“I believe you,” I said sincerely.

“With the book you wrote being a best-seller, you can maybe get certain media types to listen to you. If you make any calls trying to stir up trouble, I’ll get my hands on that deejay bitch first. I’ll turn her inside out in more ways than one.”

His reference to Sasha infuriated me, but it also scared me so effectively that I held my silence.

Now it was clear that Roosevelt Frost’s warning had indeed been only advice. This was the threat that Roosevelt, claiming to speak for the cat, had warned me to expect.

The pallor was gone from Stevenson’s face, and he was flushed with color—as though, the moment that he had decided to surrender to his psychotic desires, the cold and empty spaces within him had been filled with fire.

He reached to the dashboard controls and he switched off the car heater.

Nothing was surer than that he would abduct a little girl before the next sunset.

I found the confidence to push for answers only because I had shifted sufficiently in my seat to bring the pocketed pistol to bear on him. “Where’s my father’s body?”

“At Fort Wyvern. There has to be an autopsy.”

“Why?”

“You don’t need to know. But to put an end to this stupid little crusade of yours, I’ll at least tell you it was cancer that killed him. Cancer of a kind. There’s no one for you to get even with, the way you were talking to Angela Ferryman.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“Because I could kill you as easily as give you an answer—so why would I lie?”

“What’s happening in Moonlight Bay?”

The chief cracked a grin the likes of which had seldom been seen beyond the walls of an asylum. As if the prospect of catastrophe were nourishment to him, he sat up straighter and appeared to fatten as he said, “This whole town’s on a roller coaster straight to Hell, and it’s going to be an incredible ride.”

“That’s no answer.”

“It’s all you’ll get.”

“Who killed my mother?”

“It was an accident.”

“I thought so until tonight.”

His wicked grin, thin as a razor slash, became a wider wound. “All right. One more thing if you insist. Your mother was killed, like you suspect.”

My heart rolled, as heavy as a stone wheel. “Who killed her?”

“She did. She killed herself. Suicide. Cranked that Saturn of hers all the way up to a hundred and ran it head-on into the bridge abutment. There wasn’t any mechanical failure. The accelerator didn’t stick. That was all a cover story we concocted.”

“You lying son of a bitch.”

Slowly, slowly, Stevenson licked his lips, as if he found his smile to be sweet. “No lie, Snow. And you know what? If I’d known two years ago what was going to happen to me, how much everything was going to change, I’d have killed your old lady myself. Killed her because of the part she played in this. I’d have taken her somewhere, cut her heart out, filled the hole in her chest with salt, burned her at a stake—whatever you do to make sure a witch is dead. Because what difference is there between what she did and a witch’s curse? Science or magic? What’s it matter when the result is the same? But I didn’t know what was coming then, and she did, so she saved me the trouble and took a high-speed header into eighteen-inch-thick concrete.”

Oily nausea welled in me, because I could hear the truth in his voice as clearly as I had ever heard it spoken. I understood only a fraction of what he was saying, yet I understood too much.

He said, “You’ve got nothing to avenge, freak. No one killed your folks. In fact, one way you look at it, your old lady did them both—herself and your old man.”

I closed my eyes. I couldn’t bear to look at him, not merely because he took pleasure in the fact of my mother’s death but because he clearly believed—with reason?—that there had been justice in it.

“Now what I want you to do is crawl back under your rock and stay there, live the rest of your days there. We won’t allow you to blow this wide open. If the world finds out what’s happened here, if the knowledge goes beyond those at Wyvern and us, outsiders will quarantine the whole county. They’ll seal it off, kill every last one of us, burn every building to the ground, poison every bird and every coyote and every house cat—and then probably nuke the place a few times for good measure. And that would all be for nothing, anyway, because the plague has already spread far beyond this place, to the other end of the continent and beyond. We’re the original source, and the effects are more obvious here and compounding faster, but now it’ll go on spreading without us. So none of us are ready to die just so the scum-sucking politicians can claim to have taken action.”

When I opened my eyes, I discovered that he’d raised his pistol and was covering me with it. The muzzle was less than two feet from my face. Now my only advantage was that he didn’t know I was armed, and it was a useful advantage only if I was the first to pull the trigger.

Although I knew it was fruitless, I tried to argue with him—perhaps because arguing was the only way that I could distract myself from what he had revealed about my mother. “Listen, for God’s sake, only a few minutes ago, you said you had nothing to live for, anyway. Whatever’s happened here, maybe if we get help—”

“I was in a mood,” he interrupted sharply. “Weren’t you listening to me, freak? I told you I was in a mood. A seriously ugly mood. But now I’m in a different mood. A better mood. I’m in the mood to be all that I can be, to embrace what I’m becoming instead of trying to resist it. Change, little buddy. That’s what it’s all about, you know. Change, glorious change, everything changing, always and forever, change. This new world coming—it’s going to be dazzling.”

“But we can’t—”

“If you did solve your mystery and tell the world, you’d just be signing your own death warrant. You’d be killing your sexy little deejay bitch and all your friends. Now get out of the car, get on your bike, and haul your skinny ass home. Bury whatever ashes Sandy Kirk chooses to give you. Then if you can’t live with not knowing more, if you maybe picked up too much curiosity from a cat bite, go down to the beach for a few days and catch some sun, work up a really bitchin’ tan.”

I couldn’t believe he was going to let me go.

Then he said, “The dog stays with me.”

“No.”

He gestured with his pistol. “Out.”

“He’s my dog.”

“He’s nobody’s dog. And this isn’t a debate.”

“What do you want with him?”

“An object lesson.”

“What?”

“Gonna take him down to the municipal garage. There’s a wood-chipping machine parked there, to grind up tree limbs.”

“No way.”

“I’ll put a bullet in the mutt’s head—”

“No.”

“—toss him in the chipper—”

“Let him out of the car now.”

“—bag the slush that comes out the other end, and drop it by your house as a reminder.”

Staring at Stevenson, I knew that he was not merely a changed man. He was not the same man at all. He was someone new. Someone who had been born out of the old Lewis Stevenson, like a butterfly from a chrysalis, except that this time the process was hideously reversed: the butterfly had gone into the chrysalis, and a worm had emerged. This nightmarish metamorphosis had been underway for some time but had culminated before my eyes. The last of the former chief was gone forever, and the person whom I now challenged eye to eye was driven entirely by need and desire, uninhibited by a conscience, no longer capable of sobbing as he had sobbed only minutes ago, and as deadly as anyone or anything on the face of the earth.

If he carried a laboratory-engineered infection that could induce such a change, would it pass now to me?

My heart fought itself, throwing hard punch after hard punch.

Although I had never imagined myself capable of killing another human being, I thought I was capable of wasting this man, because I’d be saving not only Orson but also untold girls and women whom he intended to welcome into his nightmare.

With more steel in my voice than I had expected, I said, “Let the dog out of the car now.”

Incredulous, his face splitting with that familiar rattlesnake smile, he said, “Are you forgetting who’s the cop? Huh, freak? You forgetting who’s got the gun?”

If I fired the Glock, I might not kill the bastard instantly, even at such close range. Even if the first round stopped his heart in an instant, he might reflexively squeeze off a round that, from a distance of less than two feet, couldn’t miss me.

He broke the impasse: “All right, okay, you want to watch while I do it?”

Incredibly, he half turned in his seat, thrust the barrel of his pistol through one of the inch-square gaps in the steel security grille, and fired at the dog.

The blast rocked the car, and Orson squealed.

“No!” I shouted.

As Stevenson jerked his gun out of the grille, I shot him. The slug punched a hole through my leather jacket and tore open his chest. He fired wildly into the ceiling. I shot him again, in the throat this time, and the window behind him shattered when the bullet passed out of the back of his neck.

26

I sat stunned, as if spellbound by a sorcerer, unable to move, unable even to blink, my heart hanging like an iron plumb bob in my chest, numb to emotion, unable to feel the pistol in my hand, unable to see anything whatsoever, not even the dead man whom I knew to be at the other end of the car seat, briefly blinded by shock, baffled and bound by blackness, temporarily deafened either by the gunfire or perhaps by a desperate desire not to hear even the inner voice of my conscience chattering about consequences.

The only sense that I still possessed was the sense of smell. The sulfurous-carbon stink of gunfire, the metallic aroma of blood, the acidic fumes of urine because Stevenson had fouled himself in his death throes, and the fragrance of my mother’s rose-scented shampoo whirled over me at once, a storm of odor and malodor. All were real except the attar of roses, which was long forgotten but now summoned from memory with all its delicate nuances. Extreme terror gives us back the gestures of our childhood, said Chazal. The smell of that shampoo was my way, in my terror, of reaching out to my lost mother with the hope that her hand would close reassuringly around mine.

In a rush, sight, sound, and all sensation returned to me, jolting me almost as hard as the pair of 9-millimeter bullets had jolted Lewis Stevenson. I cried out and gasped for breath.

Shaking uncontrollably, I pressed the console button that the chief had pressed earlier. The electric locks on the back doors clicked when they disengaged.

I shoved open the door at my side, clambered out of the patrol car, and yanked open the rear door, frantically calling Orson’s name, wondering how I could carry him to the veterinarian’s office in time to save him if he was wounded, wondering how I was going to cope if he was dead. He couldn’t be dead. He was no ordinary dog: He was Orson, my dog, strange and special, companion and friend, only with me for three years but now as essential a part of my dark world as was anyone else in it.

And he wasn’t dead. He bounded out of the car with such relief that he nearly knocked me off my feet. His piercing squeal, in the wake of the gunshot, had been an expression of terror, not pain.

I dropped to my knees on the sidewalk, let the Glock slip out of my hand, and pulled the dog into my arms. I held him fiercely, stroking his head, smoothing his black coat, reveling in his panting, in the fast thudding of his heart, in the swish of his tail, reveling even in the dampish reek of him and in the stale-cereal smell of his biscuit-scented breath.

I didn’t trust myself to speak. My voice was a keystone mortared in my throat. If I managed to break it loose, an entire dam might collapse, a babble of loss and longing might pour out of me, and all the unshed tears for my father and for Angela Ferryman might come in a flood.

I do not allow myself to cry. I would rather be a bone worn to dry splinters by the teeth of sorrow than a sponge wrung ceaselessly in its hands.

Besides, even if I could have trusted myself to speak, words weren’t important here. Though he was certainly a special dog, Orson wasn’t going to join me in spirited conversation—at least not if and until I shed enough of my encumbering reason to ask Roosevelt Frost to teach me animal communication.

When I was able to let go of Orson, I retrieved the Glock and rose to my feet to survey the marina parking lot. The fog concealed most of the few cars and recreational vehicles owned by the handful of people who lived on their boats. No one was in sight, and the night remained silent except for the idling car engine.

Apparently the sound of gunfire had been largely contained in the patrol car and suppressed by the fog. The nearest houses were outside the commercial marina district, two blocks away. If anyone aboard the boats had been awakened, they’d evidently assumed that those four muffled explosions had been nothing more than an engine backfiring or dream doors slamming between the sleeping and the waking worlds.

I wasn’t in immediate danger of being caught, but I couldn’t cycle away and expect to escape blame and punishment. I had killed the chief of police, and though he had no longer been the man whom Moonlight Bay had long known and admired, though he had metamorphosed from a conscientious servant of the people into someone lacking all the essential elements of humanity, I couldn’t prove that this hero had become the very monster that he was sworn to oppose.

Forensic evidence would convict me. Because of the identity of the victim, first-rate police-lab technicians from both county and state offices would become involved, and when they processed the patrol car, they wouldn’t miss anything.

I could never tolerate imprisonment in some narrow candlelit cell. Though my life is limited by the presence of light, no walls must enclose me between the sunset and the dawn. None ever will. The darkness of closed spaces is profoundly different from the darkness of the night; the night has no boundaries, and it offers endless mysteries, discoveries, wonders, opportunities for joy. Night is the flag of freedom under which I live, and I will live free or die.

I was sickened by the prospect of getting back into the patrol car with the dead man long enough to wipe down everything on which I might have left a fingerprint. It would be a futile exercise, anyway, because I’d surely overlook one critical surface.

Besides, a fingerprint wasn’t likely to be the only evidence that I’d left behind. Hairs. A thread from my jeans. A few tiny fibers from my Mystery Train cap. Orson’s hairs in the backseat, the marks of his claws on the upholstery. And no doubt other things equally or more incriminating.