Dragon Tears

and no lights glowed in either of the two nearest homes.

Driven by the grim understanding that the police could take her from Danny as surely as Vince might have done, she hauled the corpse to the end of the property and out into the night desert, which stretched unpopulated to the far mountains. She struggled between mesquite shrubs and still-rooted tumbleweeds, across soft sand in some places and hard tables of shale in others.

When the cold face of the moon shone, it revealed a hostile landscape of stark shadows and sharp alabaster shapes. In one of the deeper shadows — an arroyo carved by centuries of flash floods— Janet abandoned the corpse.

She stripped the sheets off the body and buried those, but she didn’t dig a grave for the cadaver itself because she hoped that night scavengers and vultures would pick the bones clean quicker if it was left exposed. Once the denizens of the desert had chewed and pecked the soft pads of Vince’s fingers, once the sun and the carrion eaters got done with him, his identity might be deduced only by dental records. Since Vince had rarely seen a dentist, and never the same one twice, there were no records for the police to consult. With luck, the corpse would go undiscovered until the next rainy season, when the withered remains would be washed miles and miles away, tumbled and broken and mixed up with piles of other refuse, until they had essentially disappeared.

That night Janet packed what little they owned and drove away in the old Dodge with Danny She was not even sure where she was going until she had crossed the state line and driven all the way to Orange County. That had to be her final destination because she couldn’t afford to spend more money on gasoline just to get farther away from the dead man in the desert.

No one back in Tucson would wonder what had happened to Vince. He was a shiftless drifter, after all. Cutting loose and moving on was a way of life to him.

But Janet was deathly afraid to apply for welfare or any form of assistance. They might ask her where her husband was, and she didn’t trust her ability to lie convincingly.

Besides, in spite of carrion-eaters and the dehydrating ferocity of the Arizona sun, maybe someone had stumbled across Vince’s body before it had become unidentifiable. If his widow and son surfaced in California, seeking government aid, perhaps connections would be made deep in a computer, prompting an alert social worker to call the cops. Considering her tendency to succumb to anyone who exerted authority over her — a deeply ingrained trait that had been only slightly ameliorated by the murder of her husband — Janet had little chance of undergoing police scrutiny without incriminating herself.

Then they would take Danny away from her.

She could not allow that. Would not.

On the streets, homeless but for the rusted and rattling Dodge, Janet Marco discovered that she had a talent for survival. She was not stupid; she had just never before had the freedom to exercise her wits. From a society whose refuse could feed a significant portion of the Third World, she clawed a degree of precarious security, feeding herself and her son with recourse to a charity kitchen for the fewest possible meals.

She learned that fear, in which she had long been steeped, did not have to immobilize her. It could also motivate.

* * *

The breeze had grown cool and had stiffened into an erratic wind. The rumble of thunder was still far away but louder than when Janet had first heard it. Only a sliver of blue sky remained to the east, fading as fast as hope usually did.

After mining two blocks of trash containers, Janet and Danny’ headed back to the Dodge with Woofer in the lead.

More than halfway there, the dog suddenly stopped and cocked his head to listen for something else above the fluting of the wind and the chorus of whispery voices that were stirred from the agitated eucalyptus leaves. He grumbled and seemed briefly puzzled, then turned and looked past Janet. He bared his teeth, and the grumble sharpened into a low growl.

She knew what had drawn the dog’s attention. She didn’t have to look.

Nevertheless she was compelled to turn and confront the menace for Danny’s sake if not her own. The Laguna Beach cop, that cop, was about eight feet away.

He was smiling, which is how it always started with him. He had an appealing smile, a kind face, and beautiful blue eyes.

As always, there was no squad car, no indication of how he had arrived in the alleyway. It was as if he had been lying in wait for her among the peeling trunks of the eucalyptuses, clairvoyantly aware that her scavenging would bring her to this alley at this hour on this very day.

“How’re you, Ma’am?” he asked. His voice was initially gentle, almost musical.

Janet didn’t answer.

The first time he approached her last week, she had responded timidly, nervously, averting her eyes, as excruciatingly respectful of authority as she had been all her life — except for that one bloody night outside of Tucson. But she had quickly discovered that he was not what he appeared to be, and that he preferred a monologue to a dialogue.

“Looks like we’re in for a little rain,” he said, glancing up at the troubled sky.

Danny had moved against Janet. She put her free arm around him, pulling him even closer. The boy was shivering.

She was shivering, too. She hoped Danny didn’t notice.

The dog continued to bare his teeth and growl softly.

Lowering his gaze from the stormy sky to Janet again, the cop spoke in that same lilting voice: “Okay, no more farting around. Time to have some real fun. So what’s going to happen now is… you’ve got till dawn. Understand? Hmmmmm? At dawn, I’m going to kill you and your boy.”

His threat did not surprise Janet. Anyone with authority over her had always been as a god, but always a savage god, never benign. She expected violence, suffering, and imminent death. She would have been surprised only by an exhibition of kindness from someone with power over her, for kindness was infinitely rarer than hatred and cruelty.

In fact, her fear, already nearly paralyzing, might have been made even greater only by that unlikely show of kindness. Kindness would have seemed, to her, nothing more than an attempt to mask some unimaginably evil motive.

The cop was still smiling, but his freckled, Irish face was no longer friendly. It was chillier than the coolish air coming off the sea in advance of the storm.

“Did you hear me, you dumb bitch?”

She said nothing.

“Are you thinking that you ought to run, get out of town, maybe go up to L.A. where I can’t find you?”

She was thinking something rather like that, either Los Angeles or south to San Diego.

“Yes, please, try to run,” he encouraged. “That’ll make it more fun for me. Run, resist. Wherever you go, I’ll find you, but it’ll be a lot more exciting that way.”

Janet believed him. She had been able to escape her parents, and she had escaped Vince by killing him, but now she had come up against not merely another of the many gods of fear who had ruled her but the God of fear whose powers exceeded understanding.

His eyes were changing, darkening from blue to electric green.

Wind suddenly gusted strongly through the alley, whipping dead leaves and a few scraps of paper ahead of it.

The cop’s eyes had become so radiantly green, there seemed to be a light source behind them, a fire within his skull. And the pupils had changed, too, until they were elongated and strange like those of a cat.

The dog’s growl became a frightened whine.

In the nearby ravine the eucalyptus trees shook in the wind, and their soft soughing grew into a roar like that of an angry mob.

It seemed to Janet that the creature masquerading as a cop had commanded the wind to rise to lend more drama to his threat, though surely he did not have so much power as that.

“When I come for you at sunrise, I’ll break open your bodies, eat your hearts.”

His voice had changed as completely as had his eyes. It was deep, gravelly, the malevolent voice of