“He’s too old for that crap,” Cliff protested.
“Evidently not. He went around the other side, and he’s headed for a phone on
one of the northern public beaches. We’ve got to stop him, and fast.”
Cliff cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted the first names of the four
agents who were positioned on other boats along the docks. His voice carried,
echoing flatly off the water, in spite of the wind. Men came running, and even
as Cliff’s shouts faded away across the harbor, Lem was sprinting for his car in
the parking lot.
The worst happens when you least expect it.
As Travis was rinsing dinner dishes, Nora said, “Look at this.”
He turned and saw that she was standing by Einstein’s food and water dishes. The
water was gone, but half his dinner remained.
She said, “When have you known him to leave a single scrap?”
“Never.” Frowning, Travis wiped his hands on the kitchen towel. “The last few
days . . . I’ve thought maybe he’s coming down with a cold or something, but he
says he feels fine. And today he hasn’t been sneezing or coughing like he was.”
They went into the living room, where the retriever was reading Black Beauty
with the help of his page-turning machine.
They knelt beside him, and he looked up, and Nora said, “Are you sick,
Einstein?”
The retriever barked once, softly: No.
“Are you sure?”
A quick wag of the tail: Yes.
“You didn’t finish your dinner,” Travis said.
The dog yawned elaborately.
Nora said, “Are you telling us you’re a little tired?”
Yes.
“If you were feeling ill,” Travis said, “you’d let us know right away, wouldn’t
you, fur face?”
Yes.
Nora insisted on examining Einstein’s eyes, mouth, and ears for obvious signs
of infection, but at last she said, “Nothing. He seems okay. I guess even
Superdog has a right to be tired once in a while.”
The wind had come up fast. It was chilly, and under its lash the waves rose
higher than they had been all day.
A mass of gooseflesh, Garrison reached the landward end of the north flank of
the harbor’s northern breakwater. He was relieved to depart the hard and
sometimes jagged stones of that rampart for the sandy beach. He was sure he had
scraped and cut both feet; they felt hot, and his left foot stung with each
step, forcing him to limp.
At first he stayed close to the surf, away from the tree-lined park that lay
behind the beach. Over there, where park lamps lit the walkways and where
spotlights dramatically highlighted the palms, he would be more easily seen from
the street. He did not think anyone would be looking for him; he was sure his
trick had worked. However, if anyone was looking for him, he did not want to
call attention to himself.
The gusting wind tore foam off the incoming breakers and flung it in Garrison’s
face, so he felt as if he was continuously running through spiders’ webs. The
stuff stung his eyes, which had finally stopped tearing from his dunk in the
sea, and at last he was forced to move away from the surf line, farther up the
beach, where the softer sand met the lawn but where he was still out of the
lights.
Young people were on the darkish beach, dressed for the chill of the night:
couples on blankets, cuddling; small groups smoking dope, listening to music.
Eight or ten teenage boys were gathered around two all-terrain vehicles with
balloon tires, which were not allowed on the beach during the day and most
likely weren’t allowed at night.. They were drinking beer beside a pit they’d
dug in the sand to bury their bottles if they saw a cop approaching; they were
talking loudly about girls, and indulging in horseplay. No one gave Garrison
more than a glance as he hurried by. In California, health-food-and-exercise
fanatics were as common as street muggers in New York, and if an old man wanted
to take a cold swim and then run on the beach in the dark, he was no more
remarkable or noteworthy than a priest in a church.