trigger.
Orson bared his teeth but neither moved nor made a sound.
I quickly said, “He’s just a Labrador mix. He’s a good dog, wouldn’t
harm a cat.”
His anger swelling for no apparent reason, Stevenson said, “Just a
Labrador mix, huh? The hell he is. Nothing’sjust anything.
Not here. Not now. Not anymore.”
I considered reaching for the Glock in my jacket. I was holding my
bike with my left hand. My right hand wa was in my right-hand
pocket.
Even as distraught as Stevenson was, however, he was nonetheless a cop,
and he was sure to respond with deadly professionalism to any
threatening move I made. I didn’t put much faith in Roosevelt’s
strange assurance that I was revered. Even if I let the bicycle fall
over to distract him, Stevenson would shoot me dead before the Glock
cleared my pocket.
Besides, I wasn’t going to pull a gun on the chief of police unless I
had no choice but to use it. And if I shot him, that would be the end
of my life, a thwarting of the sun.
Abruptly Stevenson snapped his head up, looking away from Orson. He
drew a deep breath, then several that were as quick and shallow as
those of a hound following the spoor of its quarry.
“What’s that?”
He had a keener sense of smell than I did, because I only now realized
that an almost imperceptible breeze had brought us a faint hint of the
stench from the decomposing sea creature back under the main pier.
Although Stevenson was already acting strangely enough to make my scalp
crinkle into faux corduroy, he grew markedly stranger. He tensed,
hunched his shoulders, stretched his neck, and raised his face to the
fog, as though savoring the putrescent scent.
His eyes were feverish in his pale face, and he spoke not with the
measured inquisitiveness of a cop but with an eager, nervous curiat is
that? You smell that? Someosity that seemed perverse: “What thing
dead, isn’t it?”
“Something back under the pier,” I confirmed. “Some kind of fish, I
guess.”
“Dead. Dead and rotting. Something . . . It’s got an edge to it,
doesn’t it?” He seemed about to lick his lips. “Yeah. Yeah. Sure
does have an interesting edge to it.”
Either he heard the eerie current crackling through his voice or he
sensed my alarm, because he glanced worriedly at me and struggled to
compose himself. it was a struggle. He was teetering on a crumbling
ledge of emotion.
Finally the chief found his normal voice-or something that’s free, and
the pistol approximated it. “I need to talk to You, reach an
understanding.
Now. Tonight. Why don’t You come with me, Snow.”
“Come where?”
“My patrol car’s out front.”
“But my bicycle-” “I’m not arresting You. Just a quick chat. Let’s
make sure we understand each other.”
The last thing I wanted to do was get in a patrol car with Stevenson.
If I refused, however, he might make his invitation more formal by
taking me into custody.
Then, if I tried to resist arrest, if I climbed on my bicycle and
pumped the pedals hard enough to make the crank axle smokewhere would I
go?
With dawn only a few hours away, I had no time to flee as far as the
next town on this lonely stretch of coast. Even if I had ample time,
XP limited my world to the boundaries of Moonlight Bay, where I could
return home by sunrise or find an under standing friend to take me in
and give me darkness.
“I’m in a mood here,” Lewis Stevenson said again, through half-clenched
teeth, the hardness returning to his voice. “I’m in a real mood. You
coming with me?”
“Yes, sir. I’m cool with that.”
Motioning with his pistol, he indicated that Orson and I were to
precede him.
I walked my bike toward the end of the entrance pier, loath to have the
chief behind me with the gun. I didn’t need to be an animal
communicator to know that Orson was nervous, too.
The pier planks ended in a concrete sidewalk flanked by flower beds
full of ice plant, the blooms of which open wide in sunshine and close