destructive force of the sun. Ultraviolet light penetrates even black
thunderheads, and while the burn may build more slowly than on a
searingly bright day, the irreparable damage to my skin and eyes
nevertheless accumulates. Sunscreen lotions protect well against the
less serious forms of skin cancer, but they have little or no ability to
prevent melanoma.
Consequently, I have to seek shelter from even a daytime sky as gray
black as the char and ashes in the cold bowl of Satan’s pipe after he’s
smoked a handful of souls.
To Bobby, I said, “We’re no good without a little sleep. Grab some
mattress time, then meet Sasha and me at my house between noon and one
o’clock. We’ll put together a plan and a search party.” [ “You can’t go
back to Wyvern till sundown, but maybe some of us ought to get moving
sooner, ” he said.
“I’m for that. But there’s no point in quartering off Wyvern and
searching every foot of it. That would take too long, forever.
We’d never find them in time, ” I said, leaving unspoken the thought
that we might already be too late. “We don’t go back until we’ve got the
tracker we need.”
“Tracker? ” Sasha asked, fitting her revolver into the holster under her
denim jacket.
“Mungojerrie, ” I said, tucking away my 9-millimeter.
Bobby blinked. “The cat? ”
“He’s more than a cat, ” I reminded Bobby.
“Yeah, but”
“And he’s our only hope.”
“Cats can track? ”
“I’m sure this one can.” Bobby shook his head.
“I’m never gonna be at home in this brave new smart-animal world, bro.
It’s like I’m living in a maximum-wacky Donald Duck cartoon, but one
where, between the laughs, dudes get their guts ripped out.”
“The world according to Edgar Allan Disney, ” I said. “Anyway,
Mungojerrie hangs out around the marina.
Pay a visit to Roosevelt Frost.
He should know how to find our tracker.” Out of the pool of shadows in
the canyon east of us, the eerie ululant cries of coyotes rose, a sound
like no other on earth, like the tormented and hungry voices that
banshees would have if banshees existed.
Sasha put her right hand under her jacket, as if she might draw her
revolver again.
Such a frenzied choir of coyotes is a common sound at night, usually
signifying that a hunt has reached its bloody end, that some prey as
large as a deer has been brought down by the pack, or that the full moon
is exerting its peculiar pull, but you rarely hear such a chilling
chorus on this side of the sunrise. As much as anything that we had yet
experienced, this sinister serenade, which escalated in volume and
passion, filled me with foreboding.
“Sharky, ” Bobby said.
“White pointers, ” I said, which is surfer lingo for great whites, the
most dangerous of all sharks.
I climbed into the passenger seat of the Explorer, and by the time Sasha
started the engine, Bobby pulled past us in his Jeep, heading for Jenna
Wing’s house across town.
I didn’t expect to see him for at least seven hours, but here at the
dawn of April 12, we didn’t realize that we were entering a day of epic
bad news. The nasty surprises were coming at us like a long series of
triple overhead monoliths churned up by a typhoon in the far Pacific.
Sasha parked the Explorer in the driveway, because my father’s car was
in the garage, as were boxes of his clothing and his personal effects.
The day would come, with his death far enough in the past, when I would
not feel that disposing of his belongings would diminish him in my
memory. I was not at that day yet.
In this matter, I know I’m being illogical. My memories of my dad, which
give me sustaining strength every day, are not related to what clothes
he wore on any particular occasion, to his favorite sweater or his
silver-rimmed reading glasses. His things do not keep him vivid in my
mind, he stays with me because of his kindness, his wit, his courage,
his love, his joy in life. Yet twice in the three weeks since I’ve