12th of Never

Chapter 68

PROFESSOR PERRY JUDD tried to make sense of the enormous black hole that had opened in front of him. It was like a portal ringed with light, a tunnel of some sort, and he was being pulled through it as if he were being drawn into an eclipse of the sun.

The image was stunning, and the feeling of effortless movement was heady. At the same time, the professor knew that what he was experiencing could not be real.

Either he was dead—or he was having a dream.

A dream.

That had to be it.

He had prepared himself for the possibility of a waking dream by marking an X on the back of his left hand before going to sleep. Now he held out his hands, palms facing away from him, and spread his fingers wide. The bluish light limned each of his fingers, and he could clearly see that there were no Xs, no marks of any kind on the backs of his hands.

He was almost certainly dreaming, but to be sure, he ran another reality check. This time he pushed two fingers of his left hand into the palm of his right.

The fingers went straight through his palm.

He had really done it. He was lucid, aware that he was inside a dream, and that meant that he had control of the story and the ending.

But first—where was he?

He was sure he had never been in this place before, but then the location came to him. This had to be the Aquarium of the Bay. He had seen a video of it on the Web. He had planned to take his nephew there one day.

The main feature of the aquarium was a moving walkway that went through a long glass tunnel, and the fish swam above and around the walkway.

The shapes he saw bobbing in the halo of light were sharks. Perry Judd didn’t feel that this was a dream about sharks. But he did sense danger.

He swung his head from side to side and took in the people who had appeared on the moving walkway with him. There was a girl traveling alone, and two young men talking to one another. Someone else had a camera and was angling for various shots of the sea creatures.

The professor was trying to memorize the sights around him when a sharp, cracking sound tore through his dream. It was a gunshot. He remembered that Sergeant Boxer had told him to look around, to grab the gun, and to remember who the shooter was.

Who had fired?

The professor was startled awake.

He blinked in the blue light of his digital clock, his heart fluttering fast against his ribs like a moth on a lightbulb. He double-checked to be sure. There was his TV. There was his painting of a church in Munich. There was the X on the back of his left hand.

Definitely, he was awake and at his own home.

Still, he was aware that something had happened—or was about to happen—in the Aquarium of the Bay. Trouble was, he had failed to see the shooter. Or had he? Maybe it was one of the people he had seen.

Judd turned on his bedside lamp and called the SFPD. It was only five thirty in the morning, but an operator answered the phone.

“I have to leave a message for Inspector Conklin,” he said. “Tell him I’ll be coming in to see him this morning.”

“Your name, sir?”

“This is Professor Perry Judd.”

“And your number, please.”

Judd gave his number to the operator, who said that she didn’t know what time Inspector Conklin would be coming to work, or if he was coming in at all.

“Tell him that I’ll be there. It cannot wait.”

Judd hung up the phone and closed his eyes. He wanted to fall asleep and find out what happened inside the aquarium. Three hours later, he took a cab to the Hall of Justice and pressed the elevator button that let him out on the third floor. He found the homicide squad assistant behind her desk and demanded to see Inspector Conklin.

“He’s expecting me,” said Professor Judd.