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invasion. "You must be Bartholomew Dinkin. I just met up with Randy up the road a piece." Dinkin stood, carefully wiping his mouth, then his fingers, free of sausage grease. That done, he stuck out a meaty paw for Anna to shake.
    "I take it you're the new district ranger," he said amiably enough.
    Dense black hair was sprinkled with wiry white. He wore it close to his skull, the part marked in by the barber's clippers. His face was lined more by the extra flesh than age. Beyond those drawbacks, Dinkin was an attractive man. His skin deep brown, the tone even and rich, his cars small and close to his head, his teeth crooked but not stained. His most striking feature was his eyes: whites clear and cool, the irises a startling gray-green. Against his dark skin they appeared luminescent, as though he saw things denied ordinary mortals.
    Dinkin offered Anna coffee from a pot on top of a file cabinet behind the door. She accepted and wandered while he waited on her.
    The office was dirty. Not just old and cluttered, but dirty, as if maintenance had gone on strike. Or given up. The rangers' desks were elbow deep in flotsam: coffee cups, evidence, candy wrappers, phone messages. Two bulletin boards were completely covered with notes and notices, some yellowed and curling with age. Anna pinched up the corner of a notification of an electrical shutdown at the Mount Locust Historical Site. It was seven years old. "We were going to get around to organizing those boards," Bartholomew told her as he set her coffee down on Thigpen's desk. "But we heard you were...  well we thought that might be a good job for you." Anna picked up her coffee. "Why's that?" Dinkin sat, he squirmed a little. "You know. You being a woman and all."
    "Ah," Anna said. She drank her coffee and watched Dinkin.
    He began to look uncomfortable. He moistened a fingertip, blotted up biscuit crumbs and carried them to his mouth. "What's with the cigarette butts?" she asked, to keep him off balance.
    "Randy likes his weed. Way out here where nobody much comes, we sort of make our own rules," he said referring to smoking in a federal building.
    It had been a no-no for so long that the policy was no longer even controversial. At least not in most states of the union. "That happens," Anna said. "But I expect we'd better move the smoking outside." Her first executive decision. She waited to see if it was going to cost her.
    Barth sat a moment, his face unreadable.
    "You want to see your office?" he asked abruptly. "Sure." Anna put down the coffee, having no idea whether she'd won or lost points in what was clearly going to be a tiresome course in power politics. As she followed him into the second office on the left, she tried without success to remember why she'd wanted to move up into management. She hated leading.
    She was damned if she was going to follow. As a field ranger in the West that individualism bad stood her in good stead.
    Now she was going to have to develop people skills. Anna found herself wishing she was back on the road with the alligator.
    Anna's office was small and dirtv. Scraps of wisdom, trash, information and memorabilia from the last half dozen district rangers were crammed in drawers and file cabinets, thumbtacked to walls, taped to cupboards.
    A vintage computer, the likes of which any self-respecting grade school would turn its nose up at, sat dusty and forlorn in one corner. A deceased roach had turned up six feet worth of toes and lay in the dust beneath a counter built into the far wall and serving as a desk. An office chair, its once ergonomically correct back sprung out of alignment by weight or abuse, awaited her administrative behind. Still Anna was pleased. A real office, four walls and a door. She was moving on up in the world. The primitive, visceral, female need to clean, to impose order, rose within her.
    She shook it off. Once established, she could do as she saw fit.
    For the present, she sensed if either of these two guys saw her