that very moment, and thought of the inexplicable prophetic dream he’d
had about the “bad thing.” At last he said, “All right, okay, if he
shows up, and if you’re able to pop out of here before he kills us both,
then I’d be better off with you. I’ll take your hand, but only until we
walk up to that restaurant, call a cab, and are on our way to the
airport.” He gripped Frank’s hand reluctantly.
“As soon as we’re out of this area, I let go.”
“All right. Good enough,” Frank said.
Squinting as the rain battered their faces, they headed toward the
restaurant. The structure, which stood perhaps a hundred and fifty
yards away, appeared to be made of gray, weathered wood and lots of
glass. Bobby thought he saw dim lights in the place, but he could not
be sure; the large windows were no doubt tinted, which filtered out what
fraction of the lampglow was not already hidden by the veils of rain.
Every third or fourth incoming wave was now much larger than the others,
reached farther onto the beach, and sloshed around their legs with
enough force to unbalance them. They moved toward the higher end of the
strand, away from the breakers, but the sand was far softer there; it
sucked at their shoes and made progress more laborious.
Bobby thought of Lisa, the blond receptionist at Palomar Labs. He
pictured her coming along the beach right now, taking a crazy-romantic
walk in the warm rain with some guy who’d brought her to the islands,
pictured her face when she saw him strolling the black-sand beach
hand-in-hand with another man, cheating on Clint.
This time his laughter didn’t have a scary edge.
Frank said, “What?”
Before Bobby could even start to explain, he saw that someone actually
was heading in their general direction through the obscuring rain. It
was a dark figure, not Lisa, a man, and he was only about thirty yards
away.
He hadn’t been there a moment ago.
“It’s him,” Frank said.
Even at a distance the guy looked big. He spotted them turned directly
toward them.
Bobby said, “Get us out of here, Frank.”
“I can’t do it on demand. You know that.”
“Then let’s run,” he urged, and he tried to pull Frank down the beach,
toward the abandoned lifeguard tower and what lay beyond.
But after floundering a few steps through the sand, Frank stopped and
said, “No, I can’t, I’m worn out. I’m going to have to pray that I pop
out of here in time.” He looked worse than worn out. He looked half
dead.
Bobby turned toward Candy again, and saw the brother slogging through
the soft, wet sand much faster than they had managed but still with some
difficulty.
“Why don’t he just teleport from there to here in a flash, overwhelm
us?”
Frank’s horror at the sight of his oncoming nemesis was complete in that
he didn’t appear capable of speech. Yet words came with the shallow
breaths that rasped out of his mouth.
“Short hops, under a few hundred feet, aren’t possible. Do you know
why.” Maybe if the trip was too short, the mind had a fraction of a
second less than the minimum time required to deconstruct and fully
reconstruct the body. It didn’t matter what the son was. Even if he
couldn’t teleport across the remain stretch of sand, Candy was going to
reach them in seconds. He was only thirty feet away and closing, a
massive juggernaut of a man, with a neck thick enough to support a car
balanced on his head, and arms that would give him an advantage in a
wrestling match with a four-ton industrial robot. His blond hair was
almost white. His face was broad and sharp-featured and hard-and as
cruel as the face of one of those psychotic young boys who liked to set
ants on fire with matches and test the effects of their full-strength on
neighborhood
Charging through the storm, kicking up gouts of wet black sand with each
step, he looked less like a man than a demon with a fierce hunger for
human souls.
Holding fast to his client’s hand, Bobby said, “Frank, for God’s sake,