“You ever feel this emptiness, Snow? You ever feel an emptiness so bad, you’ve got to fill it or you’ll die, but you don’t know where the emptiness is or what in the name of God you’re supposed to fill it
with?
”
Now I didn’t understand him
at all,
but I didn’t think that he was in a mood to explain himself, so I looked solemn and nodded sympathetically. “Yes, sir. I know the feeling.”
His brow and cheeks were moist but not from the clammy air; he glistened with greasy sweat. His face was so supernaturally white that the mist seemed to pour from him, boiling coldly off his skin, as though he were the father of all fog. “Comes on you bad at night,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Comes on you anytime, but worse at night.” His face twisted with what might have been disgust. “What kind of damn dog is this, anyway?”
His gun arm stiffened, and I thought I saw his finger tighten on the trigger.
Orson bared his teeth but neither moved nor made a sound.
I quickly said, “He’s just a Labrador mix. He’s a good dog, wouldn’t harm a cat.”
His anger swelling for no apparent reason, Stevenson said, “Just a Labrador mix, huh? The hell he is. Nothing’s
just
anything. Not here. Not now. Not anymore.”
I considered reaching for the Glock in my jacket. I was holding my bike with my left hand. My right hand was free, and the pistol was in my right-hand pocket.
Even as distraught as Stevenson was, however, he was nonetheless a cop, and he was sure to respond with deadly professionalism to any threatening move I made. I didn’t put much faith in Roosevelt’s strange assurance that I was revered. Even if I let the bicycle fall over to distract him, Stevenson would shoot me dead before the Glock cleared my pocket.
Besides, I wasn’t going to pull a gun on the chief of police unless I had no choice but to use it. And if I shot him, that would be the end of my life, a thwarting of the sun.
Abruptly Stevenson snapped his head up, looking away from Orson. He drew a deep breath, then several that were as quick and shallow as those of a hound following the spoor of its quarry. “What’s that?”
He had a keener sense of smell than I did, because I only now realized that an almost imperceptible breeze had brought us a faint hint of the stench from the decomposing sea creature back under the main pier.
Although Stevenson was already acting strangely enough to make my scalp crinkle into faux corduroy, he grew markedly stranger. He tensed, hunched his shoulders, stretched his neck, and raised his face to the fog, as though savoring the putrescent scent. His eyes were feverish in his pale face, and he spoke not with the measured inquisitiveness of a cop but with an eager, nervous curiosity that seemed perverse: “What is that? You smell that? Something dead, isn’t it?”
“Something back under the pier,” I confirmed. “Some kind of fish, I guess.”
“Dead. Dead and rotting. Something…It’s got an edge to it, doesn’t it?” He seemed about to lick his lips. “Yeah. Yeah. Sure does have an interesting edge to it.”
Either he heard the eerie current crackling through his voice or he sensed my alarm, because he glanced worriedly at me and struggled to compose himself. It
was
a struggle. He was teetering on a crumbling ledge of emotion.
Finally the chief found his normal voice—or something that approximated it. “I need to talk to you, reach an understanding. Now. Tonight. Why don’t you come with me, Snow.”
“Come where?”
“My patrol car’s out front.”
“But my bicycle—”
“I’m not arresting you. Just a quick chat. Let’s make sure we understand each other.”
The last thing I wanted to do was get in a patrol car with Stevenson. If I refused, however, he might make his invitation more formal by taking me into custody.
Then, if I tried to resist arrest, if I climbed on my bicycle and pumped the pedals hard enough to make the crank axle smoke—where would I go? With dawn only a few hours away, I had no time to flee as far as the next town on this lonely stretch of coast. Even if I had ample time, XP limited my world to the boundaries of Moonlight Bay, where I could return home by sunrise or find an understanding friend to take me in and give me darkness.
“I’m in a mood here,” Lewis Stevenson said again, through half-clenched teeth, the hardness returning to his voice. “I’m in a real mood. You coming with me?”
“Yes, sir. I’m cool with that.”
Motioning with his pistol, he indicated that Orson and I were to precede him.
I walked my bike toward the end of the entrance pier, loath to have the chief behind me with the gun. I didn’t need to be an animal communicator to know that Orson was nervous, too.
The pier planks ended in a concrete sidewalk flanked by flower beds full of ice plant, the blooms of which open wide in sunshine and close at night. In the low landscape lighting, snails were crossing the walkway, antennae glistening, leaving silvery trails of slime, some creeping from the right-hand bed of ice plant to the identical bed on the left, others laboriously making their way in the opposite direction, as if these humble mollusks shared humanity’s restlessness and dissatisfaction with the terms of existence.
I weaved with the bike to avoid the snails, and although Orson sniffed them in passing, he stepped over them.
From behind us rose the crunching of crushed shells, the squish of jellied bodies tramped underfoot. Stevenson was stepping on not only those snails directly in his path but on every hapless gastropod in sight. Some were dispatched with a quick snap, but he
stomped
on others, came down on them with such force that the slap of shoe sole against concrete rang like a hammer strike.
I didn’t turn to look.
I was afraid of seeing the cruel glee that I remembered too well from the faces of the young bullies who had tormented me throughout childhood, before I’d been wise enough and big enough to fight back. Although that expression was unnerving when a child wore it, the same look—the beady eyes that seemed perfectly reptilian even without elliptical pupils, the hate-reddened cheeks, the bloodless lips drawn back in a sneer from spittle-shined teeth—would be immeasurably more disturbing on the face of an adult, especially when the adult had a gun in his hand and wore a badge.
Stevenson’s black-and-white was parked at a red curb thirty feet to the left of the marina entrance, beyond the reach of the landscape lights, in deep night shade under the spreading limbs of an enormous Indian laurel.
I leaned my bike against the trunk of the tree, on which the fog hung like Spanish moss. At last I turned warily to the chief as he opened the back door on the passenger side of the patrol car.
Even in the murk, I recognized the expression on his face that I had dreaded seeing: the hatred, the irrational but unassuageable anger that makes some human beings more deadly than any other beast on the planet.
Never before had Stevenson disclosed this malevolent aspect of himself. He hadn’t seemed capable of unkindness, let alone senseless hatred. If suddenly he had revealed that he wasn’t the real Lewis Stevenson but an alien life-form mimicking the chief, I would have believed him.
Gesturing with the gun, Stevenson spoke to Orson: “Get in the car, fella.”
“He’ll be all right out here,” I said.
“Get in,” he urged the dog.
Orson peered suspiciously at the open car door and whined with distrust.
“He’ll wait here,” I said. “He never runs off.”
“I want him in the car,” Stevenson said icily. “There’s a leash law in this town, Snow. We never enforce it with you. We always turn our heads, pretend not to see, because of…because a dog is exempted if he belongs to a disabled person.”
I didn’t antagonize Stevenson by rejecting the term
disabled.
Anyway, I was interested less in that one word than in the six words I was sure he had almost said before catching himself:
because of who your mother was.
“But this time,” he said, “I’m not going to sit here while the damn dog trots around loose, crapping on the sidewalk, flaunting that he isn’t on a leash.”
Although I could have noted the contradiction between the fact that the dog of a disabled person was exempt from the leash law and the assertion that Orson was flaunting his leashlessness, I remained silent. I couldn’t win any argument with Stevenson while he was in this hostile state.
“If he won’t get in the car when I tell him to,” Stevenson said, “
you
make him get in.”
I hesitated, searching for a credible alternative to meek cooperation. Second by second, our situation seemed more perilous. I’d felt safer than this when we had been in the blinding fog on the peninsula, stalked by the troop.
“Get the goddamn dog in the goddamn car now!”
Stevenson ordered, and the venom in this command was so potent that he could have killed snails without stepping on them, sheerly with his voice.
Because his gun was in his hand, I remained at a disadvantage, but I took some thin comfort from the fact that he apparently didn’t know that I was armed. For the time being, I had no choice but to cooperate.
“In the car, pal,” I told Orson, trying not to sound fearful, trying not to let my hammering heart pound a tremor into my voice.
Reluctantly the dog obeyed.
Lewis Stevenson slammed the rear door and then opened the front. “Now you, Snow.”
I settled into the passenger seat while Stevenson walked around the black-and-white to the driver’s side and got in behind the wheel. He pulled his door shut and told me to close mine, which I had hoped to avoid doing.
Usually I don’t suffer from claustrophobia in tight spaces, but no coffin could have been more cramped than this patrol car. The fog pressing at the windows was as psychologically suffocating as a dream about premature burial.
The interior of the car seemed chillier and damper than the night outside. Stevenson started the engine in order to be able to switch on the heater.
The police radio crackled, and a dispatcher’s static-filled voice croaked like frog song. Stevenson clicked it off.
Orson stood on the floor in front of the backseat, forepaws on the steel grid that separated him from us, peering worriedly through that security barrier. When the chief pressed a console button with the barrel of his gun, the power locks on the rear doors engaged with a hard sound no less final than the
thunk
of a guillotine blade.
I had hoped that Stevenson would holster his pistol when he got into the car, but he kept a grip on it. He rested the weapon on his leg, the muzzle pointed at the dashboard. In the dim green light from the instrument panel, I thought I saw that his forefinger was now curled around the trigger guard rather than around the trigger itself, but this didn’t lessen his advantage to any appreciable degree.
For a moment he lowered his head and closed his eyes, as though praying or gathering his thoughts.
Fog condensed on the Indian laurel, and drops of water dripped from the points of the leaves, snapping with an unrhythmical
ponk-pank-ping
against the roof and hood of the car.
Casually, quietly, I tucked both hands into my jacket pockets. I closed my right hand around the Glock.
I told myself that, because of my overripe imagination, I was exaggerating the threat. Stevenson was in a foul mood, yes, and from what I had seen behind the police station, I knew that he was not the righteous arm of justice that he had long pretended to be. But this didn’t mean that he had any violent intentions. He might, indeed, want only to talk, and having said his piece, he might turn us loose unharmed.
When at last Stevenson raised his head, his eyes were servings of bitter brew in cups of bone. As his gaze flowed to me, I was again chilled by an impression of inhuman malevolence, as I had been when he’d first stepped out of the gloom beside the marina office, but this time I knew why my harp-string nerves thrummed with fear. Briefly, at a certain angle, his liquid stare rippled with a yellow luminance similar to the eyeshine that many animals exhibit at night, a cold and mysterious inner light like nothing I had ever seen before in the eyes of man or woman.
25
The electric and electrifying radiance passed through Chief Stevenson’s eyes so fleetingly, as he turned to face me, that on any night before this one, I might have dismissed the phenomenon as merely a queer reflection of the instrument-panel lights. But since sundown, I had seen monkeys that were not merely monkeys, a cat that was somehow more than a cat, and I had waded through mysteries that flowed like rivers along the streets of Moonlight Bay, and I had learned to expect significance in the seemingly insignificant.
His eyes were inky again, glimmerless. The anger in his voice was now an undertow, while the surface current was gray despair and grief. “It’s all changed now, all changed, and no going back.”
“What’s changed?”
“I’m not who I used to be. I can hardly remember what I used to be like, the kind of man I was. It’s lost.”
I felt he was talking as much to himself as to me, grieving aloud for this loss of self that he imagined.
“I don’t have anything to lose. Everything that matters has been taken from me. I’m a dead man walking, Snow. That’s all I am. Can you imagine how that feels?”
“No.”
“Because even you, with your shitty life, hiding from the day, coming out only at night like some slug crawling out from under a rock—even you have reasons to live.”
Although the chief of police was an elected official in our town, Lewis Stevenson didn’t seem to be concerned about winning my vote.
I wanted to tell him to go copulate with himself. But there is a difference between showing no fear and begging for a bullet in the head.
As he turned his face away from me to gaze at the white sludge of fog sliding thickly across the windshield, that cold fire throbbed in his eyes again, a briefer and fainter flicker than before yet more disturbing because it could no longer be dismissed as imaginary.
Lowering his voice as though afraid of being overheard, he said, “I have terrible nightmares, terrible, full of sex and blood.”