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at the desert. “When we get back to town, have the car detailed.”

Chapter 17

    “Ah, this is the life, eh Darwin?” Fletcher pushed off the side of the pond and floated over to the bottle of scotch. He took a drink and slipped it back onto the cement rim.
    Darwin raised his head, then waggled his beak approvingly.
    “Here we are in our own private swimming hole, enjoying cocktail hour, doing the laundry and bathing all in one fell poop. Correction, Darwin. Make that— one fell swoop .”
    Darwin tilted his head and gave Doc a confused look.
    Fletcher splashed water at the macaw and said, “Come on Darwin, sing along…” And then he broke into a favorite ditty.
    “We have a little garden, a garden of our own,
    And every day we water there the seeds that we have sown,
    We love our little garden, and tend it with such care,
    You will not find a faded leaf or blighted blossom there.”

    * * *

    At the base of the pond, a rivulet of water flowed away from the open valve, snaking across the sand and disappearing beneath a greenhouse wall. Inside, the atmosphere was thick and breathless. All was quiet except for the tick tick tick of dripping water.
    The rivulet coursed through the lath house, winding across the floor, past a palm, around a stand of bamboo and disappeared directly beneath the Fletcher’s creeper vine, feeding its roots.
    Something was different now…
    The creeper vine.
    It had doubled in size! It was a now a giant throbbing green mass.
    Closer in, surrounding the creeper, a more delicate sound could be heard—like a hatchling breaching its shell, or a chrysalis splitting in two.
    It was the sound of growth.
    Unbridled.
    Insatiable.
    Alien.
    It was as if some freaky form of time-lapse photography had been projected onto the creeper vine, making it look like a Hollywood special effect.
    Leaves opened and spread apart, drinking in the sunlight. Streamers rose, snaking out in all directions. Medusa-like tendrils danced in the air like jellyfish tentacles caught in an ocean current.
    With each drop of water, the creeper grew and grew and grew.
    It spread through the nursery—a thirsty predator choking and killing other plants—unable to slake its bottomless thirst.
    At the back of the lath house, a jackrabbit flushed. It shot across the floor, zigzagging for the exit.
    High above, close to the nursery’s ceiling, there was a sudden movement. A flash of green. A whistling sound. And then something swirled through the air.
    A creeper stalk.
    It dove downward, whipsawing from above like a striking snake—and fell on the rabbit, coiling around its body like a steel spring.
    The rabbit screamed and kicked, unable to free itself from the creeper’s grip. The stalk constricted again, adding coil after deadly coil.
    The rabbit pumped its legs. Then its eyes bulged. And then its body convulsed and fell quiet as the creeper patiently smothered its prey.
    A short while later, the tip of the tendril loosened, freeing itself from the rabbit’s body. It rose straight into the air, bobbing and weaving like a charmed cobra. Then without warning, it struck down—and like a straw being driven into a soda cup’s lid, it plunged into the rabbit’s neck.
    If you’d been there, with your ear pressed close to the rabbit, you would’ve heard a tiny sucking sound as the fluids were drained from its body.

Chapter 18

    Darwin heard it first and let go with a shrill squawk .
    Fletcher turned to see what it was and couldn’t believe his eyes when Frankie Desouza’s pearl-white Escalade rolled past the main house and pulled up directly in front of the pond. What the hell was he doing here? And how did he get past the gate?
    Then he remembered he’d never gotten around to putting a lock on it.
    The doors of the Escalade winged open, and Frankie and his driver climbed out. They walked around the SUV and approached the pond, both of them looking slick and out-of-place in the open air setting.
    Frankie, sweating in the