He watched intently.
“Do You approve of the knot,” I asked, “or would You like to tie one of
your own?”
At the open fuel port, I lowered the cartridge into the tank.
The weight of it pulled the fuse all the way down into the reservoir.
Like a wick, the highly absorbent gauze would immediately begin to soak
up the gasoline.
Orson ran nervously in a circle: Hurry, hurry. Hurry quick.
Quick, quick, quick, Master Snow.
I left almost five feet of fuse out of the tank. It hung along the
side of the patrol car and trailed onto the sidewalk.
After fetching my bicycle from where I’d leaned it against the trunk of
the laurel, I stooped and ignited the end of the fuse with my butane
lighter. Although the exposed length of gauze was not gasoline-soaked,
it burned faster than I expected. Too fast.
I climbed onto my bike and pedaled as if all of Hell’s lawyers and a
few demons of this earth were baying at my heels, which they probably
were.
With Orson sprinting at my side, I shot across the parking lot to the
ramped exit drive, onto Embarcadero Way, which was deserted, and then
south past the shuttered restaurants and shops that lined the bay
front.
The explosion came too soon, a solid whump that wasn’t half as loud as
I’d anticipated. Around and even ahead of me, orange light bloomed;
the initial flare of the blast was refracted a considerable distance by
the fog.
Recklessly, I squeezed the hand brake, slid through a
hundredand-eighty-degree turn, came to a halt with one foot on the
blacktop, and looked back.
Little could be seen, no details: a core of hard yellow-white light
surrounded by orange plumes, all softened by the deep, eddying mist.
The worst thing I saw wasn’t in the night but inside my head: Lewis
Stevenson’s face bubbling, smoking, streaming hot clear grease like
bacon in a frying pan.
“Dear God,” I said in a voice that was so raspy and tremulous that I
didn’t recognize it.
Nevertheless, I could have done nothing else but light that fuse.
Although the cops would know Stevenson had been killed, evidence of how
it was done-and by whom-would now be obliterated.
I made the drive chain sing, leading my accomplice dog away from the
harbor, through a spiraling maze of streets and alleyways, deeper into
the murky, nautilus heart of Moonlight Bay. Even with the heavy Glock
in one pocket, my unzipped leather jacket flapped as though it were a
cape, and I fled unseen, avoiding light for more than one reason now, a
shadow flowing liquidly through shadows, as though I were the fabled
Phantom, escaped from the labyrinth underneath the opera house, now on
wheels and hell-bent on terror! the world above ground.
Being able to entertain such a flamboyantly romantic image of myself in
the immediate aftermath of murder doesn’t speak well of me. In my
defense, I can only say that by recasting these events as a grand
adventure, with me in a dashing role, I was desperately trying to quell
my fear and, more desperately still, struggling to suppress the
memories of the shooting. I also needed to suppress the ghastly images
of the burning body that my active imagination generated like an
endless series of pop-up spooks leaping from the black walls of a
funhouse.
Anyway, this shaky effort to romanticize the event lasted only until I
reached the alleyway behind the Grand Theater, half a block south of
Ocean Avenue, where a grime-encrusted security lamp made the fog appear
to be brown and polluted. There, I swung off my bike, let it clatter
to the pavement, leaned into a Dumpster, and brought up what little I
had not digested of my midnight dinner with Bobby Halloway.
I had murdered a man.
Unquestionably, the victim had deserved to die. And sooner or later,
relying on one excuse or another, Lewis Stevenson would have killed me,
regardless of his coconspirators’ inclination to grant special
dispensation to me; arguably, I acted in self-defense. And to save
Orson’s life.
Nevertheless, I’d killed a human being; even these qualifying
circumstances didn’t alter the moral essence of the act. His vacant