building the lie in her head that she was going to have to present. She wasn’t a good liar, and she knew it, so she made the story she was going to tell as true as she could.

“I’m not feeling too well,” she said, poking her head in the door. “I’m going to go on to bed. If you need anything from the kitchen, or... anything...”

“We’ll be up here until nine in the morning,” one of the two agents told her. “We’ll be switching off then, and the day shift will keep you company.”

“Can I bring you anything to drink? Or eat?”

“No, ma’am. We have that covered.”

“Okay, then. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Sleep well,” he told her. “You’re in good hands.” He gave her a friendly smile. The other agent, listening on a headset, nodded acknowledgment in her direction but didn’t look up. Phoebe made her way down the stairs, grabbing her backpack from the top of the kitchen table, where she’d dropped it.

She went into her bedroom and locked the door the way she did every night, and wedged the bar under it. Then she went into the bathroom and barred the bathroom door shut. She turned on the shower, because the sound carried pretty well through the pipes even with the storm banging and roaring around, and she wanted the two men upstairs to think they knew where she was. She went back into her bedroom and undid the locks on the sliding glass door, and then she went back to the bathroom. Stood in the shower fully dressed, with the water as cold as she could get it, to lower her external body temperature. She didn’t know if anyone was using infrared goggles, and she didn’t know if what she was doing would help her hide if they were. But she was trying to cover all the bases, and that was the only plan she could come up with. When her nail beds were purple and her teeth were chattering, she turned off the shower. Then she slung her backpack over her shoulder, slipped outside through the sliding glass door onto her patio, and got slammed by Helene, knocked onto her ass before she could brace herself.

She fell hard, but the wind blew her against the building, so the agents upstairs shouldn’t have seen her. And she was below the privacy fence line, so she should still be out of sight to the ones across the green.

She closed the sliding glass door. Locked the little key lock, which was basically useless. But, she told herself, better than nothing.

She crawled the couple of feet from her bedroom sliding glass door to the part of the privacy fence she shared with Alan’s patio. She jammed her backpack under the fence. Then she flopped on her belly and scooted facedown through grass and leaves and water and sandy mud.

The board privacy fence swayed in the wind, and she thought for a moment that if she got stuck and the rain kept coming down the way it was, she could easily drown in a couple of inches of water. Trapped.

Phoebe usually loved storms. Their energy and power felt magical to her, and in a way she had never been able to explain to anyone else, or even to herself, they comforted her. This storm was different. This storm felt like poison, and she wanted out of it as fast as she could get there. She broke free of the privacy fence and kept low and slow all the way to Alan’s patio doors, the ones that went into his main room.

She pounded on the glass. Hard. And waited.

Nothing.

Pounded again.

Nothing.

Oh, come on, she thought. It’s me. Answer your damned door. Let me in.