Moonlight Bay.
“We can read these later,” I said. “Let’s move. Bobby’s alone out
there.” side, not out of fear that the murderous troop might be among
the dunes even now but, in his role as food cop, to guard against the
unfair distribution of the pizza.
Sasha removed two plastic shopping bags from the Explorer.
They contained the fire extinguishers that she’d purchased at Crown
Hardware.
She closed the tailgate and used the remote on her key chain to lock
the doors. Since Bobby’s Jeep occupied his one-car garage, we were
leaving the Explorer in front of the cottage.
When Sasha turned to me, the wind made a glorious banner of her
lustrous mahogany hair, and her skin glowed softly, as if the moon had
managed to press one exquisite beam through the clot ted clouds to
caress her face.
She seemed larger than life, an elemental spirit.
“What?” she said, unable to interpret my stare.
“You’re so beautiful. Like a wind goddess drawing the storm to You.”
As Sasha opened the tailgate of the Explorer, shrieking gulls wheeled
low overhead, tumbling inland toward safer roosts, frightened by a wind
that shattered the sea and flung the wet fragments across the point of
the horn.
“You’re so full of shit,” she said, but she smiled.
“It’s one of my most charming qualities.”
A sand devil did a dervish dance around us, spitting grit in our faces,
and we hurried into the house.
the With the box from Thor’s Gun Shop in my arms, I watched white wings
dwindle across the turbulent black sky. Bobby was waiting inside,
where the lights were dialed down to a comfortable murk. The fog was
long gone.
Under the lowering clouds, the night was crystaline. He locked the
front door behind us.
Around us on the peninsula, the sparse shore grass thrashed. Looking
around at the large panes of glass, Sasha said, “I sure wish we could
nail some plywood over these.”
Tall sand devils whirled off the tops of the dunes, like pale spirits
spun up from graves.
“This is my house,” Bobby said. “I’m not going to board up the
windows, hunker down, and live like a prisoner just because of some
damned monkeys.”
I wondered if more than the wind had harried the seagulls from their
shelter. To Sasha, I said, “As long as I’ve known him, this amazing
dude hasn’t been intimidated by monkeys.”
“Never,” Bobby agreed. “And I’m not starting now.”
“They’re not here yet,” Bobby assured me as he took the two pizza-shop
boxes from the back of the Explorer.
“It’s early for them.”
“Monkeys are usually eating at this hour,” I said. “I had a little
“Let’s at least draw the blinds,” Sasha said.
I shook my head. “Bad idea. That’ll just make them suspicious.
dancing.”
If they can watch us, and if we don’t appear to be lying in wait for
them, they’ll be less cautious.”
“Maybe they won’t even come at all tonight,” Sasha hoped.
“They’ll come,” I said. Sasha took the two fire extinguishers from
their boxes and “Yeah. They’ll come,” Bobby agreed.
clipped the plastic presale guards from the triggers. They were ten
Bobby went inside with our dinner. Orson stayed close by his pound,
marine-type models, easy to handle. She put one in a corner of the
kitchen where it couldn’t be seen from the windows, and tucked the
second beside one of the sofas in the living room.
While Sasha dealt with the extinguishers, Bobby and I sat in the
candlelit kitchen, boxes of ammunition in our laps, working below table
level in case the monkey mafia showed up while we were at work. Sasha
had purchased three extra magazines for the Glock and three
speedloaders for her revolver, and we snapped cartridges into them.
“After I left here last night,” I said, “I visited Roosevelt Frost.”
Bobby looked at me from under his eyebrows. “He and Orson have a broly
chat?”
“Roosevelt tried. Orson wasn’t having any of it. But there was this
cat named Mungojerrie.”
“Of course,” he said drily.
“The cat said the people at Wyvern wanted me to walk away from this,
just move on.”
“You talk to the cat personally?”