gestures of our childhood, said Chazal. The smell of that shampoo was
my way, in my terror, of reaching out to my lost mother with the hope
that her hand would close reassuringly around mine.
In a rush, sight, sound, and all sensation returned to me, jolting me
almost as hard as the pair of 9-millimeter bullets had jolted Lewis
Stevenson. I cried out and gasped for breath.
Shaking uncontrollably, I pressed the console button that the chief had
pressed earlier. The electric locks on the back doors clicked when
they disengaged.
I shoved open the door at my side, clambered out of the patrol car, and
yanked open the rear door, frantically calling Orson’s name, wondering
how I could carry him to the veterinarian’s office in time to save him
if he was wounded, wondering how I was going to cope if he was dead.
He couldn’t be dead. He was no ordinary dog: He was Orson, my dog,
strange and special, companion and friend, only with me for three years
but now as essential a part of my dark world as was anyone else in
it.
And he wasn’t dead. He bounded out of the car with such relief that he
nearly knocked me off my feet. His piercing squeal, in the wake of the
gunshot, had been an expression of terror, not pain.
I dropped to my knees on the sidewalk, let the Glock slip out of my
hand, and pulled the dog into my arms. I held him fiercely, stroking
his head, smoothing his black coat, reveling in his panting, in the
fast thudding of his heart, in the swish of his tail, reveling even in
the dampish reek of him and in the stale-cereal smell of his
biscuit-scented breath.
I didn’t trust myself to speak. My voice was a keystone mortared in my
throat. If I managed to break it loose, an entire dam might collapse,
a babble of loss and longing might pour out of me, and all the unshed
tears for my father and for Angela Ferryman might come in a flood.
I do not allow myself to cry. I would rather be a bone worn to dry
splinters by the teeth of sorrow than a sponge wrung ceaselessly in its
hands.
Besides, even if I could have trusted myself to speak, words weren’t
important here. Though he was certainly a special dog, Orson wasn’t
going to join me in spirited conversation-at least not if and until I
shed enough of my encumbering reason to ask Roosevelt Frost to teach me
animal communication.
When I was able to let go of Orson, I retrieved the Glock and rose to
my feet to survey the marina parking lot. The fog concealed most of
the few cars and recreational vehicles owned by the handful of people
who lived on their boats. No one was in sight, and the night remained
silent except for the idling car engine.
Apparently the sound of gunfire had been largely contained in the
patrol car and suppressed by the fog. The nearest houses were outside
the commercial marina district, two blocks away. If anyone aboard the
boats had been awakened, they’d evidently assumed that those four
muffled explosions had been nothing more than an engine backfiring or
dream doors slamming between the sleeping and the waking worlds.
I wasn’t in immediate danger of being caught, but I couldn’t cycle away
and expect to escape blame and punishment. I had killed the chief of
police, and though he had no longer been the man whom Moonlight Bay had
long known and admired, though he had metamorphosed from a
conscientious servant of the people into someone lacking all the
essential elements of humanity, I couldn’t prove that this hero had
become the very monster that he was sworn to oppose.
Forensic evidence would convict me. Because of the identity of the
victim, first-rate police-lab technicians from both county and state
offices would become involved, and when they processed the patrol car,
they wouldn’t miss anything.
I could never tolerate imprisonment in some narrow candlelit cell.
Though my life is limited by the presence of light, no walls must
enclose me between the sunset and the dawn. None ever will.