snails without stepping on them, sheerly with his voice.
Because his gun was in his hand, I remained at a disadvantage, but I
took some thin comfort from the fact that he apparently didn’t know
that I was armed. For the time being, I had no choice but to
cooperate.
“In the car, pal,” I told Orson, trying not to sound fearful, trying
not to let my hammering heart pound a tremor into my voice.
Reluctantly the dog obeyed.
Lewis Stevenson slammed the rear door and then opened the front. “Now
You, Snow.”
I settled into the passenger seat while Stevenson walked around the
black-and-white to the driver’s side and got in behind the wheel. He
pulled his door shut and told me to close mine, which I had hoped to
avoid doing.
Usually I don’t suffer from claustrophobia in tight spaces, but no
coffin could have been more cramped than this patrol car. The fog
pressing at the windows was as psychologically suffocating as a dream
about premature burial.
The interior of the car seemed chillier and damper than the night
outside. Stevenson started the engine in order to be able to switch on
the heater.
The police radio crackled, and a dispatcher’s static-filled voice
croaked like frog song. Stevenson clicked it off.
Orson stood on the floor in front of the backseat, forepaws on the
steel grid that separated him from us, peering worriedly through that
security barrier. When the chief pressed a console button with the
barrel of his gun, the power locks on the rear doors engaged with a
hard sound no less final than the thunk of a guillotine blade.
I had hoped that Stevenson would holster his pistol when he got into
the car, but he kept a grip on it. He rested the weapon on his leg,
the muzzle pointed at the dashboard. In the dim green light from the
instrument panel, I thought I saw that his forefinger was now curled
around the trigger guard rather than around the trigger itself, but
this didn’t lessen his advantage to any appreciable degree.
For a moment he lowered his head and closed his eyes, as though praying
or gathering his thoughts.
Fog condensed on the Indian laurel, and drops of water dripped from the
points of the leaves, snapping with an unrhythmical ponk-pank-ping
against the roof and hood of the car.
Casually, quietly, I tucked both hands into my jacket pockets. I
closed my right hand around the Glock.
I told myself that, because of my overripe imagination, I was
exaggerating the threat. Stevenson was in a foul mood, yes, and from
what I had seen behind the police station, I knew that he was not the
righteous arm of justice that he had long pretended to be.
But this didn’t mean that he had any violent intentions. He might,
indeed, want only to talk, and having said his piece, he might turn us
loose unharmed.
When at last Stevenson raised his head, his eyes were servings of
bitter brew in cups of bone. As his gaze flowed to me, I was again
chilled by an impression of inhuman malevolence, as I had been when
he’d first stepped out of the gloom beside the marina office, but this
time I knew why my harp-string nerves thrummed with fear. Briefly, at
a certain angle, his liquid stare rippled with a yellow luminance
similar to the eyeshine that many animals exhibit at night, a cold and
mysterious inner light like nothing I had ever seen before in the eyes
of man or woman.
The electric and electrifying radiance passed through Chief Stevenson’s
eyes so fleetingly, as he turned to face me, that on any night before
this one, I might have dismissed the phenomenon as merely a queer
reflection of the instrument-panel lights. But since sundown, I had
seen monkeys that were not merely monkeys, a cat that was somehow more
than a cat, and I had waded through mysteries that flowed like rivers
along the streets of Moonlight Bay, and I had learned to expect
significance in the seemingly insignificant.
His eyes were inky again, glimmerless. The anger in his voice was now
an undertow, while the surface current was gray despair and grief.