Fear Nothing (27 page)

“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.

I’d been damn lucky. No one had heard the shots. But by their nature, both luck and time run out, and although my watch contained a microchip rather than a mainspring, I swore that I could hear it ticking.

Orson was nervous, too, vigorously sniffing the air for monkeys or another menace.

I hurried to the back of the patrol car and thumbed the button to release the trunk lid. It was locked, as I’d feared.

Tick, tick, tick.

Steeling myself, I returned to the open front door. I inhaled deeply, held my breath, and leaned inside.

Stevenson sat twisted in his seat, head tipped back against the doorpost. His mouth shaped a silent gasp of ecstasy, and his teeth were bloody, as though he had fulfilled his dreams, had been biting young girls.

Drawn by a meager cross-draft, entering through the shattered window, a scrim of fog floated toward me, as if it were steam rising off the still-warm blood that stained the front of the dead man’s uniform.

I had to lean in farther than I hoped, one knee on the passenger seat, to switch off the engine.

Stevenson’s black-olive eyes were open. No life or unnatural light glimmered in them, yet I half expected to see them blink, swim into focus, and fix on me.

Before the chief’s clammy gray hand could reach out to clutch at me, I plucked the keys from the ignition, backed out of the car, and finally exhaled explosively.

In the trunk I found the large first-aid kit that I expected. From it, I extracted only a thick roll of gauze bandage and a pair of scissors.

While Orson patrolled the entire perimeter of the squad car, diligently sniffing the air, I unrolled the gauze, doubling it again and again into a collection of five-foot loops before snipping it with the scissors. I twisted the strands tightly together, then tied a knot at the upper end, another in the middle, and a third at the lower end. After repeating this exercise, I joined the two multiple-strand lengths together with a final knot—and had a fuse approximately ten feet long.

Tick, tick, tick.

I coiled the fuse on the sidewalk, opened the fuel port on the side of the car, and removed the tank cap. Gasoline fumes wafted out of the neck of the tank.

At the trunk again, I replaced the scissors and what remained of the roll of gauze in the first-aid kit. I closed the kit and then the trunk.

The parking lot remained deserted. The only sounds were the drops of condensation plopping from the Indian laurel onto the squad car and the soft ceaseless padding of my worried dog’s paws.

Although it meant another visit with Lewis Stevenson’s corpse, I returned the keys to the ignition. I’d seen a few episodes from the most popular crime series on television, and I knew how easily even fiendishly clever criminals could be tripped up by an ingenious homicide detective. Or by a best-selling female mystery novelist who solves real murders as a hobby. Or a retired spinster schoolteacher. All this between the opening credits and the final commercial for a vaginal deodorant. I intended to give them—both the professionals and the meddlesome hobbyists—damned little with which to work.

The dead man croaked at me as a bubble of gas broke deep in his esophagus.

“Rolaids,” I advised him, trying unsuccessfully to cheer myself.

I didn’t see any of the four expended brass cartridges on the front seat. In spite of the platoons of amateur sleuths waiting to pounce, and regardless of whether having the brass might help them identify the murder weapon, I didn’t have the nerve to search the floor, especially under Stevenson’s legs.

Anyway, even if I found all the cartridges, there was still a bullet buried in his chest. If it wasn’t too grossly distorted, this wad of lead would feature score marks that could be matched to the singularities of the bore of my pistol, but even the prospect of prison wasn’t sufficient to make me take out my penknife and perform exploratory surgery to retrieve the incriminating slug.

If I’d been a different man than I am, with the stomach for such an impromptu autopsy, I wouldn’t have risked it, anyway. Assuming that Stevenson’s radical personality change—his newfound thirst for violence—was but one symptom of the weird disease he carried, and assuming that this illness could be spread by contact with infected tissues and bodily fluids, this type of grisly wet work was out of the question, which is also why I had been careful not to get any of his blood on me.

When the chief had been telling me about his dreams of rape and mutilation, I’d been sickened by the thought that I was breathing the same air that he’d used and exhaled. I doubted, however, that the microbe he carried was airborne. If it were
that
highly contagious, Moonlight Bay wouldn’t be on a roller-coaster ride to Hell, as he had claimed the town was: It would long ago have arrived in the sulfurous Pit.

Tick, tick, tick.

According to the gauge on the instrument panel, the fuel tank was nearly full. Good. Perfect. Earlier in the night, at Angela’s, the troop had taught me how to destroy evidence and possibly conceal a murder.

The fire should be so intense that the four brass cartridges, the sheet-metal body of the car, and even portions of the heavier frame would melt. Of the late Lewis Stevenson, little more than charred bones would remain, and the soft lead slug would effectively vanish. Certainly, none of my fingerprints, hairs, or clothes fibers would survive.

Another slug had passed through the chief’s neck, pulverizing the window in the driver’s door. It was now lying somewhere out in the parking lot or, with luck, was at rest deep in the ivy-covered slope that rose from the far end of the lot to the higher-situated Embarcadero Way, where it would be all but impossible to find.

Incriminating powder burns marred my jacket. I should have destroyed it. I couldn’t. I loved that jacket. It was cool. The bullet hole in the pocket made it even cooler.

“Gotta give the spinster schoolteachers
some
chance,” I muttered as I closed the front and back doors of the car.

The brief laugh that escaped me was so humorless and bleak that it scared me almost as much as the possibility of imprisonment.

I ejected the magazine from the Glock, took one cartridge from it, which left six, and then slapped it back into the pistol.

Orson whined impatiently and picked up one end of the gauze fuse in his mouth.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said—and then gave him the double take that he deserved.

The mutt might have picked it up solely because he was curious about it, as dogs tend to be curious about everything.

Funny white coil. Like a snake, snake, snake…but not a snake. Interesting. Interesting. Master Snow’s scent on it. Might be good to eat. Almost anything might be good to eat.

Just because Orson picked up the fuse and whined impatiently didn’t necessarily mean that he understood the purpose of it or the nature of the entire scheme I’d concocted. His interest—and uncanny timing—might be purely coincidental.

Yeah. Sure. Like the purely coincidental eruption of fireworks every Independence Day.

Heart pounding, expecting to be discovered at any moment, I took the twisted gauze fuse from Orson and carefully knotted the cartridge to one end of it.

He watched intently.

“Do you approve of the knot,” I asked, “or would you like to tie one of your own?”

At the open fuel port, I lowered the cartridge into the tank. The weight of it pulled the fuse all the way down into the reservoir. Like a wick, the highly absorbent gauze would immediately begin to soak up the gasoline.

Orson ran nervously in a circle:
Hurry, hurry. Hurry quick. Quick, quick, quick, Master Snow.

I left almost five feet of fuse out of the tank. It hung along the side of the patrol car and trailed onto the sidewalk.

After fetching my bicycle from where I’d leaned it against the trunk of the laurel, I stooped and ignited the end of the fuse with my butane lighter. Although the exposed length of gauze was not gasoline-soaked, it burned faster than I expected. Too fast.

I climbed onto my bike and pedaled as if all of Hell’s lawyers and a few demons of this earth were baying at my heels, which they probably were. With Orson sprinting at my side, I shot across the parking lot to the ramped exit drive, onto Embarcadero Way, which was deserted, and then south past the shuttered restaurants and shops that lined the bay front.

The explosion came too soon, a solid
whump
that wasn’t half as loud as I’d anticipated. Around and even ahead of me, orange light bloomed; the initial flare of the blast was refracted a considerable distance by the fog.