Then I found him at the open front door, peering out warily. He had retreated into the living room, just inside the threshold. His ears were flattened against his skull. His head was lowered. His hackles bristled as if he had sustained an electrical shock. He was neither growling nor whining, but tremors passed through his flanks.
Orson is many things — not least of all, strange — but he is not cowardly or stupid. Whatever he was retreating from must have been worthy of his fear.
“What’s the problem, pal?”
Failing to acknowledge me with even as little as a quick glance, the dog continued to obsess on the barren landscape beyond the porch. Although he drew his black lips away from his teeth, no snarl came from him. Clearly he no longer harbored any aggressive intent; rather, his bared teeth appeared to express extreme distaste, repulsion.
As I turned to scan the night, I glimpsed movement from the corner of my eye: the fuzzy impression of a man running in a half crouch, passing the cottage from east to west, progressing swiftly with long fluid strides through the last rank of dunes that marked the top of the slope to the beach, about forty feet away from me.
I swung around, bringing up the Glock. The running man had either gone to ground or had been a phantom.
Briefly I wondered if it was Pinn. No. Orson would not have been fearful of Jesse Pinn or of any man like him.
I crossed the porch, descended the three wooden steps, and stood in the sand, taking a closer look at the surrounding dunes. Scattered sprays of tall grass undulated in the breeze. Some of the shore lights shimmered across the lapping waters of the bay. Nothing else moved.
Like a tattered bandage unraveling from the dry white face of a mummified pharaoh, a long narrow cloud wound away from the chin of the moon.
Perhaps the running man was merely a cloud shadow. Perhaps. But I didn’t think so.
I glanced back toward the open door of the cottage. Orson had retreated farther from the threshold, deeper into the front room. For once, he was not at home in the night.
I didn’t feel entirely at home, either.
Stars. Moon. Sand. Grass. And a feeling of being watched.
From the slope that dropped to the beach or from a shallow swale between dunes, through a screen of grass, someone was watching me. A gaze can have weight, and this one was coming at me like a series of waves, not like slow surf but like fully macking double overheads, hammering at me.
Now the dog wasn’t the only one whose hackles rose.
Just when I began to worry that Bobby was taking a mortally long time, he appeared around the east end of the cottage. As he approached, sand pluming around his bare feet, he never looked at me but let his gaze travel ceaselessly from dune to dune.
I said, “Orson haired out.”
“Don’t believe it,” Bobby said.
“Totally haired out. He’s never done that before. He’s pure guts, that dog.”
“Well, if he did,” Bobby said, “I don’t blame him. Almost haired out myself.”
“Someone’s out there.”
“More than one.”
“Who?”
Bobby didn’t reply. He adjusted his grip on the shotgun but continued to hold it at the ready while he studied the surrounding night.
“They’ve been here before,” I guessed.
“Yeah.”
“Why? What do they want?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who are they?” I asked again.
As before, he didn’t answer.
“Bobby?” I pressed.
A great pale mass, a few hundred feet high, gradually resolved out of the darkness over the ocean to the west: A fog bank, revealed in lunar whitewash, extended far to the north and the south. Whether it came to land or hung offshore all night, the fog pushed a quieting pressure ahead of it. On silent wings, a formation of pelicans flew low over the peninsula and vanished across the black waters of the bay. As the remaining onshore breeze faded, the long grass drooped and was still, and I could better hear the slow surf breaking along the bay shore, although the sound was less a rumble than a lulling hushaby.
From out at the point, a cry as eerie as the call of a loon carved this deepening silence. An answering cry, equally sharp and chilling, arose from the dunes nearer the house.
I was reminded of those old Western movies in which the Indians call to one another in the night, imitating birds and coyotes, to coordinate their moves immediately before attacking the circled wagons of the homesteaders.
Bobby fired the shotgun into a nearby mound of sand, startling me so much that I nearly blew an aortic valve.
When echoes of the crash rebounded from the bay and receded again, when the last reverberations were absorbed by the vast pillow of fog in the west, I said, “Why’d you do that?”
Instead of answering me at once, Bobby chambered another shell and listened to the night.
I remembered Pinn firing the handgun into the ceiling of the church basement to punctuate the threat that he had leveled against Father Tom Eliot.
Finally, when no more loonlike cries arose, Bobby said, almost as if talking to himself, “Probably isn’t necessary, but once in a while it doesn’t hurt to float the idea of buckshot past them.”
“Who? Who are you warning off?”
I had known him to be mysterious in the past, but never quite so enigmatic as this.
The dunes continued to command his attention, and another minute of mental hang time passed before Bobby suddenly looked at me as if he had forgotten that I was standing beside him. “Let’s go inside. You scrub off the bad Denzel Washington disguise, and I’ll slam together some killer tacos.”
I knew better than to press the issue any further. He was being mysterious either to stoke my curiosity and enhance his treasured reputation for weirdness or because he had good reason to keep this secret even from me. In either case, he was in that special Bobby place, where he’s as inaccessible as if he were on his board, halfway through a tube radical, in an insanely hollow wave.
As I followed him into the house, I was still aware of being watched. The attention of the unknown observer prickled my back, like hermit-crab tracks on a surf-smoothed beach. Before closing the front door, I scanned the night once more, but our visitors remained well hidden.
The bathroom is large and luxurious: an absolute-black granite floor, matching countertops, handsome teak cabinetry, and acres of beveled-edge mirrors. The huge shower stall can accommodate four people, which makes it ideal for dog grooming.
Corky Collins — who built Bobby’s fine house long before Bobby’s birth — was an unpretentious guy, but he indulged in amenities. Like the four-person, marble-lined spa in the corner diagonally across the room from the shower. Maybe Corky — whose name had been Toshiro Tagawa before he changed it — fantasized about orgies with three beach girls or maybe he just liked to be totally, awesomely clean.
As a young man — a prodigy fresh out of law school in 1941, at the age of only twenty-one — Toshiro had been interred in Manzanar, the camp where loyal Japanese Americans remained imprisoned throughout World War II. Following the war, angered and humiliated, he became an activist, committed to securing justice for the oppressed. After five years, he lost faith in the possibility of equal justice and also came to believe that most of the oppressed, given a chance, would become enthusiastic oppressors in their own right.
He switched to personal-injury law. Because his learning curve was as steep as the huge monoliths macking in from a South Pacific typhoon, he rapidly became the most successful personal-injury attorney in the San Francisco area.
In another four years, having banked some serious cash, he walked away from his law practice. In 1956, at
