Frankie and Delores had been very happy for many years. And then they met.

Smoles lived alone in this huge house for several reasons, the main one being that no one else wanted to live there with him. He had quite a time keeping staff and his dogs kept running away and he’d tried goldfish but they all ran away too—he could never figure out how, but he’d come home and find the bowls empty and the fish just plain gone.

No one was in the car, but now that he was harboring a fugitive he had developed a level of situational awareness that bordered on painful.

He walked around the counter and out into the great room, a large stone-walled space centered around a gigantic flat-screen TV and an entertainment system capable of reaching out into the stars and catching talk shows live from outer space, if outer space had talk shows, which so far it did not.