As Eli turned from the counter, Kate scooped up the papers on which she'd been writing to organize them. As she looked her writings over, occasionally rereading snatches, she realized that on the back of one were the doodles she'd been making of Eli's name. She shoved the item in between the rest of papers with a faint squeak when she heard him return.

"Is everything okay?"

"Uh ... yeah, wine or beer?"

"I'm ...."

"You're not going anywhere tonight," she commanded. "I really do have a straightjacket and am not afraid to use it." She continued, in response to the peculiar look he gave her, with, "It was part of Halloween costume Otto wore years ago. He believed in authenticity."

"You can strap me up if you want, but I don't think whoever that was is coming back."

She stood trembling in the kitchen for a moment at the notion. She hadn't entertained such a thought, but now that it was out loud ....

"Could you dim the lights?" she asked as she poured two glasses of wine and then, "no ... really, no funny business. It's getting dark and ... crap. I never worried about not having curtains when the only person who could see in was ...."

"Someone flying by?"

"Yeah," she groaned and poured a bit more into each glass.

When Kate got back to the living room, the lights were so low as to make seeing difficult. Eli was on the couch wearing what she could just make out was a silly grin.

"What are you laughing at?"

"Oh ... nothing. You said, 'funny business.' That's what Rachel always used to say when I brought a girl home."

"She saw what a young Casanova you were." There was no question that she sat too close to him on the couch, but that was all going on the back burner. It already was well established she didn't have the strength to wrestle two anxieties at a time.

"Maybe," he replied.

Kate placed her glass on the coffee table and, by some biblical miracle, found her head once again on Eli's right thigh. It occurred to her as she stretched out that she was still too agitated even to drink, and, as tired as she was, she knew sleep wouldn't come soon, if at all.

"What took you so long getting here?" was her mild scolding.

"I was at the airport."

The notion that he'd missed a flight over her sent an unpleasant jolt through her, one that was quickly salved.

"I was back in Salt Lake City for most of the last week. You called just as I got out of the terminal."

"Oh," she said innocently. "I thought that project was done."

"So, I thought. The client doesn't seem to know the difference between dolphins and fish, and I've been dealing with his fits for the better part of a week. I can't believe some of his silly sh ...."

"Do you believe me?" she interrupted.

He replied without hesitation.

"I'm a hundred percent certain you saw something inexplicable. I'm ninety percent certain it was a man. Can you work with those numbers?"

"I can. But I'm not certain I'd believe me if I were in your shoes ... and is that how you talk to your clients?"

"I haven't been talking to the mayor of Upper Fuckistan, Utah, nearly so nice lately, but, yeah. Us design and engineering guys like throwing around words like that. It's sort of like you Hollywood folks with your 'let's do lunch'."

"I like, 'can you work with those numbers,' better. It sounds so solid."

"It's meant to."

"But how do you know?"

"To believe you? Easy. I don't think you're prone to flights of fancy."

"Uh ... I did accuse you of blinding a studio executive a few weeks ago."

"Oh, yeah," he laughed. "Forgot about that. But, you didn't accuse me of doing so telepathically or via invisible assassins, did you? An accusation, even a false one, isn't the same as a flight of fancy."

"True ... but this does sound like a flight of fancy ... quite literally."

He reached down and took her hand. "I've seen lots of strange things, some of which I can't possibly explain." His tone said he was wholly serious.

"Like what?"

"Oh, a bunch of little ones." He sighed, and his voice took on a different tenor. "I once saw an infantry company I was supporting, one-hundred and thirty-seven men strong, mistakenly walk through an Iraqi minefield without setting off a single mine. Um ... I once had one of my men dash down an alley in the middle of a firefight, with a dozen different insurgents firing automatic rifles at him, and not get a single scratch. Who the hell knows sometimes."

"How about the big ones?"

"Ohhh ...," he groaned, "you really should go to work for the CIA."

"So, there is a big one? Wow, pony up."

"I haven't told anyone this story since right after it happened, and I'm still not certain what to make of it."

"Is it another war story?"

"After a fashion," he said. "I was in the army a long time, so most of them are." There was a sound as if he were scratching his head or whiskers, and it took a few moments for him to begin. "It's sort of a detective story, actually. And ... it's sort of long. Are you sure you want to hear it?"

"Mm-hmm."

"Okay, um ... I went into Baghdad with the first wave of U.S. troops in 2003, and despite what a lot of folks say, the country didn't erupt immediately into insurgent violence. There was a period of some months after Saddam's fall where things were relatively calm. During that initial calm, I got assigned to support a military police unit in western Baghdad that was conducting presence patrols with Iraqi police and militia."

"It was a funny time in that country's history," he continued. "We assume everything is about America, and that in a country getting invaded like Iraq everyone would be talking about the fighting. One of my local linguists told me after I arrived that all during the U.S. invasion, the only thing Baghdadis were talking about was, get this, 'the Monkey Man.'"

"The what?" she laughed.

"The Monkey Man. And I didn't make that name up. All during that season, there'd been sightings on Baghdad rooftops and alleys of a man that wasn't quite a man. Now, I don't know if this Monkey Man existed or whether he relates to my story if he did ... but ...." He let out a great sigh.

"Anyway ... around two or three weeks after we began these joint presence patrols, bodies started showing up in that part of Baghdad. Now, bodies show up sometimes. There wasn't any political violence, yet, but all big cities have crime. Either way, these bodies weren't ... they didn't show signs of the trauma typical to political or criminal violence. They hadn't been shot, stabbed, or blown up. It looked like they'd been attacked by a large animal, some sort of predator."

"At first," he went on more gently, "no one was saying Monkey Man ... at least no one I heard. My Arabic wasn't very good at that point, so I relied on my linguists, and they weren't talking. After the first couple of corpses showed up, we just assumed if it wasn't stray dogs preying on the homeless that, maybe, some psycho or some local crime boss was using dogs to do their dirty work."

"But after a while, the bodies started stacking up. In the first month, three, and later, more. By the end of the third month, two or three people a week were being found brutally murdered in that way."

"Maybe people were copycatting the guy?" she asked.

"You know, I thought the same thing for a while. But ... of course, witnesses eventually came forward. And they all described the same fellow, this big, rangy guy who lurked the alleys and rooftops and ran like a deer when confronted by more than one person. People got so scared that even our local counterparts in the police and militia got reluctant about going on patrols at night."

"So, what happened?" She could feel the anxiety in her growing, but in a way that wasn't entirely unpleasant.

"After three months, the Iraqis sent a new officer to take command of the whole operation, Major Faris Al Kindi. He was a former Republican Guard officer, which put a lot of people off at first. But he was fantastic ... tough, smart, driven, everything we Americans like. And he demanded maximum effort from his men and ours. Under his command, everybody went out on patrols, from the fry cooks to the supply sergeants, even staff officers like me. I was going out on patrols in the city three and four nights a week."

"And it worked," he said, "... eventually. The number of deaths went down, largely because of the presence of security on the streets. There were nights we had patrols on damn near every block, and on three or four occasions our men chased something and even got a few shots off."

"This is all going somewhere, isn't it?" she said as she sat up and regarded him in the darkness. "Something happened. You saw this Monkey Man, didn't you?"

There was another long pause and the sound of him scratching his cheek.

"About three weeks after the increased patrols started, we were moving down a side street toward the river when this terrible, terrible scream rings out in front of us. Not knowing any better, I took off in that direction, just in time to have a woman run out of an alley and nearly slam straight into me. She was screaming hysterically in Arabic. I scarcely understood her, but it didn't matter. Because at about the time she was running into me, somebody else ran out that alley and took off at a sprint in the opposite direction."

"I don't know what it was about him. Whoever he was, he was fast ... and big, which most Iraqis aren't. But there was something about the way that guy moved that caught my eye and that I couldn't put my finger on. It was like ... he just moved wrong. So, I don't know why, but I took off after him, screaming for my men to follow." He laughed. "I was pretty wicked fit back then, and I could run like a motherfucker, so, like a dumbass, I left my troops in the dust ... but I just couldn't quite keep up with the guy I was chasing."

"Then I got lucky. Just about two blocks before I got to the river, I dashed around a corner in time to see this guy cut down an alley. I didn't hesitate. I'd been working that area for about four months, and I knew that alley was a dead-end. So, I just threw my ass into high gear, and I hit that corner just in time to almost run into that asshole coming back the other way."

There were just a few moments while Eli seemed to gather his breath before resuming.

"Given what I saw later, I don't know what made him backtrack, but there we stood, both of us, him and me, stock still staring at each other." He paused, as if for effect, and continued slowly. "That was the exact moment I realized I hadn't even pulled my pistol out. As I fumbled for it, I took a careful look at him just to make sure he wasn't doing the same thing. There was just enough light from a nearby streetlamp to make out his features, and that's when I saw it."

Eli paused and took a drink of wine, the first she'd ever seen him imbibe. Her eyes had become adjusted to the dark, and she looked at his. There was something there. Unease? Anxiety? Maybe those words were too strong, and maybe it was just the light in her darkened home. But there was also a new tone in his voice as he spoke. Something had changed.

"What did you see?" she asked in a whisper.

"He had everything a guy is supposed to have," he said delicately. "Two eyes ... two ears ... two arms, two legs. Nose, mouth, chin, fingers, hair. And ... and, um ... there wasn't anything wrong with any of them. Taken as a bunch of parts, this guy was perfectly normal. But there was something about the way they were all put together. It just wasn't ... right. We stood there a good five seconds staring at one another, me breathing heavily with my pistol half raised like an idiot, him hardly breathing at all, looking so ... alien."

"But that wasn't the worst of it," he continued in a rush. "I finally raised my pistol, and he turned and took off faster than anyone I'd ever seen, straight toward the three-story building at the end of the alley. He reached that building and kept going, with hardly a pause. He climbed the side of that building faster than anything I ever could've imagined, so fast I barely had time to squeeze off five shots before he was out of sight over the roof."

"Did you ...?"

"I don't know. I've always been a good shot. I like to think I hit him at least once, but I never knew. The only thing I know for certain is there weren't any more bodies found over the next two weeks, but right about that time the insurgency was just starting to kick off. The joint patrols were cancelled, and not much later we were transferred to another area of the city."