Dragon Tears

1

Tuesday was a fine California day, full of sunshine and promise, until Harry Lyon had to shoot someone at lunch.

For breakfast, sitting at his kitchen table, he ate toasted English muffins with lemon marmalade and drank strong black Jamaican coffee. A pinch of cinnamon gave the brew a pleasantly spicy taste.

The kitchen window provided a view of the greenbelt that wound through Los Cabos, a sprawling condominium development in Irvine. As president of the homeowners’ association, Harry drove the gardeners hard and rigorously monitored their work, ensuring that the trees, shrubs, and grass were as neatly trimmed as a landscape in a fairy tale, as if maintained by platoons of gardening elves with hundreds of tiny shears.

As a child, he had enjoyed fairy tales even more than children usually did. In the worlds of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, springtime hills were always flawlessly green, velvet-smooth. Order prevailed. Villains invariably met with justice, and the virtuous were rewarded — though sometimes only after hideous suffering. Hansel and Gretel didn’t die in the witch’s oven; the crone herself was roasted alive therein. Instead of stealing the queen’s newborn daughter, Rumpelstiltskin was foiled and, in his rage, tore himself apart.

In real life during the last decade of the twentieth century, Rumpelstiltskin would probably get the queen’s daughter. He would no doubt addict her to heroin, turn her out as a prostitute, confiscate her earnings, beat her for pleasure, hack her to pieces, and escape justice by claiming that society’s intolerance for bad-tempered, evil-minded trolls had driven him temporarily insane.

Harry swallowed the last of his coffee, and sighed. Like a lot of people, he longed to live in a better world.

Before going to work, he washed the dishes and utensils, dried them, and put them away. He loathed coming home to mess and clutter.

At the foyer mirror by the front door, he paused to adjust the knot in his tie. He slipped into a navy-blue blazer and checked to be sure the weapon in his shoulder holster made no telltale bulge.

As on every workday for the past six months, he avoided traffic-packed freeways, following the same surface streets to the Multi-Agency Law Enforcement Special Projects Center in Laguna Niguel, a route that he had mapped out to minimize travel time. He had arrived at the office as early as 8:15 and as late as 8:28, but he had never been tardy.

That Tuesday when he parked his Honda in the shadowed lot on the west side of the two-story building, the car clock showed 8:21. His wristwatch confirmed the time. Indeed, all of the clocks in Harry’s condominium and the one on the desk in his office would be displaying 8:21. He synchronized all of his clocks twice a week.

Standing beside the car, he drew deep, relaxing breaths. Rain had fallen overnight, scrubbing the air clean. The March sunshine gave the morning a glow as golden as the flesh of a ripe peach.

To meet Laguna Niguel architectural standards, the Special Projects Center was a two-story Mediterranean-style building with a columned promenade. Surrounded by lush azaleas and tall melaleucas with lacy branches, it bore no resemblance to most police facilities. Some of the cops who worked out of Special Projects thought it looked too effete, but Harry liked it.

The institutional decor of the interior had little in common with the picturesque exterior. Blue vinyl-tile floors. Pale-gray walls. Acoustic ceilings. However, its air of orderliness and efficiency was comforting.

Even at that early hour, people were on the move through the lobby and hallways, mostly men with the solid physique and self-confident attitude that marked career cops. Only a few were in uniform. Special Projects drew on plainclothes homicide detectives and undercover operatives from federal, state, county, and city agencies to facilitate criminal investigations spread over numerous jurisdictions. Special Projects teams — sometimes whole task forces — dealt with youth-gang killings, serial murders, pattern rapists, and large-scale narcotics activities.

Harry shared a second-floor office with Connie Gulliver. His half of the room was softened by a small palm, Chinese evergreens, and the leafy trailers of a pothos. Her half had no plants. On his desk were only a blotter, pen set, and small brass clock. Heaps of files, loose papers, and photographs were stacked on hers.

Surprisingly, Connie had gotten to the office first. She was standing at the window, her back to him.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Is it?” she asked sourly.

She turned to him. She was wearing badly scuffed Reeboks, blue jeans, a red-and-brown-checkered blouse, and a brown corduroy jacket. The jacket was one of her favorites, worn so often that the cords were threadbare in places, the cuffs were frayed, and the inner-arm creases in the sleeves appeared to be as permanent as river valleys carved in bedrock by eons of flowing water.

In her hand was an empty paper cup from which she had been drinking coffee. She wadded it almost angrily and threw it on the floor. It bounced and came to rest in Harry’s half of the room.

“Let’s hit the streets,” she said, heading toward the hall door.

Staring at the cup on the floor, he said, “What’s the rush?”

“We’re cops, aren’t we? So let’s don’t stand around with our thumbs up our asses, let’s go do cop stuff.”

As she moved out of sight into the hall, he stared at the cup on his side of the room. With his foot, he nudged it across the imaginary line that divided the office.

He followed Connie to the door but halted at the threshold. He glanced back at the paper cup.

By now Connie would be at the end of the corridor, maybe even descending the stairs.

Harry hesitated, returned to the crumpled cup, and tossed it in the waste can. He disposed of the other two cups as well.

He caught up with Connie in the parking lot, where she yanked open the driver’s door of their unmarked Project sedan. As he got in the other side, she started the car, twisting the key so savagely that it should have snapped off in the ignition.

“Have a bad night?” he inquired.

She slammed the car into gear.

He said, “Headache?”

She reversed too fast out of the parking slot.

He said, “Thorn in the paw?”

The car shot toward the street.

Harry braced himself, but he was not worried about her driving. She could handle a car far better than she handled people. “Want to talk about whatever’s wrong?”

“No.”

For someone who lived on the edge, who seemed fearless in moments of danger, who went skydiving and breakneck dirt-biking on weekends, Connie Gulliver was frustratingly, primly reticent when it came to making personal revelations. They had been working together for six months, and although Harry knew a great many things about her, sometimes it seemed he knew nothing important about her.

“It might help to talk about it,” Harry said.

“It wouldn’t help.”

Harry watched her surreptitiously as she drove, wondering if her anger arose from man problems. He had been a cop for fifteen years and had seen enough of human treachery and misery to know that men were the source of most women’s troubles. He knew nothing whatsoever of Connie’s love life, however, not even whether she had one.

“Does it have to do with this case?”

“No.”

He believed her. She tried, with apparent success, never to be stained by the filth in which her life as a cop required her to wade.

She said, “But I sure do want to nail this sonofabitch Durner. I think we’re close.”

Doyle Durner, a drifter who moved in the surfer subculture, was wanted for questioning in a series of rapes that had grown more violent incident by incident until the most recent victim had been beaten to death. A sixteen-year-old schoolgirl.

Durner was their primary suspect because he was known to have undergone a circumferential autologous penile engorgement. A plastic surgeon in Newport Beach liposuctioned fat out of Durner’s waist and injected it into his penis to increase its thickness. The procedure was definitely not recommended by the American Medical Association, but if the surgeon had a big mortgage to pay and the patient was obsessed with his circumference, the forces of the marketplace prevailed over concerns about post-operative complications. The circumference of Durner’s manhood had been increased fifty percent, such a dramatic enlargement that it must have’ caused him occasional discomfort. By all reports, he was happy with the results, not because he was likely to impress women but because he was likely to hurt them, which was the whole point. The victims’ description of their attacker’s freakish difference had helped authorities zero in on Durner — and three of them had noted the tattoo of a snake on his groin, which had been recorded in his police file upon his conviction for two rapes in Santa Barbara eight years ago.

By noon that Tuesday, Harry and Connie had spoken with workers and customers at three hangouts popular among surfers and other beach habitués in Laguna: a shop that sold surfboards and related gear, a yogurt and health food store, and a dimly lighted bar in which a dozen customers were drinking Mexican beers at eleven o’clock in the morning. If you could believe what they said, which you couldn’t, they had never heard of Doyle Durner and did not recognize him in the photo they were shown.

In the car between stops, Connie regaled Harry with the latest items in her collection of outrages. “You hear about the woman in Philadelphia, they found two infants dead of malnutrition in her apartment and dozens of crack-cocaine vials scattered all over the place? She’s so doped up her babies starve to death, and you know all they could charge her with? Reckless endangerment.”

Harry only sighed. When Connie was in the mood to talk about what she sometimes called “the continuing crisis”—or when she was more sarcastic, “the pre-millennium cotillion”; or in her bleaker moments, “these new Dark Ages”—no response was expected from him. She was quite satisfied to make a monologue of it.

She said, “A guy in New York killed his girlfriend’s two-year-old daughter, pounded her with his fists and kicked her because she was dancing in front of the TV, interfering with his view. Probably watching ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ didn’t want to miss a shot of Vanna White’s fabulous legs.”

Like most cops, Connie had an acute sense of black humor. It was a defense mechanism. Without it you’d be driven crazy or become terminally depressed by the endless encounters with human evil and perversity that were central to the job. To those whose knowledge of police life came from half-baked television programs, real-life cop humor could seem crude and insensitive at times — though no good cop gave a rat’s ass for what anybody but another cop thought of him.

“There’s this Suicide Prevention Center up in Sacramento,” Connie said, braking for a red traffic light. “One of the counselors got sick of getting calls from this depressive senior citizen, so he and a friend went to the old guy’s apartment, held him down, slashed his wrists and throat.”

Sometimes, beneath Connie’s darkest humor, Harry perceived a bitterness that was not common to cops. Perhaps it was worse than mere bitterness. Maybe even despair. She was so self-contained that it was usually difficult to determine exactly what she was feeling.

Unlike Connie, Harry was an optimist. To remain an optimist, however, he found it necessary not to dwell on human folly and malevolence the way she did.

Trying to change the subject, he said, “How about lunch? I know this great little Italian trattoria with oilcloth on the tables, wine bottles for candleholders, good gnocchi, fabulous manicotti.”

She grimaced. “Nah. Let’s just grab tacos at a drive-through and eat on the fly.”

They compromised on a burger joint half a block north of Pacific Coast Highway. It had about a dozen customers and a Southwest decor. The tops of the whitewashed wood tables were sealed beneath an inch of acrylic. Pastel flame-pattern upholstery on the chairs. Potted cacti. Gorman and Parkison lithographs. They ought to have been selling black-bean soup and mesquite-grilled beef instead of burgers and fries.

Harry and Connie were eating at a small table along one wall — a dry, grilled-chicken sandwich for him; shoestring fries and sloppy, aromatic cheeseburger for her — when the tall man entered in a flash of sunlight that flared off the glass door. He stopped at the hostess station and looked around.

Although the guy was neatly groomed and well dressed in light-gray cords, white shirt, and dark-gray Ultrasuede jacket, something about him instantly made Harry uneasy. His vague smile and mildly distracted air gave him a curiously professorial look. His face was round and soft, with a weak chin and pale lips. He looked timid, not threatening. Nevertheless, Harry’s gut tightened. Cop instinct.

2

Sammy Shamroe had been known as “Sam the Sham” back when he was a Los Angeles advertising agency executive blessed with a singular creative talent — and cursed with a taste for cocaine. That had been three years ago. An eternity.

Now he crawled out of the packing crate in which he lived, trailing the rags and crumpled newspapers that served as his bedding. He stopped crawling as soon as he moved beyond the drooping boughs of the oleander bush which grew at the edge of the vacant lot and concealed most of the crate. For a while he stayed on his hands and knees, his head hanging down, staring at the alley pavement.

Long ago he had ceased to be able to afford the high-end drugs that had so thoroughly ruined him. Now he suffered from a cheap-wine headache. He felt as if his skull had fallen open while he slept, allowing the wind to plant a handful of prickly burrs in the surface of his exposed brain.

He was not in the least disoriented. Because the sunlight fell straight down into the alley, leaving shadows only close along the back walls of the buildings on the north side, Sammy knew it was nearly noon. Although he hadn’t worn a watch, seen a calendar, held a job, or had an appointment to keep in three years, he was always aware of the season, the month, the day. Tuesday. He was acutely cognizant of where he was (Laguna Beach), of how he had gotten there (every mistake, every self-indulgence, every stupid self-destructive act retained in vivid detail), and of what he could expect for the rest of his life (shame, deprivation, struggle, regret).

The worst aspect of his fall from grace was the stubborn clarity of his mind, which even massive quantities of alcohol could pollute only briefly. The prickly burrs of his hangover headache were a mild inconvenience when compared to the sharp thorns of memory and self-awareness that bristled deeper in his brain.

He heard someone approaching. Heavy footsteps. A faint limp: one foot scraping lightly against the pavement. He knew that tread. He began to tremble. He kept his head down and closed his eyes, willing the footsteps to grow fainter and recede into silence. But they grew louder, nearer… then stopped directly in front of him.

“You figured it out yet?”

It was the deep, gravelly voice that had recently begun to haunt Sammy’s nightmares. But he was not asleep now. This was not the monster of his turbulent dreams. This was the real creature that inspired the nightmares.

Reluctantly Sammy opened his grainy eyes, and looked up.

The ratman stood over him, grinning.

“You figured it out yet?”

Tall, burly, his mane of hair disordered, his tangled beard flecked with unidentifiable bits and chunks of matter too disgusting to contemplate, the ratman was a terrifying figure. Where his beard did not conceal it, his face was gnarled by scars, as if he had been poked and slashed with a white-hot soldering iron. His large nose was hooked and crooked, his lips spotted with weeping sores. Upon his dark and diseased gums, his teeth perched like broken, age-yellowed marble tombstones.

The gravelly voice grew louder. “Maybe you’re already dead.”

The only ordinary thing about the ratman was his clothes: tennis shoes, charity-shop khakis, cotton shirt, and a badly weathered black raincoat, all stained and heavily wrinkled. It was the uniform of a lot of street people who, some by their own fault and some not, had fallen through the cracks in the floorboards of modern society into the shadowy crawlspace beneath.

The voice softened dramatically as the ratman bent forward, leaned closer. “Already dead and in Hell? Could it be?”

Of all the extraordinary things about the ratman, his eyes were the most disturbing. They were intensely green, unusually green, but the queerest thing was that the black pupils were elliptical like the pupils of a cat or reptile. The eyes made the ratman’s body seem like merely a disguise, a rubber suit, as if something unspeakable peered out of a costume at a world on which it had not been born but which it coveted.

The ratman lowered his voice even further to a raspy whisper: “Dead, in Hell, and me the demon assigned to torture you?”

Knowing what was coming, having endured it before, Sammy tried to scramble to his feet. But the ratman, quick as wind, kicked him before he could get out of the way. The kick caught him in the left shoulder, just missing his face, and it didn’t feel like a sneaker but like a jackboot, as if the foot inside was entirely of bone or horn or the stuff of which a beetle’s carapace was formed. Sammy curled into the fetal position, protecting his head with his folded arms as best he could. The ratman kicked him again, again, left foot, right loot, left foot, almost as if doing a little dance, a sort of jig, one-kick-anduh-two-kick-anduh-one-kick-anduh-two, not making a sound, neither snarling in rage nor laughing scornfully, not breathing hard in spite of the exertion.

The kicking stopped.

Sammy drew into an even tighter ball, like a pill bug, curling around his pains.

The alleyway was unnaturally silent except for Sammy’s soft weeping, for which he loathed himself. The traffic noise from the nearby streets had completely faded. The oleander bush behind him no longer rustled in the breeze. When Sammy angrily told himself to be a man, when he swallowed his sobs, the quietude was death-perfect.

He dared to open his eyes and peek between his arms, looking toward the far end of the alley. Blinking to clear his tear-veiled vision, he was able to see two cars halted in the street beyond. The drivers, visible only as shadowy shapes, waited motionlessly.

Closer, directly in front of his face, an inch-long wingless earwig, strangely out of its environment of rotting wood and dark places, was frozen in the process of crossing the alley. The twin prongs on the insect’s back end appeared wicked, dangerous, and were curled up like the stinging tail of a scorpion, though in reality it was harmless. Some of its six legs touched the pavement, and others were lifted in mid-stride. It didn’t move even one of its segmented antennae, as if frozen by fear or poised to attack.

Sammy shifted his gaze to the end of the alley. Out in the street, the same cars were stalled in the same spots as before. The people in them sat like mannequins.

The insect again. Unmoving. As still as if dead and pinned to an entomologist’s specimen board.

Warily Sammy lowered his crossed arms from his head. Groaning, he rolled onto his back and looked up reluctantly at his assailant.

Looming, the ratman seemed a hundred feet tall. He studied Sammy with solemn interest. “Do you want to live?” he asked.

Sammy was surprised not by the question but by his inability to answer it. He was caught between the fear of death and the need to die. Each morning he was disappointed when he woke and found that he was still among the living, and each night when he curled up in his rag-and-paper bedding, he hoped for endless sleep. Yet day after day he struggled to obtain sufficient food, to find a warm place on those rare cold nights when California’s climatic grace deserted it, to stay dry when it rained so as to avoid pneumonia, and he looked both ways before crossing a street.

Perhaps he did not want to live, but wanted only the punishment of living.

“I’d like it better if you wanted to live,” the ratman said quietly. “More fun for me.”

Sammy’s heart was beating too thunderously. Each pulse throbbed hardest in the bruised flesh that marked the impact points of the ratman’s ferocious kicks.

“You’ve got thirty-six hours to live. Better do something, don’t you think? Hmmmm? The clock is running. Ticktock, ticktock.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” Sammy asked plaintively.

Instead of replying, the ratman said, “Midnight tomorrow the rats will come for you.”

“I’ve never done anything to you.”

The scars on the tormentor’s brutal face grew livid. “… chew out your eyes…”

“Please.”

His pale lips tightened as he spoke, revealing more of his rotting teeth: “… strip away your lips while you scream, nibble your tongue…”

As the ratman grew increasingly agitated, his demeanor became not more feverish but cold. His reptilian eyes seemed to radiate a chill that found its way into Sammy’s flesh and into the deepest reaches of his mind.

“Who are you?” Sammy asked, not for the first time.

The ratman did not answer. He swelled with rage. His thick, filthy fingers curled to form fists, uncurled, curled, uncurled. He kneaded the air as if he hoped to squeeze blood from it.

What are you? Sammy wondered but dared not ask.

“Rats,” hissed the ratman.

Afraid of what was about to happen, although it had happened before, Sammy scooted backward on his butt, toward the oleander bush that half concealed his packing crate, trying to put some distance between himself and the towering hobo.

“Rats,” the ratman repeated, and he began to tremble.

It was starting.

Sammy froze, too terrified to move.

The ratman’s trembling became a shudder. The shudder escalated into violent shaking. His oily hair whipped about his head, his arms jerked, his legs jigged, and his black raincoat flapped as if he were in a cyclone, but no wind huffed or howled. The March air was as preternaturally still as it had been since the hulking vagrant’s appearance, as if the world were but a painted stage and the two of them the only actors upon it.

Becalmed on reefs of blacktop, Sammy Shamroe finally stood. He was driven to his feet by fear of the roiling tide of claws, sharp teeth, and red eyes that would soon rise around him.

Beneath his clothes, the ratman’s body churned like a burlap sack full of angry rattlesnakes. He was… changing. His face melted and reformed as if he stood in a forge controlled by some mad deity intent on molding a series of monstrosities, each of which would be more terrible than the one before it. Gone were the livid scars, gone were the reptilian eyes, gone the wild beard and tangled hair, gone the cruel mouth. For a moment his head was nothing but a mass of undifferentiated flesh, a lump of oozing mush, red with blood, then red-brown and darker, glistening, like something that had been poured out of a dog-food can. Abruptly the tissue solidified, and his head was composed of rats clinging to one another, a ball of rats, tails drooping like Rastafarian dreadlocks, fierce eyes as scarlet as drops of radiant blood. Where hands should have hung from his sleeves, rats bristled out of frayed cuffs. The heads of other rodents began to poke from between the buttons of his bulging shirt.

Though he had seen all of this before, Sammy tried to scream. His swollen tongue stuck to the roof of his dry mouth, so he made only a panicky muffled sound in the back of his throat. A scream wouldn’t help anyway. He had screamed before, during other encounters with his tormentor, and no one had responded.

The ratman came apart as if he were a rickety scarecrow in a sundering storm, pieces of his body dropping away. When each part hit the pavement, it was an individual rat. Whiskered, wet-nosed, sharp-toothed, squealing, the repellent creatures swarmed over one another, long tails lashing left and right. More rats poured out of his shirt and from under the cuffs of his trousers, far more than his clothes could possibly have contained: a score of them, two score, eighty, more than a hundred.

Like a deflating balloon that had been crafted in the form of a man, his clothes settled slowly to the pavement. Then each garment was transformed as well. The wrinkled lumps of cloth sprouted heads and limbs and produced more rodents, until both the ratman and his reeking wardrobe had been replaced by a seething mound of vermin squirming over and under one another with the boneless agility that made their kind so repulsive.

Sammy could not get his breath. The air grew even more leaden than it had been. Whereas the wind had died earlier, an unnatural stillness now seemed to settle over deeper levels of the natural world, until the fluidity of oxygen and nitrogen molecules declined drastically, as if the atmosphere had begun to thicken into a liquid, which he could draw into his lungs only with the greatest effort.

Now that the ratman’s body had disintegrated into scores of squirming beasts, the transformed corpus abruptly dispersed. The fat, sleek rats erupted out of the mound, fleeing in all directions, scuttling away from Sammy but also swarming around him, over his shoes and between his legs. That hateful, living tide spilled into the shadows along the buildings and into the vacant lot, where it either drained into holes in the building walls and in the earth — holes that Sammy could not see — or simply vanished.

A sudden breeze harried crisp dead leaves and scraps of paper ahead of it. The swish of tires and the rumble of engines arose as cars on the main street moved past the mouth of the alley. A bee buzzed by Sammy’s face.

He was able to breathe again. He stood for a moment in the bright noon light, gasping.

The worst thing was that it had all happened in sunshine, in the open air, without smoke and mirrors and clever lighting and silk threads and trapdoors and the standard tools of a magician’s craft.

Sammy had crawled out of his crate with the good intention of starting his day in spite of his hangover, maybe look for discarded aluminum cans to redeem at a recycling center, maybe do a little panhandling along the boardwalk. Now the hangover was gone, but he still didn’t feel like facing the world.

On unsteady legs, he returned to the oleander bush. The boughs were heavily laden with red flowers. He pushed them aside and stared at the large wooden crate under them.

He picked up a stick and poked at the rags and newspapers inside the big box, expecting a couple of rats to erupt from hiding. But they had gone elsewhere.

Sammy dropped to his knees and crawled into his haven, letting the draperies of oleander fall shut behind him.

From his pile of meager possessions in the back of the crate, he removed an unopened bottle of cheap burgundy and unscrewed the cap. He took a long pull of the warmish wine.

Sitting with his back against the wooden wall, clutching the bottle in both hands, he tried to forget what he had seen. As far as he could see, forgetting was his only hope of coping. He could not manage the problems of everyday life any more. So how could he expect to deal with something as extraordinary as the ratman?

A brain steeped in too many grams of cocaine, peppered with too many other drugs, and marinated in alcohol could produce the most amazing zoo of hallucinated creatures. And when his conscience got the better of him and he struggled to fulfill one of his periodic pledges of sobriety, withdrawal led to delirium tremens, which was populated by an even more colorful and threatening phantasmagoria of beasts. But none of them was as memorable and as deeply disturbing as the ratman.

He took another generous swallow of wine and leaned his head back against the wall of the crate, holding fast to the bottle with both hands.

Year by year, day by day, Sammy had found it increasingly difficult to distinguish between reality and fantasy. He had long ago ceased to trust his perceptions. Yet of one thing he was dismayingly certain: the ratman was real. Impossible, fantastical, inexplicable — but real.

Sammy expected to find no answers to the questions that haunted him. But he could not stop asking: what was this creature; where did it come from; why did it want to torment and kill a grizzled, beaten-down street person whose death — or continued existence — was of little or no consequence to the world?

He drank more wine.

Thirty-six hours. Ticktock. Ticktock.

3

Cop instinct.

When the citizen in the gray cords, white shirt, and dark-gray jacket entered the restaurant, Connie noticed him and knew he was bent in some way. When she saw that Harry had also noticed, her interest in the guy increased dramatically because Harry had a nose that would make a bloodhound envious.

Cop instinct is less instinct than a sharply honed talent for observation and the good sense to correctly interpret whatever is observed. With Connie it was more a subconscious awareness than a calculated monitoring of everyone who crossed her line of sight.

The suspect stood just inside the door, near the cash register, waiting while the hostess seated a young couple at a table near one of the big front windows.

He appeared ordinary at first glance, even harmless. But on closer inspection, Connie could identify the incongruities that had caused her subconscious to recommend a closer look at the man. No signs of tension were visible in his rather bland face, and his posture was relaxed — but his hands were fisted tightly at his sides, as if he could barely control an urgent need to strike at someone. His vague smile reinforced the air of absentmindedness that clung to him — but the smile kept coming and going, flickering uncertainly, a subtle testament to inner turmoil. His sportcoat was buttoned, which was odd because he wasn’t wearing a tie and because the day was warm. More important, the coat did not hang properly; its outer and inner pockets seemed filled with something heavy that pulled it out of shape, and it bulged over his belt buckle — as if concealing a handgun jammed under the waistband of his pants.

Of course, cop instinct wasn’t always reliable. The coat might just be old and out of shape. The guy might actually be the absent-minded professor he appeared to be; in which case his coat might be stuffed with nothing more sinister than a pipe, tobacco pouch, slide rule, calculator, lecture notes, and all sorts of items he had slipped into his pockets without quite realizing it.

Harry, whose voice had trailed off in mid-sentence, slowly put down his chicken sandwich. He was intently focused on the man in the misshapen coat.

Connie had picked up a few shoestring french fries. She dropped them onto the plate instead of eating them, and she wiped her greasy fingers on her napkin, all the while trying to watch the new customer without obviously staring at him.

The hostess, a petite blonde in her twenties, returned to the reception area after seating the couple by the window, and the man in the Ultrasuede coat smiled. She spoke to him, he replied, and the blonde laughed politely as if what he’d said was mildly amusing.

When the customer said something more and the hostess laughed again, Connie relaxed slightly. She reached for a couple of fries.

The newcomer seized the hostess by her belt, jerked her toward him, and grabbed a handful of her blouse. His assault was so sudden and unexpected, his moves so cat-quick, that he had lifted her off the floor before she began to scream. As if she weighed nothing, he threw her at nearby diners.

“Oh, shit.” Connie pushed back from the table and came to her feet, reaching under her jacket and behind to the revolver that was holstered in the small of her back.

Harry rose, too, his own revolver in hand. “Police!”

His warning was drowned out by the sickening crash of the young blonde slamming into a table, which tipped sideways. The diners toppled out of their chairs, and glasses shattered. All over the restaurant people looked up from their food, startled by the uproar.

The stranger’s flamboyance and savagery might just mean he was on drugs — or he might also be genuinely psychotic.

Connie took no chances, dropping into a crouch as she brought her gun up. “Police!”

Either the guy had heard Harry’s first warning or he had seen them out of the corner of his eye, because he was already scuttling toward the back of the restaurant, between the tables.

He had a handgun of his own — maybe a Browning 9mm, judging by the sound and by the glimpse she got. He was using it, too, firing at random, each shot thunderous in the confines of the restaurant.

Beside Connie, a painted terra-cotta pot exploded. Chips of glazed clay showered onto her. The dracaena margenata in the pot toppled over, raking her with long narrow leaves, and she crouched even lower, trying to use a nearby table as a shield.

She wanted in the worst way to get a shot at the bastard, but the risk of hitting one of the other customers was too great. When she looked across the restaurant at child’s level, thinking maybe she could pulverize one of the creep’s knees with a well-placed round, she could see him scrambling across the room. The trouble was, between her and him, a scattering of panicked, wide-eyed people had taken refuge under their tables.

“Shit.” She pursued the geek while trying to make as small a target of herself as possible, aware that Harry was going after him from another direction.

People were screaming because they were scared, or had been shot and were in pain. The crazy bastard’s gun boomed too often. Either he could change clips with superhuman speed or he had another pistol.

One of the big windows took a direct hit and came down in a jinglejangle clangor. A waterfall of glass splashed across the cold Santa Fe tile floor.

As Connie crept from table to table, her shoes picked up mashed french fries, ketchup, mustard, bits of oozing cacti, and crunching-tinkling pieces of glass. And as she passed the wounded, they cried out or pawed at her, desperate for help.

She hated to ignore them, but she had to shake them off, keep moving, try to get a shot at the walking phlegm in the Ultrasuede coat. What meager first-aid she might be able to provide wasn’t going to help them. She couldn’t do anything about the terror and pain the sonofabitch had already wrought, but she might be able to stop him from doing more damage if she stayed on his ass.

She raised her head, risking a bullet in the brain, and saw the scumbag was all the way at the back of the restaurant, standing at a swinging door that had a glass porthole in the center. Grinning, he squeezed off rounds at anything that caught his attention, apparently equally pleased to hit a potted plant or a human being. He was still unnervingly ordinary in appearance, round-faced and bland, with a weak chin and soft mouth. Even his grin failed to make him look like a madman; it was more the broad and affable smile of someone who had just seen a clown take a pratfall. But there was no doubt he was crazy-dangerous, because he shot a big saguaro cactus, then a guy in a checkered shirt, then the saguaro again, and he did have two guns, one in each hand.

Welcome to the 1990s.

Connie rose from shelter far enough to line up a shot.

Harry was equally quick to take advantage of the lunatic’s sudden obsession with the saguaro. He came to his feet in another part of the restaurant and fired. Connie fired twice. Chunks of wood exploded from the door frame beside the psycho’s head, and the glass blew out of the porthole; they had bracketed him by inches with their first shots.

The geek vanished through the swinging door, which took both Harry’s and Connie’s next rounds and kept swinging. Judging by the size of the bullet holes, the door was hollow-core, so the slugs might have gone through and nailed the sonofabitch on the other side.

Connie ran toward the kitchen, slipping a little on the food-strewn floor. She doubted they were going to be lucky enough to find the creep wounded and squirming like a half-crushed cockroach on the other side of that door. More likely, he was waiting for them. But she couldn’t rein herself in. He might even step through the door from the kitchen and cut her down as she approached. But her juices were up; she was jazzed. When her juices were up, she couldn’t help but do everything full-bore, and it didn’t even matter that her juices were up most of the time.

God, she loved this job.

4

Harry hated this cowboy stuff.

When you were a cop, you knew violence might come down sooner or later. You might suddenly find yourself up to your neck in wolves a lot nastier than any Red Riding Hood ever had to deal with. But even if it was part of the job, you didn’t enjoy it.

Well, maybe you did if you were Connie Gulliver.

As Harry rushed the kitchen door, going in low and fast with his revolver ready, he heard her behind him, feet slapping-crunching-squishing on the floor, coming full-tilt. He knew that if he looked back at her, she would be grinning, not unlike the maniac who had shot up the restaurant, and although he knew she was on the side of the angels, that grin never failed to unnerve him.

He skidded to a halt at the door, kicked it, and instantly jumped to one side, expecting an answering hail of bullets.

But the door slammed inward, swung back out, and no gunfire followed. So when it swung inward again, Connie burst past him and went into the kitchen with it. He followed her, cursing under his breath, which was the only way he ever cursed.

In the humid, claustrophobic confines of the kitchen, burgers sizzled on a grill and fat bubbled in a deep-fryer. Pots of water boiled on a stovetop. Gas ovens creaked and popped from the intense heat they contained, and a bank of microwave ovens hummed softly.

Half a dozen cooks and other employees, dressed in white slacks and T-shirts, their hair tucked under white string-tied caps, pale as dead men, stood or cowered midst the culinary equipment. They were wrapped by curling tendrils of steam and meat smoke, looking less like real people than like ghosts. Almost as one they turned toward Connie and Harry.

“Where?” Harry whispered.

One of the employees pointed toward a half-open door at the back of the kitchen.

Harry led the way along a narrow aisle flanked on the left by racks of pots and utensils. On the right was a series of butcher blocks, a machine used to cut well-scrubbed potatoes into raw french fries, and another that shredded lettuce.

The aisle widened into a clear space with deep sinks and heavy-duty commercial dishwashers along the wall to the left. The half-open door was about twenty feet directly ahead, past the sinks.

Connie moved up to his side as they drew near the door. She kept enough distance between them to assure they couldn’t both be taken out by one burst of gunfire.

The darkness past that threshold bothered Harry. A windowless storeroom probably lay beyond. The smiling, moon-faced perp would be even more dangerous once cornered.

After flanking the door, they hesitated, taking a moment to think. Harry would gladly have taken half the day to think, giving the perp plenty of time to stew in there. But that wasn’t how it-worked. Cops were expected to act rather than react. If there was a way out of the storeroom, any delay on their part would allow the perp to escape.

Besides, when your partner was Connie Gulliver, you did not have the luxury of dawdling or ruminating. She was never reckless, always professional and cautious — but so quick and aggressive that it seemed sometimes as if she had come to homicide investigations by way of a SWAT team.

Connie snatched up a broom that was leaning against the wall. Holding it near the base, she poked the handle against the half-open door, which swung inward with a protracted squeak. When the door was all the way open, she threw the broom aside. It clattered like old bones on the tile floor.

They regarded each other tensely from opposite sides of the doorway.

Silence in the storeroom.

Without exposing himself to the perp, Harry could see just a narrow wedge of darkness beyond the threshold.

The only sounds were the chuckling and sputtering of the pots and deep fryers in the kitchen, the hum of the exhaust fans overhead.

As Harry’s eyes adjusted to the gloom beyond the door, he saw geometric forms, dark gray in the threatening black. Suddenly he realized it wasn’t a storeroom. It was the bottom of a stairwell.

He cursed under his breath again.

Connie whispered: “What?”

“Stairs.”

He crossed the threshold, as heedless of his safety as Connie was of hers, because there was no other way to do it. Stairways were narrow traps in which you couldn’t easily dodge a bullet, and dark stairways were worse. The gloom above was such that he couldn’t see if the perp was up there, but he figured he made a perfect target with the backlighting from the kitchen. He would have preferred to blockade the stairwell door and find another route onto the second floor, but by then the perp would be long gone or barricaded so well that it might cost a couple of other cops’ lives to root him out.

Once committed, he took the stairs as fast as he dared, slowed only by the need to stay to one side, against the wall, where the floorboards would be the tightest and the least likely to sag and squeak underfoot. He reached a narrow landing, moving blindly with his back to the wall.

Squinting up into utter lightlessness, he wondered how a second floor could be as perfectly dark as a basement.

From above came soft laughter.

Harry froze on the landing. He was confident that he was no longer backlit. He pressed tighter to the wall.

Connie bumped into him and also froze.

Harry waited for the queer laugh to come again. He hoped to get a fix precise enough to make it worth risking a shot and revealing his own location.

Nothing.

He held his breath.

Then something thumped. Rattled. Thumped again. Rattled. Thumped again.

He realized some object was rolling and bouncing down the steps toward them. What? He had no idea. His imagination deserted him.

Thump. Rattle. Thump.

Intuitively he knew that whatever was coming down the stairs was not good. That’s why the perp had laughed. Something small from the sound of it, but deadly in spite of being small. He was infuriated with himself for being unable to think, to visualize. He felt stupid and useless. A foul sweat suddenly sheathed him.

The object hit the landing and rolled to a stop against his left foot. It bumped his shoe. He jerked back, then immediately squatted, blindly felt the floor, found the damn thing. Larger than an egg but roughly egg-shaped. With the intricate geometric surface of a pinecone. Heavier than a pinecone. With a lever on top.

“Get down!” He stood and threw the hand grenade back into the upper hall before following his own advice and dropping as flat as possible on the landing.

He heard the grenade clatter against something above.

He hoped his throw had sent the damn thing all the way into the second-floor hall. But maybe it bounced off a stairwell wall and was arcing down even now, the timer ticking off the last second or two before detonation. Or maybe it had barely landed in the upstairs hall and the perp had kicked it back at him.

The explosion was loud, bright, cataclysmic. His ears rang painfully, every bone seemed to vibrate as the blast wave passed through him, and his heartbeat accelerated even though it had been racing already. Chunks of wood, plaster, and other debris rained over him, and the stairwell was filled with the acrid stench of burnt powder like a Fourth of July night after a big fireworks display.

He had a vivid mental picture of what might have happened if he had been two seconds slower: his hand dissolving in a spray of blood as he gripped the grenade upon detonation, his arm tearing loose of his body, his face crumpling in on itself….

“What the hell?” Connie demanded, her voice close yet far away, distorted because Harry’s ears were still ringing.

“Grenade,” he said, scrambling to his feet.

“Grenade? Who is this bozo?”

Harry had no clue as to the guy’s identity or motivation, but he now knew why the Ultrasuede jacket had hung so lumpily. If the perp had been packing one grenade, why not two? Or three?

After the brief flash of the explosion, the darkness on the stairs was as deep as ever.

Harry discarded caution and clambered up the second flight, aware that Connie was coming close behind him. Caution didn’t seem prudent under the circumstances. You always had a chance of dodging a bullet, but if the perp was carrying grenades, all the caution in the world wouldn’t count when the blast hit.

Not that they were accustomed to dealing with grenades. This was a first.

He hoped the lunatic had been waiting to hear them die in the explosion — and had instead been caught unawares when the grenade boomeranged on him. Any time a cop killed a perp, the paperwork was horrendous, but Harry was willing to sit at a typewriter happily for days if only the guy in the Ultrasuede coat had been transformed into wet wallpaper.

The long upstairs corridor was windowless and must have been night-black before the explosion. But the grenade had blown one door off its hinges and had torn holes in another. Some daylight filtered through the windows of unseen rooms and into the hallway.

Damage from the explosion was extensive. The building was old enough to have lath and plaster construction instead of drywall, and in places the lath showed through like brittle bones between ragged gaps in the desiccated flesh of some ancient pharaoh’s mummified body. Splintered floorboards had torn loose; they were scattered half the length of the corridor, revealing the subfloor and in some places the charred beams beneath.

No flames had sprung up. The snuffing force of the blast had prevented anything from catching fire. The thin haze of smoke from the explosion didn’t reduce visibility, except that it stung his eyes and made them water.

The perp was not in sight.

Harry breathed through his mouth to avoid sneezing. The acrid haze was a bitterness on his tongue.

Eight doors opened off the hall, four on each side, including the one that had been blown entirely from its hinges. With no more direct communication than a glance, Harry and Connie moved in concert from the top of the stairs, careful not to step in any of the holes in the floor, heading toward the open doorway. They had to inspect the second level quickly. Every window was potentially an escape route, and the building might have back stairs.

“Elvis!”

The shout came from the doorless room they were approaching.

Harry glanced at Connie, and they both hesitated because there was a weirdness about the moment that was unsettling.

“Elvis!”

Though other people might have been on the second floor before the perp had arrived, somehow Harry knew it was the perp shouting.

“The King! The Master of Memphis!”

They flanked the doorway as they had done at the foot of the stairs.

The perp began shouting titles of Presley hits: “Heartbreak Hotel, Blue Suede Shoes, Hound Dog, Money Honey, Jailhouse Rock….”

Harry looked at Connie, raised one eyebrow. She shrugged.

“Stuck on You, Little Sister, Good Luck Charm…”

Harry signaled to Connie that he would go through the door first, staying low, relying on her to lay down a suppressing fire over his head as he crossed the threshold.

“Are You Lonesome Tonight, A Mess of Blues, In the Ghetto!”

As Harry was about to make his move, a grenade arced out of the room. It bounced on the hall floor between him and Connie, rolled, and disappeared into one of the holes made by the first explosion.

No time to fish for it under the floorboards. No time to get back to the stairs. If they delayed, the corridor would blow up around them.

Contrary to Harry’s plan, Connie rushed first through the blasted doorway into the room with the perp, staying low, squeezing off a couple of rounds. He followed her, firing twice over her head, and both of them clattered across the shattered door that had been torn off its hinges and blown down in the first explosion. Boxes. Supplies. Stacked everywhere. No sign of the perp. They both dropped to the floor, threw themselves down and between piles of boxes.

They were still dropping, scrambling, when the hallway went to pieces in a flash and a crash behind them. Harry tucked his head under his arm and tried to protect his face.

A brief hot wind brought a storm of debris through the doorway, and a lighting fixture on the ceiling dissolved into glass hail.

Breathing the fireworks stink again, Harry raised his head. A wicked-looking piece of wooden shrapnel — as big as the blade of a butcher’s knife, thicker, almost as sharp — had missed him by two inches and embedded itself in a large carton of paper napkins.

The thin film of sweat on his face was as cold as ice-water.

He tipped the expended cartridges from the revolver, fumbled the speedloader from its pouch and slipped it in, twisted it, dropped it, snapped the cylinder shut.

“Return to Sender, Suspicious Minds, Surrender!”

Harry was pierced by a longing for the simple, direct, and comprehensible villains of the Brothers Grimm, like the evil queen who ate the heart of a wild boar, thinking it was really the heart of her stepdaughter, Snow White, whose beauty she envied and whose life she had ordered forfeited.

5

Connie raised her head and glanced at Harry, who was lying beside her. He was covered with dust, chips of wood, and glimmering bits of glass, as she no doubt was herself.

She could see that he wasn’t getting off on this the way she was. Harry liked being a cop; to him a cop was a symbol of order and justice. Madness like this pained him because order could be imposed only through violence equal to what the perpetrator dealt out. And real justice for the victims could never be extracted from a perp who was so far gone that he couldn’t feel remorse or fear retribution.

The geek shouted again. “Long Legged Girl, All Shook Up, Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me!”

Connie whispered: “Elvis Presley didn’t sing ‘Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me.’”

Harry blinked. “What?”

“That was Mac Davis, for God’s sake.”

“Rock-a-Hula Baby, Kentucky Rain, Flaming Star, I Feel So Bad!”

The geek’s voice seemed to be coming from overhead.

Cautiously Connie eased up from the floor, revolver in hand. She peered between the stacked boxes, then over them.

At the far end of the room, near the corner, a ceiling trapdoor was open. A folding ladder extended from it.

“A Big Hunk o’ Love, Kiss Me Quick, Guitar Man!”

The walking piece of dog vomit had gone up that ladder. He was shouting at them from the dark attic above.

She wanted to get hold of the geek and smash his face in, which was not a measured police response, perhaps, but heartfelt.

Harry spotted the ladder when she did, and as she rose to her feet, he stood beside her. She was tense, ready to hit the floor again fast if another grenade dropped out of that overhead trap.

“Any Way You Want Me, Poor Boy, Running Bear!”

“Hell, that wasn’t Elvis, either,” Connie said, not bothering to whisper any more. “Johnny Preston sang ‘Running Bear.’”

“What does it matter?”

“The guy’s an asshole,” she said angrily, which was not exactly an answer. But the truth was, she didn’t know why it bothered her that this loser couldn’t get his Elvis trivia correct.

“You’re the Devil in Disguise, Don’t Cry Daddy, Do the Clam!”

‘“Do the Clam’?” Harry said.

Connie winced. “Yeah, I’m afraid that was Elvis.”

As sparks squirted from the shorting wires in the damaged light fixture overhead, they crossed the room on opposite sides of a long waist-high row of boxes, closing in on the attic access.

From the world beyond the dust-streaked window, faraway sirens wailed. Backup and ambulances.

Connie hesitated. Now that the geek had gone into the attic, it might be best to flush him out with tear gas, lob up a concussion grenade to stun him senseless, and just wait for reinforcements.

But she rejected the cautious course. While it would be safer for her and Harry, it could be riskier for everyone else in downtown Laguna Beach. The attic might not be a dead end. A service door to the roof would give the creep a way out.

Evidently Harry had the same thought. He hesitated a fraction of a second less than she did, and started up the ladder first.

She didn’t object to his leading the way because he was not acting out of some misguided protective urge, not trying to spare the lady cop from danger. She’d come through the previous doorway first, so he led this time. They intuitively shared the risk, which was one thing that made them a good team in spite of their differences.

Of course, though her heart was pounding and her gut was clenched, she would have preferred to go first. Crossing a solid bridge was never as satisfying as walking on a high wire.

She followed him up the ladder, and he hesitated at the top only briefly before disappearing into the gloom above. No shot rang out, no explosion shook the building, so Connie went into the attic, too.

Harry had moved out of the gray light that came up through the trap. He crouched a few feet away, beside a naked dead woman.

On second glance, it proved to be a mannequin with permanently staring, dust-coated eyes and an eerily serene smile. She was bald, and her plaster skull was marred by a water stain.

The attic was dark but not impenetrable. Pale daylight sifted through a series of screened ventilation cut-outs in the eaves and through larger vane-capped vents in the end walls, revealing cobweb-festooned rafters under a peaked roof. The center offered enough headroom for even a tall man to stand erect, though nearer the wide walls it was necessary to crouch. Shadows loomed everywhere, while piles of storage trunks and crates offered numerous hiding places.

A congregation seemed to have gathered in that high place to conduct a secret Satanic ceremony. Throughout the long, wide chamber were the partial silhouettes of men and women, sometimes lit from the side, sometimes backlit, more often barely visible, standing or leaning or lying, all silent and motionless.

They were mannequins similar to the one on the floor beside Harry Nevertheless, Connie felt their stares, and her skin grew pebbly with gooseflesh.

One of them actually might be able to see her, one who was made not of plaster but of blood, flesh, and bone.

6

Time seemed suspended in the high redoubt of the mannequins. The humid air was tainted with dust, the crisp aroma of age-yellowed newspapers, moldering cardboard, and pungent mildew that had sprung up in some dark corner and would perish with the end of the rainy season. The plaster figures watched, breathless.

Harry tried to remember what businesses shared the building with the restaurant, but he couldn’t recall to whom the mannequins might belong.

From the east end of the long chamber came a frantic hammering, metal on metal. The perp must be pounding on the larger vent in the end wall, trying to break out, willing to risk a drop to the alley, serviceway, or street below.

Half a dozen frightened bats erupted from their roosts and swooped back and forth through the long garret, seeking safety but reluctant to trade the gloom for bright daylight. Their small voices were shrill enough to be heard over the rising shriek of the sirens. When they passed close enough, the leathery flap of their wings and an air-cutting whoosh made Harry flinch.

He wanted to wait for backup.

The perp hammered harder than before.

Metal screeched as if giving way.

They couldn’t wait, didn’t dare.

Remaining in a crouch, Harry crept between piles of boxes toward the south wall, and Connie slipped away in the opposite direction. They would take the perp in a pincer move. When Harry went as far to the south side of the room as the sloping ceiling allowed, he turned toward the east end, where the heavy hammering originated.

On all sides, mannequins struck eternal poses. Their smooth, round limbs seemed to absorb and amplify the meager light that passed through the narrow vents in the eaves; where not clothed by shadows, their hard flesh had a supernatural alabaster glow.

The hammering stopped. No clang or pop or final wrenching noise indicated that the vent had been knocked loose.

Harry halted, waited. He could hear only the sirens a block away and the squealing of the bats when they swooped near.

He inched forward. Twenty feet ahead, at the terminus of the musty passageway, dim ash-gray light issued from an unseen source to the left. Probably the big vent on which the perp had been hammering. Which meant it was still firmly in place. If the vent had been knocked out of its frame, daylight would have flooded that end of the attic.

One by one, the sirens expired down in the street. Six of them.

As Harry crept forward, he saw a pile of severed limbs in one of the shadowy niches in the eaves between two rafters, spectrally illuminated. He flinched and almost cried out. Arms cut off at the elbows. Hands amputated at the wrists. Fingers spread as if reaching for help, pleading, seeking. Even as he gasped in shock, he realized the macabre collection was only a heap of mannequin parts.

He proceeded in a duckwalk, less than ten feet from the end of the narrow passageway, acutely aware of the soft but betraying scrape of his shoes on the dusty floorboards. Like the sirens, the agitated bats had fallen silent. A few shouts and the crackling transmissions of police-band radios rose from the street outside, but those sounds were distant and unreal, as if they were the voices in a nightmare from which he was just waking or into which he was slipping. Harry paused every couple of feet, listening for whatever revealing noises the perp might be making, but the guy was ghost-quiet.

When he reached the end of the aisle, about five feet from the east wall of the attic, he stopped again. The vent on which the perp had been hammering must be just around the last stack of boxes.

Harry held his breath and listened for the breathing of his prey. Nothing.

He eased forward, looked around the boxes, past the end of the passageway into the clear area in front of the east wall. The perp was gone.

He had not left by the yard-square attic vent. It was damaged but still in place, emitting a vague draft and thin, uneven lines of daylight that striped the floor where the perp’s footprints marred the carpet of dust.

Movement at the north end of the attic caught Harry’s attention, and his trigger finger tensed. Connie peered around the corner of the boxes piled on that side of the garret.

Across the wide gap, they stared at each other.

The perp had circled behind them.

Though Connie was mostly in shadows, Harry knew her well enough to be certain of what she was mouthing silently: shit, shit, shit.

She came out of the northern eaves and crept across the open space at the east end, moving toward Harry. She peered warily into the mouths of other aisles between rows of boxes and mannequins.

Harry started toward her, squinting into the gloomy aisles on his side. The garret was so wide, so packed with goods, that it was a maze. And it harbored a monster to rival any in mythology.

From elsewhere in the high room came the now-familiar voice: “All Shook Up, I Feel So Bad, Steamroller Blues!”

Harry squeezed his eyes shut. He wanted to be somewhere else. Maybe in the kingdom of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” with its twelve gorgeous young heirs to the throne, subterranean castles of light, trees with leaves of gold, others with leaves of diamonds, enchanted ballrooms filled with beautiful music…. Yeah, that would be all right. It was one of the Grimm Brothers’ gentler tales. Nobody in it got eaten alive or hacked to death by a troll.

“Surrender!”

It was Connie’s voice this time.

Harry opened his eyes and frowned at her. He was afraid she would give away their position. True, he had not been able to pinpoint the perp by listening to him; sounds bounced around the attic in strange ways, which was a protection for them as well as for the madman. Nevertheless, silence was wiser.

The perp shouted again: “A Mess of Blues, Heartbreak Hotel!”

“Surrender!” Connie repeated.

“Go Away Little Girl!”

Connie grimaced. “That wasn’t Elvis, you peabrain! That was Steve Lawrence. Surrender.”

“Stay Away.”

“Surrender.”

Harry blinked sweat out of his eyes and studied Connie with incomprehension. He had never felt less in control of a situation. Something was going down between her and the lunatic, but Harry didn’t have a clue as to what it was.

“I Don’t Care If the Sun Don’t Shine.”

“Surrender.”

Suddenly Harry remembered that “Surrender” was the title of a Presley classic.

“Stay Away.”

He thought that might be another Presley song.

Connie slipped into one of the aisles, out of Harry’s sight, as she called out: “It’s Now or Never.”

“What’d I Say?”

Moving away into the maze, Connie answered the perp with two Presley titles: “Surrender. I Beg of You.”

“I Feel So Bad.”

After a hesitation, Connie responded: “Tell Me Why.”

“Don’t Ask Me Why”

A dialogue had been established. In Presley song titles. Like some bizarre television quiz-show contest with no prizes for correct answers but plenty of peril for wrong ones.

In a crouch, Harry eased into a different aisle from the one that Connie had taken. A spider’s web wrapped his face. He pulled it off and crept deeper into the mannequin-guarded shadows.

Connie resorted to a previously used title: “Surrender.”

“Stay Away.”

“Are You Lonesome Tonight?”

After a hesitation, the perp admitted: “Lonely Man.”

Harry still couldn’t get a fix on the voice. Sweat was really pouring off him now, wispy remnants of the spider web clung to his hair and tickled his brow, his mouth tasted like the bottom of a pestle in Frankenstein’s laboratory, and he felt as if he’d stepped out of reality into some drug addict’s dark hallucinations.

“Let Yourself Go,” Connie advised.

“I Feel So Bad,” the perp repeated.

Harry knew he shouldn’t be so disoriented by the peculiar twists this pursuit kept taking. These were the 1990s, after all, an age of unreason if ever there had been one, when the bizarre was so common as to establish a new definition of normality. Like the holdup men who had recently taken to threatening convenience-store clerks not with guns but with syringes full of AIDS-tainted blood.

Connie called to the perp, “Let Me Be Your Teddy Bear,” which seemed, to Harry, an odd turn in the song-title conversation.

But the perp came right back at her in a voice full of yearning and suspicion: “You Don’t Know Me.”

Connie needed only a few seconds to find the right follow-up: “Doncha Think It’s Time?”

And talk about bizarre: Richard Ramirez, the serial killer known as the Night Stalker, was visited regularly in prison by a stream of attractive young women who found him appealing, exciting, a romantic figure. Or what about that guy in Wisconsin not long ago, cooking parts of his victims for dinner, keeping rows of severed heads in his refrigerator, and neighbors said, well, yeah, there had been bad smells coming from his apartment for years, and now and then they heard screams and high-powered electric saws, but the screaming never lasted long, and anyway the guy seemed so nice, he seemed to care about people. The 1990s. No decade like it.

“Too Much,” the perp finally said, evidently disbelieving Connie’s professed romantic interest.

“Poor Boy,” she said with apparently genuine sympathy.

“Way Down.” The perp’s voice, now annoyingly whiny, echoed off the cobwebbed rafters as he admitted his lack of self-esteem, a very ‘90s sort of excuse.

“Wear My Ring Around Your Neck,” Connie said, romancing him as she prowled through the maze, no doubt intending to blow him away the moment she caught sight of him.

The perp didn’t reply.

Harry kept on the move, too, diligently searching each shadowy niche and byway, but feeling useless. He had never imagined that in the last decade of this strange century, he might have to be an expert on rock-‘n’-roll trivia to be an effective cop.

He hated crap like this, but Connie loved it. She embraced the chaos of the times; there was something dark and wild in her.

Harry reached an aisle that was perpendicular to his. It was deserted — except for a couple of naked mannequins that had toppled over long ago, one atop the other. Hunkered down, shoulders hunched protectively, Harry moved on.

“Wear My Ring Around Your Neck,” Connie called out again from elsewhere in the maze.

Maybe the perp was hesitating because he thought it was an offer that a guy should make to a gal, not the other way around. Though definitely a ‘90s man, maybe the bastard still had an old-fashioned sense of gender roles.

“Treat Me Nice,” Connie said.

No answer.

“Love Me Tender,” Connie said.

The perp still did not respond, and Harry was alarmed that the conversation had become a monologue. The creep might be close to Connie, letting her talk so he could get a better, final fix on her.

Harry was about to shout a warning when an explosion shook the building. He froze, crossing his arms protectively over his face. But the blast had not occurred in the attic; there had been no flash.

From the floor below came cries of agony and terror, confused voices, shouts of anger.

Evidently other cops had entered the lower room where the ladder gave access to the attic, and the perp had heard them. He’d dropped a grenade through the trapdoor.

The gruesome screams conjured an image in Harry’s mind: some guy trying to keep his intestines from spilling out of his belly.

He knew that he and Connie were in a rare moment of total agreement, experiencing the same dread and fury. For once he didn’t give a damn about the perp’s legal rights, excessive use of force, or the proper way of doing things. He just wanted the bastard dead.

Above the screams, Connie tried to re-establish the dialogue: “Love Me Tender.”

“Tell Me Why” the perp demanded, still doubting her sincerity.

“My Baby Left Me,” Connie said.

The screams were subsiding on the floor below. Either the injured man was dying, or others were moving him out of the room where the grenade had detonated.

“Anyway You Want Me,” Connie said.

The perp was silent for a moment. Then his voice echoed through the room, infuriatingly directionless, “I Feel So Bad.”

“I’m Yours,” Connie said.

Harry couldn’t get over the speed with which she thought of the appropriate titles.

“Lonely Man.” the perp said, and indeed he sounded miserable.

“I’ve Got a Thing About You Baby,” Connie said.

She’s a genius, Harry thought admiringly. And seriously obsessed with Presley.

Counting on the perp being pretty much distracted by Connie’s weird seduction, Harry risked showing himself. Because he was directly under the peak of the roof, he rose slowly to his full height, and surveyed the garret on all sides.

Some piles of boxes were shoulder-high, but many others were only a few inches higher than Harry’s waist. A lot of human forms stared back from the shadows, tucked in among the boxes and even sitting on them. But all of them must have been mannequins because none moved or shot at him.

“Lonely Man. All Shook Up,” the perp said despairingly.

“There’s Always Me.”

“Please Don’t Stop Loving Me.”

“Can’t Help Falling in Love,” Connie said.

Standing, Harry had a slightly better sense of the direction from which the voices arose. Both Connie and the perp were ahead of him, but at first he couldn’t discern if they were close to each other. He could not see over the boxes into any of the other avenues of the maze.

“Don’t Be Cruel,” the perp pleaded.

“Love Me,” Connie urged.

“I Need Your Love Tonight.”

They were at the west end of the attic, the south side, and they were close to each other.

“Stuck on You,” Connie insisted.

“Don’t Be Cruel.”

Harry sensed an escalation in the intensity of the dialogue, subtly conveyed in the gunman’s tone, in the speed of responses, and in his repetition of the same title.

“I Need Your Love Tonight.”

“Don’t Be Cruel.”

Harry stopped putting caution first. He hurried toward the voices, into an area more densely populated by mannequins, groups clustered in niches between boxes. Pale shoulders, graceful arms, hands pointing or raised as if in greeting. Painted eyes sightless in the gloom, painted lips eternally parted in half-formed smiles, in greetings never vocalized, in passionless erotic sighs.

More spiders lived there, too, evidenced by webs that tangled in his hair and stuck to his clothes. As he moved, he wiped the gossamer off his face. Wispy rags of it dissolved on his tongue and lips, and his mouth flooded with saliva as nausea gripped him. He choked down his gorge and expelled a wad of spittle and spider stuff.

“It’s Now or Never,” Connie promised from somewhere nearby.

The familiar answering three words had become less of a plea than a warning: “Don’t Be Cruel.”

Harry had the feeling the guy wasn’t being lulled at all but was ticking toward a new explosion.

He proceeded another few feet and stopped, turning his head from side to side, listening intently, afraid he would miss something because the booming of his own heart was so loud in his ears.

“I’m Yours, Puppet on a String, Let Yourself Go,” Connie urged, voice falling to a stage whisper to foster a false sense of intimacy with her prey.

Although Harry respected Connie’s skills and instincts, he was afraid that her eagerness to sucker the perp was distracting her from the realization that the perp might not be responding out of his confusion and longing but out of a similar desire to sucker her.

“Playing for Keeps, One Broken Heart for Sale,” Connie said.

She sounded as if she was right on top of Harry, in the next aisle, surely no farther than two aisles away, and parallel with him.

“Ain’t That Loving You Baby, Crying in the Chapel.” Connie’s whisper had grown more fierce than seductive, as if she was also aware that something had gone wrong with the dialogue.

Harry tensed, waiting for the perp’s response, squinting into the gloom ahead, then turning to look back the way he had come when he imagined the smiling, moon-faced killer stealing up behind him.

The attic seemed to be not merely silent but the source of all silence, as the sun was the source of light. The unseen spiders moved with perfect stealth through all the dark corners of that high room, and millions of dust motes drifted as soundlessly as planets and asteroids in the airless void of space, and on both sides of Harry, gatherings of mannequins stared without seeing, listened without hearing, posed without knowing.

Forced between clenched teeth, hard as a threat, Connie’s whisper had ceased to be an invitation, had become a challenge; and song titles no longer constituted her entire rap: “Anyway You Want Me, you toad, come on, come to mama. Let Yourself Go, dirtbag.”

No reply.

The attic was silent but also eerily still, filled with less motion than a dead man’s mind.

Harry had the strange feeling that he was becoming one of the mannequins that stood around him, his flesh transformed into plaster, his bones into steel rods, sinews and tendons changing into bundles of wire. He let only his eyes move, and his gaze slid across the inanimate citizens of the garret.

Painted eyes. Pale breasts with permanently erect nipples, round thighs, tight buttocks, curving away into darkness. Hairless torsos. Men and women. Bald heads or matted wigs caked with dust.

Painted lips. Puckered as if to plant a kiss, or in a playful pout, or parted slightly as if in erotic surprise at the electricity of a lover’s touch, others formed into shy smiles, some coy, some with a broader curve, the dull gleam of teeth, here a more thoughtful smile, and there a full and perpetual laugh. No. Wrong. The dull gleam of teeth. Mannequin teeth don’t gleam. No saliva on mannequin teeth.

Which one, there, there, in the back of the niche, behind four true mannequins, one clever mime, peering out between bald and bewigged heads, almost lost in shadows but moist eyes glistening in the dimness, no more than six feet away, face to face, the smile opening wider as Harry watched, wider but as humorless as a wound, the weak chin, the moon face, and one more song title so soft as to be barely audible, “Blue Moon,” Harry taking in all of this in an instant, even as he was bringing up the muzzle of his revolver and squeezing the trigger.

The perp opened fire with his Browning 9mm maybe a fraction of a second before Harry did, and the attic was filled with the crashes and echoes of shots. He saw the flash of the pistol’s muzzle, which seemed to be directly in front of his chest, oh God please, and he emptied his revolver faster than seemed possible, all in a blink if he’d dared to blink, the weapon bucking so hard that it seemed likely to fly out of his grip.

Something hit him hard in the gut, and he knew he had been shot, though he had no pain yet, just a sharp pressure and a flare of heat. And before the pain could follow, he was knocked backward, mannequins toppling into him, driving him against the wall of the aisle. The stacked boxes rocked, and some were dislodged into the next branch of the maze. Harry was carried to the floor in a clatter of plaster limbs and hard pale bodies, trapped under them, gasping for breath, trying to shout for help, able to make no sound louder than a wheeze. He smelled the distinct metallic odor of blood.

Someone snapped on the attic lights, a long string of small bulbs hanging just under the peak of the roof, but that improved visibility only for a second or two, just long enough for Harry to see that the perp was part of the weight that held him on the floor. The moon face peered down from the top of the heap, between the naked interlocking limbs and past the hairless skulls of the mannequins, his eyes now as sightless as theirs. His smile was gone. His lips were’ painted, but with blood.

Although Harry knew that the lights were not actually going out, it seemed as though they were on a dimmer being cycled off. He tried to call out for help but still could only wheeze. His gaze shifted from the moon face toward the fading lightbulbs overhead. The last thing he saw was a rafter streaming with tattered cobwebs. Cobwebs that fluttered like the flags of long-lost nations. Then he slipped into darkness as deep as a dead man’s dream.

7

Out of the west-northwest, ominous clouds rolled like silent battalions of war machines, driven by a high-altitude wind. Though the day was still calm and pleasantly warm at ground level, the blue sky steadily vanished behind those thunderheads.

Janet Marco parked her broken-down Dodge at one end of the alleyway. With her five-year-old son, Danny, and the stray dog that had recently attached itself to them, she walked along that narrow backstreet, examining the contents of one garbage can after another, seeking survival in the discards of others.

The east side of the alley was flanked by a deep but narrow ravine filled with immense eucalyptus trees and a tangle of dried brush, while the west side was defined by a series of two- and three-car garages separated by wrought-iron and painted-wood gates. Beyond some of the gates, Janet glimpsed small patios and cobbled courtyards shaded by palms, magnolias, ficuses, and Australian tree ferns that flourished in the ocean air. The houses all faced the Pacific over the roofs of other houses on lower tiers of the Laguna hills, so they were mostly three stories tall, vertical piles of stone and stucco and weathered cedar shingles designed to make maximum use of the expensive real estate.

Though the neighborhood was affluent, the rewards of scavenging were pretty much the same there as anywhere else: aluminum cans that could be returned to a recycling center for pennies, and redeemable bottles. However, once in a while she found a treasure: bags of clothes that were out of style but looked unworn, broken appliances that would fetch a couple of dollars from a second-hand shop if they needed only minor repairs, unwanted costume jewelry, or books and old-fashioned phonograph records that could be resold to specialty shops for collectors.

Danny toted a plastic garbage bag into which Janet dropped the aluminum cans. She carried another bag to hold the bottles.

As they progressed along the alleyway, under a rapidly darkening sky, Janet repeatedly glanced back at the Dodge. She worried about the car and tried never to get more than two blocks from it, keeping it in sight as much as possible. The car was not only a means of conveyance; it was their shelter from the sun and the rain, and a place to store their meager belongings. It was home.

She lived in dread of a mechanical breakdown severe enough to be irreparable — or irreparable within their means, which was the same thing. But she was most afraid of theft, because with the car gone they would have no roof over their heads, no safe place to sleep.

She knew that no one was likely to steal such a rolling wreck. The thief’s desperation would have to exceed Janet’s own, and she could not conceive of anyone more desperate than she was.

From a large brown plastic trash can, she extracted half a dozen aluminum cans that someone had already flattened and that ought to have been separated for recycling. She put them in Danny’s garbage bag.

The boy watched solemnly. He said nothing. He was a quiet child. His father had intimidated him into being the next thing to a mute, and in the year since Janet had cut that domineering bastard out of their lives, Danny had become only slightly less withdrawn.

Janet glanced back at the car. Still there.

Cloud shadows fell over the alleyway, and a soft salt-scented breeze arose. From far out over the sea came a low peal of thunder.

She hurried to the next can, and Danny followed her.

The dog, which Danny had named Woofer, sniffed at the trash containers, padded to a nearby gate, and poked his snout between the iron bars. His tail wagged continuously. He was a friendly mutt, reasonably well-behaved, the size of a golden retriever, with a black and brown coat, and a cute face. But Janet tolerated the cost of feeding him only because he had drawn so many smiles from the boy in the past few days. Until Woofer came along, she had almost forgotten what Danny’s smile was like.

Again, she glanced at the battered Dodge. It was all right.

She looked toward the other end of the alley, and then toward the brush-choked ravine and peeling trunks of the huge eucalyptuses across the way. She was afraid not of just car thieves, and not merely of residents who might object to her rummaging through their garbage. She was also afraid of the cop who had been harassing her lately. No. Not a cop. Something that pretended to be a cop. Those strange eyes, the kind and freckled face that could change so swiftly into a creature out of a nightmare…

Janet Marco had one religion: fear. She had been born into that cruel faith without being aware of it, as full of wonder and the capacity for delight as any child. But her parents were alcoholics, and their sacrament of distilled spirits revealed in them an unholy rage and a capacity for sadism. They vigorously instructed her in the doctrines and dogmas of the cult of fear. She learned of only one god, which was neither a specific person nor a force; to her, god was merely power, and whoever wielded it was automatically elevated to the status of deity.

That she had fallen under the thrall of a wife-beater and control freak like Vince Marco, as soon as she was old enough to escape her parents, was no surprise. By then she was devoted to victimhood, had a need to be oppressed. Vince was lazy, shiftless, a drunkard, a gambler, a womanizer, but he was highly skilled and energetic when it came to crushing the spirit of a wife.

For eight years they had moved around the West, never staying longer than six months in any town, while Vince made a subsistence living — although not always an honest one. He didn’t want Janet to develop friendships. If he remained the only consistent presence in her life, he had total control; there was no one to advise and encourage her to rebel.

As long as she was utterly subservient and wore her fear for him to see, the beatings and torments were less severe than when she was more stoical and denied him the pleasure of her anguish. The god of fear appreciated visible expressions of his disciple’s devotion every bit as much as did the Christian God of love. Perversely, fear became her refuge and her only defense against even greater savageries.

And so she might have continued until she was no better than a shivering, terrorized animal cowering in its burrow… but Danny came along to save her. After the baby was born, she began to fear for him as much as for herself. What would happen to Danny if Vince went too far some night and, in an alcoholic frenzy, beat her to death? How would Danny cope alone, so small, so helpless? In time she feared harm to Danny more than to herself — which should have added to her burden but which was strangely liberating. Vince didn’t realize it, but he was no longer the only consistent presence in her life. Her child, by his very existence, was an argument for rebellion and a source of courage.

She still might never have become courageous enough to throw off her yoke if Vince had not raised his hand to the boy. One night a year ago, in a dilapidated rental house with a desert-brown lawn on the outskirts of Tucson, Vince had come home reeking of beer and sweat and some other woman’s perfume, and had beaten Janet for sport. Danny was four then, too small to protect his mother but old enough to feel that he ought to defend her. When he appeared in his pajamas and tried to intervene, his father slapped him repeatedly, viciously, knocked him down, and kicked at him until the boy scrambled out of the house into the front yard, weeping and terrified.

Janet had endured the beating, but later, when both her husband and her boy were asleep, she’d gone to the kitchen and taken a knife from a wall rack near the stove. Utterly fearless for the first — and perhaps last — time in her life, she returned to the bedroom and stabbed Vince repeatedly in the throat, neck, chest, and stomach. He woke as the first wound was inflicted, tried to scream, but only gurgled as his mouth filled with blood. He resisted, briefly and ineffectually.

After checking on Danny in the next room to be sure he had not awakened, Janet wrapped Vince’s body in the bloodstained bed sheets. She tied the shroud in place at his ankles and neck with clothesline, dragged him through the house, out of the kitchen door, and across the backyard.

The high moon grew alternately dim and bright as clouds like galleons sailed eastward across the sky, but Janet was not concerned about being seen. The shacks along that stretch of the state route were widely spaced, and no lights glowed in either of the two nearest homes.

Driven by the grim understanding that the police could take her from Danny as surely as Vince might have done, she hauled the corpse to the end of the property and out into the night desert, which stretched unpopulated to the far mountains. She struggled between mesquite shrubs and still-rooted tumbleweeds, across soft sand in some places and hard tables of shale in others.

When the cold face of the moon shone, it revealed a hostile landscape of stark shadows and sharp alabaster shapes. In one of the deeper shadows — an arroyo carved by centuries of flash floods— Janet abandoned the corpse.

She stripped the sheets off the body and buried those, but she didn’t dig a grave for the cadaver itself because she hoped that night scavengers and vultures would pick the bones clean quicker if it was left exposed. Once the denizens of the desert had chewed and pecked the soft pads of Vince’s fingers, once the sun and the carrion eaters got done with him, his identity might be deduced only by dental records. Since Vince had rarely seen a dentist, and never the same one twice, there were no records for the police to consult. With luck, the corpse would go undiscovered until the next rainy season, when the withered remains would be washed miles and miles away, tumbled and broken and mixed up with piles of other refuse, until they had essentially disappeared.

That night Janet packed what little they owned and drove away in the old Dodge with Danny She was not even sure where she was going until she had crossed the state line and driven all the way to Orange County. That had to be her final destination because she couldn’t afford to spend more money on gasoline just to get farther away from the dead man in the desert.

No one back in Tucson would wonder what had happened to Vince. He was a shiftless drifter, after all. Cutting loose and moving on was a way of life to him.

But Janet was deathly afraid to apply for welfare or any form of assistance. They might ask her where her husband was, and she didn’t trust her ability to lie convincingly.

Besides, in spite of carrion-eaters and the dehydrating ferocity of the Arizona sun, maybe someone had stumbled across Vince’s body before it had become unidentifiable. If his widow and son surfaced in California, seeking government aid, perhaps connections would be made deep in a computer, prompting an alert social worker to call the cops. Considering her tendency to succumb to anyone who exerted authority over her — a deeply ingrained trait that had been only slightly ameliorated by the murder of her husband — Janet had little chance of undergoing police scrutiny without incriminating herself.

Then they would take Danny away from her.

She could not allow that. Would not.

On the streets, homeless but for the rusted and rattling Dodge, Janet Marco discovered that she had a talent for survival. She was not stupid; she had just never before had the freedom to exercise her wits. From a society whose refuse could feed a significant portion of the Third World, she clawed a degree of precarious security, feeding herself and her son with recourse to a charity kitchen for the fewest possible meals.

She learned that fear, in which she had long been steeped, did not have to immobilize her. It could also motivate.

The breeze had grown cool and had stiffened into an erratic wind. The rumble of thunder was still far away but louder than when Janet had first heard it. Only a sliver of blue sky remained to the east, fading as fast as hope usually did.

After mining two blocks of trash containers, Janet and Danny’ headed back to the Dodge with Woofer in the lead.

More than halfway there, the dog suddenly stopped and cocked his head to listen for something else above the fluting of the wind and the chorus of whispery voices that were stirred from the agitated eucalyptus leaves. He grumbled and seemed briefly puzzled, then turned and looked past Janet. He bared his teeth, and the grumble sharpened into a low growl.

She knew what had drawn the dog’s attention. She didn’t have to look.

Nevertheless she was compelled to turn and confront the menace for Danny’s sake if not her own. The Laguna Beach cop, that cop, was about eight feet away.

He was smiling, which is how it always started with him. He had an appealing smile, a kind face, and beautiful blue eyes.

As always, there was no squad car, no indication of how he had arrived in the alleyway. It was as if he had been lying in wait for her among the peeling trunks of the eucalyptuses, clairvoyantly aware that her scavenging would bring her to this alley at this hour on this very day.

“How’re you, Ma’am?” he asked. His voice was initially gentle, almost musical.

Janet didn’t answer.

The first time he approached her last week, she had responded timidly, nervously, averting her eyes, as excruciatingly respectful of authority as she had been all her life — except for that one bloody night outside of Tucson. But she had quickly discovered that he was not what he appeared to be, and that he preferred a monologue to a dialogue.

“Looks like we’re in for a little rain,” he said, glancing up at the troubled sky.

Danny had moved against Janet. She put her free arm around him, pulling him even closer. The boy was shivering.

She was shivering, too. She hoped Danny didn’t notice.

The dog continued to bare his teeth and growl softly.

Lowering his gaze from the stormy sky to Janet again, the cop spoke in that same lilting voice: “Okay, no more farting around. Time to have some real fun. So what’s going to happen now is… you’ve got till dawn. Understand? Hmmmmm? At dawn, I’m going to kill you and your boy.”

His threat did not surprise Janet. Anyone with authority over her had always been as a god, but always a savage god, never benign. She expected violence, suffering, and imminent death. She would have been surprised only by an exhibition of kindness from someone with power over her, for kindness was infinitely rarer than hatred and cruelty.

In fact, her fear, already nearly paralyzing, might have been made even greater only by that unlikely show of kindness. Kindness would have seemed, to her, nothing more than an attempt to mask some unimaginably evil motive.

The cop was still smiling, but his freckled, Irish face was no longer friendly. It was chillier than the coolish air coming off the sea in advance of the storm.

“Did you hear me, you dumb bitch?”

She said nothing.

“Are you thinking that you ought to run, get out of town, maybe go up to L.A. where I can’t find you?”

She was thinking something rather like that, either Los Angeles or south to San Diego.

“Yes, please, try to run,” he encouraged. “That’ll make it more fun for me. Run, resist. Wherever you go, I’ll find you, but it’ll be a lot more exciting that way.”

Janet believed him. She had been able to escape her parents, and she had escaped Vince by killing him, but now she had come up against not merely another of the many gods of fear who had ruled her but the God of fear whose powers exceeded understanding.

His eyes were changing, darkening from blue to electric green.

Wind suddenly gusted strongly through the alley, whipping dead leaves and a few scraps of paper ahead of it.

The cop’s eyes had become so radiantly green, there seemed to be a light source behind them, a fire within his skull. And the pupils had changed, too, until they were elongated and strange like those of a cat.

The dog’s growl became a frightened whine.

In the nearby ravine the eucalyptus trees shook in the wind, and their soft soughing grew into a roar like that of an angry mob.

It seemed to Janet that the creature masquerading as a cop had commanded the wind to rise to lend more drama to his threat, though surely he did not have so much power as that.

“When I come for you at sunrise, I’ll break open your bodies, eat your hearts.”

His voice had changed as completely as had his eyes. It was deep, gravelly, the malevolent voice of something that belonged in Hell.

He took a step toward them.

Janet backed up two steps, pulling Danny along. Her heart was hammering so hard, she knew her tormentor could hear it.

The dog also retreated, alternately whining and growling, his tail tucked between his legs.

“At dawn, you sorry bitch. You and your snot-nosed little brat. Sixteen hours. Only sixteen hours, bitch. Ticktock… ticktock… ticktock….”

The wind died in an instant. The whole world fell silent. No rustling of trees. No distant thunder.

A twig, bristling with half a dozen long eucalyptus leaves, hung in the air a few inches to her right and a foot in front of her face. It was motionless, abandoned by the whooping wind that had supported it, but still magically suspended like the dead scorpion in the souvenir acrylic paperweight that Vince had once bought at an Arizona truckstop.

The cop’s freckled face stretched and bulged with amazing elasticity, like a rubber mask behind which a great pressure had been exerted. His green, catlike eyes appeared ready to pop out of his wildly deformed skull.

Janet wanted to run for the car, her haven, home, lock the door, safe in their home, and drive like hell, but couldn’t do it, dared not turn her back on him. She knew she would be brought down and torn apart in spite of the promised sixteen-hour headstart, because he wanted her to watch his transformation, demanded it, and would be furious if ignored.

The powerful were intensely proud of their power. The gods of fear needed to preen and to be admired, to see how their power humbled and terrified those who were powerless before them.

The cop’s distended face melted, his features running together, eyes liquefying into red pools of hot oil, the oil soaking into his doughy cheeks until he was eyeless, nose sliding into his mouth, lips spreading out across his chin and cheeks, then no chin or cheeks any more, just an oozing mass. But his waxlike flesh didn’t steam or drip to the ground, so the presence of heat was probably an illusion.

Maybe all of it was an illusion, hypnosis. That would explain a lot, raise new questions, yes, but explain a lot.

His body was pulsing, writhing, changing inside his clothes. Then his clothes were dissolving into his body, as if they had never been real clothes but just another part of him. Briefly the new form he assumed was covered with matted black fur: an immense elongated head began taking shape on a powerful neck, hunched and gnarled shoulders, baleful yellow eyes, a ferocity of wicked teeth and two-inch claws, a movie werewolf.

On each of the four previous occasions this thing had appeared before her, it had manifested itself differently, as if to impress her with its repertoire. But she was unprepared for what it became now. It relinquished the wolf incarnation even before that body had completely taken form, and assumed a human guise once more, though not the cop. Vince. Even though the facial features were less than half developed, she believed it was going to become her dead husband. The dark hair was the same, the shape of the forehead, the color of one malevolent pale eye.

The resurrection of Vince, buried beneath Arizona sands for the past year, shook Janet more than anything else the creature had done or become, and at last she cried out in fear. Danny screamed, too, and clung even more tightly to her.

The dog did not have the fickle heart of a stray. He stopped whining and responded as if he had been with them since he was a pup. He bared his teeth, snarled, and snapped at the air in warning.

Vince’s face remained less than half formed, but his body took shape, and he was naked as he had been when she had overwhelmed him in his sleep. In his throat, chest, and belly, she thought she saw the wounds left by the kitchen knife with which she had killed him: gaping gashes that were bloodless, but dark and raw and terrible.

Vince raised one arm, reaching toward her.

The dog attacked. Collarless life on the streets had not left Woofer weak or sickly. He was a strong, well-muscled animal, “and when he launched himself at the apparition, he seemed to take flight as readily as a bird.

His snarl was clipped off, and he was miraculously halted in midair, body in the arc of attack, as if he were only an image on a videotape after someone pushed the “pause” button. Flash-frozen. Foamy slaver shone like frost on his black lips and in the fur around his muzzle, and his teeth gleamed as coldly as rows of small sharp icicles.

The eucalyptus twig, clothed in silvery-green leaves, hung unsupported to Janet’s right, the dog to her left. The atmosphere seemed to have crystallized, trapping Woofer for eternity in his moment of courage, yet Janet was able to breathe when she remembered to try.

Still half-formed, Vince stepped toward her, passing the dog.

She turned and ran, pulling Danny with her, expecting to freeze in mid-step. What would it feel like? Would darkness fall over her when she was paralyzed or would she still be able to see Vince walk into view from behind her and come eye to eye again? Would she drop into a well of silence or be able to hear the dead man’s hateful voice? Feel the pain of each blow that he rained on her or be as insensate as the levitated eucalyptus twig?

Like flood waters, a tide of wind roared through the alleyway, nearly knocking her over. The world was filled with sound again.

She spun around and looked back in time to see Woofer return to life in midair and finish his interrupted leap. But there was no longer anyone for him to attack. Vince was gone. The dog landed on the pavement, slipped, skidded, rolled over, and sprang to his feet again, snapping his head around in fear and confusion, looking for his prey as if it had vanished before his eyes.

Danny was crying.

The threat seemed to have passed. The backstreet was deserted but for Janet, her boy, and the dog. Nevertheless, she hurried Danny toward the car, eager to get away, glancing repeatedly at the brush-filled ravine and at the deep shadows between the huge trees as she passed them, half expecting the troll to climb out of its lair again, ready to feed on their hearts sooner than it had promised.

Lightning flickered. The roar of thunder was louder and closer than before.

The air smelled of the rain to come. That ozone taint reminded Janet of the stink of hot blood.

8

Harry Lyon was sitting at a corner table at the rear of the burger restaurant, clasping a water glass in his right hand, his left hand fisted on his thigh. Now and then he took a sip of water, and each sip seemed colder than the one before it, as if the glass absorbed a chill, instead of heat, from his hand.

His gaze traveled over the toppled furniture, ruined plants, broken glass, scattered food, and congealing blood. Nine wounded had been carried away, but two dead bodies lay where they had fallen. A police photographer and lab technicians were at work.

Harry was aware of the room and the people in it, the periodic flash of the camera, but what he saw more clearly was the remembered moon face of the perpetrator peering down at him through the tangled limbs of the mannequins. The parted lips wet with blood. The twin windows of his eyes and the view of Hell beyond.

Harry was no less surprised to be alive now than when they had pulled the dead man and the department-store dummies off him. His stomach still ached dully where the plaster hand of the mannequin had poked into him with the full weight of the perp behind it. He’d thought he’d been shot. The perp had fired twice at close range, but evidently both rounds had been deflected by the intervening plaster torsos and limbs.

Of the five rounds that Harry had fired, at least three had done major damage.

Plainclothes detectives and techs passed in and out of the nearby, bullet-torn kitchen door, on their way to or from the second floor and attic. Some spoke to him or clapped him on the shoulder.

“Good work, Harry.”

“Harry, you okay?”

“Nice job, man.”

“You need anything, Harry?”

“Some shitstorm, huh, Harry?”

He murmured “thanks” or “yes” or “no” or just shook his head. He wasn’t ready for conversation with any of them, and he certainly wasn’t ready to be a hero.

A crowd had gathered outside, pressing eagerly against police barriers, gawking through both broken and unbroken windows. He tried to ignore them because too many of them seemed to resemble the perp, their eyes shining with a fever glaze and their pleasant everyday faces unable to conceal strange hungers.

Connie came through the swinging door from the kitchen, righted an overturned chair, and sat at the table with him. She held a small notebook from which she read. “His name was James Ordegard. Thirty-one. Unmarried. Lived in Laguna. Engineer. No police record. Not even a traffic citation.”

“What’s his connection with this place? Ex-wife, girlfriend work here?”

“No. So far we can’t find a connection. Nobody who works here remembers ever seeing him before.”

“Carrying a suicide note?”

“Nope. Looks like random violence.”

“They talk to anyone where he works?”

She nodded. “They’re stunned. He was a good worker, happy—”

“The usual model citizen.”

“That’s what they say.”

The photographer took a few more shots of the nearest corpse — a woman in her thirties. The strobe flashes were jarringly bright, and Harry realized that the day beyond the windows had grown overcast since he and Connie had come in for lunch.

“He have friends, family?” Harry asked.

“We have names, but we haven’t talked to them yet. Neighbors either.” She closed the notebook. “How you doin‘?”

“I’ve been better.”

“How’s your gut?”

“Not bad, almost normal. It’ll be a lot worse tomorrow. Where the hell did he get the grenades?”

She shrugged. “We’ll find out.”

The third grenade, dropped through the attic trapdoor into the room below, had caught a Laguna Beach officer by surprise. He was now in Hoag Hospital, desperately clinging to life.

“Grenades.” Harry was still disbelieving. “You ever hear anything like it?”

He was immediately sorry he had asked the question. He knew it would get her started on her favorite subject — the pre-millennium cotillion, the continuing crisis of these new Dark Ages.

Connie frowned and said, “Ever hear anything like it? Not like, maybe, but just as bad, worse, lots worse. Last year in Nashville, a woman killed her handicapped boyfriend by setting his wheelchair on fire.”

Harry sighed.

She said, “Eight teenagers in Boston raped and killed a woman. You know what their excuse was? They were bored. Bored. The city was at fault, you see, for doing so little to provide kids with free leisure activities.”

He glanced at the people crowding the crime-scene barriers beyond the front windows — then quickly averted his eyes.

He said, “Why do you collect these nuggets?”

“Look, Harry, it’s the Age of Chaos. Get with the times.”

“Maybe I’d rather be an old fogey.”

“To be a good cop in the nineties, you’ve gotta be of the nineties. You gotta be in sync with the rhythms of destruction. Civilization is coming down around our ears. Everyone wants a license, no one wants responsibility, so the center won’t hold. You’ve gotta know when to break a rule to save the system — and how to surf on every random wave of madness that comes along.”

He just stared at her, which was easy enough, much easier than considering what she had said, because it scared him to think she might be right. He couldn’t consider it. Wouldn’t. Not right now, anyway. And the sight of her lovely face was a welcome distraction.

Although she did not measure up to the current American standard of ultimate gorgeousness set by beer-commercial bimbos on television, and though she did not possess the sweaty exotic allure of the female rock stars with mutant cleavage and eight pounds of stage makeup who unaccountably aroused a whole generation of young males, Connie Gulliver was attractive. At least Harry thought so. Not that he had any romantic interest in her. He did not. But he was a man, she was a woman, and they worked closely together, so it was natural for him to notice that her dark-brown-almost-black hair was beautifully thick with a silken luster though she cropped it short and combed it with her fingers. Her eyes were an odd shade of blue, violet when light struck them at a certain angle, and might have been irresistibly enticing if they had not been the watchful, suspicious eyes of a cop.

She was thirty-three, four years younger than Harry. In rare moments when she let her guard down, she looked twenty-five.

Most of the time, however, the dark wisdom acquired from police work made her seem older than she was.

“What’re you staring at?” she asked.

“Just wondering if you’re really as hard inside as you pretend to be.”

“You ought to know by now.”

“That’s just it — I ought to.”

“Don’t get Freudian on me, Harry.”

“I won’t.” He took a sip of water.

“One thing I like about you is, you don’t try to psychoanalyze everyone. All that stuff’s a load of crap.”

“I agree.”

He wasn’t surprised to find they shared an attitude. In spite of their many differences, they were enough alike to work well as partners. But because Connie avoided self-revelation, Harry had no idea whether they had arrived at their similar attitudes for similar— or totally opposed — reasons.

Sometimes it seemed important to understand why she held certain convictions. At other times Harry was equally sure that encouraging intimacy would lead to a messier relationship. He hated messiness. Often it was wise to avoid familiarity in a professional association, keep a comfortable distance, a buffer zone — especially when you were both carrying firearms.

In the distance, thunder rolled.

A cool draft slipped across the jagged edges of the big broken window and all the way to the back of the restaurant. Discarded paper napkins fluttered on the floor.

The prospect of rain pleased Harry. The world needed to be cleansed, freshened.

Connie said, “You going to check in for a mind massage?”

Following a shooting, they were encouraged to take a few sessions of counseling.

“No,” Harry said. “I’m fine.”

“Why don’t you knock off, go home?”

“Can’t leave you with everything.”

“I can handle it here.”

“What about all the paperwork?”

“I can do that, too.”

“Yeah, but your reports are always full of typos.”

She shook her head. “Your clock’s wound too tight, Harry.”

“It’s all computers, but you don’t even bother to run the spell-check program.”

“I just had grenades thrown at me. Fuck spell-check.”

He nodded and got up from the table. “I’ll go back to the office and start writing up the report.”

Accompanied by another long, low rumble of thunder, a couple of morgue attendants in white jackets approached the dead woman. Under the supervision of an assistant coroner, they prepared to remove the victim from the scene.

Connie handed her notebook to Harry. For his report, he would need some of the facts she had collected.

“See you later,” she said.

“Later.”

One of the attendants unfolded an opaque body bag. It had been doubled so tightly upon itself that the layers of plastic separated with a sticky, crackling, unpleasantly organic noise.

Harry was surprised by a wave of nausea.

The dead woman had been facedown with her head turned away from him. He had heard another detective say that she had been shot in the chest and face. He didn’t want to see her when they rolled her over to put her into the bag.

Quelling his nausea with an effort of will, he turned away and headed for the front door.

Connie said, “Harry?”

Reluctantly he looked back.

She said, “Thanks.”

“You, too.”

That was probably the only reference they would ever make to the fact that their survival had depended on being a good team.

He continued toward the front door, dreading the crowd of onlookers.

From behind him came a wet, suction-breaking sound as they lifted the woman out of the congealing blood that half glued her to the floor.

Sometimes he could not remember why he had become a cop. It seemed not a career choice but an act of madness.

He wondered what he might have become if he had never entered police work, but as always his mind blanked on that one. Perhaps there was such a thing as destiny, a power infinitely greater than the force which drove the earth around the sun and kept the planets in alignment, moving men and women through life as if they were only pieces on a game board. Perhaps free will was nothing more than a desperate illusion.

The uniformed officer at the front door stepped aside to let him out. “It’s a zoo,” he said.

Harry wasn’t sure if the cop was referring to life in general or just to the mob of onlookers.

Outside, the day was considerably cooler than when Harry and Connie had gone into the restaurant for lunch. Above the screen of trees, the sky was as gray as cemetery granite.

Beyond police sawhorses and a barrier of taut yellow crime-scene tape, sixty or eighty people jostled one another and craned their necks for a better view of the carnage. Young people with new-wave haircuts stood shoulder to shoulder with senior citizens, businessmen in suits next to beachboys in cutoffs and Hawaiian shirts. A few were eating huge chocolate-chip cookies bought at a nearby bakery, and they were generally festive, as if none of them would ever die.

Harry was uncomfortably aware that the crowd took an interest in him when he stepped out of the restaurant. He avoided meeting anyone’s gaze. He didn’t want to see what emptiness their eyes might reveal.

He turned right and moved past the first of the large windows, which was still intact. Ahead was the broken pane where only a few toothlike shards still bristled from the frame. Glass littered the concrete.

The sidewalk was empty between the police barriers and the front of the building — and then a young man of about twenty slipped under the yellow tape where it bridged the gap between two curbside trees. He crossed the sidewalk as if unaware that Harry was approaching, his eyes and attention fixed intently on something inside the restaurant.

“Please stay behind the barrier,” Harry said.

The man — more accurately a kid in well-worn tennis shoes, jeans, and a Tecate beer T-shirt — stopped at the shattered window, giving no indication that he had heard the warning. He leaned through the frame, fiercely focused on something inside.

Harry glanced into the restaurant and saw the body of the woman being maneuvered into a morgue bag.

“I told you to stay behind the barrier.”

They were close now. The kid was an inch or two shorter than Harry’s six feet, lean, with thick black hair. He stared at the corpse, at the morgue attendants’ glistening latex gloves which grew redder by the moment. He seemed unaware that Harry was at his side, looming over him.

“Did you hear me?”

The kid was unresponsive. His lips were parted slightly in breathless anticipation. His eyes were glazed, as though he’d been hypnotized.

Harry put a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

Slowly the kid turned from the slaughter, but he still had a faraway look, staring through Harry. His eyes were the gray of lightly tarnished silver. His pink tongue slowly licked his lower lip, as if he had just taken a bite of something tasty.

Neither the punk’s failure to obey nor the arrogance of his blank stare was what set Harry off. Irrationally, perhaps, it was that tongue, the obscene pink tip leaving a wet trail on lips that were too full. Suddenly Harry wanted to hammer his face, split his lips, break out his teeth, drive him to his knees, shatter his insolence, and teach him something about the value of life and respect for the dead.

He grabbed the kid, and before he quite knew what was happening, he was half shoving and half carrying him away from the window, back across the sidewalk. Maybe he hit the creep, maybe not, he didn’t think so, but he manhandled him as roughly as if he had caught him in the act of mugging or molesting someone, wrenched and jerked him around, bent him double, and forced him under the crime-scene tape.

The punk went down hard on his hands and knees, and the crowd moved back to give him a little room. Gasping for breath, he rolled onto his side and glared up at Harry. His hair had fallen across his face. His T-shirt was torn. Now his eyes were in focus and his attention won.

The onlookers murmured excitedly. The scene in the restaurant was passive entertainment, the killer dead by the time they arrived, but this was real action right in front of their eyes. It was as if a television screen had expanded to allow them to step through the glass, and now they were part of a real cop drama, right in the middle of the thrills and chills; and when he looked at their faces, Harry saw that they were hoping the script was colorful and violent, a story worth recounting to their families and friends over dinner.

Abruptly he was sickened by his own behavior, and he turned from the kid. He walked fast to the end of the building, which extended to the end of the block, and slipped under the yellow tape at a spot where no crowd was gathered.

The department car was parked around the corner, two-thirds of the way along the next tree-lined block. With the onlookers behind him and out of sight, Harry began to tremble. The trembling escalated into violent shivering.

Halfway to the car he stopped and leaned one hand against the rough trunk of a tree. He took slow deep breaths.

A peal of thunder shook the sky above the canopy of trees.

A phantom dancer, made of dead leaves and litter, spun down the center of the street in the embrace of a whirlwind.

He had dealt much too harshly with the kid. He’d been reacting not to what the kid had done but to everything that had happened in the restaurant and the attic. Delayed-stress syndrome.

But more than that: he had needed to strike out at something, someone, God or man, in frustration over the stupidity of it all, the injustice, the pure blind cruelty of fate. Like some grim bird of despair, his mind kept circling back to the two dead people in the restaurant, the wounded, the cop clinging to a thread of life at Hoag Hospital, their tortured husbands and wives and parents, bereaved children, mourning friends, the many links in the terrible chain of grief that was forged by each death.

The kid had just been a convenient target.

Harry knew he ought to go back and apologize, but couldn’t. It was not the kid he dreaded facing as much as that ghoulish crowd.

“The little creep needed a lesson anyway,” he said, justifying his actions to himself.

He had treated the kid more like Connie might have done. Now he even sounded like Connie.

… you gotta be in sync with the rhythms of destruction…civilization is coming down around our ears… gotta know when to break a rule to save the system… surf on every random wave of madness that comes along….

Harry loathed that attitude.

Violence, madness, envy, and hatred would not consume them all. Compassion, reason, and understanding would inevitably prevail. Bad times? Sure, the world had known plenty of bad times, hundreds of millions dead in wars and pogroms, the official murderous lunacies of fascism and communism, but there had been a few precious eras of peace, too, and societies that worked at least for a while, so there was always hope.

He stopped leaning on the tree. He stretched, trying to loosen his cramped muscles.

The day had started out so well, but it sure had gone to hell in a hurry.

He was determined to get it back on track. Paperwork would help. Nothing like official reports and forms in triplicate to make the world seem ordered and rational.

Out in the street, the whirlwind had gathered more dust and detritus. Earlier the ghost dancer had appeared to be waltzing along the blacktop. Now it was doing a frantic jitterbug. As Harry took a step away from the tree, the column of debris changed course, zigged toward him, and burst upon him with startling power, forcing him to shut his eyes against the abrasive grit.

For one crazy moment he thought he was going to be swept up as Dorothy had been, and spun off to Oz. Tree limbs rattled and shook overhead, shedding more leaves on him. The huffing and keening of the wind briefly swelled into a shriek, a howl — but in the next instant fell into graveyard stillness.

Someone spoke directly in front of Harry, voice low and raspy and strange: “Ticktock, ticktock.”

Harry opened his eyes and wished he hadn’t.

A hulking denizen of the streets, fully six-feet-five, odious and clad in rags, stood before him, no more than two feet away. His face was grossly disfigured by scars and weeping sores. His eyes were narrowed, little more than slits, and gummy white curds clogged the corners. The breath that came between the hobo’s rotten teeth and across his suppurating lips was so foul that Harry gagged on the stench.

“Ticktock, ticktock,” the vagrant repeated. He spoke quietly, but the effect was like a shout because his voice seemed to be the only sound in the world. A preternatural silence draped the day.

Feeling threatened by the size and by the extravagant filthiness of the stranger, Harry took a step backward. The man’s greasy hair was matted with dirt, bits of grass, and leaf fragments; dried food and worse was crusted in his tangled beard. His hands were dark with grime, and the underside of every ragged, overgrown fingernail was tar-black. He was no doubt a walking petri dish in which thrived every deadly disease known to man, and an incubator of new viral and bacterial horrors.

“Ticktock, ticktock.” The hobo grinned. “You’ll be dead in sixteen hours.”

“Back off,” Harry warned.

“Dead by dawn.”

The hobo opened his squinched eyes. They were crimson from lid to lid and corner to corner, without irises or pupils, as if there were only panes of glass where eyes should have been and only a store of blood within the skull.

“Dead by dawn,” the hobo repeated.

Then he exploded. It wasn’t anything like a grenade blast, no killing shockwaves or gush of heat, no deafening boom, just a sudden end to the unnatural stillness and a violent influx of wind, whoosh! The hobo appeared to disintegrate, not into particles of flesh and gouts of blood but into pebbles and dust and leaves, into twigs and flower petals and dry clods of earth, into pieces of old rags and scraps of yellowed newspapers, bottle caps, glittering specks of glass, torn theater tickets, bird feathers, string, candy wrappers, chewing-gum foil, bent and rusted nails, crumpled paper cups, lost buttons….

The churning column of debris burst over Harry. He was forced to close his eyes again as the mundane remains of the fantastic hobo pummeled him.

When he could open his eyes without risk of injury, he spun around, looking in every direction, but the airborne trash was gone, dispersed to all corners of the day. No whirlwind. No ghost dancer. No hobo: he had vanished.

Harry turned around again in disbelief, gaping.

His heart knocked fiercely.

From another street, a car horn blared. A pickup truck turned the corner, approaching him, engine growling. On the other side of the street, a young couple walked hand in hand, and the woman’s laughter was like the ringing of small silver bells.

Suddenly Harry realized just how unnaturally quiet the day had become between the appearance and departure of the rag-clothed giant. Other than the gravelly and malevolent voice and what few sounds of movement the hobo made, the street had been as silent as any place a thousand leagues beneath the sea or in the vacuum of space between galaxies.

Lightning flashed. The shadows of tree limbs twitched on the sidewalk around him.

Thunder drummed the fragile membrane of the sky, drummed harder, the heavens grew blacker as if lightning-burnt, the air temperature seemed to drop ten degrees in an instant, and the laden clouds split. A scattering of fat raindrops snapped against the leaves, ponged off the hoods of parked cars, painted dark blotches on Harry’s clothes, splattered his face, and drove a chill deep into his bones.

1

The world appeared to be dissolving beyond the windshield of the parked car, as if the clouds had released torrents of a universal solvent. Silver rain sluiced down the glass, and the trees outside seemed to melt as readily as green crayons. Hurrying pedestrians fused with their colorful umbrellas and deliquesced into the gray downpour.

Harry Lyon felt as if he would be liquefied as well, rendered into an insensate solution and swiftly washed away. His comfortable world of granite reason and steely logic was eroding around him, and he was powerless to halt the disintegration.

He could not decide whether he had actually seen the burly vagrant or merely hallucinated him.

God knew, an underclass of the dispossessed wandered the American landscape these days. The more money the government spent to reduce their numbers, the more of them there were, until it began to seem as if they were not the result of any public policy or lack of it but a divine scourge. Like so many people, Harry had learned to look away from them or through them because there seemed to be nothing he could do to help them in any significant way… and because their very existence raised disturbing questions about the stability of his own future. Most were pathetic and harmless. But some were undeniably strange, their faces enlivened by the ticks and twitches of neurotic compulsions, driven by obsessive needs, the gleam of madness in their eyes, the capacity for violence evident in the unremitting coiled tension of their bodies. Even in a town like Laguna Beach — portrayed in travel brochures as a pearl of the Pacific, one more California paradise — Harry could no doubt find at least a few homeless men whose demeanor and appearance were as hostile as that of the man who had seemed to come out of the whirlwind.

He could not, however, expect to find one of them with scarlet eyes lacking irises and pupils. He was not confident, either, about the probability of locating any street person who could manifest himself out of a dust devil, or explode into a collection of mundane debris and fly away on the wind.

Perhaps he had imagined the encounter.

That was a possibility Harry was loath to consider. The pursuit and execution of James Ordegard had been traumatic. But he didn’t believe being caught in Ordegard’s bloody rampage was sufficiently stressful to cause hallucinations replete with dirty fingernails and killer halitosis.

If the filthy giant was real, where had he come from? Where had he gone, who had he been, what disease or birth defect had left him with those terrifying eyes?

Ticktock, ticktock, you’ll be dead by dawn.

He twisted the key in the ignition and started the engine.

Paperwork awaited him, soothingly tedious, with blanks to fill in and boxes to check. A neatly typed file would reduce the messy Ordegard case to crisp paragraphs of words on clean white paper, and then none of it would seem as inexplicable as it did at that moment.

He wouldn’t include the crimson-eyed hobo in his report, of course. That had nothing to do with Ordegard. Besides, he didn’t want to give Connie or anyone else in Special Projects a reason to make jokes at his expense. Dressing for work unfailingly in a coat and tie, being disdainful of foul language in a profession rife with it, going by the book at all times, and being obsessive about the neatness of his case files already made him a frequent target of their humor. But later, at home, he might type up a report about the hobo, just for himself, as a way of bringing order to the bizarre experience and putting it behind him.

“Lyon,” he said, meeting his own eyes in the rearview mirror, “you are a ridiculous specimen.”

He switched on the windshield wipers, and the melting world solidified.

The afternoon sky was so overcast that the streetlamps, which were operated by a solar-sensitive switch, were deceived by the false twilight. The pavement glistened, shiny black. All of the gutters were full of fast-moving, dirty water.

He went south on Pacific Coast Highway, but instead of turning east on Crown Valley Parkway toward Special Projects, he kept going. He passed Ritz Cove, then the turnoff for the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and drove all the way into Dana Point.

When he pulled up in front of Enrique Estefan’s house, he was somewhat surprised, although subconsciously he had known where he was headed.

The house was one of those charming bungalows built in the ‘40s or early ‘50s, before soulless stucco tract homes had become the architecture of choice. Decoratively carved shutters, scalloped fascia, and a multiple-pitch roof gave it character. Rain drizzled off the fronds of the big date palms in the front yard.

During a brief lull in the downpour, he left the car and ran up the walkway. By the time he climbed the three brick steps onto the porch, the rain was coming down hard again. There was no wind any more, as if the great weight of the rain suppressed it.

Shadows waited like a gathering of old friends on the front porch, among a bench-style swing and white wooden chairs with green canvas cushions. Even on a sunny day the porch would be comfortably cool, for it was sheltered by densely interwoven, red-flowering bougainvillaea that festooned a trellis and spread across the roof.

He put his thumb on the bell push and, above the drumming of the rain, heard soft chimes inside the house.

A six-inch lizard skittered across the porch floor to the steps, and out into the storm.

Harry waited patiently. Enrique Estefan — Ricky to his friends— did not move very fast these days.

When the inner door swung open, Ricky squinted out through the screen door, clearly not happy to be disturbed. Then he grinned and said, “Harry, good to see you.” He opened the screen door, stepped aside. “Really good to see you.”

“I’m dripping,” Harry said, pulling off his shoes and leaving them on the porch.

“That’s not necessary,” Ricky said.

Harry entered the house in his stocking feet.

“Still the most considerate man I ever met,” Ricky said.

“That’s me. Ms. Manners of the gun-and-handcuff set.”

They shook hands. Enrique Estefan’s grip was firm, although his hand was hot, dry, leathery, padded with too little flesh, almost withered, all knuckles and metacarpals and phalanges. It was almost like exchanging greetings with a skeleton.

“Come on in the kitchen,” Ricky said.

Harry followed him across the polished-oak floor. Ricky shuffled, never entirely lifting either foot.

The short hallway was illumined only by the light spilling in from the kitchen at the end and by a votive candle flickering in a ruby glass. The candle was part of a shrine to the Holy Mother that was set up on a narrow table against one wall. Behind it was a mirror in a silver-leafed frame. Reflections of the small flame glimmered in the silver leaf and danced in the looking glass.

“How’ve you been, Ricky?”

“Pretty good. You?”

“I’ve had better days,” Harry admitted.

Although he was Harry’s height, Ricky seemed several inches shorter because he leaned forward as if progressing against a wind, his back rounded, the sharp lines of his shoulder blades poking up prominently against his pale-yellow shirt. From behind, his neck looked scrawny. The back of his skull appeared as fragile as that of an infant.

The kitchen was bigger than expected in a bungalow and a lot cheerier than the hallway: Mexican-tile floor, knotty-pine cabinetry, a large window looking onto a spacious backyard. A Kenny G number was on the radio. The air was heavy with the rich aroma of coffee.

“Like a cup?” Ricky asked.

“If it’s not any trouble.”

“No trouble at all. Just made a fresh pot.”

While Ricky got a cup and saucer from one of the cabinets and poured coffee, Harry studied him. He was worried by what he saw.

Ricky’s face was too thin, drawn with deeply carved lines at the corners of his eyes and framing his mouth. His skin sagged as if it had lost nearly all elasticity. His eyes were rheumy. Maybe it was only a backsplash of color from his shirt, but his white hair had an unhealthy yellow tint, and both his face and the whites of his eyes exhibited a hint of jaundice.

He had lost more weight. His clothes hung loosely on him. His belt was cinched to the last hole, and the seat of his pants drooped like an empty sack.

Enrique Estefan was an old man. He was only thirty-six, one year younger than Harry, but he was an old man just the same.

2

Much of the time, the blind woman lived not merely in darkness but in another world quite apart from the one into which she had been born. Sometimes that inner realm was a kingdom of brightest fantasy with pink and amber castles, palaces of jade, luxury high-rise apartments, Bel Air estates with vast verdant lawns. In these settings she was the queen and ultimate ruler — or a famous actress, fashion model, acclaimed novelist, ballerina. Her adventures were exciting, romantic, inspiring. At other times, however, it was an evil empire, all shadowy dungeons, dank and dripping catacombs full of decomposing corpses, blasted landscapes as gray and bleak as the craters of the moon, populated by monstrous and malevolent creatures, where she was always on the run, hiding and afraid, neither powerful nor famous, often cold and naked.

Occasionally her interior world lacked concreteness, was only a domain of colors and sounds and aromas, without form or texture, and she drifted through it, wondering and amazed. Often there was music — Elton John, Three Dog Night, Nilsson, Marvin Gaye, Jim Croce, the voices of her time — and the colors swirled and exploded to accompany the songs, a light show so dazzling that the real world could never produce its equal.

Even during one of those amorphous phases, the magic country within her head could darken and become a fearful place. The colors grew clotted and somber; the music discordant, ominous. She felt that she was being swept away by an icy and turbulent river, choking on its bitter waters, struggling for breath but finding none, then breaking the surface and gasping in lungsful of sour air, frantic, weeping, praying for delivery to a warm dry shore.

Once in a while, as now, she surfaced from the false worlds within her and became aware of the reality in which she actually existed. Muffled voices in adjacent rooms and hallways. The squeak of rubber-soled shoes. The pine scent of disinfectant, medicinal aromas, sometimes (but not now) the pungent odor of urine. She was swaddled in crisp, clean sheets, cool against her fevered flesh. When she disentangled her right hand from the bedding and reached out blindly, she found the cold steel safety railing on the side of her hospital bed.

At first she was preoccupied by the need to identify a strange sound. She did not try to rise up, but held fast to the railing and was perfectly still, listening intently to what initially seemed to be the roar of a great crowd in a far arena. No. Not a crowd. Fire. The chuckling-whispering-hissing of an all-consuming blaze. Her heart began to pound, but at last she recognized the fire for what it was: its opposite, the quenching downpour of a major storm.

She relaxed slightly — but then a rustle arose nearby, and she froze again, wary. “Who’s there?” she asked, and was surprised that her speech was thick and slurred.

“Ah, Jennifer, you’re with us.”

Jennifer. My name is Jennifer.

The voice had been that of a woman. She sounded past middle-age, professional but caring.

Jennifer almost recognized the voice, knew she had heard it before, but she was not calmed.

“Who are you?” she demanded, disconcerted that she was unable to rid herself of the slur.

“It’s Margaret, dear.”

The tread of rubber-soled shoes, approaching.

Jennifer cringed, half expecting a blow but not sure why.

A hand took hold of her right wrist, and Jennifer flinched.

“Easy, dear. I only want to take your pulse.”

Jennifer relented and listened to the rain.

After a while, Margaret let go of her wrist. “Fast but nice and regular.”

Memory slowly seeped back into Jennifer. “You’re Margaret?”

“That’s right.”

“The day nurse.”

“Yes, dear.”

“So it’s morning?”

“Almost three o’clock in the afternoon. I go off-duty in an hour. Then Angelina will take care of you.”

“Why am I always so confused when I first… wake up?”

“Don’t worry about it, dear. There’s nothing you can do to change it. Is your mouth dry? Would you like something to drink?”

“Yes, please.”

“Orange juice, Pepsi, Sprite?”

“Juice would be nice.”

“I’ll be right back.”

Footsteps receding. A door opening. Left open. Above the sound of the rain, busy noises from elsewhere in the building, other people on other errands.

Jennifer tried to shift to a more comfortable position in the bed, whereupon she rediscovered not merely the extent of her weakness but the fact that she was paralyzed on her left side. She could not move her left leg or even wiggle her toes. She had no feeling in her left hand or arm.

A deep and terrible dread filled her. She felt helpless and abandoned. It seemed a matter of the utmost urgency that she recall how she had gotten in this condition and into this place.

She lifted her right arm. Although she realized that it must be thin and frail, it felt heavy.

With her right hand, she touched her chin, her mouth. Dry, rough lips. They had once been otherwise. Men had kissed her.

A memory glimmered in the darkness of her mind: a sweet kiss, murmured endearments. It was but a fragment of a recollection, without detail, leading nowhere.

She touched her right cheek, her nose. When she explored the left side of her face, she could feel it with her fingertips, but her cheek itself did not register her touch. The muscles in that side of her face felt… twisted.

After a brief hesitation, she slid her hand to her eyes. She traced their contours with her fingertips, and what she discovered caused her hand to tremble.

Abruptly she remembered not only how she had wound up in this place but everything else, her life back to childhood all in a flash, far more than she wanted to remember, more than she could bear.

She snatched her hand away from her eyes and made a thin, awful sound of grief. She felt crushed under the weight of memory.

Margaret returned, shoes squeaking softly.

The glass clinked against the nightstand when she put it down.

“I’ll just raise the bed so you’ll be able to drink.”

The motor hummed, and the head of the bed began to lift, forcing Jennifer into a sitting position.

When the bed stopped moving, Margaret said, “What’s wrong, dear? Why, I’d think you were trying to cry… if you could.”

“Does he still come?” Jennifer asked shakily.

“Of course, he does. At least twice a week. You were even alert on one of his visits a few days ago. Don’t you remember?”

“No. I… I…”

“He’s very faithful.”

Jennifer’s heart was racing. A pressure swelled across her chest. Her throat was so tight with fear that she had trouble speaking: “I don’t… don’t…”

“What’s the matter, Jenny?”

“… don’t want him here!”

“Oh, now, you don’t mean that.”

“Keep him out of here.”

“He’s so devoted.”

“No. He’s… he’s…”

“At least twice a week, and he sits with you for a couple of hours, whether you’re with us or wrapped up inside yourself.”

Jennifer shuddered at the thought of him in the room, by the bed, when she was not aware of her surroundings.

She reached out blindly, found Margaret’s arm, squeezed it as tightly as she could. “He’s not like you or me,” she said urgently.

“Jenny, you’re upsetting yourself.”

“He’s different.”

Margaret put her hand on Jennifer’s, gave it a reassuring squeeze. “Now, I want you to stop this, Jenny.”

“He’s inhuman.”

“You don’t mean that. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“He’s a monster.”

“Poor baby. Relax, honey.” A hand touched Jennifer’s forehead, began to smooth away the furrows, brush the hair back. “Don’t get yourself excited. Everything’ll be all right. You’re going to be fine, baby. Just settle down, easy now, relax, you’re safe here, we love you here, we’ll take good care of you….”

After more of that, Jennifer grew calmer — but no less afraid.

The aroma of oranges made her mouth water. While Margaret held the glass, Jennifer drank through a straw. Her mouth didn’t work quite right. Occasionally she had minor difficulty swallowing, but the juice was cold and delicious.

When she emptied the glass, she let the nurse blot her mouth with a paper napkin.

She listened to the soothing fall of the rain, hoping that it would settle her nerves. It did not.

“Should I turn the radio on?” Margaret asked.

“No, thank you.”

“I could read to you if you’d like. Poetry. You always enjoy listening to poetry.”

“That would be nice.”

Margaret drew a chair to the side of the bed and sat in it. As she sought a certain passage in a book, the turning of the pages was a crisp and pleasant sound.

“Margaret?” Jennifer said before the woman could begin to read.

“Yes?”

“When he comes to visit…”

“What is it, dear?”

“You’ll stay in the room with us, won’t you?”

“If that’s what you want, of course.”

“Good.”

“Now, how about a little Emily Dickinson?”

“Margaret?”

“Hmmmmm?”

“When he comes to visit and I’m… lost inside myself… you never let me alone with him, do you?”

Margaret was silent, and Jennifer could almost see the woman’s disapproving frown.

“Do you?” she insisted.

“No, dear. I never do.”

Jennifer knew the nurse was lying.

“Please, Margaret. You seem like a kind person. Please.”

“Dear, really, he loves you. He comes so faithfully because he loves you. You’re in no danger from your Bryan, none at all.”

She shivered at the mention of the name. “I know you think I’m mentally disturbed… confused….”

“A little Emily Dickinson will help.”

“I am confused about a lot of things,” Jennifer said, dismayed to hear her voice growing rapidly weaker, “but not about this. I’m not the least bit confused about this.”

In a voice too full of artifice to convey the powerful, hidden sinewiness of Dickinson, the nurse began to read: “That Love is all there is, Is all we know of Love….”

3

Half of the large table in Ricky Estefan’s spacious kitchen was covered with a dropcloth on which were arranged the small-scale power tools he used to craft silver jewelry: a hand-held drill, engraving instrument, emery wheel, buffer, and less easily identifiable equipment. Bottles of fluids and cans of mysterious compounds were neatly arranged to one side, as were small paintbrushes, white cotton cloths, and steel-wool pads.

He had been at work on two pieces when Harry interrupted: a strikingly detailed scarab brooch and a massive belt buckle covered with Indian symbols, maybe Navajo or Hopi. His second career.

His forge and mold-making equipment were in the garage. But when he worked on the finishing details of his jewelry, he sometimes liked to sit by the kitchen window, where he could enjoy a view of his rose garden.

Outside, even in the dreary gray deluge, the plentiful blooms were radiant — yellow and red and coral, some as big as grapefruits.

Harry sat at the uncluttered part of the table with his coffee, while Ricky shuffled to the other side and put his cup and saucer down among the cans, bottles, and tools. He lowered himself into his chair as stiffly as an octogenarian with severe arthritis.

Three years ago, Ricky Estefan had been a cop, one of the best, Harry’s partner. He’d been a good-looking guy, too, with a full head of hair, not yellow-white as it was now, but thick and black.

His life had changed when he had unwittingly walked into the middle of a robbery at a convenience store. The strung-out gunman had a crack habit for which he needed financing, and maybe he smelled cop the moment Ricky stepped through the door or maybe he was in the mood to waste anyone who even inadvertently delayed the transfer of the money from the cash register to his pockets. Whichever the case, he fired four times at Ricky, missing him once, hitting him once in the left thigh and twice in the abdomen.

“How’s the jewelry business?” Harry asked.

“Pretty good. I sell everything I make, get more orders for custom belt buckles than I can fill.”

Ricky sipped his coffee and savored it before swallowing. Coffee was not on his approved diet. If he drank much, it played hell with his stomach — or what was left of his stomach.

Getting gutshot is easy; surviving is a bitch. He was lucky that the perp’s weapon was only a.22 pistol, unlucky that it was fired at close range. For beginners, Ricky lost his spleen, part of his liver, and a small section of his large intestine. Although his surgeons took every precaution to keep the abdominal cavity clean, the slugs spread fecal matter, and Ricky quickly developed acute, diffuse, traumatic peritonitis. Barely survived it. Gas gangrene set in, antibiotics wouldn’t stop it, and he underwent additional surgery in which he lost his gallbladder and a portion of his stomach. Then a blood infection. Temperature somewhere near that on the sunward surface of Mercury. Peritonitis again, too, and the removal of another piece of the colon. Through it all he had maintained an amazingly upbeat mood and, in the end, felt blessed that he had retained enough of his gastrointestinal system to be spared the indignity of having to wear a colostomy bag for the rest of his life.

He had been off-duty when he’d walked into that store, armed but expecting no trouble. He had promised Anita, his wife, to pick up a quart of milk and tub of soft margarine on his way home from work.

The gunman had never come to trial. The distraction provided by Ricky had allowed the store owner — Mr. Wo Tai Han — to pick up a shotgun which he kept behind the counter. He’d taken off the back of the perp’s head with a blast from that 12-gauge.

Of course, this being the last decade of the millennium, that had not been the end of it. The mother and father of the gunman sued Mr. Han for depriving them of the affection, companionship, and financial support of their deceased son, and never mind that a crack addict was incapable of providing any of those things.

Harry drank some coffee. It was good and strong. “You hear from Mr. Han lately?”

“Yeah. He’s real confident about winning on appeal.”

Harry shook his head. “Never can tell what a jury will do these days.”

Ricky smiled tightly. “Yeah. I figure I’m lucky I didn’t get sued, too.”

He hadn’t been lucky in much else. At the time of the shooting, he and Anita had been married only eight months. She stayed with him another year, until he was on his feet, but when she realized he was going to be an old man for the rest of his days, she called it quits. She was twenty-six. She had a life to live. Besides, these days, the clause of the matrimony vows that mentioned “in sickness and in health, till death do us part” was widely regarded as not binding until the end of a lengthy trial period of, say, a decade, sort of like not being vested in a pension plan until you had worked with the company for five years. For the past two years, Ricky had been alone.

It must be Kenny G Day. Another of his tunes was on the radio. This one was less melodic than the first. It made Harry edgy. Maybe any song would have made him edgy just then.

“What’s wrong?” Ricky asked.

“How’d you know something’s wrong?”

“You’d never in a million years go visiting friends for no reason during work hours. You always give the taxpayer his money’s worth.”

“Am I really that rigid?”

“Do you really need to ask?”

“I must’ve been a pain in the ass to work with.”

“Sometimes.” Ricky smiled.

Harry told him about James Ordegard and the death among the mannequins.

Ricky listened. He spoke hardly at all, but when he did have something to say, it was always the right thing. He knew how to be a friend.

When Harry stopped and stared for a long while at the roses in the rain, apparently finished, Ricky said, “That’s not everything.”

“No,” Harry admitted. He fetched the coffee pot, refreshed their cups, sat down again. “There was this hobo.”

Ricky listened to that part of it as soberly as he had listened to the rest. He did not seem incredulous. No slightest doubt was visible in his eyes or attitude. After he had heard it all, he said, “So what do you make of it?”

“Could’ve been seeing things, hallucinating.”

“Could you? You?”

“But for God’s sake, Ricky, how could it have been real?”

“Is the hobo really weirder than the perp in the restaurant?”’

The kitchen was warm, but Harry was chilled. He folded both hands around the hot coffee cup. “Yeah. He’s weirder. Not by much, maybe, but worse. The thing is… you think maybe I should request psychiatric leave, take a couple of weeks for counseling?”

“Since when did you start believing those brainflushers know what they’re doing?”

“I don’t. But I wouldn’t be happy about some other cop walking around with a loaded gun, hallucinating.”

“You’re no danger to anyone but yourself, Harry. You’re going to worry yourself to death sooner or later. Look, as for this guy with red eyes — everybody has something happen to him sometime in his life that he can’t explain, a brush with the unknown.”

“Not me,” Harry said firmly, shaking his head.

“Even you. Now if this guy starts driving up in a whirlwind every hour on the hour, asking if he could have a date, wants to tongue-kiss you — then maybe you have a problem.”

Armies of rain marched across the bungalow roof.

“I’m a tightly wound customer,” Harry said. “I realize it.”

“Exactly. You’re tight. Not a loose bolt in you, my man.”

He and Ricky watched the rain for a couple of minutes, saying nothing.

Finally Ricky put on a pair of protective goggles and picked up the silver belt buckle. He switched on the hand-held buffer, which was about the size of an electric toothbrush and not loud enough to hinder conversation, and began cleaning tarnish and minute silver shavings out of one of the etched designs.

After a while Harry sighed. “Thanks, Ricky.”

“Sure.”

Harry took his cup and saucer to the sink, rinsed them off, and put them in the dishwasher.

On the radio, Harry Connick, Jr., was singing about love.

Over the sink was another window. The hard rain was beating the hell out of the roses. Bright petals, like confetti, were scattered across the soaked lawn.

When Harry returned to the table, Ricky turned off the buffer and started to get up. Harry said, “It’s okay, I’ll let myself out.”

Ricky nodded. He looked so frail.

“See you soon.”

“Won’t be too long till the season starts,” Ricky said.

“Let’s take in an Angels game opening week.”

“I’d like that,” Ricky said.

They both enjoyed baseball. There was a comforting logic in the structure and progression of every game. It was an antidote for daily life.

On the front porch, Harry slipped into his shoes again and tied the laces, while the lizard that he had frightened upon arrival — or one just like it — watched him from the arm of the nearest chair. Slightly iridescent green and purple scales glimmered dully along each serpentine curve of its body, as if a handful of semiprecious stones had been discarded there on the white wood.

He smiled at the tiny dragon.

He felt back in balance again, calm.

As he came off the last step onto the sidewalk and into the rain, Harry looked toward the car and saw someone sitting in the front passenger seat. A shadowy, hulking figure. Wild hair and a tangled beard. The intruder was facing away from Harry, but then he turned his head. Even through the rain-spotted side window and from a distance of thirty feet, the hobo was instantly recognizable.

Harry swung back toward the house, intending to shout for Ricky Estefan, but changed his mind when he recalled how suddenly the vagrant had vanished before.

He looked at the car, expecting to discover that the apparition had evaporated. But the intruder was still there.

In his bulky black raincoat, the man seemed too large for the sedan, as if he were not in a real car but in one of those scaled-down versions in a bumper-car pavilion at a carnival.

Harry moved quickly along the front walk, slopping through gray puddles. Drawing nearer the street, he saw the well-remembered scars on the maniacal face — and the red eyes.

As he reached the car, Harry said, ” What’re you doing in there?”

Even through the closed window, the hobo’s reply was clearly audible: “Ticktock, ticktock, ticktock….”

“Get out of there,” Harry ordered.

“Ticktock… ticktock….”

An indefinable but unnerving quality of the derelict’s grin made Harry hesitate.

“… ticktock…”

Harry drew his revolver, held it with the muzzle skyward. He put his left hand on the door handle.

“… ticktock…”

Those liquid red eyes daunted Harry. They looked like blood blisters that might burst and stream down the grizzled face. The sight of them, so inhuman, was enervating.

Before his courage could drain away, he jerked open the door.

He was almost knocked over by a blast of cold wind, and staggered backward two steps. It came out of the sedan as if an arctic gale had been stored up in there, stung his eyes and drew forth tears.

The wind passed in a couple of seconds. Beyond the open car door, the front passenger seat was empty.

Harry could see enough of the sedan interior to know for certain that the vagrant was not in there anywhere. Nevertheless, he circled the vehicle, looking through all of the windows.

He stopped at the back of the car, fished his keys out of his pocket, and unlocked the trunk, covering it with his revolver as the lid swung up. Nothing: spare tire, jack, lug wrench, and tool pouch.

Surveying the quiet residential neighborhood, Harry slowly became aware of the rain again, of which he’d been briefly oblivious. A vertical river poured out of the sky. He was soaked to the skin.

He slammed the trunk lid, and then the front passenger door. He went around to the driver’s side and got in behind the steering wheel. His clothes made wet squishing noises as he sat down.

Earlier, on the street in downtown Laguna Beach, the hobo had reeked of body odor and had expelled searingly bad breath. But there was no lingering stink of him in the car.

Harry locked the doors. Then he returned his revolver to the shoulder holster under his sodden sportcoat.

He was shivering.

Driving away from Enrique Estefan’s bungalow, Harry switched on the heater, turned it up high. Water seeped out of his soaked hair and trickled down the nape of his neck. His shoes were swelling and tightening around his feet.

He remembered the softly radiant red eyes staring at him through the car window, the oozing sores in the scarred and filthy face, the crescent of broken yellow teeth — and abruptly he was able to identify the unnerving quality in the hobo’s grin which had halted him as he had first been about to yank open the door. Gibbering lunacy was not what made the strange derelict so threatening. It was not the grin of a madman. It was the grin of a predator, cruising shark, stalking panther, wolf prowling by moonlight, something far more formidable and deadly than a mere deranged vagrant.

All the way back to Special Projects in Laguna Niguel, the scenery and the streets were familiar, nothing mysterious about the other motorists that he passed, nothing otherworldly about the play of headlights in the nickel-bright rain or the metallic clicking that the cold droplets made against the skin of the sedan, nothing eerie about the silhouettes of palm trees against the iron sky. Yet he was overcome by a feeling of the uncanny, and he struggled to avoid the conclusion that he had brushed up against something… supernatural.

Ticktock, ticktock…

He thought about the rest of what the hobo had said after appearing out of the whirlwind: You’ll be dead by dawn.

He glanced at his watch. The crystal was still filmed with rainwater, the face distorted, but he could read the time: twenty-eight minutes past three.

When was sunrise? Six o’clock? Six-thirty? Thereabouts, somewhere between. At most, fifteen hours away.

The metronomic thump of the windshield wipers began to sound like the ominous cadence of funeral drums.

This was ridiculous. The derelict couldn’t have followed him all the way to Enrique’s house from Laguna Beach — which meant the hobo was not real, merely imagined, and therefore posed no threat.

He was not relieved. If the hobo was imaginary, Harry was in no danger of dying by dawn. But as far as he could see, that left a single alternative explanation, and not one that was reassuring: he must be having a nervous breakdown.

4

Harry’s side of the office was comforting. The blotter and pen set were perfectly squared with each other and precisely aligned with the edges of the desk. The brass clock showed the same time as did his wristwatch. The leaves of the potted palm, Chinese evergreens, and pothos were all clean and glossy.

The blue screen of the computer monitor was soothing, as well, and all the Special Projects forms were installed as macros, so he could complete them and print them without resort to a typewriter. Uneven spacing inevitably resulted when one attempted to fill in the blanks on forms with that antiquated technology.

He was an excellent typist, and he could compose case narrative in his head almost as fast as he could type. Anyone was capable of filling in blank spaces or making Xs in boxes, but not everyone was skilled at the part of the job he liked to call the “essay test.” His case narratives were written in language both more vivid and succinct than that of any other detective he had ever known.

As his fingers flew across the keyboard, crisp sentences formed on the screen, and Harry Lyon was more at peace with the world than he had been at any time since he had sat at his breakfast table that morning, eating English muffins with lemon marmalade and enjoying the view of the meticulously trimmed condominium greenbelt. When James Ordegard’s killing spree was summarized in spare prose stripped of value-weighted verbs and adjectives, the episode didn’t seem half as bizarre as when Harry actually had been a part of it. He hammered out the words, and the words soothed.

He was even feeling sufficiently relaxed to allow himself to get more casual in the office than was his habit. He unbuttoned the collar of his shirt and slightly loosened the knot of his tie.

He took a break from the paperwork only to walk down the hall to the vending-machine room to get a cup of coffee. His clothes were still damp in spots and hopelessly wrinkled, but the frost in his marrow had melted.

On his way back to the office with the coffee, he saw the hobo. The hulking vagrant was at the far end of the hall, crossing the intersection, passing left to right in another corridor. Facing forward, never looking toward Harry, the guy moved purposefully, as if in the building on other business. In a few long strides he was through the intersection and out of sight.

As Harry hurried along the hall to see where the man had gone, trying not to spill the coffee, he told himself that it hadn’t been the same person. There had been a vague resemblance, that was all; imagination and frayed nerves had done the rest.

His denials were without conviction. The figure at the end of the corridor had been the same height as his nemesis, with those bearish shoulders, that barrel chest, the same filthy mane of hair and tangled beard. The long black raincoat had spread around him like a robe, and he’d had that leonine self-possession, as if he were some mad prophet mystically transported from the days of the Old Testament and dropped into modern times.

Harry braked at the end of the hallway by sliding into the intersection, wincing as hot coffee slopped out of the cup and stung his hand. He looked right, where the vagrant had been headed. The only people in that corridor were Bob Wong and Louis Yancy, loan-outs from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, who were consulting over a manila file folder.

Harry said, “Where’d he go?”

They blinked at him, and Bob Wong said, “Who?”

“The hairball in the black raincoat, the hobo.”

The two men were puzzled.

Yancy said, “Hobo?”

“Well, if you didn’t see him, you had to smell him.”

“Just now?” Wong asked.

“Yeah. Two seconds ago.”

“Nobody came through here,” Yancy said.

Harry knew they weren’t lying to him, weren’t part of some immense conspiracy. Nevertheless, he wanted to walk past them and inspect all of the rooms along the corridor.

He restrained himself only because they were already staring at him curiously. He suspected he was something of a sight— disheveled, pale, wild-eyed.

He could not tolerate the idea that he was making a spectacle of himself. He’d built a life on the principles of moderation, orderliness, and self-control.

Reluctantly he returned to his office. He took a cork coaster from his top desk drawer, put it on the blotter, and set the dripping cup of coffee on it.

He kept a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle of Windex in the bottom drawer of one of the filing cabinets. He used a couple of the towels to blot his coffee-damp hands, then wiped off the wet cup.

He was pleased to see that his hands were not shaky.

Whatever the hell was happening, he would eventually figure it out and deal with it. He could deal with anything. Always had. Always would. Self-control. That was the key.

He took several slow, deep breaths. With both hands he smoothed his hair back from his forehead.

Heavy as a slab of slate, the lowering sky had pressed twilight into an earlier appearance. It was only a few minutes after five o’clock, an hour until sunset, but the day had surrendered to a protracted dusk. Harry turned on the overhead fluorescent lights.

For a minute or two he stood at the partially fogged window, watching tons of rain crash straight down on the parking lot. The thunder and lightning were long past, and the air was too heavy to permit wind, so the deluge had a tropical intensity, a grueling relentlessness that led the mind to ancient myths involving divine punishment, arks, and lost continents vanished beneath swollen seas.

Calmed somewhat, he returned to his desk chair and swung around to the computer. He was about to call up the case-narrative document that he had saved before going down the hall for coffee, when he realized that the screen was not blank, as it should have been.

Another document had been created in his absence. It consisted of a single word centered on the screen: TICKTOCK.

5

It was nearly six o’clock when Connie Gulliver returned to the office from the crime scene, having caught a ride in a Laguna Beach Police Department black-and-white. She was grousing about the media, one television reporter in particular who had dubbed her and Harry “Batwoman and Batman,” for God-alone-knew what reason, maybe because their desperate pursuit of James Ordegard involved so much derring-do, or maybe just because there had been a flock of bats in the attic where they had nailed the bastard. Electronic journalists did not always have discernibly logical reasons or credible justifications for doing and saying some of the things they did and said. Reporting the news was neither a sacred trust nor a public service to them, it was show business, where you needed flash and splash more than facts and figures. Connie had been around long enough to know all of that and to be resigned to it, but she was hot about it anyway, haranguing Harry from the moment she walked through the door.

He was just finishing the paperwork when she arrived, having dawdled during the past half an hour, waiting for her. He’d decided to tell her about the tramp with the blood-red eyes, in part because she was his partner and he was loath to conceal anything significant from a partner. He and Ricky Estefan had always shared everything, which was one reason he had gone to see Ricky before returning to Special Projects, the other reason being that he valued Ricky’s insights and advice. Whether the threatening hobo was real or a symptom of mental collapse, Connie had a right to know about him.

If that filthy, spectral figure was imaginary, perhaps just talking about him with someone would puncture the balloon of delusion. The hobo might never appear again.

Harry also wanted to tell her because telling her gave him a reason to spend some off-duty time with her. At least a little socializing between partners was advisable, helped strengthen that special bond between cops who had to put their lives on the line for each other. They needed to talk about what they had been through that afternoon, relive it together, and thereby transform it from a traumatic experience into a polished anecdote with which to annoy rookies for years to come.

And in truth, he wanted to spend some time with Connie because he had begun to be interested in her not only as a partner but as a woman. Which surprised him. They were such opposites. He had spent so much time telling himself that she drove him nuts. Now he couldn’t stop thinking about her eyes, the luster of her hair, the fullness of her mouth. Though he had not wanted to admit it, this change in his attitude had been building up speed for some time, and today gears had finally shifted in his head.

No mystery about that. He’d nearly been killed. More than once. A brush with death was a great clarifier of thoughts and feelings. He’d not only had a brush with death; he’d been embraced by it, hugged tight.

He had seldom harbored so many intense emotions all at once: loneliness, fear, aching self-doubt, joy at just being alive, desire so acute that it weighed upon his heart and made breathing just a little more difficult than usual.

“Where do I sign?” Connie asked, when he told her he had completed the paperwork.

He spread out all the requisite forms on his desk, including Connie’s own official statement. He had written it for her, as he always did, which was against department policy and one of the few rules he had ever broken. But they split chores according to their skills and preferences, and he just happened to be better at this part than she was. Her own case narratives tended to be angry in tone instead of solemnly neutral, as if every crime was the most grievous personal affront to her, and sometimes she used words like “asshole” or “shithead” instead of “suspect” or “arrestee,” which was guaranteed to send the defendant’s attorney into rapturous spasms of self-righteousness in the courtroom.

Connie signed all of the forms that he put in front of her, including the cleanly typed statement attributed to her, without reading any of them. Harry liked that. She trusted him.

As he watched her scribble her signature, he decided they should go somewhere special, even with him rumpled and damp, a cozy bar with plushly padded booths and low lighting and candles on the tables, a pianist making cocktail music — but not one of those slick guys who did polyester lounge versions of good tunes and sang “Feelings” once every half hour, the anthem of sentimental inebriates and mush-heads in all fifty states.

Connie couldn’t stop fuming about being labeled Batwoman and other abuses suffered at the hands of the media, so Harry had difficulty finding a moment to insert an invitation to drinks and dinner, which gave him too much time to look at her. Not that she looked any less appealing the longer he watched her. Just the opposite: when he took the time to study her face feature by feature, she proved to be more attractive than he had ever realized. The problem was, he also began to see just how tired she was: red-eyed, pale, large dark smudges of weariness beneath her eyes, shoulders slumped under the weight of the day. He began to doubt that she would want to have a drink and rehash the events of the lunch hour.

And the more aware he became of her exhaustion, the more profoundly weary he felt himself.

Her bitterness over the electronic news media’s tendency to turn tragedy into entertainment reminded Harry that she had begun the day angry, as well, troubled by something she had refused to discuss.

As his ardor cooled, he wondered whether it was really such a good idea to have a romantic interest in a partner in the first place. Department policy was to split up teams who developed more than a friendly relationship when off-duty, whether gay or straight. Long-enforced policies were usually based on a wealth of hard experience.

Connie finished signing the papers and gave him a once-over. “This is the first time you’ve ever looked as if you might consider shopping at the Gap instead of exclusively at Brooks Brothers.” Then she actually hugged him, which might have stirred his passion again except that it was a buddy hug. “How’s your gut feel?”

Just a dull ache, that’s all, thank you, nothing that would inhibit me from making passionate, hot, sweaty love to you.

He said, “I’m fine.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“God, I’m tired.”

“Me, too.”

“I think I’ll sleep a hundred hours.”

“At least ten.”

She smiled and, to his surprise, affectionately pinched his cheek. “See you in the morning, Harry.”

He watched her as she walked out of the office. She was still wearing badly scuffed Reeboks, blue jeans, a red-and-brown-checkered blouse, and a brown corduroy jacket — and the outfit was worse for the wear of the past ten hours. Yet he could not have found her more alluring if she had been shoehorned into a clinging, sequined gown with canyonesque décolletage.

The room was dreary without her. The fluorescent light painted hard, cold edges on the furniture, on every leaf of every plant.

Beyond the steamed window, the premature twilight was giving way to night, but the stormy day had been so somber that the phase of demarcation was excruciatingly subtle. Rain hammered on the anvil of darkness.

Harry had come full circle from physical and mental exhaustion to thoughts of passion to exhaustion once more. It was almost like being an adolescent boy again.

He shut down the computer, switched off the lights, closed the office door, and filed copies of the reports in the front office.

Driving home in the depressingly leaden fall of rain, he hoped to God that he could sleep, and that his sleep would be without dreams. When he woke refreshed in the morning, perhaps the answer to the mystery of the crimson-eyed hobo would be apparent.

Halfway home he almost switched on the radio, wanting music. Just before he touched the controls, he stayed his hand. He was afraid that, instead of some top-forty number, he would hear the voice of the vagrant chanting: ticktock, ticktock, ticktock….

6

Jennifer must have dozed off. It was ordinary sleep, however, not the delirium of the fantasy worlds that so frequently offered her escape. When she woke, she did not have to shake off clinging visions of emerald-diamond-sapphire temples or cheering audiences enthralled with her vocal virtuosity in a Carnegie Hall of the mind. She was sticky because of the humidity, with a sour taste in her mouth — stale orange juice and heavy sleep.

Rain was still falling. It drummed complicated rhythms on the roof of the hospital. Private sanitarium, actually. But not rhythms alone: chuckling-gurgling-burbling atonal melodies as well.

Sightless, Jennifer had no easy way to know with certainty the hour of the day or the season. However, blind for twenty years, she had developed a refined awareness of her circadian rhythms and was able to guess the time of year and day with surprising accuracy.

She knew that spring was drawing near. Perhaps it was March, the end of the rainy season in southern California. She knew not the day of the week, but she suspected it was early evening, between six and eight o’clock.

Perhaps she’d eaten dinner, though she did not remember it. Sometimes she was barely conscious enough to swallow when they spoon-fed her, but not sufficiently aware to enjoy what she ate. On other occasions, when in a deeper catatonic state, she received nutrients intravenously.

Although the room was cast in silence, she was aware of another presence, either because of some indefinable peculiarity of the air pressure or an odor only subconsciously perceived. She remained motionless, trying to breathe as if sound asleep, waiting for the unknown person to move or cough or sigh and, thereby, provide her, with a clue to identity.

Her companion did not oblige her. Gradually, Jennifer came to suspect that she was alone with him.

She knew that a pretense of sleep was safest.

She struggled to stay perfectly still.

Finally she could no longer tolerate continued ignorance. She said, “Margaret?”

No one responded.

She knew the silence was false. She strove to recall the name of the swing-shift nurse. “Angelina?”

No reply. Only the rain.

He was torturing her. It was psychological torture, but that was by far the most effective weapon that could be used against her. She had known so much physical and emotional pain that she had developed defenses against those forms of abuse.

“Who’s there?” she demanded.

“It’s me,” he said.

Bryan. Her Bryan.

His voice was soft and gentle, even musical, in no way threatening, yet it caused ice to form in her blood.

She said, “Where’s the nurse?”

“I asked her to leave us alone.”

“What do you want?”

“Just to be with you.”

“Why?”

“Because I love you.”

He sounded sincere, but she knew that he was not. He was congenitally incapable of sincerity.

“Go away,” she pleaded.

“Why do you hurt me?”

“I know what you are.”

“What am I?”

She did not respond.

He said, “How can you know what I am?”

“Who better to know?” she said harshly, consumed by bitterness, self-loathing, loathing, and despair.

Judging by the sound of his voice, he was standing near the window, closer to the plink and paradiddle of the rain than to the faint noises in the corridor. She was terrified that he would come to the bed, take her hand, touch her cheek or brow.

She said, “I want Angelina.”

“Not yet.”

“Please.”

“No.”

“Then go away.”

“Why do you hurt me?” he asked again. His voice remained as gentle as ever, melodic as that of a choirboy, untouched by anger or frustration, only sorrow. “I come twice a week. I sit with you. Without you, what would I be? Nothing. I’m aware of that.”

Jennifer bit her lip and did not reply.

Suddenly she sensed that he was moving. She could hear no footsteps, no rustle of garments. He could be quieter than a cat when he wished to be.

She knew he was approaching the bed.

Desperately she sought the oblivion of her delusions, either the bright fantasies or dark terrors within her damaged mind, she cared not which, anything other than the horror of reality in that too, too private sanitarium room. But she could not retreat at will into those interior realms; periodic involuntary consciousness was, perhaps, the greatest curse of her pathetic, debilitated condition.

She waited, trembling.

She listened.

He was ghost-silent.

The thunderous pummeling of rain on the roof was cut off from one second to the next, but she understood that the rain had not actually ceased to fall. Abruptly the world was clutched in the grip of an uncanny silence, stillness.

Jennifer brimmed with fear, even into the paralyzed extremities of her left side.

He took hold of her right hand.

She gasped and tried to pull away.

“No,” he said, and tightened his grip. He was strong.

She called for the nurse, knowing it was useless to do so.

He held her with one hand and caressed her fingers with the other. He tenderly massaged her wrist. He stroked the withered flesh of her forearm.

Blindly, she waited, trying not to speculate upon what cruelties would ensue.

He pinched her arm, and a wordless plea for mercy escaped her. He pinched harder, then again, but probably not hard enough to leave a bruise.

Enduring, Jennifer wondered what his face was like, whether ugly or plain or handsome. She intuited that it would not be a blessing to recover her sight if she were required, just once, to gaze into his hateful eyes.

He pushed one finger into her ear, and his nail seemed as long and pointed as a needle. He twisted it and scraped, pressed harder still, until the pressure-pain was unbearable.

She screamed, but no one responded.

He touched her pancake breasts, deflated from long years of supine existence and intravenous nourishment. Even in her sexless condition, her nipples were a source of pain, and he knew how to deliver agony.

However, it was not so much anything he did to her that mattered… but what he might think to do next. He was endlessly inventive. True terror lay in the anticipation of the unknown.

She screamed for someone, anyone, help, surcease. She begged God for death.

Her shrieks and cries for help fell into a void.

Finally she was silent and endured.

He released her, but she was acutely aware that he was still at her bedside.

“Love me,” Bryan said.

“Please go away.”

Softly: “Love me.”

If Jennifer had been capable of producing tears, she would have wept.

“Love me, and I won’t have any reason to hurt you again. All I want is for you to love me.”

She was no more capable of loving him than she was of producing tears from her ruined eyes. Easier to love a viper, a rock, or the cold indifferent blackness between the stars.

“I only need to be loved,” he insisted.

She knew that he was incapable of love. Indeed, he had no concept whatsoever of the meaning of the word. He wanted it only because he could not have it, could not feel it, because it was a mystery to him, a great unknown. Even if she were able to love him and convince him of her love, she would not be saved, for he would be unmoved by love when at last it was given to him, would deny its existence, and would continue to torture her out of habit.

Suddenly the rain sound resumed. Voices in the corridor. Squeaking wheels on the tiered cart that carried dinner trays.

The torment was over. For now.

“I can’t stay long this evening,” Bryan said. “Not the usual eternity.”

He chuckled at that remark, amused by himself, but to Jennifer it was only an offensive wet sound in his throat, humorless.

He said, “I’ve had an unexpected increase in business. So much to do. I’m afraid I’ve got to run.”

As always, he marked his departure by bending over the bed railing and kissing the numb left side of her face. She could not feel the pressure or texture of his lips against her cheek, only a butterfly-wing touch of coolness. She suspected that his kiss might have felt no different, maybe only colder, if planted on the still-sensitive right side of her face.

When he left, he chose to make noise, and she listened to his receding footsteps.

After a while, Angelina came to feed her dinner. Soft foods. Mashed potatoes with gravy. Pureed beef. Pureed peas. Applesauce with a sprinkling of cinnamon and brown sugar. Ice cream. Things she would have no difficulty swallowing.

Jennifer said nothing about what had been done to her. From grim experience, she had learned that she would not be believed.

He must have the appearance of an angel, because everyone but her seemed disposed to trust him on first sight, attributing to him only the kindest motives and noblest intentions.

She wondered if her ordeal would ever end.

7

Ricky Estefan emptied half the box of rigatoni into the big pot of boiling water. A head of foam rose instantaneously, and an appealing starchy smell wafted up in a cloud of steam. On another burner stood a smaller pot of fragrantly bubbling spaghetti sauce.

As he adjusted the gas flames, he heard a strange noise toward the front of the house. A thump, not especially loud but solid. He cocked his head, listened. Just when he decided that he’d imagined the noise, it came again: thump.

He went down the hall to the front door, switched on the porch light, and looked through the fish-eye lens in the peephole. As far as he could see, no one was out there.

He unlocked the door, opened it, and cautiously leaned outside to look both ways. None of the outdoor furniture had fallen over. The night was windless, so the bench swing hung motionless on its chains.

The rain continued to fall hard. In the street, the vaguely purplish light of the mercury-vapor lamps revealed rivers along both gutters, nearly to the tops of the curbs, churning toward the drains at the end of the block, glistening like streams of molten silver.

He was concerned that the thump had signaled storm damage of some kind, but that seemed unlikely without a good wind.

After he closed the door, he twisted the dead-bolt into place and slid the security chain home. Since being gutshot and struggling back from the brink, he had developed a healthy paranoia. Well, healthy or unhealthy, it was a damned fine example of paranoia, shiny from use. He kept the doors locked at all times, and with nightfall he drew the drapes shut at every window so no one could peer inside.

His fear embarrassed him. He had once been so strong, capable, and self-confident. When Harry had left earlier, Ricky had pretended to stay at the kitchen table, working on the belt buckle. But as soon as he heard the front door close, he shuffled down the hall to slip the dead-bolt quietly into place while his old friend was still on the front porch. His face had been burning with shame, but he’d been uneasy about leaving a door unlocked even for a few minutes.

Now, as he turned away from the door, the mysterious noise came again. Thump.

This time he thought it was located in the living room. He stepped through the archway to find the source.

Two table lamps were on in the living room. A warm amber glow suffused that cozy space. The coved ceiling was patterned with twin circles of light broken by the shadows of lamp shade wires and finials.

Ricky liked light throughout the house in the evening until he went to bed. He no longer was comfortable entering a dark room and then flicking a switch.

Everything was in order. He even peered behind the sofa to be sure… well, to be sure that nothing was amiss back there.

Thump.

His bedroom?

A door in the living room opened on a small vestibule with a simply but charmingly coffered ceiling. Three other doors ringed the vestibule: guest bath, a cramped guest bedroom, and a master bedroom of modest dimensions, one lamp aglow in each. Ricky checked everywhere, closets too, but found nothing that could have caused the thumping.

He pulled the drapes aside at each window to see if the latches were engaged and all the panes of glass intact. They were.

Thump.

This time it seemed to come from the garage.

From the nightstand beside his bed, he got a revolver. Smith & Wesson.38 Chief’s Special. He knew it was fully loaded. He flipped the cylinder out and checked anyway. All five rounds were there.

Thump.

He developed a stitch in his lower left abdomen, a painful stretching-twitching sensation with which he was too familiar, and although the bungalow was small, he needed more than a minute to reach the connecting door to the garage. It was off the hallway, just before the kitchen. He leaned against it, one ear to the crack of the jamb, listening.

Thump.

The sound had definitely come from the. garage.

He pinched the dead-bolt turn between thumb and forefinger… then hesitated. He didn’t want to go into the garage.

He became aware of a dew of perspiration on his brow.

“Come on, come on,” he said, but he didn’t respond to his own urging.

He hated himself for being afraid. Although he remembered the terrible pain of the bullets smacking through his belly and scrambling his guts, although he could recall the agony of all the subsequent infections and the anguish of the months in the hospital under the shadow of death, although he knew that many other men would have given up when he persevered, and although he knew that his caution and fear were justified by all that he had experienced and survived, he hated himself nonetheless.

Thump.

Cursing himself, he disengaged the lock, opened the door, found the light switch. He stepped across the threshold.

The garage was wide enough for two cars, and his blue Mitsubishi was parked on the far side. The half nearest the house was occupied by his long workbench, racks of tools, cabinets filled with supplies, and the gas-fired forge in which he melted small ingots of silver to pour into the jewelry and buckle molds that he created.

The rataplan of the rain was louder here because there was no drop ceiling and the garage roof was not insulated. A damp chill rose off the concrete floor.

No one was in the nearer half of the large chamber. None of the storage cabinets had a compartment big enough to hide a man.

With the.38 in hand, he circled the car, looked inside it, even eased down onto his creaking knees and peered under it. Nobody was hiding there.

The exterior man-size door of the garage was locked from the inside. So was the only window, which in any case was too small to admit anyone older than five.

He wondered if the noise had originated on the roof. For a minute, two minutes, he stood beside the car, staring up at the rafters, waiting for the thump to come again. Nothing. Just the rain, rain, rain, an unceasing tattoo.

Feeling foolish, Ricky returned to the house and locked the connecting door. He took the revolver into the kitchen with him and put it on the built-in secretary beside the telephone.

The flames under both the pasta and sauce had gone out. For a moment he thought the gas service had failed, but then he saw that the knobs in front of both burners were in the OFF position.

He knew they had been on when he left the kitchen. He turned them on again, and blue flames came to life with a whoosh under the pots. After adjusting them to the right intensity, he stared at them for a while; the flames did not subside of their own accord.

Somebody was playing games with him.

He returned to the secretary, picked up the gun, and considered searching the house again. But he had already inspected every inch of the place, and knew for certain that he was alone.

Following a brief hesitation, he searched it again — with the same result as the first time.

When he returned to the kitchen, no one had turned off the gas.

The sauce was boiling so rapidly, it had begun to stick to the bottom of the pot. He put the gun aside. He speared a piece of rigatoni with a large fork, blew on it to cool it, tasted. It was slightly overcooked but okay.

He drained the pasta into a colander in the sink, shook the colander, dumped the pasta on a plate, and added sauce.

Somebody was playing games with him.

But who?

8

Rain drizzled through the leafy oleander bushes, encountered the layers of plastic garbage bags that Sammy had draped across the packing crate, and drained off the plastic into the vacant lot or out into the alleyway. Under the rags that served as bedding, the floor of the crate was also lined with plastic, so his humble home was relatively dry.

Even if he had been sitting in water up to his waist, Sammy Shamroe might not have noticed, for he had already finished one double-liter jug of wine and had started a second. He was feeling no pain — or at least that’s what he told himself.

He had it pretty good, really. The cheap wine kept him warm, temporarily purged him of self-hatred and remorse, and put him in touch with certain innocent feelings and naive expectations of childhood. Two fat blueberry-scented candles, salvaged from someone else’s garbage and anchored now in a pie pan, filled his sanctuary with a pleasant fragrance and a soft light as cozy as that from an antique Tiffany lamp. The close walls of the packing crate were comforting rather than claustrophobic. The ceaseless chorus of the rain was lulling. But for the candles, perhaps it had been something like this in the sac of fetal membranes: snugly housed, suspended weightless in amniotic fluid, surrounded by the soft liquid roar of Mother’s blood rushing through her veins and arteries, not merely unconcerned about the future but unaware of it.

Even when the ratman pulled aside the hanging rug that served as a door over the only opening in the crate, Sammy was not delivered from his imitation prenatal bliss. Deep down, he knew that he was in trouble, but he was too whacked to be afraid.

The crate was eight feet by six, as large as many walk-in closets. Bearish as he was, the ratman still could have squeezed in across from Sammy without knocking over the candles, but he remained crouched in the doorway, holding back the rug with one arm.

His eyes were different from what they had always been before. Shiny black. Without any whites at all. Pinpoint yellow pupils in the center, glowing. Like distant headlights on the night highway to Hell.

“How’re you doing, Sammy?” the ratman asked in a tone of voice that was uncharacteristically solicitous. “You getting along okay, hmmmmm?”

Though a surfeit of wine had so numbed Sammy Shamroe’s survival instinct that he couldn’t get back in touch with his fear, he knew that he should be afraid. Therefore he remained motionless and watchful, as he might have done if a rattlesnake had slithered into his crate and blocked the only way out.

The ratman said, “Just wanted you to know, I won’t be stopping around for a while. Got new business. Overworked. Got to deal with more urgent matters first. When it’s over, I’ll be exhausted, sleep for a whole day, around the clock.”

Being temporarily fearless did not mean that Sammy had become courageous. He dared not speak.

“Did you know how much this exhausts me, Sammy? No? Thinning out the herd, disposing of the lame and the diseased — it’s no piece of cake, let me tell you.”

When the ratman smiled and shook his head, shining beads of rainwater were flung off his beard. They spattered Sammy.

Even in the comforting womb of his wine haze, Sammy retained enough awareness to be amazed by the ratman’s sudden garrulousness. Yet, as amazing as it was, the huge man’s monologue was curiously reminiscent of something he had heard before, a long time ago in another place, though he could not recall where or when or from whom. It wasn’t the gravelly voice or the words themselves that brought Sammy to the edge of déjà vu, but the tonal quality of the ratman’s revelations, the eerie earnestness, the cadences of his speech.

“Dealing with vermin like you,” the ratman said, “is draining. Believe me. Draining. It’d be so much easier if I could waste each of you the first time we meet, make you spontaneously combust or make your head explode. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

No. Colorful, exciting, interesting for sure, but not nice, Sammy thought, although his fear remained in abeyance.

“But to fulfill my destiny,” the ratman said, “to become what I am required to become, I have to show you my wrath, make you quiver and be humbled before me, make you understand the meaning of your damnation.”

Sammy remembered where he had heard this sort of thing before. Another street person. Maybe eighteen months ago, two years ago, up in Los Angeles. A guy named Mike, had a messiah complex, thought he was chosen by God to make the world pay for its sins, finally went over the top with the concept, knifed three or four people who were lined up outside an art-house theater that was showing a re-released director’s cut of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure with twenty minutes of material never seen in the original version.

“Do you know what I am becoming, Sammy?”

Sammy just clutched his remaining two-liter jug.

“I am becoming the new god,” said the ratman. “A new god is needed. I have been chosen. The old god was too merciful. Things have gotten out of hand. It’s my duty to Become, and having Become, to rule more sternly.”

In the candlelight, the raindrops remaining in the ratman’s hair and eyebrows and beard glimmered as if a woefully misguided artisan had decorated him with jewels in the manner of a Fabergé egg.

“When I deal out these more urgent judgments, and when I’ve had a chance to rest, I’ll be back to see you,” the ratman promised. “I just didn’t want you to think you’d been forgotten. Wouldn’t want you to feel neglected, unappreciated. Poor, poor Sammy. I won’t forget you. That’s not just a promise — it’s the sacred word of the new god.”

Then the ratman worked a malevolent miracle to insure that he was not forgotten even in the thousand-fathom oblivion of a deep wine sea. He blinked, and when his lids popped up again, his eyes were no longer ebony and yellow, were not eyes at all any longer, but were balls of greasy white worms writhing in his sockets. When he opened his mouth, his teeth had become razor-sharp fangs. Venom dripped, a glossy black tongue fluttered like that of a questing serpent, and a violent exhalation erupted from him, reeking of putrefied flesh. His head and body swelled, burst, but didn’t deconstruct into a horde of rats this time. Instead, ratman and clothes were transformed into tens of thousands of black flies that swarmed through the packing crate, buzzing fiercely, batting against Sammy’s face. The thrumming of their wings was so loud that it drowned out even the drone of the pouring rain, and then—

They were gone.

Vanished.

The rug hung heavy and wet over the open section of the crate.

Candleglow flickered and pulsed across the wooden walls.

The air smelled of blueberry-scented wax.

Sammy chugged a couple of long swallows of wine directly from the mouth of the jug, instead of pouring it first into the dirty jelly jar that he had been using. A little of it spilled over his whisker-stubbled chin, but he didn’t care.

He was eager to remain numb, detached. If he had been in touch with his fear during the past few minutes, he would no doubt have peed his pants.

He felt it was also important to remain detached in order to think less emotionally about what the ratman had said. Previously, the creature had spoken little and had never revealed anything of its own motivations or intentions. Now it was spouting all this babble about thinning the herd, judgment, godhood.

It was valuable to know the ratman’s mind was filled with the same crazy stuff that had cluttered up the head of old Mike, stabber of moviegoers. Regardless of his ability to appear out of nowhere and disappear into thin air, in spite of his inhuman eyes and ability to change shapes, all of that god blather made him seem hardly more special than any of the countless heirs of Charles Manson and Richard Ramirez who roamed the world, heeding inner voices, killing for pleasure, and keeping refrigerators filled with the severed heads of their victims. If in some fundamental way he was like the other psychos out there, then even with his special talents he was as vulnerable as they were.

Though functioning in a wine fog, Sammy could see that this new insight might be a useful survival tool. The problem was, he had never been good at survival.

Thinking about the ratman made his head hurt. Hell, the mere prospect of surviving gave him a migraine. Who wanted to survive? And why? Death would only come later if not sooner. Each survival was merely a short-term triumph. In the end, oblivion for everyone. And in the meantime, nothing but pain. To Sammy, it seemed that the only terrible thing about the ratman was not that he killed people but that he apparently liked to make them suffer first, cranked up the terror, poured on the pain, did not remove his victims from this world with kindly despatch.

Sammy tipped the jug and poured wine into the jelly jar that was on the floor, braced between his splayed legs. He raised the glass to his lips. In the glimmering ruby liquid, he sought a glimmerless, peaceful, perfect darkness.

9

Mickey Chan was sitting alone in a back booth, concentrating on his soup.

Connie saw him as soon as she pushed through the front door of the small Chinese restaurant in Newport Beach, and she made her way toward him between black-lacquered chairs and tables with silver-gray tablecloths. A red and gold painted dragon coiled across the ceiling, serpentined around the light fixtures.

If Mickey saw her coming, he pretended to be unaware. He sucked soup from the spoon, then spooned up more, never taking his gaze off the contents of his bowl.

He was small but sinewy, in his late forties, and wore his hair closely cropped. His skin was the shade of antique parchment.

Although he allowed his Caucasian clients to think that he was Chinese, he was actually a Vietnamese refugee who had fled to the States after the fall of Saigon. Rumor had it, he’d been a Saigon homicide detective or an officer in the South Vietnamese Internal Security Agency, which was probably true.

Some said that he’d had a reputation as a real terror in the interrogation room, a man who would resort to any tool or technique to break the will of a suspected criminal or Communist, but Connie doubted those stories. She liked Mickey. He was tough, but he had about him the air of a man who had known great loss and was capable of profound compassion.

As she reached his table, he spoke to her without shifting his attention from the soup: “Good evening, Connie.”

She slid into the other side of the booth. “You’re fixated on that bowl as if the meaning of life is in it.”

“It is,” he said, still spooning.

“It is? Looks like soup to me.”

“The meaning of life can be found in a bowl of soup. Soup always begins with a broth of some kind, which is like the liquid flow of days that makes up our lives.”

“Broth?”

“Sometimes in the broth are noodles, sometimes vegetables, bits of egg white, slivers of chicken or shrimp, mushrooms, perhaps rice.”

Because Mickey would not look at her, Connie found herself staring across the table at his soup almost as intensely as he was.

He said, “Sometimes it is hot, sometimes cool. Sometimes it is meant to be cool, and then it is good even if there’s no slightest warmth in it. But if it’s not meant to be cool, then it will taste bitter, or curdle in the stomach, or both.”

His strong but gentle voice had a hypnotic effect. Enthralled, Connie stared at the placid surface of the soup, oblivious now to everyone else in the restaurant.

“Consider. Before the soup is eaten,” Mickey said, “it has value and purpose. After it is eaten, it is valueless to everyone except to whoever has consumed it. And in fulfilling its purpose, it ceases to exist. Left behind will be only the empty bowl. Which can symbolize either want and need — or the pleasant expectation of other soups to come.”

She waited for him to continue, and only shifted her gaze from his soup when she realized that he was now staring at her. She met his eyes and said, “That’s it?”

“Yes.”

“The meaning of life?”

“All of it.”

She frowned. “I don’t get it.”

He shrugged. “Me neither. I make up this crap as I go along.”

She blinked at him. “You what?”

Grinning, Mickey said, “Well, it’s sort of expected of a Chinese private detective, you see. Pithy sayings, impenetrable philosophical observations, inscrutable proverbs.”

He was not Chinese, nor was his real name Mickey Chan. When he arrived in the US and decided to put his police background to use by becoming a private detective, he had felt that Vietnamese names were too exotic to inspire confidence and too difficult for Westerners to pronounce. And he’d known he couldn’t make a good living solely from clients of Vietnamese heritage. Two of his favorite American things were Mickey Mouse cartoons and Charlie Chan movies, and it made sense to him to have his name legally changed. Because of Disney and Rooney and Mantle and Spillane, Americans liked people named Mickey; and thanks to a lot of old movies, the name Chan was subconsciously associated with investigative genius. Evidently, Mickey had known what he was doing, because he had built a thriving business with a sterling reputation, and now had ten employees.

“You suckered me,” she said, indicating the soup.

“You’re not the first.”

Amused, she said, “If I could pull the right strings, I’d have the courts change your name to Charlie Mouse. See how that works.”

“I’m glad you can still smile,” Mickey said.

A beautiful young waitress with jet-black hair and almond eyes appeared at the table and asked if Connie would like to order dinner.

“Just a bottle of Tsingtao, please,” Connie said. And to Mickey: “I don’t feel much like smiling, if you want to know the truth. You sure as hell ruined my day with that call this morning.”

“Ruined your day? Me?”

“Who else?”

“Maybe a certain gentleman with a Browning and a few grenades?”

“So you heard about that.”

“Who hasn’t? Even in southern California it’s the kind of story that gets on the news ahead of the sports report.”

“On a slow day maybe.”

He finished his soup.

The waitress returned with the beer.

Connie poured the Tsingtao down the side of the chilled pilsner glass to minimize the head, took a sip, and sighed.

“I’m sorry,” Mickey said sincerely “I know how much you wanted to believe you had a family.”

“I did have a family,” she said. “They’re just all gone.”

Between the ages of three and eighteen, Connie had been raised in a series of state institutions and temporary foster homes, each more abysmal than the one before it, requiring her to be tough and to fight back. Because of her personality, she had not appealed to adoptive parents and could not escape by that route. Certain of her character traits, which she saw as strengths, were considered attitude problems by other people. From the youngest age, she had been independent-minded, solemn beyond her years, virtually unable to be a child. To act her age, she literally would have had to act, for she had been an adult in a child’s body.

Until seven months ago, she had not given much thought to the identity of her parents. There seemed to be no percentage in caring. For whatever reason, they had abandoned her as a child, and she had no memory whatsoever of them.

Then one sunny Sunday afternoon, when she went skydiving out of the airfield at Perris, her ripcord jammed. She fell four thousand feet toward brown desert scrub as arid as Hell, with the conviction that she was dead except for the actual dying. Her chute deployed at the last possible moment to allow survival. Although her landing was rough, she was lucky; it resulted in only a sprained ankle, abraded left hand, bruises — and a sudden need to know where she’d come from.

Everyone had to exit this life without a clue as to where they were going, so it seemed essential to know at least something about the entrance.

During off-duty hours, she could have used official channels, contacts, and computers to investigate her past, but she preferred Mickey Chan. She didn’t want her colleagues getting involved with her search, pulling for her and curious — in case she found something she didn’t want to share with them.

As it turned out, what Mickey had learned after six months of prying into official files was not pretty.

When he handed her the report in his stylish Fashion Island office with its 19th-century French art and Biedermeier furniture, he said, “I’ll be in the next room, dictating some letters. Let me know when you’re finished.”

His Asian reticence, the implication that she might need to be alone, alerted her to just how bad the truth was.

According to Mickey’s report, a court had removed her from the care of her parents because she had suffered repeated severe physical abuse. As punishment for unknown transgressions — perhaps merely for being alive — they beat her, shaved off all of her hair, blindfolded her and tied her and left her in a closet for eighteen hours at a stretch, and broke three of her fingers.

When remanded to the care of the court, she had not yet learned to speak, for her parents had never taught or permitted her to talk.

But speech had come quickly to her, as if she relished the rebellion that the mere act of speaking represented.

However, she never had the opportunity to accuse her mother and father. While fleeing the state to avoid prosecution, they had died in a fiery head-on collision near the California-Arizona border.

Connie read Mickey’s first report with grim fascination, less shaken by its contents than most people would have been because she had been a cop long enough to have seen the likes of it many times — and worse. She did not feel that the hatred directed against her had been earned by her shortcomings or because she had been less lovable than other kids. It was just how the world worked sometimes. Too often. At least she finally understood why, even at the tender age of three, she had been too solemn, too wise beyond her years, too independent-minded, just too damned tough to be the cute and cuddly girl that adoptive parents were seeking.

The abuse must have been worse than the dry language of the report made it sound. For one thing, courts usually tolerated a lot of parental brutality before taking such drastic action. For another— she had blocked all memories of it and of her sister, which was an act of some desperation.

Most children who survived such experiences grew up deeply troubled by their repressed memories and feelings of worthlessness — or even utterly dysfunctional. She was fortunate to be one of the strong ones. She had no doubts about her value as a human being or her specialness as an individual. Though she might have enjoyed being a gentler person, more relaxed, less cynical, quicker to laugh, she nevertheless liked herself and was content in her own way.

Mickey’s report hadn’t contained entirely bad news. Connie learned that she had a sister of whom she’d been unaware. Colleen. Constance Mary and Colleen Marie Gulliver, the former born three minutes before the latter. Identical twins. Both abused, both permanently removed from parental care, eventually sent to different institutions, they had gone on to lead separate lives.

As she sat in the client chair that day a month ago, in front of Mickey’s desk, a shiver of delight had swept along Connie’s spine at the realization that someone existed with whom she shared such a singularly intimate bond. Identical twins. She abruptly understood why she sometimes dreamed of being two people at once and appeared in duplicate in those sleeping fantasies. Though Mickey was still seeking leads on Colleen, Connie dared to hope she was not alone.

But now, a few weeks later, Colleen’s fate was known. She had been adopted, raised in Santa Barbara — and died five years ago at the age of twenty-eight.

That morning, when Connie learned she had lost her sister again, and forever this time, she had known a more intense grief than at any time in her life.

She had not wept.

She seldom did.

Instead, she had dealt with that grief as she dealt with all disappointments, setbacks, and losses: she kept busy, obsessively busy— and she got angry. Poor Harry. He had taken the brunt of her anger all morning without having a clue as to the cause of it. Polite, reasonable, peace-loving, long-suffering Harry. He would never know just how perversely grateful she had been for the chance to chase down the moon-faced perp, James Ordegard. She had been able to direct her rage at someone more deserving of it, and work off the pent-up energy of the grief that she could not release through tears.

Now she drank Tsingtao and said, “This morning, you mentioned photographs.”

The busboy removed the empty soup bowl.

Mickey put a manila envelope on the table. “Are you sure you want to look at them?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“You can never know her. The pictures might bring that home.”

“I’ve already accepted it.”

She opened the envelope. Eight or ten snapshots slid out.

The photos showed Colleen as young as five or six, as old as her mid-twenties, which was nearly as old as she had ever gotten. She wore different clothes from those that Connie had ever worn, styled her hair differently, and was photographed in living rooms and kitchens, on lawns and beaches, that Connie had never seen. But in every fundamental way — height, weight, coloration, facial features, even expressions and unconscious body attitudes — she was Connie’s perfect double.

Connie had the uncanny feeling that she was seeing photos of herself in a life that she could not remember having lived.

“Where did you get these?” she asked Mickey Chan.

“From the Ladbrooks. Dennis and Lorraine Ladbrook, the couple that adopted Colleen.”

Examining the photographs again, Connie was struck by the fact that Colleen was smiling or laughing in every one of them. The few pictures that had ever been taken of Connie as a child were usually institutional group shots with a crowd of other kids. She didn’t have a single photograph of herself in which she was smiling.

“What are the Ladbrooks like?” she asked.

“They’re in business. They work together, own an office-supply store in Santa Barbara. Nice people, I think, quiet and unassuming. They weren’t able to have any children of their own, and they adored Colleen.”

Envy darkened Connie’s heart. She coveted the love and years of normality that Colleen had known. Irrational, to envy a dead sister. And shameful. But she could not help herself.

Mickey said, “The Ladbrooks haven’t gotten over her death, not even after five years. They didn’t know she was a twin. They never were given that information by the child welfare agencies.”

Connie returned the photographs to the manila envelope, unable to look at them any longer. Self-pity was an indulgence that she loathed, but that’s what her envy was swiftly becoming. A heaviness, like piled stones, pressed upon her breast. Later, in the privacy of her apartment, maybe she would feel like spending more time with her sister’s lovely smile.

The waitress arrived with moo goo gai pan and rice for Mickey.

Ignoring the chopsticks that were provided with a regular complement of flatware, Mickey picked up his fork. “Connie, the Ladbrooks would like to meet you.”

“Why?”

“Like I said, they never knew Colleen had a twin.”

“I’m not sure it’s a good idea. I can’t be Colleen for them. I’m someone different.”

“I don’t think it would be like that.”

After she drank some beer, she said, “I’ll think about it.”

Mickey dug into his moo goo gai pan as if nothing tastier had ever come out of any kitchen in the Western hemisphere.

The look and smell of the food made Connie half ill. She knew that nothing was wrong with the dinner, only with her reaction to it. She had more than one reason to be queasy. It had been a hard day.

Finally she asked the dreadful question that remained. “How did Colleen die?”

Mickey studied her for a moment before answering. “I was ready to tell you this morning.”

“I wasn’t ready to hear, I guess.”

“Childbirth.”

Connie had been prepared for any of the stupid and pointless ways that death could come suddenly to an attractive twenty-eight-year-old woman in these dark terminal years of the millennium. She had not been prepared for this, however, and it jolted her.

“She had a husband.”

Mickey shook his head. “No. Unwed mother. I don’t know the circumstances, who the father was, but it doesn’t seem to be a sore point with the Ladbrooks, nothing they consider a stain on her memory. She was a saint in their eyes.”

“What about the baby?”

“A girl.”

“She lived?”

“Yes,” Mickey said. He put down his fork, drank some water, blotted his mouth with a red napkin, watching Connie all the while. “Her name is Eleanor. Eleanor Ladbrook. They call her Elbe.”

“Ellie,” Connie said numbly.

“She looks a great deal like you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this morning?”

“You didn’t give me a chance. Hung up on me.”

“I didn’t.”

“Just about. Very brusque, you were. Tell me the rest this evening, you said.”

“Sorry. When I heard Colleen was dead, I thought it was over.”

“Now you have a family. You’re someone’s aunt.”

She accepted the reality of Elbe’s existence, but she could not yet begin to get a handle on what Ellie might mean to her own life, her future. After having been alone for so long, she was stunned to learn for certain that someone of her own flesh and blood was also alive in this vast and troubled world.

“Having family somewhere, even one, must make a difference,” Mickey said.

She suspected it would make a huge difference. Ironically, earlier in the day, she had nearly been killed before learning that she had one very important new reason to live.

Putting another manila envelope on the table, Mickey said, “The final report. The Ladbrooks’ address and phone number’s in there when you decide you need them.”

“Thank you, Mickey.”

“And the bill. It’s in there, too.”

She smiled. “Thank you anyway.”

As Connie slid out of the booth and stood, Mickey said, “Life’s funny. So many connections with other people that we don’t even know about, invisible threads linking us to some we’ve long forgotten and some we won’t meet for years — if ever.”

“Yeah. Funny.”

“One more thing, Connie.”

“What’s that?”

“There’s a Chinese saying that goes… ‘Sometimes life can be as bitter as dragon tears—’”

“This more of your crap?”

“Oh, no. It’s a real saying.” Sitting there, a small man in a large booth, with his gentle face and crinkled eyes full of good humor, Mickey Chan seemed like a thin Buddha. “But that’s only part of the saying — the part you already understand. The whole thing goes… ‘Sometimes life can be as bitter as dragon tears. But whether dragon tears are bitter or sweet depends entirely on how each man perceives the taste.’”

“In other words, life is hard, even cruel — but it’s also what you make of it.”

Putting his slender hands flat together without interleaving his fingers, in the position of oriental prayer, Mickey bowed his head in her direction with mock solemnity. “Perhaps wisdom may yet enter through the thick bone of your Yankee head.”

“Anything’s possible,” she admitted.

She left with the two manila envelopes. Her sister’s captured smile. The promise of her niece.

Outside, rain was still coming down at a rate that made her wonder if a new Noah was at work somewhere in the world, even now marching pairs of animals up a boarding gangway.

The restaurant was in a new strip shopping center, and a deep overhang kept the pedestrian walkway dry. A man was standing to the left of the door. Peripheral vision gave Connie the impression that he was tall and husky, but she didn’t actually look at him until he spoke to her.

“Have mercy on a poor man, will you, please? Mercy for a poor man, lady?”

She was about to step off the curb, out from under the overhang, but his voice was arresting. Soft, gentle, even musical, it seemed radically out of sync with the size of the person she had seen from the corner of her eye.

Turning, she was surprised by the formidable ugliness of the man, and wondered how he could possibly earn even a meager living as a beggar. His unusual size, knotted hair, and unkempt beard gave him the mad aspect of Rasputin, though that crazed Russian priest had been a pretty-boy by comparison. Terrible bands of scar tissue disfigured his face, and his beak nose was dark with broken blood vessels. His lips were marked by oozing blisters. One glimpse of his diseased teeth and gums reminded her of those in a corpse she had once seen after it had been exhumed for poison tests nine years after burial. And the eyes. Cataracts. Thick, milky membranes. She could barely see the dark circles of the irises underneath. His appearance was so threatening that Connie imagined most people, upon being panhandled by him, turned and fled rather than approach to press money into his extended hand.

“Mercy on a poor man? Mercy on the blind? Spare change for one less fortunate than you?”

The voice was extraordinary in its own right, but doubly so considering the source. Clear, melodious, it was the instrument of a born singer who would deliver every lyric sweetly. It must be the voice alone that, in spite of his appearance, made it possible for him to live as a mendicant.

Ordinarily, in spite of his voice, Connie would have told him to buzz off — though not so politely. Some beggars became homeless by no fault of their own; and having experienced homelessness of a kind when she’d been an institutionalized child, she had compassion for the genuinely victimized. But her job required daily contact with too many street people for her to be able to romanticize them as a class; in her experience, many were gravely demented and for their own sakes belonged in the mental institutions from which do-gooders had “mainstreamed” them, while others had earned their perdition through alcohol, drugs, or gambling.

She suspected that in every stratum of society, from the mansion to the gutter, the genuinely innocent were a distinct minority.

For some reason, however, although this guy looked as if he had made every bad decision and self-destructive choice it was within his power to make, she fished in her jacket pockets until she found a couple of quarters and a ten-dollar bill worn soft with age. To her greater surprise, she kept the quarters and gave him the ten bucks.

“Bless you, lady. God bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you.”

Astonished at herself, she turned away from him. She hurried out into the rain, toward her car.

As she ran, she wondered what had possessed her. But it really wasn’t hard to figure. She had been given more than one gift during the course of the day. Her life had been spared in the pursuit of Ordegard. And they had nailed the creep. And then there was five-year-old Eleanor Ladbrook. Ellie. A niece. Connie could not recall many days as fine as this, and she supposed her good fortune had put her in the mood to give something back when an opportunity arose.

Her life, one wasted perp, and a new direction for her future — not a bad trade for ten dollars.

She got in the car, slammed the door. She already had the keys in her right hand. She switched on the engine and gunned it because it chugged a little as if protesting the weather.

Suddenly she was aware that her left hand was clenched in a tight fist. She wasn’t conscious of having made the fist. It was as if her hand had closed in a lightning-quick spasm.

Something was in her hand.

She uncurled her fingers to look at what she held.

The parking-lot lamps shed enough light through the rain-smeared windshield for her to see the crumpled item.

A ten-dollar bill. Worn soft with age.

She stared at it in confusion, then with growing disbelief. It must be the same ten bucks she thought she had given to the beggar.

But she had given the money to the tramp, had seen his grimy mitt close around it as he babbled his gratitude.

Bewildered, she looked through the side window of the car toward the Chinese restaurant. The beggar was no longer there.

She scanned the entire pedestrian walkway He was nowhere in front of the strip shopping center.

She stared at the crumpled money.

Gradually her good mood faded. She was overcome by dread.

She had no idea why she should be afraid. And then she did. Cop instinct.

10

Harry took longer than he expected to get home from Special Projects. Traffic moved sluggishly, repeatedly clogging up at flooded intersections.

He lost more time when he stopped at a 7-Eleven to get a couple of things he needed for dinner. A loaf of bread. Mustard.

Every time he went into a convenience store, Harry thought of Ricky Estefan stopping after work that day for a quart of milk — and buying a drastic life change instead. But nothing bad happened in the 7-Eleven, except that he heard the story about the baby and the birthday party.

A small television on the check-out counter kept the clerk entertained when business was slow, and it was turned to the news while Harry was paying for his purchases. A young mother in Chicago had been charged with murdering her own infant child. Her relatives had planned a big birthday party for her, but when her babysitter failed to show up, it had looked as if she wouldn’t be able to go and enjoy herself. So she dumped her two-month-old infant down the chute of her apartment-building trash incinerator, went to the party, and danced up a storm. Her lawyer had already said her defense would be postpartum depression.

Yet another example of the continuing crisis for Connie’s collection of outrages and atrocities.

The clerk was a slender young man with dark, sorrowful eyes. In Iranian-accented English, he said, “What’s this country coming to?”

“Sometimes I wonder,” Harry said. “But then again, in your former country, they don’t just let the lunatics run around free, they actually put them in charge.”

“True,” the clerk said. “But here, too, sometimes.”

“Can’t argue that.”

As he was pushing through one of the two glass doors on his way out of the store, with the bread and mustard in a plastic bag, Harry suddenly realized he was carrying a folded newspaper under his right arm. He stopped with the door half open, took the paper from under his arm, and stared at it uncomprehendingly. He was sure he had not picked up a paper, let alone folded one and put it under his arm.

He returned to the cash register. When he put the paper on the counter, it unfolded.

“Did I pay for this?” Harry asked.

Puzzled, the clerk said, “No, sir. I didn’t even see you pick it up.”

“I don’t remember picking it up.”

“Did you want it?”

“No, not really.”

Then he noticed the headline at the top of the front page: SHOOTOUT AT LAGUNA BEACH RESTAURANT. And the subhead: TWO DEAD, TEN WOUNDED. It was the late edition with the first story about Ordegard’s bloody rampage.

“Wait,” Harry said. “Yes. Yes, I guess I’ll take it.”

On those occasions when one of his cases became newsworthy, Harry never read about himself in the papers. He was a cop, not a celebrity.

He gave the clerk a quarter and took the evening edition.

He still didn’t understand how the paper had gotten folded and tucked under his arm. Blackout? Or something stranger, more directly related to the other inexplicable events of the day?

When Harry opened the front door and, dripping, stepped into the foyer of his condominium, home had never seemed so inviting. It was a neat and ordered haven, into which the chaos of the outside world could not intrude.

He took off his shoes. They were saturated, probably ruined. He should have worn galoshes, but the weather report had not called for rain until after nightfall.

His socks were wet, too, but he left them on. He would mop the foyer tile after he changed into clean, dry clothes.

He stopped in the kitchen to put the bread and mustard on the counter beside the cutting board. Later he would make sandwiches with some cold poached chicken. He was starved.

The kitchen sparkled. He was so pleased that he had taken the time to clean up the breakfast mess before going to work. He would have been depressed to see it now.

From the kitchen he went through the dining room, down the short hall to the master bedroom, carrying the evening newspaper. As he crossed the threshold, he snapped on the lights — and discovered the hobo on his bed.

Alice never fell down any rabbit hole deeper than the one into which Harry dropped at the sight of the vagrant.

The man seemed even bigger than he had been out of doors or from a distance in the Special Projects corridor. Dirtier. More hideous. He did not have the semi-transparency of an apparition; in fact, with his masses of tangled hair and intricately layered varieties of grime and webwork of scars, with his dark clothes so wrinkled and tattered that they recalled the interment wrappings of an ancient Egyptian mummy, he was more real than the room itself, like a painstakingly detailed figure painted by a photorealist and then inserted into a minimalist’s line-drawing of a room.

The tramp’s eyes opened. Like pools of blood.

He sat up and said, “You think you’re so special. But you’re just one more animal, walking meat like all the rest of them.”

Dropping the newspaper, pulling his revolver from his shoulder holster, Harry said, “Don’t move.”

Ignoring the warning, the intruder swung his legs over the side of the bed, got up.

The impression of the vagrant’s head and body remained in the spread, pillows, and mattress. A ghost could walk through snow, leaving no footprints, and hallucinations had no weight.

“Just another diseased animal.” If anything, the vagrant’s voice was deeper and raspier than it had been on the street in Laguna Beach, the guttural voice of a beast that had laboriously learned to talk. “Think you’re a hero, don’t you? Big man. Big hero. Well, you’re nothing, less than a pissant, that’s what you are. Nothing!”

Harry couldn’t believe it was going to happen again, not twice in one day, and for God’s sake not in his own home.

Backing up one step into the doorway, he said, “You don’t lie down on the floor right now, on your face, hands behind your back, right now, so help me God I’ll blow your head off.”

Starting around the bed toward Harry, the vagrant said, “You think you can shoot anyone you like, push anyone around if you want to, and that’s the end of it, but that’s not the end of it with me, shooting me is never the end of it.”

“Stop, right now, I mean it!”

The intruder didn’t stop. His moving shadow was huge on the wall. “Rip your guts out, hold them in your face, make you smell them while you die.”

Harry had the revolver in both hands. A shooter’s stance. He knew what he was doing. He was a good marksman. He could have hit a flitting hummingbird at such close range, let alone this great looming hulk, so there was only one way it could end, the intruder as cold as a side of beef, blood all over the walls, only one plausible scenario — yet he felt in greater danger than ever before in his life, infinitely more vulnerable than he had been among the mannequins in the box-maze attic.

“You people,” the vagrant said, rounding the foot of the bed, “are so much fun to play with.”

One last time, Harry ordered him to stop.

But he kept coming, maybe ten feet away, eight, six.

Harry opened fire, squeezing shots off nice and smooth, not letting the hard recoil of the handgun pull the muzzle off target, once, twice, three times, four, and the explosions were deafening in the small bedroom. He knew every round did damage, three in the torso, the fourth in the base of the throat from only inches more than arm’s length, causing the head to snap around as if doing a comic double take.

The hobo didn’t go down, didn’t stagger backward, only jerked with each hit he took. Inflicted point-blank, the throat wound was ghastly. The bullet must have punched all the way through, leaving an even worse exit wound in the back of the neck, fracturing or severing the spine, but there was no blood, no spray or spout or smallest spurt, as if the man’s heart had stopped beating long ago and all the blood had dried and hardened in his vessels. He kept coming, no more stoppable than an express train, rammed into Harry, knocking the wind out of him, lifting him, carrying him backward through the doorway, slamming him so hard against the far hallway wall that Harry’s teeth snapped together with an audible clack and the revolver flipped out of his hand.

Pain spread like a Japanese accordion fan from the small of Harry’s back across both shoulders. For a moment he thought he was going to black out, but terror kept him conscious. Pinned to the wall, feet dangling off the floor, stunned by the plaster-cracking force with which he’d been hammered, he was as helpless as a child in the iron grip of his assailant. But if he could remain conscious, his strength might flood back into him, or maybe he would think of something to save himself, anything, a move, a trick, a distraction.

The hobo leaned against Harry, crushing him. The nightmarish face loomed closer. The livid scars were encircled by enlarged pores the size of match heads, packed with filth. Tufts of wiry black hair bristled from his flared nostrils.

When the man exhaled, it was like a mass grave venting the gases of decomposition, and Harry choked in revulsion.

“Scared, little man?” the vagrant asked, and his ability to speak seemed unaffected by the hole in his throat and the fact that his vocal cords had been pulverized and blown out through the back of his neck. “Scared?”

Harry was scared, yes, he would have been an idiot if he hadn’t been scared. No amount of weapons training or police work prepared you for going face to face with the boogeyman, and he didn’t mind admitting it, was prepared to shout it from a rooftop if that’s what the vagrant wanted, but he couldn’t get his breath to speak.

“Sunrise in eleven hours,” the hobo said. “Ticktock.”

Things were moving in the depths of the tramp’s bushy beard. Crawling. Maybe bugs.

He shook Harry fiercely, rattling him against the wall.

Harry tried to bring his arms up between them, break the big man’s hold. It was like trying to force concrete to yield.

“First everything and everyone you love,” the vagrant snarled.

Then he turned, still holding Harry, and threw him back through the bedroom doorway.

Harry hit the floor hard and rolled into the side of the bed.

“Then you!”

Gasping and dazed, Harry looked up and saw the hobo filling the doorway, watching him. The revolver was at the big man’s feet. He kicked it into the room, toward Harry, and it spun to a stop on the carpet, just out of reach.

Harry wondered if he could get to the gun before the bastard came down on him. Wondered if there was any point trying. Four shots, four hits, no blood.

“Did you hear me?” the vagrant demanded. “Did you hear me? Did you hear me, hero? Did you hear me?” He didn’t pause for an answer, kept repeating the question in an increasingly angry and curiously mocking tone of voice, louder, louder still, “Did you hear me, hero? Did you hear me, did you hear me, did you hear me, hear me, hear me? Did you hear me? DID YOU HEAR ME, DID YOU, DID YOU, DID YOU, HERO, DID YOU, DID YOU?”

The hobo was trembling violently, and his face was dark with rage and hatred. He wasn’t even looking at Harry any longer, but at the ceiling, howling the words—“DID YOU HEAR ME, DID YOU HEAR ME?”—as if his fury had become so enormous that one man could no longer be a satisfactory target for it, screaming at the whole world or even worlds beyond, voice oscillating between bass thunder and a piercing shriek.

Harry tried to get to his feet by supporting himself against the bed.

The vagrant raised his right hand, and green static electricity crackled between his fingers. Light shimmered in the air above his palm, and suddenly his hand was on fire.

He snapped his wrist and flung a fireball across the room. It hit the drapes, and they exploded into flames.

His eyes were not red liquid pools any longer. Instead, fire licked out of the sockets, lapping up over his eyebrows, as though he was just the hollow figure of a man, made of wicker, burning from the inside out.

Harry was on his feet. His legs were shaky.

All he wanted was to get out of there. Burning drapes covered the window. The hobo was in the doorway. No exit.

The vagrant turned and snapped his wrist in the manner of a magician revealing a dove, and another white-hot churning sphere spun across the room, smashed into the dresser, burst like a Molotov cocktail, showering flames. The dresser mirror shattered. Wood split, drawers popped open, and the conflagration spread.

Smoke curled out of his beard, and fire spat from his nostrils. His hooked nose blistered and began to melt. His mouth was open in a shout, but the only sounds he made were the hiss, pop, and crackle of combustion. He exhaled a pyrotechnic cascade, sparks in all the colors of the rainbow, and then flames shot from his mouth. His lips curled up as crisp as deep-fried pork rinds, turned black, and peeled back from smouldering teeth.

Harry saw snakes of flame wriggle up the wall from the dresser and onto the ceiling. In places the carpet was burning.

Already the heat was tremendous. Soon the air would be full of acrid smoke.

Bright flares squirted out of the three bullet holes in the vagrant’s chest, red and gold fire instead of blood. He flicked his wrist once more, and a third bright sputtering globe erupted from his hand.

The hissing mass streaked at Harry. He dropped into a crouch. It passed over his head, so close that he protected his face with one arm and cried out when the wake of searing heat washed over him. The bedclothes erupted into flames as if they had been soaked in gasoline.

When Harry looked up, the doorway was empty. The vagrant was gone.

He scooped the revolver off the floor and rushed into the hall, with the carpet sprouting flames around his stockinged feet. He was glad his socks were sopping wet.

The hallway was deserted, which was good, because he didn’t want another confrontation with… with whatever the hell he’d just had a confrontation with, not if bullets didn’t work. The kitchen to his left. He hesitated, then stepped in front of the doorway, gun at the ready. Fire eating the cabinets, curtains flapping like the skirts of dancers in Hell, smoke rolling toward him. He kept moving. The foyer ahead, living room to the right, where the thing must have gone, thing not hobo. He was reluctant to pass the archway, afraid the thing would plunge out at him, seize him in its incandescent hands, but he had to get out fast, the place was filling with smoke, and he was coughing, unable to draw enough clean air.

Edging to the foyer with his back against the hallway wall, facing the arch, Harry kept the gun in front of him, more because of training and habit than because he had any faith in its efficacy. Anyway, only one round remained in the cylinder.

The living room was burning, too, and in the middle stood the fiery figure, fully engulfed, arms spread wide to embrace the torrid tempest, consumed by it yet obviously in no pain, perhaps even in a state of rapture. Each lambent caress of flame seemed to be a source of perverse pleasure to the thing.

Harry was sure that it was watching him from within its shrouds of fire. He was afraid it might suddenly approach, arms still in a cruciform posture, to pin him against the wall again.

He crabbed sideways past the archway into the small foyer, as a black tide of smothering, blinding smoke rolled down the hall from the bedroom and submerged him. The last thing Harry saw was his soggy shoes, and he snatched them up in the same hand with which he held the gun. The smoke was so dense that no light penetrated to the foyer even from the leaping flames behind him. Anyway, his eyes stung and flooded with tears; he was forced to squeeze them tight shut. In the tarry blackness, there was a danger of becoming disoriented, even in such a small space.

He held his breath. One inhalation would be toxic enough to bring him to his knees, choking, dizzy. But he hadn’t been getting clean air since the master bedroom, so he wasn’t going to be able to hold out long, a few seconds. Even as he scooped up the shoes, he grabbed for the doorknob, couldn’t find it in the darkness, fumbled, began to panic, but closed his left hand around it. Locked. Dead-bolt latch. His lungs were hot, as if fire had gotten into them. Chest ached. Where was the dead-bolt? Should be above the knob. He wanted to breathe, found the dead-bolt, had to breathe, couldn’t, disengaged the lock, was aware of a growing inner darkness more dangerous than the outer one, grasped the knob, tore the door open, plunged outside. The smoke was still around him, sucked out by the cool night, and he had to weave to the right to find clean air, the first breath of which was painfully icy in his lungs.

In the garden courtyard, where walkways wound among azaleas and plum-thorn hedges and lush beds of English primrose, with the U-shaped building around him, Harry blinked furiously, clearing his vision. He saw a few neighbors coming out of their apartments onto the lower promenade, and above were two people on the second-story promenade by which all of the upper apartments were accessed. They’d probably been drawn by the gunfire, because it was not a neighborhood where that sound was common. They were staring in shock at him and at the plumes of oily smoke churning out of his front door, but he didn’t think he’d heard anybody yelling “fire,” so he began to shout it, and then the others picked up the cry.

Harry sprinted to one of the two alarm boxes along the ground-floor promenade. He dropped his gun and shoes, and yanked down the lever that broke the fogged glass. Bells clanged stridently.

To his right the living-room window of his own condo, which faced the courtyard, blew out and showered glass onto the concrete deck of the promenade. Smoke followed, and whipping pennants of fire, and Harry expected to see the burning man climb out through the broken window and continue the pursuit.

Crazily, a line from a movie theme song flashed through his mind: Who you gonna call? GHOSTBUSTERS!

He was living in a Dan Aykroyd movie. He might have found it funny if he hadn’t been so scared that his thudding heart was halfway up his throat.

Sirens rose in the distance, fast approaching.

He ran from door to door, pounding with his fists on each. More soft explosions. A strange metallic screech. Ceaselessly clanging alarm bells. Sequenced bursts of shattering glass rang like hundreds of wind chimes hammered by an erratically gusting storm. Harry didn’t look back for the source of any of the sounds, kept moving from door to door.

When the sirens grew to dominate all other sounds and seemed to be only a couple of blocks away, he was finally confident that everyone in the building had been alerted and gotten out. People were scattered across the courtyard garden, staring up at the roof or watching the street for the fire engines, horrified and scared, stunned silent or weeping.

He raced back to the first alarm box and pulled on his shoes, which he’d left there. He snatched up his revolver, stepped over a border of azaleas, waded through bloom-laden primrose, and splashed through a couple of puddles on a concrete walkway.

Only then did he realize the rain had stopped falling during the few minutes he had been in his apartment. The ficus and palm trees were still dripping, as was the shrubbery. The wet fronds and leaves were bejeweled with thousands of tiny ruby reflections of the growing fire.

He turned and, like his neighbors, looked back at the building, ” startled to see how fast the blaze was spreading. The apartment above his was engulfed. At broken windows, bloody tongues of flame licked across the remaining teeth of glass that bristled from the frames. Smoke billowed, and dreadful light pulsed and sputtered against the night.

Looking toward the street, Harry was relieved to see that fire trucks had entered the sprawling Los Cabos complex. Less than a block away, the sirens began to die, but the beacons kept flashing.

People had rushed into the street from other buildings, but they quickly got out of the way of the emergency vehicles.

An intense wave of heat drew Harry’s attention to his own building again. The blaze had broken through to the roof.

As in a fairy tale, high upon the shingled peak, fire like a dragon was silhouetted against the dark sky, lashing its yellow and orange and vermillion tail, spreading huge carnelian wings, scales scintillant, scarlet eyes flashing, roaring a challenge to all knights and would-be slayers.

11

Connie stopped for a pepperoni and mushroom pizza on the way home. She ate at the kitchen table, washing the food down with a can of Coors.

For the past seven years, she had rented a small apartment in Costa Mesa. The bedroom contained only a bed, a nightstand, and a lamp, no dresser; her wardrobe was so simple that she was easily able to store all of her clothes and shoes in the single closet. The living room contained a black leather recliner, a floor lamp on one side of the big chair for when she wanted to read, and an end table on the other side; the recliner faced a television set and VCR on a wheeled stand. The dining area in the kitchen was furnished with a card table and four folding chairs with padded seats. The cabinets were mostly empty, containing only the minimum pots and utensils for cooking quick meals, a few bowls, four dinner plates, four salad plates, four cups and saucers, four glasses — always four because that was the number in the smallest set she could find to buy — and canned goods. She never entertained.

Possessions did not interest her. She had grown up without them, drifting from one foster home and institution to another with only a battered cloth suitcase.

In fact she felt encumbered by possessions, tied down, trapped. She owned not a single knickknack. The only artwork or decoration on the walls was a poster in the kitchen, a photograph taken by a sky-diver from five thousand feet — green fields, rolling hills, a dry riverbed, scattered trees, two blacktop and two dirt roads narrow as threads, intersecting in the manner of lines on an abstract painting. She read voraciously, but all her books were from the library. All videotapes that she watched were rented.

She owned her car, but that was as much a machine of freedom as it was a steel albatross.

Freedom was the thing she sought and cherished, in place of jewelry and clothes and antiques and art, but it was sometimes more difficult to acquire than an original Rembrandt. In the long, sweet free-fall before the parachute had to be deployed, there was freedom. Astride a powerful motorcycle on a lonely highway, she could find a measure of freedom, but a dirt bike in the desert vastness was even better, with only vistas of sand and rocky outcroppings and withered scrub brush rolling toward the blue sky in all directions.

While she ate pizza and drank beer, she took the snapshots out of the manila envelope and studied them. Her dead sister, so like herself.

She thought about Ellie, her sister’s child, living up in Santa Barbara with the Ladbrooks, no image of her face among the pictures but perhaps as much like Connie as Colleen had been. She tried to decide how she felt about having a niece. As Mickey Chan suggested, it was a wonderful thing to have family, not to be alone in the world after having been alone for as long as she could remember. A pleasant thrill shivered through her when she thought about Ellie, but it was tempered by the concern that a niece might be an encumbrance far heavier than all the material possessions in the world.

What if she met Ellie and developed an affection for her?

No. She wasn’t concerned about affection. She had given and received that before. Love. That was the worry.

She suspected that love, though a blessing, could also be a confining chain. What freedom might be lost by loving someone — or by being loved? She didn’t know because she had never given or received any emotion as powerful and profound as love — or as what she thought love must be like, having read of it in so many great novels. She had read that love could be a trap, a cruel prison, and she had seen people’s hearts broken by the weight of it.

She had been alone so long.

But she was comfortable in her solitude.

Change involved a terrible risk.

She studied her sister’s smiling face in the almost-real colors of Kodachrome, separated from her by the thin glossy veneer of the photographic finish — and by five long years of death.

For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: “It might have been!”

She could never know her sister. However, she could still know her niece. All she needed was the courage.

She got another beer from the refrigerator, returned to the table, sat down to study Colleen’s face for a while longer — and found a newspaper obscuring the photographs. The Register. A headline caught her eye: SHOOTOUT AT LAGUNA BEACH RESTAURANT… TWO DEAD, TEN WOUNDED.

For a long uneasy moment she stared at the headline. The paper hadn’t been there a minute ago, hadn’t been anywhere in the house, in fact, because she had never bought it.

When she’d gone to get a fresh beer from the refrigerator, her back had never been turned to the table. She knew beyond doubt that no one else was in the apartment. But even if an intruder had gotten in, she could not possibly have missed seeing him enter the kitchen.

Connie touched the paper. It was real, but the contact chilled her as deeply as if she had touched ice.

She picked it up.

It stank of smoke. Its pages were brown along the cut edges, feathering to yellow and then to white toward the center, as if it had been salvaged from a fire just before it burned.

12

The crowns of the tallest palm trees disappeared into roiling clouds of smoke.

Stunned and weeping residents moved back as firemen in yellow-and-black slickers and high rubber boots unrolled hoses from the trucks and pulled them across walkways, flowerbeds. Other firemen appeared at a trot, carrying axes. Some were wearing breathing apparatus so they could enter the smoke-filled condominiums. Their swift arrival virtually insured that most of the apartments would be saved.

Harry Lyon glanced toward his own unit, at the south end of the building, and a sharp pang of loss stabbed through him. Gone. His alphabetically shelved collection of books, his CDs neatly arranged in drawers according to type of music and then by the artist’s name, his clean white kitchen, carefully nurtured houseplants, the twenty-nine volumes of his daily diary which he had been keeping since he was nine (a separate journal for each year) — all gone. When he thought of the ravenous fire eating its way through his rooms, soot sifting over what little the fire didn’t consume, everything glossy turning mottled and dull, he felt nauseous.

He remembered his Honda in the attached garage behind the building, started in that direction, then halted because it seemed foolish to jeopardize his own life to save a car. Besides, he was the president of the homeowners’ association. At a time like this he ought to stay with his neighbors, offer them reassurance, comfort, advice about insurance and other issues.

As he holstered his revolver to avoid alarming the firemen, he remembered something the vagrant had said to him when he was pinned against the wall, the breath knocked out of him: First everything and everyone you love… then you!

When he thought about those words, considered the ramifications of them, profound fear crept spider-quick through him, worse than any fright he’d known so far, as dark as the fire was bright.

He headed for the garages, after all. Suddenly he desperately needed the car.

As Harry dodged firemen and rounded the side of the building, the air was filled with thousands of glowing embers like luminescent moths, swooping and fluttering, adance upon the spiraling thermal currents. High on the roof a cataclysmic crack was followed by a crash that jarred the night. A hail of burning shingles clattered down on the sidewalk and flanking shrubs.

Harry crossed his arms over his head, afraid the flaming cedar shakes would set his hair on fire, hoping that his clothes were still too damp to ignite. Slipping out of the firefall unharmed, he pushed through a wet iron gate still cold from the rain.

Behind the building, the wet blacktop was sequined with glass from exploded rear windows, spangled with puddles. Every mirrored surface swarmed with copper and claret images of the bright tempest raging on the roof of the main building. Glowing serpents slithered around Harry’s feet as he ran.

The back driveway was still deserted when he reached his garage door and yanked it up. But even as it was swinging out of the way, a fireman appeared and shouted at him to get out of there.

“Police!” Harry replied. He hoped that would buy him the few seconds he needed, though he didn’t pause to flash his badge.

Falling embers had seeded a few flames on the long garage roof. Thin smoke filled his double-wide stall, trickling down from the smouldering tar paper between the rafters and the shingles.

Keys. Harry was suddenly afraid he had left them on the foyer table or in the kitchen. Approaching the car, coughing because of the wispy but bitter smoke, he frantically patted his pockets and was relieved to hear the keys jingle in his sportcoat.

First everything and everyone you love…

He reversed out of the garage, shifted gears, drove past the fireman who had shouted, and escaped the far end of the driveway two seconds before an approaching fire truck would have turned in and blocked it. They nearly kissed bumpers as Harry swung the Honda into the street.

When he had driven three or four blocks with uncharacteristic recklessness, weaving through traffic and running red lights, the radio snapped on of its own accord. The vagrant’s deep, raspy voice echoed from the stereo speakers, startling him.

“Gotta rest now, hero. Gotta rest.”

“What the hell?”

Only a static hiss answered him.

Harry eased up on the accelerator. He reached toward the radio to switch it off, but hesitated.

” Very tired… a little nap…”

Hissing static.

“… so you have an hour…”

Hissing.

“…. but I‘ll be back…”

Hissing.

Harry kept glancing away from the busy street ahead, at the lighted dial of the radio. It glowed a soft green but recalled to him the radiant red eyes — first blood, then fire — of the vagrant.

“…. big hero… just walking meat…”

Hissing.

””… shoot anyone you like… big man… but shooting me… never the end of it… not me… not me….”

Hissing. Hissing. Hissing.

The car passed through a flooded depression in the pavement. Phosphorescent white water plumed like angels’ wings on both sides.

Harry touched the radio controls, half expecting an electric shock or worse, but nothing happened. He punched the OFF button, and the hissing stopped.

He didn’t try to run the next red traffic light. He eased to a stop behind a line of cars, struggling to sort through the events of the past several hours and make sense of them.

Who you gonna call?

He didn’t believe in ghosts or ghostbusters.

Nevertheless he was shivering, and not merely because his clothes were still damp. He switched on the heater.

Who you gonna call?

Ghost or not, at least the vagrant had not been hallucinated. He wasn’t a sign of mental breakdown. He was real. Not human, perhaps, but real.

That understanding was strangely calming. The thing Harry feared the most was not the supernatural or the unknown — but the internal disorder of madness, a threat that now seemed to have been replaced by an external adversary, bizarre beyond reckoning and terrifyingly powerful but, at least, external.

As the light changed to green and the traffic started moving again, he looked around at the streets of Newport Beach. He saw that he had headed west toward the coast and north from Irvine, and for the first time became consciously aware of where he was going. Costa Mesa. Connie Gulliver’s apartment.

He was surprised. The burning apparition had promised to destroy everyone and everything he loved before destroying him, and all by the break of dawn. Yet Harry had chosen to go to Connie before checking in with his own parents in Carmel Valley. Earlier he had admitted to a keener interest in her than he had previously been willing to acknowledge, but perhaps that admission had not exposed the true complexity of his feelings even to himself. He knew that he cared for her, though the why of his caring was still in part a mystery to him, considering how utterly different from one another they were and how tightly closed upon herself she was. Neither was he sure of the depth of his caring, except that it was deep, more than deep enough to be the biggest revelation in a day filled with revelations.

As he passed Newport Harbor, through the gaps between the commercial buildings on his left, he saw the tall masts of yachts thrusting into the night, sails furled. Like a forest of church steeples. They were reminders that, like many of his generation, he had been raised without any specific faith and, as an adult, had never managed to discover a faith of his own. It wasn’t that he denied the existence of God, only that he could not find a way to believe.

When you encounter the supernatural, who you gonna call? If not ghostbusters, then God. If not God… who you gonna call?

For most of his life Harry had placed his faith in order, but order was merely a condition, not a force he could call upon for help. In spite of the brutalities with which his job brought him into contact, he continued to believe, as well, in the decency and courage of human beings. That was what sustained him now. He was going to Connie Gulliver not merely to warn her but to seek her counsel, to ask her to help him find his way out of the darkness that had descended upon him.

Who you gonna call? Your partner.

When he stopped at the next red traffic light, he was surprised again, but this time not by what he found within himself. The heater had warmed the car and chased away the worst of his shivers. But he still felt a hard coldness over his heart. This newest surprise was in his shirt pocket, against his breast, not emotions but something tangible that he could fish out and hold and see. Four shapeless dark lumps. Metal. Lead. Though he could not begin to grasp how they had wound up in his pocket, he knew what the objects were: the shots that he had pumped into the vagrant, four lead slugs misshapen by high-velocity impacts with flesh, bone, and cartilage.

13

Harry took off his jacket, tie, and shirt to clean up as best he could in Connie’s bathroom. His hands were so grimy they reminded him of the vagrant’s hands, and required vigorous lathering to come clean. He washed his hair, face, chest, and arms in the sink, sluicing away some of his weariness with the soot and ashes, then slicked his hair back with her comb.

He could not do much with his clothes. He wiped them with a dry washcloth to remove the surface grit, but they remained somewhat spotted and heavily wrinkled. His white shirt was gray now, fouled by a vague perspiration odor and the heavier stench of smoke, but he had to put it on again because he had no other clothes into which he could change. In memory, he had never allowed himself to be seen in such a disheveled state.

He attempted to rescue his dignity by securing the top button on his shirt and knotting his tie.

More than the dismaying condition of his clothes, the condition of his body worried him. His abdomen was sore where the hand of the mannequin had rammed into him. A dull ache throbbed in the small of his back and did not fade altogether until it reached halfway up his spine, a reminder of the force with which the hobo had slammed him into the wall. The back of his left arm, all along the triceps, was tender, as well, because he had landed on it when the hobo had thrown him out of the hallway into the bedroom.

While he had been on the move, running for his life, pumped up with adrenaline, he hadn’t been aware of his various pains, but inactivity revealed them. He was concerned that his muscles and joints might begin to stiffen. He was pretty sure, before the night was out, he would need to be quick and agile more than once if he hoped to save his butt.

In the medicine cabinet he found a bottle of Anacin. He shook four into the palm of his right hand, then capped the bottle and put it in a jacket pocket.

When he returned to the kitchen and asked for a glass of water with which to take the pills, Connie handed him a can of Coors.

He declined. “I’ve got to keep a clear head.”

“One beer won’t hurt. Might even help.”

“I don’t drink much.”

“I’m not asking you to mainline vodka with a needle.”

“I’d prefer water.”

“Don’t be a prig, for Christ’s sake.”

He nodded, accepted the beer, popped the tab, and chased the four aspirin with a long cold swallow It tasted wonderful. Maybe it was just what he needed.

Starved, he took a slice of cold pizza from the open box on the counter. He tore off a mouthful and chewed enthusiastically, with none of his usual concern for manners.

He had never been to her place before, and he had noticed how Spartan it was. “What do they call this style of decor — Early Monk?”

“Who cares about decor? I’m just showing my landlord a little courtesy. If I croak in the line of duty, he can hose the place out in an hour and have it rented tomorrow.”

She returned to the card table and stared at the six objects she had lined up on it. A ten-dollar bill worn soft with age. One heat-discolored newspaper with pages slightly burnt along one edge. Four misshapen lead slugs.

Joining her, Harry said, “Well?”

“I don’t believe in ghosts, spirits, demons, that crap.”

“Me neither.”

“I saw this guy He was just a bum.”

“I still can’t believe you gave him ten bucks,” Harry said.

She actually blushed. He had never seen her blush before. The first thing ever to embarrass her in his company was this indication that she possessed some compassion.

She said, “He was… compelling somehow.”

“So he wasn’t ‘just a bum.”’

“Maybe not, if he could get ten bucks out of me.”

“I’ll tell you one thing.” He stuffed the last bite of pizza in his mouth.

“So tell me.”

Around the pizza, Harry said, “I saw him burn up alive in my living room, but I don’t think they’ll find any charred bones in the ashes. And even if he hadn’t spoken out of the car radio, I’d expect to see him again, as big and dirty and weird and unburnt as ever.”

As Harry got a second piece of pizza, Connie said, “Thought you just told me you don’t believe in ghosts either.”

“Don’t.”

“Then what?”

Chewing, he regarded her thoughtfully. “You believe me, then?”

“Part of it happened to me, too, didn’t it?”

“Yeah. I guess enough to make you believe me.”

“Then what?” she repeated.

He wanted to sit down at the table, take a load off his feet, but he figured he was more likely to stiffen up if he settled in a chair. He leaned against the counter by the sink.

“I’ve been thinking…. Every day, working an investigation, out on the street, we meet people who aren’t like us, who think the law is just a sham to gull the ignorant masses into obedience. These people care about nothing but themselves, satisfying their own desires, regardless of the cost to others.”

“Hairballs, scumbags — they’re our business,” she said.

“Criminal types, sociopaths. They have lots of names. Like the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they walk among us and pass for civilized, ordinary human beings. But even though there’s a lot of them, they’re still a small minority and anything but ordinary. Their civilization is a veneer, stage makeup concealing the scaly, crawling savage thing we evolved from, the ancient reptile consciousness.”

“So? This isn’t news,” she said impatiently. “We’re the thin line between order and chaos. We look into that abyss every day. Teetering on that edge, testing myself, proving I’m not one of them, won’t fall into that chaos, won’t become, can’t become, like them — that’s what makes this work so exciting. It’s why I’m a cop.”

“Really?” he said, surprised.

That was not at all why he was a cop. Protecting the genuinely civilized, guarding them from the pod people among them, preserving peace and the beauty of order, providing for continuity and progress — that was why he had become a police officer, at least part of the reason, and certainly not to prove to himself that he was not one of the reptilian throwbacks.

While Connie spoke, she turned her eyes from Harry and stared at a nine-by-twelve manila envelope lying on one of the chairs at the table. He wondered what it contained.

“When you don’t know where you come from, when you don’t know if you can love,” she said quietly, almost as if talking to herself, “when all you want is freedom, you have to force yourself to take on responsibility, a lot of it. Freedom without responsibility is pure savagery.” Her voice was not merely quiet. It was haunted. “Maybe you come from savagery, you can’t be sure, but what you do know about yourself is you can hate real well even if you can’t love, and that scares you, means maybe you could slide into that abyss yourself….”

Harry stopped chewing halfway through a mouthful of pizza, riveted by her.

He knew she was revealing herself as she had never done before. He just didn’t fully understand what she was revealing.

As if she had broken out of a trance, her gaze clicked up from the envelope to Harry, and her soft voice hardened. “So, all right, the world is full of these shitheads, scumbags, sociopaths, whatever you want to call them. What’s your point?”

He swallowed the pizza. “So suppose an ordinary cop, going about his business, runs into a sociopath who’s worse than the usual scumbags, infinitely worse.”

She had gone to the refrigerator while he was talking. She took another beer from it. “Worse? In what way?”

“This guy has…”

“What?”

“He has a… gift.”

“What gift? Is this riddle hour? Spit it out, Harry.”

He stepped to the table, stirred one finger through the four lead slugs lying there. They rattled against the Formica surface with a sound that seemed to echo down eternity.

“Harry?”

Though he needed to tell her his theory, he was reluctant to begin. What he had to say would no doubt forever blow his image as Mr. Equanimity.

He took a pull on his beer, followed it with a deep breath, and plunged: “Suppose you had to deal with a sociopath… a psychotic with paranormal powers that made going up against him like duk-ing it out with an apprentice God. Psychic powers.”

She was gaping at him. The ring-pull on the beer can encircled her index finger, but she wasn’t popping it open. She appeared to be holding a pose for a painter.

Before she could interrupt, he said, “I don’t mean he can just predict the suit of a playing card chosen randomly from a deck, tell you who’s going to win the next World Series, or levitate a pencil. Nothing as small-time as that. Maybe this guy has the power to manifest himself out of thin air — and vanish into it. The power to’ start fires, to burn without being consumed, to take bullets without really being killed. Maybe he can pin a psychic tag on you the way a game warden might tag a deer with an electronic transmitter, then keep track of you when you’re out of his sight, no matter where you go or how far you run. I know, I know, it’s absurd, it’s crazy, it’s like stumbling into a Spielberg movie, only darker, something by James Cameron out of David Lynch, but maybe it’s true.”

Connie shook her head, incredulous. Opening the refrigerator door and putting the unpopped beer can back on the shelf, she said, “Maybe two should be my limit tonight.”

He urgently needed to convince her. He was aware of how quickly the night was slipping away, how fast dawn was coming.

Turning from the refrigerator, she said, ” Where’d he get these amazing powers?”

“Who knows? Maybe he lived too long under high-power electric lines, the magnetic fields caused changes in his brain. Maybe there was too much dioxin in his milk when he was a baby, or he ate too many apples contaminated with some bizarre toxic chemical, his house is right under a hole in the ozone layer, aliens are experimenting on him to give the National Enquirer a good story, he ate too damn many Twinkies, he listened to way too much rap music! How the fuck do I know?”

She stared at him. At least she was no longer gaping. “You’re serious about this.”

“Yeah.”

“I know, because in the six months we’ve worked together, that’s the first time you’ve ever used the F word.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Of course you are,” she said, managing a trace of sarcasm even under these circumstances. “But this guy… he’s just a bum.”

“I don’t think that’s his real appearance. I think he can be anything he wants to be, manifest himself in any form he chooses, because the manifestation isn’t really him… it’s a projection, a thing he wants us to see.”

“Isn’t this the next thing to a ghost?” she asked. “And didn’t we agree that neither of us believes in ghosts?”

He snatched the ten-dollar bill off the table. “If I’m so completely wrong, then how do you explain this?”

“Even if you’re right… how do you explain it?”

“Telekinesis.”

“What’s that?”

“The power to move an object through time and space with only the power of the mind.”

“Then why didn’t I see the bill floating through the air into my hand?” she asked.

“That’s not how it works. More like teleportation. It goes from one place to another, poof, without physically traveling the distance in between.”

She threw her hands up in exasperation. “Beam me up, Scotty!”

He glanced at his wristwatch. 8:38. Ticktock… ticktock…

He knew he sounded like a lunatic, better suited to the afternoon television talkshow circuit or late-night radio call-in programs than to police work. But he also knew he was right, or at least that he was circling the periphery of the truth if not yet at the heart of it.

“Look,” he said, picking up the fire-browned newspaper and shaking it at her, “I haven’t read it yet, but if you comb through this paper, I know you’ll find a few stories to add to that damn collection of yours, evidence of the new Dark Ages.” He dropped the paper, and the odor of smoke puffed from it. “Let me see, what are some of the stories you’ve told me lately, things you picked up from other papers, television? I’m sure I can remember some of them.”

“Harry—”

“Not that I want to remember. I’d rather forget, God knows.” He started to pace more or less in a circle. “Wasn’t there one about a judge in Texas sentencing a guy to thirty-five years in jail for stealing a twelve-ounce can of Spam? And at the same time, up in Los Angeles, some rioters beat a guy to death in the street, all of it recorded by newsmen on videotape, but no one really wants to further disturb the community by tracking down the killers, not when the beating was a protest against injustice?”

She went to the table, pulled out a chair, turned it backward, and’ sat down. She stared at the burnt newspaper and other objects.

He kept pacing, speaking with increasing urgency: “And wasn’t there one about a woman who got her boyfriend to rape her eleven-year-old daughter, because she wanted a fourth child but wasn’t able to have any more, so she figured she could be a mother to her little girl’s bastard? Where was that? Wisconsin, was it? Ohio?”

“Michigan,” Connie said somberly.

“And wasn’t there one about a guy beheading his six-year-old stepson with a machete—”

“Five. He was five.”

“—and a bunch of teenage boys somewhere stabbed a woman a hundred and thirty times to steal a lousy dollar—”

“Boston,” she whispered.

“—oh, yes, and there was that little jewel about the father who beat his preschooler to death because the boy couldn’t remember the alphabet past G. And some woman in Arkansas or Louisiana or Oklahoma laced her baby’s cereal with crushed glass, hoping to make her sick enough so the father would get a leave from the Navy and be able to spend some time at home.”

“Not Arkansas,” Connie said. “Mississippi.”

Harry stopped pacing, crouched beside her chair, face to face with her.

“See, you accept all these incredible things, incredible as they are. You know they happened. These are the nineties, Connie. The pre-millennium cotillion, the new Dark Ages, when anything can happen and usually does, when the unthinkable isn’t only thinkable but accepted, when every miracle of science is matched by an act of human barbarity that hardly raises anyone’s eyebrow. Every brilliant technological achievement is countered by a thousand atrocities of human hatred and stupidity. For every scientist seeking a cure for cancer there are five thousand thugs willing to hammer an old lady’s skull to applesauce just for the change in her purse.”

Troubled, Connie looked away from him. She picked up one of the misshapen slugs. Frowning, she turned it over and over between her thumb and forefinger.

Spooked by the uncanny speed with which the minutes changed on the liquid-crystal display of his wristwatch, Harry would not relent.

“So who’s to say there couldn’t be some guy in a lab somewhere who discovered something to enhance the power of the human brain, to magnify and tap the powers we’ve always suspected are within us but could never use? Maybe this guy injected himself with this stuff. Or maybe the guy we’re after, he’s the subject of the experiment, and when he realized what he’d become, he killed everyone at the lab, everyone who knew. Maybe he walks the world among us now, the scariest damn pod person of them all.”

She put down the deformed slug. She turned to him again. She had beautiful eyes. “The experiment thing makes sense to me.”

“But it’s probably not anything like that, not anything we could figure, something different.”

“If such a man exists, can he be stopped?”

“He’s not God. No matter what powers he has, he’s still a man— and a deeply disturbed one at that. He’ll have weaknesses, points of vulnerability.”

He still crouched beside her chair, and she put one hand against the side of his face. The tender gesture surprised him. She smiled. “You’ve got one hell of a wild imagination, Harry Lyon.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve always liked fairy tales.”

Frowning again, she took her hand away as if chagrined to have been caught in a moment of tenderness. “Even if he’s vulnerable, he can’t be dealt with if he can’t be found. How will we track down this Ticktock?”

“Ticktock?”

“We don’t know his real name,” she said, “so Ticktock seems as good as any for the time being.”

Ticktock. It was a fairy-tale villain’s name if he had ever heard one. Rumpelstiltskin, Mother Gothel, Knucklebone — and Ticktock.

“All right.” Harry stood. He paced again. “Ticktock.”

“How do we find him?”

“I don’t know for sure. But I know where I want to start. The Laguna Beach city morgue.”

She twitched at that. “Ordegard?”

“Yeah. I want to see the autopsy report if they’ve done one yet, talk to the coroner if possible. I want to know if they found anything strange.”

“Strange? Like what?”

“Damned if I know. Anything out of the ordinary.”

“But Ordegard’s dead. He wasn’t just a… a projection. He was real, and now he’s dead. He can’t be Ticktock.”

Countless fairy tales, legends, myths, and fantasy novels gave Harry a vast store of incredible concepts from which to draw. “So maybe Ticktock has the power to take over other people, slip into their minds, control their bodies, use them as if they were puppets, then dispose of them when he wants, or slip out again when they die. Maybe he was controlling Ordegard, then he moved on to the hobo, and now maybe the hobo is dead, really dead, his bones in my burned-out living room, and Ticktock will turn up in some other body next time.”

“Possession?”

“Something like it.”

“You’re beginning to scare me,” she said.

“Beginning? You are a tough broad. Listen, Connie, just before he trashed my condo, Ticktock said something like… ‘You think you can shoot anyone you like, and that’s the end of it, but not with me, shooting me isn’t the end of it.’” Harry tapped the butt of the gun in his shoulder holster. “So who’d I shoot today? Ordegard. And this Ticktock is telling me that’s not the end of it. So I want to find out if there’s anything odd about Ordegard’s corpse.”

She was amazed but not disbelieving. She was getting in the swing of it. “You want to know if there were signs of possession.”

“Yeah.”

“Exactly what are the signs of possession?”

“Anything odd.”

“Like the corpse’s skull is empty, no brain, just ashes in there? Or maybe the number 666 burnt into the back of his neck?”

“I wish it would be something that obvious, but I doubt it.”

Connie laughed. A nervous laugh. Shaky. Brief.

She got up from the chair. “Okay, let’s go to the morgue.”

Harry hoped that a talk with the coroner or a quick reading of the autopsy report would tell him what he needed to know, and that it would not be necessary to view the corpse. He didn’t want to have to look at that moon face again.

14

The large institutional kitchen at Pacific View Care Home in Laguna Beach was all white tile and stainless steel, as clean as a hospital.

Any rats or roaches creep in here, Janet Marco thought, they better be able to live on scouring powder, ammonia water, and wax.

Though antiseptic, the kitchen did not smell like a hospital.

Lingering aromas of ham, roast turkey, herb stuffing, and scalloped potatoes were overlaid by the yeasty, cinnamon fragrance of the sweetrolls that they were baking for breakfast in the morning. It was a warm place, too, and the warmth was welcome after the chill that the recent storm had brought to the March air.

Janet and Danny were having dinner at one end of a long table in the southeast corner of the kitchen. They were in no one’s way but enjoyed a vantage point from which they could watch the busy staff.

Janet was fascinated by the operation of the big kitchen, which ticked along like clockwork. The workers were industrious and seemed happy in their busyness. She envied them. She wished she could get a job at Pacific View, in the kitchen or any other department. But she didn’t know what skills were required. And she doubted that even the owner, good man that he was, would hire anyone who lived in a car, washed in public lavatories, and had no permanent address.

Though she liked watching the kitchen staff, the sight of them sometimes frustrated the devil out of her.

But she couldn’t blame Mr. Ishigura, the owner and operator of Pacific View, because he was a godsend on nights like this. Both thrifty and kind, he was dismayed by waste and by the thought of anyone going hungry in such a prosperous country. Invariably, after almost a hundred patients and the staff had eaten dinner, enough food remained to provide for ten or twelve people, because recipes could not be refined to produce precisely the number of portions needed. Mr. Ishigura provided these meals free to certain of the homeless.

The food was good, too, really good. Pacific View was not an ordinary nursing home. It was classy. The patients were rich, or had relatives who were rich.

Mr. Ishigura did not advertise his generosity, and his door was not open to everyone. When he saw street people who seemed, to him, to have fallen to their fate not entirely by their own doing, he approached them about the free lunches and dinners at Pacific View. Because he was selective, it was possible to eat there without having to share the table with some of the moody and dangerous alcoholics and addicts who made many of the church and mission kitchens so unappealing.

Janet didn’t take advantage of Mr. Ishigura’s hospitality nearly as often as it was available. Of the seven lunches and seven dinners she might have eaten at Pacific View each week, she limited herself to no more than two of each. Otherwise, she was able to provide for herself and Danny, and she took pride in every meal that was bought with her own earnings.

That Tuesday night, she and Danny shared the facilities with three elderly men, one aged woman whose face was as wrinkled as a crumpled paper bag but who wore a gaily colored scarf and bright red beret, and an unfortunately ugly young man with a deformed face. They were all ragged but not filthy, unbarbered but clean-smelling enough.

She didn’t speak to any of them, although she would have enjoyed conversation. It had been so long since she had spoken at any length to anyone but Danny that she was not confident of making chit-chat with another adult.

Besides, she was leery of encountering someone with a keen curiosity. She did not want to have to answer questions about herself, her past. She was, after all, a murderer. And if Vince’s body had been found in the Arizona desert, she might also be wanted by the police.

She didn’t even speak to Danny, who needed no encouragement either to eat or to mind his manners. Though he was only five, the boy was well-behaved and knew how to conduct himself at the table.

Janet was fiercely proud of him. From time to time, as they ate, she smoothed his hair or touched the back of his neck or patted his shoulder, so he would know that she was proud.

God, she loved him. So little, so innocent, so patiently enduring of one hardship after another. Nothing must happen to him. He must have his chance to grow up, become something in this world.

She could enjoy dinner only as long as she kept thoughts of the policeman to a minimum. The policeman who could change shape. Who had almost become a werewolf like out of a movie. Who had become Vince, while thunder rolled and lightning flashed, and who had halted Woofer in midair.

After the encounter in that alleyway earlier in the day, Janet had driven north in the pouring rain, out of Laguna Beach, heading for Los Angeles, desperate to put a lot of miles between them and the mysterious creature who wanted to kill them. It had said that it could find them no matter where they ran, and she had believed it. But just waiting to be killed was intolerable.

She got only as far as Corona Del Mar, the next town up the coast, before realizing that she must go back. In Los Angeles, she would have to learn what neighborhoods were best for scavenging, when the garbage pickups were scheduled so she could search the cans just ahead of the sanitation trucks, which communities had the most tolerant police, where cans and bottles could be redeemed, where to find another humanitarian like Mr. Ishigura, and so much more. Her cash on hand was low at the moment, and she could not afford to live on their meager savings long enough to learn the ropes in a new place. It was Laguna Beach or nowhere.

Maybe the worst thing about being dirt poor was not having any choices.

She’d driven back to Laguna Beach, mentally chastising herself for the gasoline she’d wasted.

They parked on a side street and stayed in the car all during the rainy afternoon. By the gray storm light, with Woofer dozing in the back seat, she read to Danny from a thick storybook rescued from a trash bin. He loved being read to. He sat enthralled, while pearl and silver water shadows played across his face in patterns that matched the streams of rain shimmering down the windshield.

Now the rain was gone, the day was ended, dinner was finished, and it was time to return to the old Dodge for the night. Janet was exhausted, and she knew Danny would drop quickly into sleep like a stone sinking in a pond. But she dreaded closing her eyes, for she was afraid that the policeman thing would find them while they slept.

When they gathered up their dirty dishes and carried them to the sink where they always left them, Janet and Danny were approached by a cook whose first name was Loretta and whose last name was unknown to Janet. Loretta was a heavy-set woman of about fifty, with skin as smooth as porcelain and a brow so free of lines that she must never have had a worry in her entire life. Her hands were strong, and red from kitchen work. She was carrying a disposable pie tin full of meat scraps.

“That dog still hanging around?” Loretta asked. “The cute fella who’s been trailing after you the last few times?”

“Woofer,” Danny said.

“He’s taken a shine to my boy,” Janet said. “He’s out in the alley now, waiting for us.”

“Well, I’ve got a treat for the cutie,” Loretta said, indicating the meat scraps.

A pretty blond nurse, standing at a nearby butcher’s block and drinking a glass of milk, overheard their conversation. “Is he really cute?”

“Just a mutt,” Loretta said, “no fancy breed, but he oughta be in pictures, this one.”

“I’m a dog nut,” the nurse said. “I have three. I love dogs. Can I see him?”

“Sure, sure, come on,” Loretta said. Then she checked herself and smiled at Janet. “You mind if Angelina sees him?”

Angelina was evidently the nurse.

“Heavens no, why would I mind?” Janet said.

Loretta led the way to the alley door. The scraps in the pie tin were not fat and gristle, but choice bits of ham and turkey.

Outside the door in a cone of yellow light from a security lamp, Woofer sat in patient anticipation, his head cocked to the right, one ear pricked up and one ear floppy as usual, a quizzical look on his face. A cool breeze, the first stirring of the air since the storm had passed, ruffled his fur.

Angelina was instantly captivated. “He’s wonderful!”

“He’s mine,” Danny said so softly that it was doubtful anyone but Janet had heard him.

As if he understood the nurse’s praise, Woofer grinned, and his bushy tail vigorously swept the blacktop.

Maybe he did understand. Within a day of encountering Woofer, Janet had decided that he was a smart mutt.

Taking the pie tin full of scraps from the cook, Angelina moved in front of everyone and squatted down before the dog. “You are a cutie. Look at this, fella. Does this look good? Bet you’ll like this.”

Woofer glanced at Janet, as if seeking permission to feast on the scraps. He was just a collarless street dog now, but evidently he had been someone’s house pet at one time. He had the restraint that came from training and the capacity for reciprocal affection that in animals — perhaps in people as well — grew from being loved.

Janet nodded.

Only then did the pooch take his dinner, snatching hungrily at the chunks and slivers of meat.

Unexpectedly, Janet Marco perceived a kinship with the dog that unnerved her. Her parents had treated her with the cruelty that some sick people directed against animals; indeed, they would have dealt with any cat or dog more humanely than they’d dealt with her. Vince had been no kinder. And though there were no indications that the dog had been beaten or starved, he had surely been abandoned. Though he was without a collar, he clearly had not been raised wild; for he was too eager to please and too needful of affection. Abandonment was just another form of abuse, which meant that Janet and the dog had shared a host of hardships, fears, and experiences.

She decided to keep the dog regardless of the trouble and expense he might pose. There was a bond between them, worthy of respect: they were both living creatures capable of courage and commitment — and both in need.

While Woofer ate with canine enthusiasm, the young blond nurse petted him, scratched behind his ears, and cooed to him.

“Told you he was a cutie,” said the cook, Loretta, folding her arms across her immense bosom and beaming at Woofer. “Oughta be in movies, he should. A regular little charmer.”

“He’s mine,” Danny said worriedly, and again in such a low voice that only Janet could have heard him. He was standing at her side, holding fast to her, and she put a hand on his shoulder reassuringly.

Halfway through his meal, Woofer suddenly looked up from the pie tin and regarded Angelina curiously. His good ear pricked again. He sniffed at her starched white uniform, her slender hands, then pushed his head under her knees to get a good whiff of her white shoes. He sniffed her hands again, licked her fingers, chuffing and whining, prancing in place, increasingly excited.

The nurse and cook laughed, thinking that Woofer was reacting only to the good food and all of the attention, but Janet knew he was responding to something else. Mixed up with all the chuffing and whining were brief low growls as he caught some scent that he didn’t like. And his tail had stopped wagging.

Without warning and to Janet’s great mortification, the dog slipped out of Angelina’s cuddling hands, shot around her, streaked past Danny, between the cook’s legs, and straight through the open door into the kitchen.

“Woofer, no!” Janet cried.

The dog didn’t heed her, kept going, and everyone in the alleyway went after him.

The kitchen staff tried to capture Woofer, but he was too quick for them. He dodged and feinted, claws clicking on the tile floor. He scrambled under food preparation tables, rolled and leaped and abruptly changed directions again and again to elude grasping hands, exhibiting all the agility of an eel, panting and grinning and apparently having a good time.

However, it wasn’t entirely fun and doggy games. At the same time, he was urgently searching for something, following an elusive scent, sniffing at the floor and at the air. He appeared to be disinterested in the ovens filled with baking sweetrolls from which flowed a virtual flood of mouth-watering aromas, and he didn’t leap up toward any of the counters on which food was exposed. Something else interested him, whatever he had first detected on the young blond nurse named Angelina.

“Bad dog,” Janet kept repeating as she joined the chase, “bad dog, bad dog!”

Woofer cast a couple of hurt looks her way but didn’t settle down.

A nurse’s aide, unaware of what was happening in the kitchen, pushed through a pair of swinging doors with a cart of supplies, and the dog instantly took advantage of the opening. He shot past the aide, through the doors, into another part of the care home.

Bad dog. Not true. Good dog. Good.

The food place is full of so many tasty odors, he can’t track the other scent, the strange scent, quick as he wants to. But on the other side of the swinging doors is a long, long narrow place with other places opening off both sides. Here the hungry-making smells aren’t as heavy.

Lots of other smells, though, mostly people smells, mostly not wonderful. Sharp odors, salty odors, sick-making sweet odors, sour.

Pine. A bucket of pine in the long, long narrow place. He real quick sticks his nose in the bucket of pine, wondering how the whole tree got in there, but it isn’t a tree, only water, dirty-looking water that smells like a whole pine tree, a bunch of them, all in a bucket. Interesting.

Hurry on.

Pee. He can smell pee. People pee. Different kinds of people pee. Interesting. Ten, twenty, thirty different pee smells, none of them real strong but there, lots more people pee than he had ever smelled inside anyplace anytime. He can tell a lot from the smell of people’s pee, what they ate, what they drank, where they’ve been today,” whether they’ve rutted lately, whether they’re healthy or sick, angry or happy, good or bad. Most of these people haven’t rutted in a long time, and are sick one way or another, some of them bad sick. None of the pee is the kind of pee that’s fun to smell.

He smells shoe leather, floor wax, wood polish, starch, roses, daisies, tulips, carnations, lemons, ten-twenty-lots of kinds of sweat, chocolate good, poop bad, dust, damp earth from a plant pot, soap, hair spray, peppermint, pepper, salt, onions, the sneeze-making bitterness of termites in one wall, coffee, hot brass, rubber, paper, pencil shavings, butterscotch, more pine trees in a bucket, another dog. Interesting. Another dog. Somebody has a dog and brings its scent in on their shoes, interesting dog, female, and they track the scent around the long narrow place. Interesting. There are countless other odors — his world is odors more than anything — including that strange scent, strange and bad, bare-your-teeth bad, enemy, hateful thing, smelled before, policeman smell, wolf smell, policeman-wolf-thing smell, there, got it again, this way, this way, follow.

People are chasing him because he doesn’t belong here. All sorts of places people think you don’t belong, though you never smell as bad as most people, even the clean ones, and though you aren’t as big or crashing around with so much noise and taking up so much space as people do.

Bad dog, the woman says, and that hurts him because he likes the woman, the boy, is doing this for them, finding out about the bad policeman-wolf-thing with the strange smell.

Bad dog. Not true. Good dog. Good.

Woman in white, coming through a door, looking surprised, smelling surprised, trying to stop him. Quick snarl. She jumps back. So easy to scare, people. So easy to fool.

The long narrow place meets another long narrow place. More doors, more odors, ammonia and sulphur and more kinds of sick smells, more kinds of pee. People live here but also pee here. So strange. Interesting. Dogs don’t pee where they live.

Woman in the narrow place, carrying something, looks surprised, smells surprised, says, Oh, look, how cute.

Give her a wag of the tail. Why not? But keep going.

That scent. Strange. Hateful. Strong, getting stronger.

An open door, soft light, a space with a sick woman lying on a bed. He goes in, suddenly wary, looking left and right, because this place reeks of the strange odor, the bad thing, the floor, the walls, and especially a chair, where the bad thing sat. It was here for a long time, more than once, lots of times.

The woman says, Who’s there?

She stinks. Faint sour sweat. Sickness but more than that. Sadness. Deep, low, terrible unhappiness. And fear. More than anything else, the sharp, lightning-storm, iron smell of fear.

Who’s there? Who is it?

Running feet in the long narrow space outside, people coming.

Fear so heavy that the strange-bad odor is almost blotted out by the fear, fear, fear, fear.

Angelina? Is that you? Angelina?

The bad scent, thing scent, is all around the bed, up on the bed. The thing stood here and talked to the woman, not long ago, today, touching her, touching the white cloth draped over her, its vile residue there, up there in the bed, rich and ripe up there in the bed with the woman, and interesting, oh-so-very interesting.

He races back to the door, turns, runs at the bed, leaps, sails, one paw catching the railing but otherwise clearing all obstacles, up with the sick and fear-soaked woman, plop.

A woman screamed.

Janet had never been afraid that Woofer would bite anyone. He was a gentle and friendly dog, and seemed incapable of harming a soul except, perhaps, the thing that had confronted them in the alleyway earlier in the day.

But when she burst into the softly lighted hospital room behind Angelina, and saw the dog on the patient’s bed, for an instant Janet thought it was attacking the woman. She pulled Danny against her to shield him from the savage sight, before she realized Woofer was only straddling the patient and sniffing her, vigorously sniffing but nothing worse.

“No,” the invalid cried, “no, no,” as if not merely a dog but something out of the deeper pits of Hell had leapt upon her.

Janet was ashamed of the commotion, felt responsible, and was afraid of the consequence. She doubted that she and Danny would be welcome to take meals in the Pacific View kitchen any longer.

The woman in the bed was thin — beyond thin, wasted — and so pale, as softly radiant as a ghost in the lamplight. Her hair was white and lusterless. She seemed ancient, a shriveled crone, but some indefinable aspect of her made Janet think the poor soul might be much younger than she appeared.

Obviously weak, she was struggling to rise slightly from her pillows and ward off the dog with her right arm. When she became aware of the arrival of those pursuing Woofer, she turned her head toward the door. Her gaunt face might once have been beautiful but was now cadaverous and, in one respect at least, nightmarish.

Her eyes.

She had none.

Janet shuddered involuntarily — and was glad she had shielded Danny, after all.

“Get it off me!” the woman shrieked in terror out of proportion to any threat that Woofer posed. “Get it off me!”

At first, glimpsed in the gray and purple shadows, the invalid’s eyelids merely appeared to be closed. But as the lamplight fell more directly across her drawn face, the true horror of her condition became apparent. Her lids were sewn shut like those of a corpse. The surgical thread had no doubt long ago dissolved, but upper and lower lids had grown together. Nothing existed immediately beneath the flaps of skin to support them, so they sagged inward, leaving shallow concavities.

Janet felt sure the woman had not been born without eyes. Some terrible experience, not nature, had stolen her vision. How severe must the injuries have been, if physicians had concluded it wasn’t possible to install glass eyes even for cosmetic reasons? Dire intuition told Janet that this blind and shriveled patient had encountered someone worse than Vince, and more cold-blooded than Janet’s own reptilian parents.

As Angelina and a male orderly closed in on the bed, calling the blind woman “Jennifer” and assuring her everything was going to be all right, Woofer leaped to the floor again and foiled them with another unanticipated move. Instead of making directly for the door to the corridor, he streaked into the adjoining bathroom, which was shared with the room next door, and from there scrambled into the hall.

Holding Danny’s hand in hers, Janet led the chase this time, not solely because she felt responsible for what had happened and was afraid that their dining privileges at Pacific View were on the verge of being canceled forever, but because she was eager to leave the shadowed, stuffy room and its mealy-skinned, eyeless resident.

This time the chase led into the main hall and from there into the public lounge.

Janet damned herself for ever letting the mutt into their lives. The worst thing wasn’t even the humiliation he’d brought them with this prank, but all of the attention he was drawing. She feared attention. Huddling down, keeping quiet, staying in the corners and shadows of life was the only way to reduce the amount of abuse you had to take. Besides, she wanted to remain virtually transparent to others at least until her dead husband had rested under Arizona sands for another year or two.

Woofer was too fast for them even though he kept his snout to the floor, sniffing every step of the way.

The evening receptionist in the lounge was a young Hispanic woman in a white uniform, hair in a pony tail secured by a red ribbon. Having risen from her desk to check out the source of the oncoming tumult, she assessed the situation and acted quickly. She stepped to the front door as Woofer flew into the lounge. She opened it, and let him shoot past her into the street.

Outside, breathless, Janet halted at the bottom of the front steps. The care home was east of the coast highway, on a sloped street lined with Indian laurels and bottlebrush trees. The mercury-vapor streetlamps shed a vaguely blue light. When a fluctuant breeze shivered branches, the pavement crawled with jittering leaf shadows.

Woofer was about forty feet away, dappled by the blue light, sniffing continuously at the sidewalk, shrubs, tree trunks, curb. He tested the night air most of all, apparently seeking an elusive scent. From the bottlebrush trees, the storm had knocked down scores of bristly red blooms which littered the pavement, like colonies of mutant sea anemones washed up by an apocalyptic tide. When the dog sniffed at these, he sneezed. His progress was halting and uncertain but steadily southward.

“Woofer!” Danny shouted.

The mutt turned and looked at them.

“Come back!” Danny pleaded.

Woofer hesitated. Then he twitched his head, snapped at the air, and continued after whatever phantom he was pursuing.

Fighting back tears, Danny said, “I thought he liked me.”

The boy’s words made Janet regret the unvoiced curses she had heaped upon the dog during the chase. She called after him, as well.

“He’ll come back,” she assured Danny.

“He’s not.”

“Maybe not now but later, maybe tomorrow or the day after, he’ll come home.”

The boy’s voice trembled with loss: “How can he come home when there’s no home to find us at?”

“There’s the car,” she said lamely.

She was more acutely aware than ever that a rusted old Dodge was a grievously inadequate home. Being able to provide no better for her son suddenly made her heart so heavy that it ached. She was troubled by fear, anger, frustration, and a desperation so intense that it made her nauseous.

“Dogs have sharper senses than we do,” she said. “He’ll track us down. He’ll track us down, all right.”

Black tree shadows stirred on the pavement, a vision of the dead leaves of autumns to come.

The dog reached the end of the block and turned the corner, moving out of sight.

“He’ll track us down,” she said, but did not believe.

Stink beetles. Wet tree bark. The lime odor of damp concrete. Roasting chicken in a people place nearby. Geraniums, jasmine, dead leaves. The moldy-sour scent of earthworms rutting in the rain-soaked dirt of flowerbeds. Interesting.

Most smells now are after-the-rain smells because rain cleans up the world and leaves its own tang afterwards. But even the hardest rain can’t wash away all of the old smells, layers and layers, days and weeks of odors cast off by birds and bugs, dogs and plants, lizards and people and worms and cats—

He catches a whiff of cat fur, and freezes. He clenches his teeth at the scent, flares his nostrils. He tenses.

Funny about cats. He doesn’t hate them, really, but they’re so chasable, so hard to resist. Nothing’s more fun than a cat at its best, unless maybe a boy with a ball to throw and then something good to eat.

He’s almost ready to go after the cat, track it down, but then his snout burns with an old memory of claw scratches and a sore nose for days. He remembers the bad things about cats, how they can move so fast, slash you, then go straight up a wall or tree where you can’t go after them, and you sit below barking at them, your nose stinging and bleeding, feeling stupid, and the cat licks its fur and looks at you and then settles down to sleep, until finally you just have to go somewhere and bite on an old stick or snap a few lizards in two until you feel better.

Car fumes. Wet newspaper. Old shoe full of people foot smell.

Dead mouse. Interesting. Dead mouse rotting in the gutter. Eyes open. Tiny teeth bared. Interesting. Funny how dead things don’t move. Unless they’re dead long enough, and then they’re full of movement, but it’s still not them moving but things in them. Dead mouse, stiff tail sticking straight up in the air. Interesting.

Policeman-wolf-thing.

He snaps his head up and seeks the faint scent. Mostly this thing has a scent unlike any creature he’s ever met up with before, which is what makes it interesting. Partly it’s a human odor but only partly. It’s also a thing-that-will-kill-you odor, which you sometimes smell on people and on certain crazy-mean dogs bigger than you and on coyotes and on snakes that rattle. In fact it has more of a thing-that-will-kill-you stink than anything he’s ever run across before, which means he’s got to be careful. Mostly it has its own scent: like yet not like the sea on a cold night; like yet not like an iron fence on a hot day; like yet not like the dead and rotting mouse; like yet not like lightning, thunder, spiders, blood, and dark holes in the ground that are interesting but scary. Its faint scent is one fragile thread in the rich tapestry of night aromas, but he follows it.