Tick Tock

SIX

Under the roof of the silent and unmoving carousel among the herd of colourful horses frozen in mid-gallop, Tommy and Del found a two-person chariot with carved eagles on the sides. They were glad to be out of the rain and to have a chance, however brief, to rest.

Ordinarily the perimeter of the carousel was covered when it was not in use, but this night it stood open to the elements.

Scootie quietly prowled among the horses, circling the elevated platform, apparently on sentry duty, ready to warn them if the demon approached in either its Samaritan guise or any other.

The Balboa Fun Zone, arguably the heart of the pen-insula’s important tourist business, extended for a few blocks along Edgewater Avenue, a pedestrian mall that did not admit vehicular traffic west of Main Street. Numerous gift shops, Pizza Pete’s, ice-cream stands, restaurants, Balboa Saloon, arcades offering video games and pinball and skee-ball, boat-rental operations, bumper cars, a Ferris wheel, the carousel on which Tommy and Del sat, Lazer Tag, docks for various companies offering guided-tour cruises, and other diversions lined Edgewater, with views of the dazzling harbour and its islands to be glimpsed between the attractions on the north side.

In spring, summer, and autumn - or on any warm day in the winter - tourists and sun lovers strolled this promenade, taking a break from the Pacific surf and from the beaches on the opposite side of the narrow penin-sula. Newlyweds, elderly couples, spectacular-looking young women in bikinis, lean and tanned young men in shorts, and children walked-skated-rollerbladed among veterans in wheelchairs and babies in strollers, enjoying the glitter of sunlight on water, eating ice cream cones, roasted corn from Kountry Corn, popsicles, cookies. Laughter and happy chatter mingled with the music from the carousel, the putter of boat engines, and the ceaseless ring-beep-pong-bop from the game arcades.

At two-thirty, on this stormy November morning, the Fun Zone was deserted. The only sounds were those made by the rain as it drummed hollowly on the carousel roof, pinged off the brass poles on the outer circle of horses, snapped against festoons of limp vinyl pennants, and drizzled through the fronds of the queen palms along the harbour side of the promenade. This was a lonely music, the forlorn and tuneless anthem of desolation.

The shops and other attractions were shuttered and dark but for an occasional security lantern. On summer evenings, when augmented by the neon and the spark-ling Tivoli lights of the arcades and rides, the old bronze lampposts with frosted-glass globes - some round, most in the form of urns with finials - provided an appealing and romantic glow; then everything glimmered, includ-ing the great mirror that was the harbour, and the world was scintillant, effervescent. But now the lamplight was strangely bleak, cold, too feeble to prevent the crushing weight of the November night from pressing low over the Fun Zone.

Extracting a shotgun shell from a pocket in her ski jacket, Del spoke in a murmur that would not carry beyond the carousel: ‘Here. You only fired one round, I think.’

‘Yeah,’ Tommy said, matching her soft tone.

‘Keep it fully loaded.’

‘Those poor damn guys,’ he lamented as he slid the shell into the magazine tube on the Mossberg. ‘What horrible deaths.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ she said.

‘They wouldn’t have been there, the thing wouldn’t have been there, if I hadn’t been there.’

‘It’s upsetting,’ she agreed. ‘But you were only trying to stay alive, running for your life, and they stepped in.’

‘Still.’

‘Obviously, they were marked for an unnatural extrac-tion.’

‘Extraction?’

‘From this world. If the thing in the fat man hadn’t gotten them, then they would have been taken in some other unusual way. Like spontaneous combustion. Or an encounter with a lycanthrope.’

‘Lycanthrope? Werewolf?’ He wasn’t able to deal with her weirdness just now, so he changed the subject. ‘Where the hell did you learn to shoot like that? Your mother again?’

‘Daddy. He taught Mom and me, wanted us to be prepared for anything. Pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns. I can handle an Uzi as if I was born with it, and-’

‘Uzi?’

‘Yeah. And when it comes to-’

‘Submachine guns?’

‘-when it comes to knife throwing-’

‘Knife throwing?’ Tommy said, and realized that he had raised his voice.

‘-I’m good enough to put together a stage act and make a living with it in Vegas or even the circus, if I ever had to,’ Del continued in a murmur as she unzipped another pocket and took from it a handful of cartridges for the Desert Eagle. ‘Unfortunately, I’m not half as good at fencing as I’d like to be, though I’ll admit to being first-rate with a crossbow.’

‘He died when you were ten,’ Tommy said. ‘So he taught you all this when you were just a little kid?’

‘Yeah. We’d go out in the desert near Vegas and blow the crap out of empty soda bottles, tin cans, posters of old movie monsters like Dracula and the creature from the Black Lagoon. It was a lot of fun.’

‘What in the name of God was he preparing you for?’

‘Dating.’

‘Dating?’

‘That was his joke. Actually he was preparing me for the unusual life he knew I was going to have.’

‘How could he know?’

Rather than answer the question, Del said, ‘But the truth is, because of the training Daddy gave me, I’ve never been on a date with any guy who intimidated me, never had a problem.’

‘I guess not. I think you’d have to be dating Hannibal Lecter before you’d feel uneasy.’

Pressing the last two rounds into the.44 magazine, she said, ‘I still miss Daddy. He truly understood me - and not many people ever do.’

‘I’m trying,’ Tommy assured her.

Passing by on his sentry duties, Scootie came to Del, put his head in her lap, and whimpered as though he had heard the regret and the sense of loss in her voice.

Tommy said, ‘How could a little girl hold and fire a gun like that? The recoil-’

‘Oh, of course, we started with an air rifle, an air pistol, and then a.22,’ she said, slamming the loaded magazine into the Israeli pistol. ‘When we practiced with rifles or shotguns, Daddy padded my shoulders, crouched behind to brace me, and held the gun with me. He was only familiarizing me with the more powerful weapons, so I’d feel comfortable with them from an early age, wouldn’t be afraid of them when the time came to actually handle them. He died before I really got good with the bigger stuff, and then Mom continued the lessons.’

‘Too bad he never got around to teaching you how to make bombs,’ Tommy said with mock dismay.

‘I’m comfortable with dynamite and most plastic explosives, but they really aren’t particularly useful for self-defence.’

‘Was your father a terrorist?’

‘Furthest thing from it. He thought all politics were stupid. He was a gentle man.’

‘But he just usually had some dynamite laying around to practice making bombs.’

‘Not usually.’

‘Just at Christmas, huh?’

‘Basically, I learned explosives not to make bombs but to disarm them if I had to.’

‘A task we’re all faced with every month or so.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ve only had to do it twice.’ Tommy wanted to believe that she was kidding, but he decided not to ask. His brain was overloaded with new discoveries about her, and in his current weariness, he did not have the energy or the mental capacity to contemplate more of her disconcerting revelations. ‘And I thought my family was strange.’

‘Everyone thinks his family is strange,’ Del said, scratching Scootie behind the ears, ‘but it’s just that, because we’re closer to the people we love, we tend to see them through a magnifying glass, through a thicker lens of emotion, and we exaggerate their eccentricities.’

‘Not in the case of your family,’ he said. ‘Magnifying glass or no magnifying glass, it’s a strange clan.’

Scootie returned to his patrol, padding quietly away through the motionless stampede of wooden horses.

As Del zipped shut the pocket from which she had taken the ammunition, she said, ‘The way I see it, your family might have a prejudice against blondes, but when they see how much I’ve got to offer, they’ll learn to like me.’

Grateful that she couldn’t see him blush in this gloom, Tommy said, ‘Never mind expertise with guns. Can you cook? That’s a big deal in my family.’

‘Ah, yes, the family of fighting bakers. Well, I’ve picked up a lot from my folks. Daddy won several prizes in chilli-cooking contests all across Texas and the Southwest, and Mom graduated from Cordon Bleu.’

‘Was that while she was a ballerina?’

‘Right after.’

He checked his watch - 2:37. ‘Maybe we better get moving again.’

Another siren rose in the distance.

Del listened long enough to be sure that the siren was drawing nearer rather than receding. ‘Let’s wait a while. We’re going to have to find new wheels and hit the road again, but I don’t want to be hot-wiring a car when the streets around here are crawling with cops.’

‘If we stay too long in one place-’

‘We’re okay for a while. You sleepy?’

‘Couldn’t sleep if I tried.’

‘Eyes itchy and burning?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘But I’ll be okay.’

‘Your neck aches so bad you can hardly hold up your head,’ she said, as if she could feel his discomfort.

‘I’m alert enough. Don’t worry about me,’ he said, and with one hand he squeezed the nape of his neck as if he could pull the pain out of his flesh.

She said, ‘You’re weary to the bone, poor baby. Turn away from me a little. Let me work on you.’

‘Work on me?’

‘Move your butt a little, tofu boy, come on,’ she said, nudging him with her hip.

The chariot was narrow, but he was able to turn enough to allow her to massage his shoulders and the back of his neck. Her slender hands were surprisingly strong, but though she pressed hard at times, she relieved rather than caused pain.

Sighing, he said, ‘Who taught you this?’

‘It’s just a thing I know. Like my painting.’

They were both quiet for minute, except for Tommy’s occasional groan as Del’s fingers found another coil of tension and slowly unwound it.

The diligent Scootie passed, out at the edge of the platform, as black as the night itself and as silent as a spirit.

As she worked her thumbs up and down the nape of Tommy’s neck, Del said, ‘Have you ever been abducted by aliens?’

‘Oh, boy.’

‘What?’

‘Here we go again.’

‘You mean you have?’

‘Been abducted? Of course not. I mean, here you go again, getting weird.’

‘You don’t believe in extraterrestrial intelligences?’

‘I believe the universe is so big that there’s got to be lots of other intelligent species in it.’

‘So what’s weird?’

‘But I don’t believe they come all the way across the galaxy to kidnap people and take them up in flying saucers and examine their genitals.’

‘They don’t just examine the genitals.’

‘I know, I know. Sometimes they take the abductee to Chicago for beer and pizza.’

She lightly, chastisingly slapped the back of his head. ‘You’re being sarcastic.’

‘A little.’

‘It’s not becoming to you.’

‘Listen, an alien species, vastly more intelligent than we are, creatures millions of years more evolved than we are, probably wouldn’t have any interest in us at all - and certainly wouldn’t be interested enough to spend so much manpower harassing a bunch of ordinary citizens.’

Massaging his scalp now, Del said, ‘Personally, I believe in alien abductions.’

‘I am not surprised.’

‘I believe they’re worried about us.’

‘The aliens?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Why would they be worried about us?’

‘We’re such a troubled species, so confused, self-destructive. I think the aliens want to help us achieve enlightenment.’

‘By examining our genitals? Then those guys sitting ringside at nude-dancing clubs only want to help the girls on the stage to achieve enlightenment.’

From behind him, she reached around to his forehead, drawing light circles on his brow with her fingers. ‘You’re such a wise guy.’

‘I write detective novels.’

‘Maybe you’ve even been abducted,’ she said.

‘Not me.’

‘You wouldn’t remember.’

‘I’d remember,’ he assured her.

‘Not if the aliens didn’t want you to.’

‘Just a wild shot in the dark here - but I bet you think you've been abducted.’

She stopped massaging his brow and pulled him around to face her again. Her murmur fell to a con-spiratorial whisper: ‘What if I told you there are a few nights when I’ve had missing hours, blank spots, where I just seem to have blacked out, gone into a fugue state or something. All abductees report these missing hours,

these holes in their memories where their abduction experiences have been erased or suppressed.’

‘Del, dear sweet loopy Del, please don’t be offended, please understand that I say this with affection: I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that you had a couple of these missing hours every day of the week.’

Puzzled, she said, ‘Why would I be offended?’

‘Never mind.’

‘Anyway, I don’t have them every day of the week -only one or two days a year.’

‘What about ghosts?’ he asked.

‘What about them?’

‘Do you believe in ghosts?’

‘I’ve even met a few,’ she said brightly. ‘What about the healing power of crystals?’ She shook her head. ‘They can’t heal, but they can focus your psychic power.’

‘Out-of-body experiences?’

‘I’m sure it can be done, but I like my body too much to want to leave it even for a short time.’

‘Remote viewing?’

‘That’s easy. Pick a town.’

‘What?’

‘Name a town.’

‘Fresno,’ he said.

With bubbly confidence, she said, ‘I could describe any room in any building in Fresno - where I’ve never been in my life, by the way - and if we drove up there tomorrow, you’d see it was just like I said.’

‘What about Big Foot?’

She put a hand over her mouth to stifle her giggle. ‘You’re such a goof, Tuong Tommy. Big Foot is bull-shit, invented by the tabloids to sell newspapers to gullible fools.’

He kissed her.

She kissed him too. She kissed him better than he had ever been kissed before. She had a talent for it, like throwing knives.

When at last he pulled back from her, Tommy said, ‘I’ve never met anyone remotely like you, Deliverance Payne - and I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.’

‘One thing’s for sure. If it had been any other woman who picked you up from your burning car, you wouldn’t have lived half this long.’

That was inarguably true. No other woman - no other person - he had ever met would have reacted with such equanimity when the demon had slammed against the window and fastened itself to the glass with its hideous sucker pads. No one else could have done the stunt driving necessary to detach the repulsive beast from the van - and perhaps no one else, even having seen the creature, would have accepted Tommy’s devil-doll story so unequivocally.

‘There is such a thing as fate,’ she told him.

‘I suppose there might be.’

‘There is. Destiny. It’s not written in stone, however. On a spiritual level, completely unconsciously, we make our destinies for ourselves.’

Bewilderment and joy swelled in Tommy, and he felt as though he were a child just beginning to unwrap a wonderful gift. ‘That doesn’t sound as totally crazy to me as it would have an hour or two ago.’

‘Of course, it doesn’t. I suspect that while I wasn’t looking, I’ve made you my destiny, and it’s beginning to seem as if you’ve made me yours.’

Tommy had no answer to that. His heart was pound-ing. He had never felt this way before. Even if he’d had a computer keyboard in front of him and time to think, he would not easily have been able to put these new feelings into words.

Abruptly his joyful mood and sense of impending tran-scendence were diminished when a strange slithering sensation crept up the hollow of his spine. He shiv-ered.

‘Cold?’ she asked.

‘No.’

As sometimes happens along the coast, the air tem-perature had bottomed out after midnight; it was rising again. The sea was an efficient heat sink that stored up the warmth of the sun during the balmy day and gradually released it after darkness fell.

The slithering in the spine came again, and Tommy said, ‘It’s just a weird feeling..

‘Oooh, I like weird feelings.’

‘... maybe a premonition.’

‘Premonition? You’re getting more interesting by the moment, Tuong Tommy. Premonition of what?’

He looked around uneasily at the tenebrous forms of the carousel horses. ‘I… don’t quite… know…

Then he suddenly became aware that his neck and shoulders were no longer sore. His headache had pas-sed too.

Astonished, he said, ‘That was an incredible massage.’

‘You’re welcome.’

In fact, no pain lingered in any muscle in his body, not even in those that he had bruised when he had been tackled on the concrete patio. He was not sleepy, either, and his eyes no longer itched and burned as before. Indeed, he felt wide-awake, energetic, and better than he had felt before this entire pursuit had begun.

Frowning at Del in the gloom, he said, ‘Hey, how did-’

Scootie interrupted, thrusting his head between them and whining fearfully.

‘It’s coming,’ Del said, rising from the chariot.

Tommy snatched the Mossberg off the carousel floor.

Already Del was easing between the horses, using them for cover but moving closer to the edge of the platform for a better view of the promenade.

Tommy joined her behind a great black stallion with bared teeth and wild eyes.

Standing almost on point and utterly still, like a hunt-ing dog in a field where a pheasant had been spotted in the brush, Scootie stared east along lamp lit Edgewater Avenue, past Anchors Away Boat Rentals and Original Harbour Cruises toward Balboa Beach Treats. Except for his smaller size, he might have been one of the carved animals waiting in mid-stampede for sunshine and for the riders who would come with it.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Tommy whispered.

‘Wait.’

‘Why?’

‘I want to see it better,’ she said, indicating the three-globe streetlamp past which the fat man would have to come. Her words were almost as faint as exhalations.

‘I have no desire to see it better.’

‘Anyway, we have the guns. We can knock it down again.’

‘We might not be lucky this time.’

‘Scootie can try to misdirect it.’

‘You mean lead it away from us?’

Del didn’t reply.

Ears pricked, head held high, Scootie was clearly ready to do whatever his mistress demanded of him.

Maybe the dog could outrun the creature. Although the thing posing as the portly Samaritan apparently was a supernatural entity, immortal and ultimately unstoppable, it too seemed bound by some of the laws of physics, which was why the hard impact of high-calibre ammunition could halt it, knock it down, delay it; consequently, there was no reason to assume that it could move as fast as Scootie, who was smaller, lower to the ground, and designed by nature for speed.

‘But the thing won’t be lured away by the dog,’ Tommy whispered. ‘Del, it isn’t interested in the dog. It only wants me… and maybe you now.’

‘Hush,’ she said.

In the wintry light from the frosted globes on the nearest lamp, the falling rain appeared to be sleet. The concrete walkway glistened as though coated with ice.

Beyond the light, the rain darkened to tarnished silver and then to ash grey, and out of the greyness came the fat man, walking slowly along the centre of the deserted promenade.

At Tommy’s side, Scootie twitched but made no sound. Holding the shotgun in both hands, Tommy hunched lower behind the carousel stallion. In the windless night, he stared out at the promenade past the perpetually wind-tossed tail of the carved horse.

At the other end of the leaping stallion, Del shrank herself too, watching the Samaritan from under the horse’s neck.

Like a dirigible easing along the ground toward its berth, the fat man advanced as if he were drifting rather than walking, making no splashing sounds on the puddled pavement.

Tommy felt the night grow chillier, as though the demon moved in clouds of cold sufficiently powerful to damp the effect of the harbour’s slow release of the day’s stored heat.

At first the Samaritan-thing was only a grey mass in the grey static of the rain, but then its image cleared as it came forth into the lamplight. It was slightly larger than before, but not as large as it should have been if, indeed, it had devoured two men, every scrap of flesh and splinter of bone.

Realizing how absurd it was to try to rationalize the biology of a supernatural entity, Tommy wondered again if his sanity had fled sometime earlier in the night.

The Samaritan-thing still wore the raincoat, though that garment was punctured and torn, apparently by gunfire. The hood lay rumpled at the back of its neck, and its head was exposed.

The thing’s face was human but inhumanly hard and perhaps no longer capable of gentler expressions, and at a distance the eyes seemed to be human, as well. Most likely this was the moon-round face of the fat man who had stopped to lend assistance at the scene of the Corvette crash. The mind and soul of the fat man were long gone, however, and the thing wearing his form was an entity of such pure hatred and savagery that it could not prevent its true nature from darkling through even the soft features of a face well suited to smiles and laughter.

As the thing moved more directly into the December-pale light, no more than forty feet away, Tommy saw that it cast three distinct shadows, when he might have expected that, like a vampire, it would cast none. For a moment he thought that the shadows were a freakish effect of the three globes on the old streetlamp, but then he noted that they stretched across the wet pavement at angles unrelated to the source of illumination.

When he returned his attention to the creature’s face, he saw its pudgy features change. A far leaner and utterly different face metamorphosed on the rotund body; the nose became more hawkish, the jawline jutted, and the ears flattened tighter to the skull. The rain-soaked mop of thick black hair crinkled into lank blond curls. Then a third countenance replaced the second: that of a slightly older man with brush-cut, iron-grey hair and the square features of the quintessential army drill sergeant.

As he watched the Samaritan’s moon-round visage reappear, Tommy suspected that the other two faces were those of the unlucky men whom the creature had slaughtered a short while ago on the patio behind that Harbour side house. He shuddered - and feared that the demon would hear the chattering of his teeth even at a distance of forty feet, even through the screening tattoo of the rain.

The beast stepped to the centre of the light fall from the lamp, where it stopped. Its eyes were dark and human one moment, radiant green and unearthly the next.

Because Scootie’s flank was against Tommy’s left leg, he felt the dog shiver.

From the centre of the promenade, the creature sur-veyed the Fun Zone around it, beginning with the carousel, which was elevated two feet above the public walkway and partially screened by a low, green wrought-iron fence. The terrible eyes, serpent bright and serpent mean, seemed to fix on Tommy, and he could sense the beast’s hellish hunger.

The old carousel was crowded with shadows that outnumbered the riders who, for decades, had mounted its tail-chasing steeds, so it seemed unlikely that Tommy and Del and Scootie could be seen in such blackish shelter, as long as they remained still. Yet the hateful demon looked upon the world through extraordinary eyes, and Tommy became convinced that it had spotted him as easily as it would have if he had been standing in noontime sun.

But the creature’s gaze slid away from him. The demon studied Bay Burger to the west, then looked north across the promenade to the dark Ferris wheel and the Fun Zone Boat Company.

It knows we’re nearby, Tommy thought.

Opposite the elevated carousel were lush palm trees gracing an open-air dining terrace with views of boat docks and the harbour beyond. Turning its back to the horses, the demon slowly surveyed the fixed tables, benches, trash containers, empty bicycle racks, and drip-ping trees.

On the terrace, two additional three-globe lampposts shed more of the icy light that seemed, in this strange night, to reveal less than it should. The area was well enough illuminated, however, for the creature to ascer-tain, at a glance, that its prey was not hiding there. Nevertheless, it spent an inordinate amount of time studying the terrace, as if doubting its own eyes, as if it thought that Tommy and Del were able, chameleon-like, to assume the visual character of any background and effectively disappear.

Finally the beast looked west again along the prom-enade and then focused once more on the carousel. Its radiant gaze travelled over the shadowed horses only briefly before it turned to stare east, back the way that it had come, as if it suspected that it had passed their hiding place.

It seemed confused. Indeed, its frustration was almost palpable. The thing sensed that they were close, but it could not catch their scent - or whatever more exotic spoor it tracked.

Tommy realized that he was holding his breath. He let it out and inhaled slowly through his open mouth, half convinced that even a breath drawn too sharply would instantly attract the hunter’s attention.

Considering that the creature had tracked them many miles across the county to the New World Saigon Bakery and later had found them again at Del’s house, its current inability to detect them from only forty feet away was baffling.

The creature turned to the carousel.

Tommy held his breath again.

The serpent-eyed Samaritan raised its plump hands and moved its flattened palms in circles in the rain-filled air, as though wiping off a dirty pane of glass.

Seeking psychic impressions, some sign of us, trying to get a clearer view, Tommy thought.

He tightened his grip on the Mossberg.

Round and round, round and round, the pale hands moved, like radar dishes, seeking signals.

Tick.

Tock.

Tommy sensed that their time and luck were rapidly running out, that the demon’s inhuman senses would lock onto them at any second.

Sailing down from the night above the harbour, wings thrumming, as ethereal as an angel but as swift as a flash of light, a large seagull swooped past the demon’s pale hands and arced up into the darkness from which it had come.

The Samaritan-thing lowered its hands.

The gull plummeted once more, wings cleaving the chilled air and the rain in a breathtaking display of graceful aerobatics. As radiant as a haunting spirit in the frost-white light, it swept past the demon’s upraised hands again, and then rocketed heavenward in a spiral.

The Samaritan-thing peered up at the bird, turning to watch it as it wheeled across the sky.

Something important was happening, something mysterious and profound, which Tommy could not comprehend.

He glanced at Del for her reaction, but her attention remained riveted on the demon, and he could not see her face.

At Tommy’s side, flank pressed against his leg, the Labrador quivered.

The seagull circled back across the harbour and swooped down into the Fun Zone again. Flying only a few feet above the surface of the promenade, it sailed past the demon and disappeared between the shops and arcades to the east.

The serpent-eyed Samaritan stared intently after the gull, clearly intrigued. Its arms hung at its sides, and it repeatedly flexed and fisted its plump hands as though working off the excess energy of rage and frustration.

From overhead and west near the stilled Ferris wheel came the thrumming of many wings, as eight or ten seagulls descended in a flock.

The demon swung around to face them. Breaking out of their steep dive only a few feet above the ground, the gulls streaked after the first bird, swarming straight toward the demon and then parting. into two groups that swept around it, disappearing east on Edgewater Avenue. None of them cawed or shrieked in their characteristic manner; but for the air-cutting whoosh of their wings, they passed in eerie silence,

Captivated, curious, the Samaritan-thing faced east to watch them depart.

It took a step after them, another step, but then halted.

Through the wintry lamplight fell sleet-white rain. The demon took another step east. Stopped. Stood swaying.

At the nearby docks, boats creaked on the rising tide, and a halyard clink-clink-clinked against a steel mast.

The Samaritan-thing directed its attention once more to the carousel.

Out of the west came a drumming different from - and louder than - the rain.

The beast turned toward the Ferris wheel, tilting its face up, peering into the bottomless black sky, raising its plump white hands, as though either seeking the source of the drumming or preparing to fend off an assault.

Out of the swarming darkness above the harbour, birds descended once more, not merely eight or ten, but a hundred birds, two hundred, three hundred, seagulls and pigeons and sparrows and blackbirds and crows and hawks, even several enormous and startlingly prehistoric-looking blue heron, beaks open but producing no sound, a river of feathers and small shiny eyes, pour-ing down over the Ferris wheel, along the promenade, splitting into two streams to pass the demon, and then rejoining in a single surging mass to disappear east between the shops and arcades, and still they came, a hundred more and then a hundred behind them, and hundreds arcing down after them, as though the sky would disgorge birds forever, the drumming of frantic pinions reverberating off every hard surface with such formidable volume that it was reminiscent of the freight-train rumble of a medium-magnitude earthquake.

On the carousel, Tommy felt the vibration of the wings, waves of pressure against his face and against his marvelling eyes, and his tympanic membranes began to flutter in sympathy, so that it felt as though the wings themselves, not merely the sound of them, were in his ears. The humid air carried the faint ammonia scent of damp feathers.

He remembered something that Del had said earlier in the night: The world is full of strange stuff Don’t you watch ‘The X Files’?

Although the spectacle of the birds left Tommy as clueless as he was wonderstruck, he suspected that Del understood what was happening, that what was deepest mystery to him was as clear as rainwater to her.

With the apparently infinite flock swooping around the demon, it turned away from the Ferris wheel, and stared east toward where the birds disappeared into the night past the Balboa Pavilion. It hesitated. Took a step in that direction. Stopped. Took another step.

As though finally interpreting the winged visitation as a sign that it could not ignore, the beast broke into a run, drawn by the birds in the night ahead of it, encouraged by the birds rocketing past on both sides of it, harried by the birds behind it. The torn raincoat flapped like great tattered wings, but the Samaritan-thing remained earthbound, borne east by birds and bird shadows.

For perhaps a minute after the Samaritan-thing passed out of sight, the birds continued to descend from the stormy sky above the Ferris wheel to the west, sail along Edgewater Avenue past the carousel, and disappear to the east. Gradually the flock grew thinner, until it ended with a few blackbirds, two gulls, and a single blue heron at least three feet tall.

The blackbirds abruptly broke from their pell-mell eastward flight, spiralled over the dining terrace as if battling one another, and then fell to the promenade, where they fluttered on the wet concrete as though stunned.

The two seagulls landed on the pavement, stumbled forward, flopped on their sides, squawked in distress, sprang to their feet, and wobble-walked in circles, bob-bing their heads, apparently dazed and confused.

Stalk-legged and ungainly in appearance, the giant blue heron was nevertheless a graceful creature - except in this instance. It tottered off the promenade onto the dining terrace, weaving around the boles of the palm trees, curling and bending its long neck as if the muscles were so loose that it couldn’t hold its head up, in general performing as if inebriated.

One by one the blackbirds stopped flopping on the con-crete, hopped onto their feet, shook themselves, spread their wings, and soared into the air.

The pair of gulls regained their composure. They also took wing and disappeared into the deep black sky above the harbour.

Having regained its equilibrium, the heron sprang onto one of the tables on the dining terrace and stood erect, its head held high, surveying the night on all sides, as if surprised to find itself in this place. Then it, too, departed.

Tommy sucked in a deep cool breath and blew it out and said, ‘What the hell was that?’

‘Birds,’ Del said.

‘I know they were birds, even a blind man would know they were birds, but what were they doing?’

The dog shook itself, whined, and padded to Del rubbing against her as if for comfort.

‘Good Scootie,’ she said, crouching to scratch the dog behind the ears. ‘Him were so quiet, so still. Him good baby, him is, mommy’s little Scootie-wootums.’

Scootie wagged his tail happily and chuffed.

To Tommy, Del said, ‘We better get out of here.’

‘You haven’t answered my question.’

‘You have so many questions,’ she said.

‘Right now, only this one about the birds.’

Rising from beside the dog, she said, ‘Will you feel better if I scratch behind your ears too?’

‘Del, damn it!’

‘They were just birds. Agitated about something.’

‘More than that,’ he disagreed.

‘Everything is more than it seems, but nothing is as mysterious as it appears to be.’

‘I want a real answer, not metaphysics.’

‘Then you tell me.’

‘What the hell is going on here, Del, what have I gotten into the middle of, what is this all about?’

Instead of answering, she said, ‘It might come back. We better get moving.’

Frustrated, he followed her and Scootie off the carou-sel and into the rain. They went down the steps to Edgewater Avenue along which the thousands of birds had flocked.

At the end of the wall and the iron railing that defined the raised area where the carousel stood, they stopped and peeked out warily along the Fun Zone, east to where the demon had disappeared. The beast was nowhere to be seen. All of the birds were gone as well.

Scootie led them onto the promenade.

A few dozen feathers in different hues were stuck to the wet concrete or floated in the puddles. Otherwise, it would have been easy to believe that the birds had not been real, but a phenomenal and phantasmagoric illusion.

‘This way,’ Del said, and she headed briskly west, the opposite direction from that in which the Samaritan-thing had gone.

‘Are you a witch?’ Tommy asked.

‘Certainly not.’

‘That’s suspicious.’

‘What?’ she asked.

‘Such a direct answer. You never give them.’

‘I always give direct answers. You just don’t listen to them properly.’

As they passed between the Fun Zone Game Room and the Fun Zone Boat Company, between Mrs. Fields Cookies and the deserted Ferris wheel, Tommy said exasperatedly, ‘Del, I’ve been listening all night, and I still haven’t heard anything that makes sense.’

‘That just proves what bad ears you have. You better make an appointment to see a good audiologist. But you sure do kiss a lot better than you hear, tofu boy.’

He had forgotten the kiss that they had shared on the carousel. How could he possibly have forgotten the kiss? Even with the sudden arrival of the Samaritan-thing followed by the astonishing flock of birds, how could he have forgotten that kiss?

Now his lips burned with the memory of her lips, and he tasted the sweetness of her darting tongue as though it was still in his mouth.

Her mention of the kiss left him speechless.

Maybe that had been her intention.

Just past the Ferris wheel at the intersection of Edgewater Avenue and Palm Street, Del stopped as if not sure which way to go.

Directly ahead, Edgewater was still a pedestrian promenade, though they were nearing the end of the Fun Zone.

Palm Street entered from the left. Though no parking was allowed along it, the street was open to vehicular traffic because it terminated at the boarding ramp to the Balboa Ferry.

At this hour no traffic moved on Palm, because the ferry was closed for the night. In the docking slip at the foot of the ramp, one of the barge-type, three-car ferries creaked softly, wallowing on the high tide.

They could turn left on Palm and leave the Fun Zone for the next street to the south, which was Bay Avenue. In the immediate vicinity, it was not a residential street, but they might still find a parked car or two that Del could hot-wire.

Tommy was thinking like a thief. Or at least he was thinking like a thief’s apprentice. Maybe blondes - at least this blonde - were every bit the corrupting influence that his mother had always believed them to be.

He didn’t care.

He could still taste the kiss.

For the first time, he felt as tough and adaptable and suave as his detective, Chip Nguyen.

Beyond Bay Avenue was Balboa Boulevard, the main drag for the length of the peninsula. With police no doubt still coming and going from the scene of the shooting farther east, Tommy and Del would be too noticeable on the well-lighted boulevard, where at this hour they would probably be the only pedestrians.

Scootie growled, and Del said, ‘It’s coming back.’

For an instant Tommy didn’t understand what she meant, and then he understood too well. Bringing up the shotgun, he spun around to face east. The promenade was deserted as far as he could see, and even at night in the rain he could see past the carousel and as far as the Balboa Pavilion at the entrance to the Fun Zone.

‘It doesn’t know exactly where we are yet,’ she said, ‘but it’s coming back this way.’

‘Intuition again?’ he asked sarcastically.

‘Or whatever. And I don’t think we can outrun it on foot.’

‘So we’ve got to find a car,’ he said, still keeping a watch on the east end of the Fun Zone, expecting the Samaritan-thing to come racing toward them, birdless and furious.

‘Car, no. That’s too dangerous. That means going out toward the boulevard where a cop might pass by and see us and think we’re suspicious.’

‘Suspicious? What’s suspicious about two heavily armed people and a big strange black dog on the street at three in the morning in the middle of a storm?’

‘We’ll steal a boat,’ Del said.

Her announcement drew his attention away from the promenade. ‘A boat?’

‘It’ll be fun,’ she said.

Already she and Scootie were on the move, and Tommy glanced east along the deserted amusement area once more before scrambling after the woman and the dog.

Past the entrance ramp to the ferry was Balboa Boat Rentals, a business that offered a variety of sailing skiffs, small motor boats, and kayaks to the tourist trade.

Tommy didn’t know how to sail, wasn’t sure that he would be able to operate a motor boat, and didn’t relish paddling out onto the dark rain-lashed harbour in a kayak. ‘I’d prefer a car.’

Del and Scootie ran past the shuttered rental facil-ity and departed the open promenade. They passed between a couple of dark buildings and went to the sea wall.

Tommy followed them through a gate and along a pier. Though he wore rubber-soled shoes, the rain-soaked planks were slippery.

They were in what appeared to be a small marina area where docking space could be rented, though some of the docks to the west were evidently private. A line of boats - some commercial party boats, some charter-fishing craft, and a few private craft big enough to be classified as full-blown yachts - were fled up side by side in the pounding rain, dimly revealed by the pier security lamps.

Del and Scootie hurried along a dock head serving several slips and moorings, looking over ten boats before stopping at a sleek white double-deck cruiser. ‘This is good,’ she said as Tommy joined them.

‘Are you kidding? You’re going to take this? It’s huge!’

‘Not so big. Bluewater 563, fifty-six-foot length, four-teen-foot beam.’

‘We can’t handle this - how could we ever handle this?

- we need a whole crew to handle this,’ Tommy babbled, wishing that he didn’t sound so panicky.

‘I can handle it just swell’ she assured him with her usual ebullience. ‘These Bluewater yachts are sweet, really sweet, about as easy as driving a car.’

‘I can drive a car, but I can’t drive one of these.’

‘Hold this.’ She handed him the.44 Magnum and moved out along the finger of the dock to which the Bluewater was tied.

Following her, he said, ‘Del, wait.’

Pausing briefly to untie the bow line from a dock cleat, she said, ‘Don’t worry. This baby’s got less than two feet of draft, a windage-reducing profile, and the hull’s after sections are virtually flat-’

‘You might as well be talking alien abductions again.’

‘-two deep, wide-spaced propeller pockets give it a whole lot more turning leverage,’ she continued as she passed three smaller lines and went to the back of the craft, where she untied the stern line from another dock cleat, coiled it, and tossed it aboard. ‘You have real shaft-angle efficiency with this sweetheart. Twenty-one tons, but I’ll make it pirouette.’

‘Twenty-one tons,’ he worried, following her back to midships. ‘Where are you planning on taking this -Japan?’

‘No, it’s a coastal cruiser. You wouldn’t want to take this too far out on the open sea. Anyway, we’re just going across the harbour to Balboa Island, where the police aren’t all agitated. We can get a car there without being spotted.’

As Del unzipped her ski jacket and stripped out of it, Tommy said, ‘Is this piracy?’

‘Not if no one’s aboard. Ordinary theft,’ she assured him brightly, handing her jacket to him.

‘What’re you doing?’

‘I’m going to have my hands full with the boat, so you’re our only line of defence. The jacket pockets are full of spare ammo. You might need it. Position yourself on the bow deck, and if the damn thing shows up, do what’s necessary to keep it from getting aboard.

As the skin crawled on the nape of his neck, Tommy looked back across the dock, along the pier and east to the gate through which they had come from the Fun Zone. The Samaritan-thing was not yet in sight.

‘It’s getting close,’ she assured him.

Her voice was no longer at his side, and when he turned to her, he saw that she had already climbed aboard the yacht through the gap in the port railing.

Scootie was also aboard, ascending the port-side steps to the open upper deck.

‘What about these lines?’ Tommy asked, indicating the three dock ties that she had not cast off.

‘Forward spring, after spring, and breast line. I’ll take care of them. You just get in position on the bow.’

He shoved the Desert Eagle under the waistband of his jeans, praying to God he wouldn’t stumble and fall and accidentally blow off his manhood. Draping Del’s jacket over the shotgun in his left hand, he grabbed the railing with his right hand, and pulled himself aboard.

As he started forward, another worry occurred to him, and he turned to Del. ‘Hey, don’t you need keys or something to start it?’

‘No.’

‘For God’s sake, it can’t be like an outboard motor with a pull cord.’

‘I have my ways,’ she assured him.

In spite of the deep gloom, he could see that her smile was even more enigmatic than any with which she had previously favoured him.

She leaned toward him, kissed him lightly on the mouth, and then said, ‘Hurry.’

He went forward to the open bow deck. At the foremost point of the yacht, he stepped into the slightly depressed well in which was mounted the anchor winch. He dropped the jacket, which wasn’t going anywhere because it weighed about ten pounds with all the ammo in its pockets.

With a sigh of relief at not having been neutered, he gingerly withdrew the pistol from his waistband and placed it on top of the jacket, where he could easily get hold of it if the need arose.

The rain-swept docks were still deserted.

A halyard rattled mutedly against a mast on a sailboat. Dock rollers creaked and rasped over concrete pilings, and jammed rubber fenders squeaked between a boat hull and a dock.

The water was oil-black and had a faint briny smell. In the detective novels he wrote, this was the cold, murky, secret-keeping water into which villains some-times dropped chain-wrapped victims in concrete boots. In other writers’ books, such water was home to great white sharks, giant killer squid, and sea serpents.

He looked back at the dark windows of the enclosed lower deck, immediately behind him, wondering where Del had gone.

The smaller top deck began farther aft, and as he raised his gaze to it, soft amber light appeared at the windshield of what might be an upper helm station. Then he glimpsed Del as she slipped behind the wheel and looked over the instrumentation.

When Tommy checked the docks again, nothing moved on them, although he wouldn’t have been surprised to see policemen, harbour policemen, Coast Guardsmen, FBI agents, and so many other officers of one law-enforcement agency or another that the Samaritan-thing, if it showed up, would be unable to shoulder its way through the crowd. He had probably broken more laws tonight than in his entire previous thirty years combined.

The Bluewater’s twin diesel engines chugged, coughed, and then turned over with a hard rumble of power. The foredeck vibrated under Tommy’s shoes.

He looked toward the top-deck helm again and saw, beside Del, Scootie’s head, ears pricked. The Labrador was apparently standing with his forepaws on the instru-ment board, and Del was patting his big head as if to say, Good dog.

For some reason he couldn’t grasp, Tommy was reminded of the swarming birds. He flashed back, as well, to the courtyard of Del’s house, when they had entered from the street with the Samaritan in pursuit of them, and the previously locked front door had seemed to be open before she could have reached it. Abruptly he felt poised on the brink of a satori again, but then the moment passed without bringing him enlightenment.

This time, when he turned his attention to the docks, he saw the Samaritan-thing hurtling through the gate at the sea wall, no more than two hundred feet away, raincoat billowing like a cape behind it, no longer dazzled by birds, its eyes on the prize.

‘Go, go!’ Tommy urged Del as the yacht began to ease backward out of its slip.

The demon descended to the dock head and raced westward along the base of the sea wall, passing all of the boats that Del had rejected.

Standing in the anchor well, Tommy held the Mossberg in both hands, hoping the creature would never get close enough to require the use of the shotgun.

The yacht was halfway out of the slip and moving faster by the second.

Tommy heard the thudding of his own heart, and then he heard an even louder pounding: the hollow booming of the demon’s footfalls on the dock planks.

The yacht was three-quarters of the way out of the slip, and waves of black water rolled in where it had been, slapping the dock.

Skidding on the wet planks, the fat-man-that-wasn’t-a-fat-man reached the head of the slip and sprinted onto the port-side finger, desperately trying to catch them before they reversed all the way into the channel.

The beast was close enough for Tommy to see its radiant green eyes in the pale face of the Samaritan, as improbable and frightening in the countenance of the fat man as in that of the rag doll.

The Bluewater reversed all the way out of the slip, churning hard through water now festooned with gar-lands of phosphorescent foam.

The demon sprinted to the end of the port-side finger of the slip just as the yacht pulled away. It didn’t stop, but leaped across the six-foot gap between the end of the dock and the boat, slammed into the pulpit only three feet in front of Tommy, and seized the railing with both hands.

As the thing tried to pull itself over the railing and aboard, Tommy squeezed off a round from the shotgun, point-blank in its face, flinching at the roar and at the gout of flame that spurted from the muzzle of the Mossberg.

In the pearlescent glow of the running lights, he saw the fat man’s face vanish in the blast, and he gagged in revulsion at the grisly spectacle.

But the Samaritan-thing didn’t let go of the pulpit railing. It should have been torn loose by the powerful hit that it had taken, but the relentless beast still hung from the bow and continued trying to drag-heave-roll itself onto the foredeck.

Out of the raw, oozing mass of torn flesh left by the shotgun blast, the fat man’s glistening white face at once miraculously re-formed, utterly undamaged, and the green serpent eyes blinked open, radiant and fierce.

The thick-lipped mouth yawned wide, gaping silently for a moment, and then the Samaritan-thing screamed at Tommy. The piercing voice was not remotely human, less like an animal sound than like an electronic shriek.

Cast back on the faith of his youth, pleading with the Holy Virgin, Mother of God, to save him, Tommy pumped another round into the breech, fired, worked the pump action again, and fired a third round, both from a distance of only three feet.

The hands on the railing were not human any more. They had metamorphosed into chitinous pincers with serrated edges and were locked so fiercely that the stainless-steel tubing actually appeared to be bending in the creature’s grip.

Tommy pumped, fired, pumped, squeezed the trigger,

pumped, squeezed the trigger, and then realized that he was dry firing. The magazine of the Mossberg was empty.

Shrieking again, the beast hauled itself higher on the pulpit railing as the bow of the reversing yacht came around to port and away from the dock.

Tommy dropped the empty shotgun, snatched up the Desert Eagle, slipped, and fell backward. He landed on his butt on the bow deck with his feet still in the anchor well.

The gun was beaded with rain. His hands were wet and shaking. But he didn’t drop the weapon when he landed.

Clambering over the railing, shrieking in triumph, the serpent-eyed Samaritan loomed over Tommy. The moon-round, moon-pale visage split open from chin to hairline, as if it wasn’t a skull at all but a strained sausage skin, and the halves of the bifurcated face peeled apart, with the demented green eyes bulging at either side, and out of the sudden gash sprouted an obscene mass of writhing, segmented, glossy-black tentacles as thin as whips, perhaps two feet long, and as agitated as the appendages of a squid in a feeding frenzy. At the base of the squirming tentacles was a wet sucking hole full of clashing teeth.

Two, four, five, seven times Tommy fired the.44 Magnum. The pistol bucked in his hands and the recoil slammed through him hard enough to rattle his verte-brae. At such close quarters, he didn’t have to be as first-rate a marksman as Del was, and every round seemed to strike home.

The creature shuddered with the impact of the shots and pitched backward over the pulpit railing. Pincers flailed, grabbed, and one of them locked tightly on the steel tubing. Then the eighth and ninth rounds found their mark, and simultaneously a section of railing gave way with a gong-like clang, and the beast plunged backward into the harbour.

Tommy scrambled to the damaged railing, slipped, almost pitched through the gap, clutched a firmly anchored section tightly with one hand, and searched the black water for some sign of the creature. It had vanished.

He didn’t believe that it was really gone. He anxiously scanned the water, waiting for the Samaritan-thing to surface.

The yacht was cruising forward now, east along the channel, past the other boats in the moorings and the small marina. A speed limit was in effect in the harbour, but Del wasn’t obeying it.

Moving aft along the short bow deck, clutching at the starboard railing, Tommy searched the waters on that side, but soon the area where the creature had disap-peared was well behind them and receding rapidly.

The crisis wasn’t over. The threat wasn’t gone. He was not going to make the mistake of taking another breather. He wasn’t safe until dawn.

If then.

He returned to the pulpit to retrieve the shotgun and the ski jacket full of ammunition. His hands were shaking so badly that he dropped the Mossberg twice.

The yacht was cruising fast enough to stir up a wind of its own in the windless night. Although the skeins of rain still fell as straight as the strands of a glass-bead curtain, the speed at which the boat surged forward made it seem as if the droplets were being flung at Tommy by the fury of the storm.

Carrying both of the guns and the ski jacket, he retreated along the narrow port-side pass way and hur-riedly climbed the steep stairs to the upper deck.

The aft portion of the open-air top deck contained a built-in table for alfresco dining and an enormous elevated sun-bathing pad across the entire stern. Toward starboard, an enclosed stairwell led to the lower deck.

Scootie was standing on the sunbathing pad, gazing down at the foaming wake that trailed away from the stern. He was as focused on the churning water as he might have been on a taunting cat, and he didn’t look up at Tommy.

Forward on the top deck, the upper helm station had a hardtop roof and a windshield, but the back of it was meant to be open in good cruising weather. Currently a custom-sewn vinyl enclosure was snugged to the supporting rear framework of the hardtop, forming a weather-proofed cabin of sorts, but Del had unsnapped the centre vent to gain access to the wheel.

Tommy pushed through the loose flaps, into the dim light beyond, which arose only from the control board.

Del was in the captain’s seat. She glanced away from the rain-streaked windshield. ‘Nice job.’

‘I don’t know,’ he said worriedly, putting the guns down on the console behind her. He began to unzip pockets on the ski jacket. ‘It’s still out there some-where.’

‘But we’re outrunning it now, on the move and safe.’

‘Yeah, maybe,’ he said as he added nine rounds of ammo to the Desert Eagle magazine, replenishing the thirteen-shot capacity as quickly as his trembling hands could cope with the cartridges. ‘How long to cross the harbour?’

Bringing the Bluewater sharply and expertly around to port, she said, ‘We’re starting the run right now. Going so fast, I’ll have to throttle back just a little, but it should still take like maybe two minutes.’

At various points down the centre of the broad harbour, clusters of boats bobbled at permanent moorings, grey shapes in the gloom that effectively divided the expanse of water into channels. But as far as could be seen in the rain, theirs was the only craft currently making way. Del said, ‘Problem is - when we get to Balboa Island, I need to find an empty slip, a suitable dock to tie up to, and that might take some time. Thank God, it’s high tide and this baby has such a low draft, ‘cause we can slide in almost anywhere.’

Reloading the Mossberg, he said, ‘How’d you start the engines without keys?’

‘Hot-wired the sucker.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Found a key.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘Well,’ she said airily, ‘those are your choices.’

Outside on the open top deck, Scootie began to bark ferociously.

Tommy’s stomach fluttered nervously, and his heart swelled with dread. ‘Jesus, here we go already.’

Armed with both the shotgun and the pistol, he pushed through the vinyl flaps, into the night and rain.

Scootie still stood vigilantly on the sunbathing pad, staring down at the churning wake.

Balboa Peninsula was swiftly receding.

Tommy stepped quickly past the dining table and the upholstered horseshoe bench that encircled it, to the platform on which the dog stood.

No railing encircled the outer edge of the sunbathing pad, only a low wall, and Tommy didn’t want to risk standing on it and perhaps pitching over the stern. He wriggled forward on his belly, across the wet canvas -upholstered pad, beside the Labrador, where he peered down at the turbulent wake.

In the murk, he couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

The dog barked more savagely than ever.

‘What is it, fella?’

Scootie glanced at him and whined.

He could see the wake but nothing of the boat’s stern, which was recessed beneath the top deck. Easing forward, his upper body extended over the low sun-deck wall, Tommy squinted down and back at the lower portion of the yacht.

Under Tommy, behind the enclosed first deck, was a back-porch-type afterdeck. It was overhung by the sunbathing platform on which he lay, and was therefore largely concealed.

Sans raincoat, the fat man was climbing out of the harbour and over the afterdeck railing. He disappeared under the overhang before Tommy could take a shot at him.

The dog scrambled to a closed stair head hatch immedi-ately starboard of the sunbathing platform.

Joining the Labrador, Tommy put down the pistol. Holding the Mossberg in one hand, he opened the hatch.

A small light glowed at the bottom of moulded-fibreglass steps, revealing that the Samaritan-thing was already clambering upward. Its serpent eyes flashed, and it shrieked at Tommy.

Grasping the shotgun with both hands, Tommy pumped the entire magazine into the beast.

It grasped at a rail and held on tenaciously, but the last two blasts tore it loose and hurled it to the bottom of the steps. The thing rolled out of the stairwell, onto the afterdeck again, out of sight.

The indomitable creature would be stunned, as before. Judging by experience, however, it wouldn’t be out of action for long. There wasn’t even any blood on the steps. It seemed to absorb the buckshot and bullets without sustaining any real wounds.

Dropping the shotgun, Tommy retrieved the.44 pistol. Thirteen rounds. That might be enough ammunition to knock the beast back down the stairs twice more, but then there would be no time to reload.

Del appeared at his side, looking gaunt and more worried than she had been before. ‘Give me the gun,’ she said urgently.

‘Who’s driving?’

‘I locked the wheel. Give me the gun and go forward, down the port stairs to the foredeck.’

‘What are you going to do?’ he demanded, reluctant to leave her there even if she had the Desert Eagle.

‘I’ll start a fire,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘You said fire distracted it.’

He remembered the enraptured mini-kin at the blazing Corvette, lost to all sensation except the dancing flames. ‘How’re you going to start a fire?’

‘Trust me.’

‘But-’

Below, the recuperated Samaritan-thing shrieked and entered the bottom of the stairwell.

‘Give me the damn gun!’ she snarled, and virtually tore it out of Tommy’s grip.

The Desert Eagle bucked in her hands - once, twice, three times, four times - and the roar echoed back at them out of the stairwell, like cannon fire.

Squealing, spitting, hissing, the creature crashed down to the afterdeck again.

To Tommy, Del shouted, ‘Go, damn it, go!’

He stumbled across the open top deck to the port stairs farther forward, beside the helm station.

More gunfire erupted behind him. The beast had come back at her faster this time than before.

Clutching at the railing, he descended the open port-side stairs, up which he had climbed earlier. At the bottom, the narrow railed passway led forward to the bow but didn’t lead back toward the stern, so there was no easy route by which the Samaritan-thing could make its way to him directly from the afterdeck - unless it broke into the enclosed lower deck, rampaged forward through the staterooms, and smashed out at him through a window.

More gunfire crashed above and aft, and the hard sound slapped across the black water, so it seemed as though Newport had gone to war with neighbouring Corona Del Mar.

Tommy reached the bow deck, where only a few min-utes ago he’d taken a stand against the Samaritan-thing when it had first tried to board the vessel.

In the night ahead, Balboa Island loomed.

‘Holy shit,’ Tommy said, horrified by what was about to happen.

They were approaching Balboa Island at considerable speed, on a line as direct and true as if they were being guided by a laser beam. With the wheel locked and the throttles set, they would pass between two large private docks and ram the sea wall that surrounded the island.

He turned, intending to go back to the helm and make Del change course, but he halted in astonishment when he saw that the aft end of the yacht was already ablaze. Orange and blue flames leaped into the night. Shimmering with reflections of the fire, the falling rain looked like showers of embers from a celestial blaze.

Scootie padded along the port-side pass way and onto the bow deck.

Del was right behind the Labrador. ‘The damn thing’s in the stairwell, burning in ecstasy, like you said. Creepy as hell.’

‘How did you set it on fire so quick?’ Tommy demanded, half shouting to be heard above the drum-ming rain and the engines.

‘Diesel fuel,’ she said, raising her voice as well.

‘Where’d you get diesel fuel?’

‘There’s six hundred gallons aboard.’ ‘But in tanks somewhere.’

‘Not any more.’

‘And diesel fuel doesn’t burn that fiercely.’

‘So I used gasoline.’

‘Huh?’

‘Or napalm.’

‘You’re lying to me again!’ he fumed.

‘You’re making it necessary.’

‘I hate this crap.’

‘Sit on the deck,’ she instructed.

‘This is so nuts!’

‘Sit down, grab hold of the railing.’

‘You’re some crazy gonzo Amazon witch or some-thing.’

‘Whatever you say. Just brace yourself, ‘cause we’re going to crash, and you don’t want to be thrown over-board.’

Tommy looked toward Balboa Island, which was clearly defined by the streetlamps along the seawall and the dark shapes of houses beyond. ‘Dear God.’

‘As soon as we run aground,’ she said, ‘get up, get off the boat, and follow me.’

She crossed to the starboard flank of the bow deck, sat with her legs splayed in front of her, and grabbed hold of the railing with her right hand. Scootie clam-bered into her lap, and she put her left arm around him.

Following Del’s example, Tommy sat on the deck, facing forward. He didn’t have a dog to hug, so he gripped the port railing with both hands.

Sleek and swift, the yacht cruised through the rainy darkness toward doom.

If Del had set the fuel tanks on fire, the engines wouldn’t be running. Would they?

Don’t think, just hold on.

Maybe the fire had come from the same place as the seething flock of birds. Which was - where?

Just hold on.

He expected the boat to explode under him.

He expected the flaming Samaritan-thing to shake off its rapture and, still ablaze, leap upon him.

He closed his eyes.

Just hold on.

If he had just gone home to his mother’s for corn tay cam and stir-fried vegetables with Nuoc Mam sauce, he might not have been home when the doorbell rang, might never have found the doll, might now be in bed, sleeping peacefully, dreaming about the Land of Bliss at the peak of fabled Mount Phi Lai, where everyone was immortal and beautiful and deliriously happy twenty-four hours every day, where everyone lived in perfect harmony and never said one cross word to anyone else and never suffered an identity crisis. But, nooooo, that wasn’t good enough for him. Nooooo, he had to offend his mother and make a statement about his independence by going instead to a diner for cheeseburgers, cheeseburgers and French fries, cheeseburgers and French fries and onion rings and a chocolate milkshake, Mr. Big Shot with his own car phone and his new Corvette, intrigued by the blond waitress, flirting with her, when the world was filled with beautiful and intelligent and charming Vietnamese girls - who were perhaps the most lovely women in the world - who never called you ‘tofu boy,’ never hot-wired cars, didn’t think they had been abducted by aliens, didn’t threaten to blow your head off when you wanted to look at their paintings, never stole yachts and set them on fire, gorgeous Vietnamese women who never talked in riddles, never said things like ‘reality is what you think it is,’ didn’t have any exper-tise with throwing knives, hadn’t been taught by their fathers to use high explosives, didn’t wear father-killing bullets as necklace pendants, didn’t run around with big black smart assed hounds from hell with farting rubber hotdogs. He couldn’t go home and eat corn tay cam, had to write stupid detective novels instead of becoming a doctor or a baker, and now as payment for his selfishness and his arrogance and his bull-headed determination to be what he could never be, he was going to die.

Just hold on.

He was going to die.

Just hold.

Here came the big sleep, the long goodbye.

Hold.

He opened his eyes.

Shouldn’t have done that.

Balboa Island, where no structure was taller than three stories, where half of the houses were bungalows and cottages, seemed as large as Manhattan, towering.

Screws turning furiously, the fifty-six-foot, merrily blazing Bluewater yacht came into the island at extreme high tide, drawing less than two feet, virtually skimming like a cigarette racing boat, for God’s sake, in spite of its size, came in between two docks (one of which was already decorated for Christmas), and struck the massive steel-reinforced concrete sea wall with a colossal shattering-ripping-screeching-booming noise that made Tommy cry out in fear and that would have awakened the dead if perhaps any of the islanders had perished in their sleep this night. At the water line, the hull, although as strong as any, was crushed and torn open at the bow. The impact dramatically slowed the yacht, but the diesel engines were so powerful and the screws provided such enormous thrust that the vessel surged forward, striving to climb the sea wall, heaving across the top of it, angling up at the bow, up, over the wide public promenade that ringed the island, up, as though it might churn all the way out of the harbour and sail through the front of one of the large houses that lined the island’s waterfront. Then at last it shuddered to a halt, securely hung up on the sea wall and badly weighed down by the tons of seawater pouring through the broken hull into the lower holds.

Tommy had been bounced against the deck and slammed sideways against the low port sill, but he had held fast to the railing, even though at one point he thought that his left arm was going to be dislocated at the shoulder. He came through the wreck without serious injury, however, and when the yacht was fully at rest, he let go of the railing, rose into a crouch, and crabbed sideways across the bow to Del.

She was on her feet by the time he reached her. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’

The stern of the yacht burned brighter than ever. The fire was spreading forward, and there were flames behind the windows of the lower-deck staterooms.

An eerie and chilling ululation arose from deep within the crackling blaze. It might have been steam venting or hydraulic fluid singing through a pierced steel line - or the crooning of the enraptured demon.

The bow deck was canted three or four degrees because the boat was ramped up on the sea wall. They walked uphill to the pulpit, which thrust out of the water and was suspended over the deserted pedestrian promenade.

All along the recently slumbering waterfront, lights began to blink on in the closely spaced houses.

Scootie hesitated at the gap in the pulpit railing, but only briefly, then leaped down onto the concrete sward on the island side of the sea wall.

Del and Tommy followed him. From the pulpit to the sidewalk was about a ten-foot drop.

The dog sprinted west along the promenade, as if he knew where he was going.

Del followed the Labrador, and Tommy followed Del. He glanced back once and, in spite of all the outrageous incidents of the night, which should have inured him to spectacle, he was awestruck at the sight of the enormous boat balanced on the sea wall, overhanging the public walkway, as if it were the Ark washed ashore after the Great Flood.

As worried faces began to appear at upstairs windows but before any front doors flew open, before frightened voices rose in the night, Tommy and Del and the dog found the nearest street leading away from the promen-ade. They headed toward the centre of the island.

Although Tommy looked over his shoulder from time to time, expecting a serpent-eyed fat man or worse, no creature swaddled in fire pursued them.