Abruptly his joyful mood and sense of impending transcendence were diminished when a strange slithering sensation crept up the hollow of his spine. He shivered.
‘Cold?’ she asked.
‘No.’
As sometimes happens along the coast, the air temperature had bottomed out after midnight; it was rising again. The sea was an efficient heat sink that stored up the warmth of the sun during the balmy day and gradually released it after darkness fell.
The slithering in the spine came again, and Tommy said, ‘It’s just a weird feeling . .
‘Oooh, I like weird feelings.’
‘…maybe a premonition.’
‘Premonition? You’re getting more interesting by the moment, Tuong Tommy. Premonition of what?’
He looked around uneasily at the tenebrous forms of the carousel horses. ‘I… don’t quite… know…
Then he suddenly became aware that his neck and shoulders were no longer sore. His headache had passed too.
Astonished, he said, ‘That was an incredible massage.’
‘You’re welcome.’
In fact, no pain lingered in any muscle in his body, not even in those that he had bruised when he had been tackled on the concrete patio. He was not sleepy, either, and his eyes no longer itched and burned as before. Indeed, he felt wide-awake, energetic, and better than he had felt before this entire pursuit had begun.
Frowning at Del in the gloom, he said, ‘Hey, how did-’
Scootie interrupted, thrusting his head between them and whining fearfully.
‘It’s coming,’ Del said, rising from the chariot.
Tommy snatched the Mossberg off the carousel floor.
Already Del was easing between the horses, using them for cover but moving closer to the edge of the platform for a better view of the promenade.
Tommy joined her behind a great black stallion with bared teeth and wild eyes.
Standing almost on point and utterly still, like a hunting dog in a field where a pheasant had been spotted in the brush, Scootie stared east along lamp lit Edgewater Avenue, past Anchors Away Boat Rentals and Original Harbour Cruises toward Balboa Beach Treats. Except for his smaller size, he might have been one of the carved animals waiting in mid-stampede for sunshine and for the riders who would come with it.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Tommy whispered.
‘Wait.’
‘Why?’
‘I want to see it better,’ she said, indicating the three-globe streetlamp past which the fat man would have to come. Her words were almost as faint as exhalations.
‘I have no desire to see it better.’
‘Anyway, we have the guns. We can knock it down again.’
‘We might not be lucky this time.’
‘Scootie can try to misdirect it.’
‘You mean lead it away from us?’
Del didn’t reply.
Ears pricked, head held high, Scootie was clearly ready to do whatever his mistress demanded of him.
Maybe the dog could outrun the creature. Although the thing posing as the portly Samaritan apparently was a supernatural entity, immortal and ultimately unstoppable, it too seemed bound by some of the laws of physics, which was why the hard impact of high-calibre ammunition could halt it, knock it down, delay it; consequently, there was no reason to assume that it could move as fast as Scootie, who was smaller, lower to the ground, and designed by nature for speed.
‘But the thing won’t be lured away by the dog,’ Tommy whispered. ‘Del, it isn’t interested in the dog. It only wants me… and maybe you now.’
‘Hush,’ she said.
In the wintry light from the frosted globes on the nearest lamp, the falling rain appeared to be sleet. The concrete walkway glistened as though coated with ice.
Beyond the light, the rain darkened to tarnished silver and then to ash grey, and out of the greyness came the fat man, walking slowly along the centre of the deserted promenade.
At Tommy’s side, Scootie twitched but made no sound. Holding the shotgun in both hands, Tommy hunched lower behind the carousel stallion. In the windless night, he stared out at the promenade past the perpetually wind-tossed tail of the carved horse.
At the other end of the leaping stallion, Del shrank herself too, watching the Samaritan from under the horse’s neck.
Like a dirigible easing along the ground toward its berth, the fat man advanced as if he were drifting rather than walking, making no splashing sounds on the puddled pavement.