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decal on the portside door panel declared the big chopper was the property of Horizons Unlimited Tours, Little Tamtung Island, a Subsidiary of Cryptozoica Enterprises.
    Kavanaugh walked up the short flight of stairs and opened the screen door. He hadn’t bothered to lock it. Like the exterior, the interior of the house wasn’t very memorable. He did not turn on the overhead lights. There wasn’t anything in the room he cared to see. There was a daybed, an old TV he almost never watched because the reception was so problematical, a bookcase, a couple of wicker chairs along with a few odds and ends that might have been junk or rare objet d’art.
    The grinning, bleached-out skull of a Deinoncychus he used as a paperweight could have been both. It rested atop a scattering of Horizons Unlimited promotional brochures, advertising package tours to the Cryptozoica Spa and Living Laboratory.
    The house felt like a furnace, despite the cooling rain shower. Even after five years in the South Seas and two and a half on Little Tamtung, he still suffered from the heat. He stayed because the island had become his home as well as his prison, his own Elba.
    Kavanaugh had never quite managed to think of the house as his home, even though he had paid too much for it. Raised in a big old Indiana farmhouse, his idea of a home was three stories high with a ceiling full of junk cast off and forgotten by four preceding generations.
    He unclipped the Bren Ten’s holster from his belt and put it on a shelf above the day bed. Taking off his sweat-soaked shirt was like stripping away another layer of skin. He tossed it over the back of a kitchen chair, ignored the two cockroaches that shook their feelers at him indignantly, and opened his small, college-dorm size refrigerator. It wasn’t much cooler than the rest of the house, but the bourbon bottle was still on the top shelf.
    He poured an inch into a nearly clean glass and slid the Blue Train CD into the player. With the haunting notes of Coltrane’s trumpet as an accompaniment, he carried the bourbon out to the porch.
    Kavanaugh stood and sipped at the tepid liquor and absently traced the scar tissue along his right rib cage, then fingered the weal curving down from his hairline that pulled the outside corner of his right eye slightly out of line.
    The scars had matching saddle-stitch patterns. A couple of times, women in the Phoenix of Beauty had remarked about the symmetrical way the scars lined up along his body. He knew they were hinting to hear the story of how he had incurred the injuries, but he never told them, for several good reasons.
    The memories of the attack were hazy, like a dimly remembered nightmare from childhood. Primarily, he didn’t talk about it because he knew no one would believe the culprits were a pack of vicious Deinonychus. Even pointing out the skull of the creature that had sunk its fangs into his right side wouldn’t have convinced them.
    Kavanaugh sat down on the porch railing. He heard the flapping rustle of wings overhead and he reflexively jumped, biting back a curse. The trilling cry of a night bird did not comfort him. He half expected to hear the clacking screech of the archeopteryx, flying out of the darkness to bite off his nose. It wouldn’t be the first time Huang Luan had attacked and inflicted scars on him.
    During the struggle to cage the feathered monster, it had latched onto his thumb and damn near gnawed off the top joint. Recollecting the incident, he stared at the black peak rising above Big Tamtung, wishing he had the courage to take Huang Luan back there, but the archeopteryx had become accustomed to being pampered and dining on the occasional dead sailor.
    Memories tumbled over each other in his mind, as they always did when he looked at the pinnacle of volcanic rock while his belly was full of bourbon. After resigning from the Air Force eleven years before, he had gone into partnership with Augustus Crowe and formed an exclusive travel