The rear of the van was open to the front compartment. Janet, Danny, and Sammy crowded forward to look over the front seat and through the windshield.
Serpentine tendrils of thin fog were beginning to slither across the coast highway from the ocean. The headlights of an oncoming car, the only other traffic in sight, caught the lazily drifting mist at just the right angle and created a horizontal ribbon of rainbowlike colors that began at the right-hand curb and ended at the left-hand curb. The car drove through the colors, carrying them off into the night.
Detective Gulliver was still standing out on the sidewalk with Woofer.
Detective Lyon released the handbrake and put the van in gear. Raising his voice slightly, he said, “Okay, we’re ready.”
On the sidewalk, Detective Gulliver could hear him because the van’s side window was open. She talked to the dog, made a shooing motion with her hands, and the dog studied her quizzically.
Realizing that they were asking him to lead them where he had wanted to lead them just a couple of minutes ago, Woofer took off downhill, north along the sidewalk. He ran about one-third of a block, stopped, and looked back to see if Detective Gulliver was following. He seemed pleased to discover that she was staying with him. He wagged his tail.
Detective Lyon took his foot off the brake and let the van drift downhill, close behind Detective Gulliver, keeping pace with her, so the dog would get the idea that the vehicle was also following him.
Though the van was not moving fast, Janet gripped the seat behind Detective Lyon’s head to steady herself, and Sammy clutched the headrest behind the empty passenger seat. With one hand, Danny held fast to Janet’s belt, and stood on his tiptoes to try to see what was happening outside.
When Detective Gulliver had almost caught up with Woofer, the dog took off again, sprinted to the end of the block and stopped at the intersection to look back. He watched the woman approaching him, then studied the van for a moment, then the woman, then the van. He was a smart dog; he would get it.
“Wish he’d just talk to us and tell us what we need to know,” Detective Lyon said.
“Who?” Sammy asked.
“The dog.”
After Detective Gulliver followed Woofer across the intersection and halfway along the next block, she stopped and let Detective Lyon catch up to her. She waited until Woofer was looking at her, then opened the passenger door and got into the van.
The dog sat down and stared at them.
Detective Lyon let the van drift forward a little.
The dog pricked up his ears lopsidedly.
The van drifted.
The dog got up and trotted farther north. He stopped, looked back to be sure the van was still coming, then trotted farther.
“Good dog,” Detective Gulliver said.
“Very good dog,” Detective Lyon said.
Danny said proudly, “He’s the best dog there is.”
“I’ll second that,” said Sammy Shamroe, and rubbed one hand on the boy’s head.
Turning his face into Janet’s side, Danny said, “Mama, the man really stinks.”
“Danny!” Janet said, appalled.
“It’s okay,” Sammy said. He was inspired to launch into another of his earnest but rambling assurances of repentance. “It’s true. I stink. I’m a mess. Been a mess for a long time, but that’s over now. You know one reason I was a mess? Because I thought I knew everything, thought I understood exactly what life was about, that it was meaningless, that there was no mystery to it, just biology. But after this, after tonight, I have a different view on things. I don’t know everything, after all. It’s true. Hell, I don’t know diddly-squat! There’s
One block later, the dog turned right, heading east along a steeply rising street.
Detective Lyon turned the corner after Woofer, then glanced at his wristwatch. “Two o’clock. Damn, time’s just going too fast.”
Outside, Woofer rarely turned his head to glance at them any more. He was confident that they would stay with him.
The sidewalk along which he padded was littered with bristly red blooms from the large bottlebrush trees that lined the entire block. Woofer sniffed at them as he proceeded east, and they made him sneeze a couple of times.
Suddenly Janet thought she knew where the dog was taking them. “Mr. Ishigura’s nursing home,” she said.
Detective Gulliver turned in the front seat to look at her. “You know where he’s going?”
“We were there for dinner. In the kitchen.” And then: “My God, the poor blind woman with no eyes!”
Pacific View Care Home was in the next block. The dog climbed the steps and sat at the front door.
3
After visiting hours, no receptionist was on duty. Harry could look through the glass in the top of the door and see the dimly lit and totally deserted public lounge.
When he rang the bell, a woman’s voice responded through the intercom. He identified himself as a police officer on urgent business, and she sounded concerned and eager to cooperate.
He checked his wristwatch three times before she appeared in the lounge. She didn’t take an extraordinarily long time; he was just remembering Ricky Estefan and the girl who had lost an arm at the rave, and each second blinked off by the red indicator light on his watch was part of the countdown to his own execution.
The nurse, who identified herself as the night supervisor, was a no-nonsense Filipino lady, petite but not in the least fragile, and when she saw him through the portal in the door, she was less sanguine than she had been over the intercom. She would not open up to him.
First of all, she didn’t believe he was a police officer. He couldn’t blame her for being suspicious, considering that after all he had been through during the past twelve or fourteen hours, he looked as if he lived in a packing crate. Well, actually, Sammy Shamroe lived in a packing crate, and Harry didn’t look quite
She would only open the door the width of the industrial-quality security chain, so heavy it was surely the model used to restrict access to nuclear-missile silos. At her demand, he passed through his police ID wallet. Although it included a photograph that was sufficiently unflattering to resemble him in his current battered and filthy condition, she was unconvinced that he was an officer of the law.
Wrinkling her cute nose, the night supervisor said, “What else have you got?”
He was sorely tempted to draw his revolver, shove it through the gap, cock the hammer, and threaten to blow her teeth out through the back of her head. But she was in her middle to late thirties, and it was possible that she had grown up under — and been toughened by — the Marcos regime before emigrating to the US, so she might just laugh in his face, stick her finger in the barrel, and tell him to go to hell.
Instead, he produced Connie Gulliver, who was for once a more presentable police officer than he was. She grinned through the door glass at the pint-sized Gestapo Florence Nightingale, made nice talk, and passed her own credentials through the gap on demand. You would have thought they were trying to get into the main vault at Fort Knox instead of a pricey private nursing home.
He checked his watch. It was 2:03 A.M.
Based on the limited experience they’d had with Ticktock, Harry guessed that their psychotic Houdini required as little as an hour but more commonly an hour and a half of rest between performances, recharging his supernatural batteries in about the same amount of time that a stage magician needed to stuff all the silk scarves and doves and rabbits back up his sleeves to get ready for the late show. If that was the case, then they were safe
