“Matisse, Beethoven, Wallace Stevens, Shakespeare.”
“Vandals, hooligans.”
“Dick Dale,” I said, dropping the sacred name of the King of the Surf Guitar, the father of all surf music.
Bobby blinked but said, “Graffiti.”
“You are a sick man.”
“I’m the healthiest person you know. Drop this insanely useless crusade, Chris.”
“I must really be swimming in a school of slackers when a little curiosity is seen as a crusade.”
“Live life. Soak it up. Enjoy. That’s what you’re here to do.”
“I’m having fun in my own way,” I assured him. “Don’t worry — I’m just as big a bum and jerk-off as you are.”
“You wish.”
When I tried to walk the bike around him, he sidestepped into my path again.
“Okay,” he said resignedly. “All right. But walk the bike with one hand and keep the Glock in the other until you’re back on hard ground and can ride again. Then ride fast.”
I patted my jacket pocket, which sagged with the weight of the pistol. One round fired accidentally at Angela’s. Nine left in the magazine. “But they’re just monkeys,” I said, echoing Bobby himself.
“And they’re not.”
Searching his dark eyes, I said, “You have something else that I should know?”
He chewed on his lower lip. Finally: “Maybe I am Kahuna.”
“That’s not what you were about to tell me.”
“No, but it’s not as fully nutball as what I was going to say.” His gaze traveled over the dunes. “The leader of the troop…I’ve only glimpsed him at a distance, in the darkness, hardly more than a shadow. He’s bigger than the rest.”
“How big?”
His eyes met mine. “I think he’s a dude about my size.”
Earlier, as I had stood on the porch waiting for Bobby to return from his search of the beach scarp, I had glimpsed movement from the corner of my eye: the fuzzy impression of a man loping through the dunes with long fluid strides. When I’d swung around with the Glock, no one had been there.
“A man?” I said. “Running with the millennium monkeys, leading the troop? Our own Moonlight Bay Tarzan?”
“Well, I hope it’s a man.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
Breaking eye contact, Bobby shrugged. “I’m just saying there aren’t only the monkeys I’ve seen. There’s someone or something big out there with them.”
I looked toward the lights of Moonlight Bay. “Feels like there’s a clock ticking somewhere, a bomb clock, and the whole town’s sitting on explosives.”
“That’s my point, bro. Stay out of the blast zone.”
Holding the bike with one hand, I drew the Glock from my jacket pocket.
“As you go about your perilous and foolish adventures, XP-Man,” Bobby said, “here’s something to keep in mind.”
“More boardhead wisdom.”
“Whatever was going on out there at Wyvern — and might still be going on — a big troop of scientists must have been involved. Hugely educated dudes with foreheads higher than your whole face. Government and military types, too, and lots of them. The elite of the system. Movers and shakers. You know why they were part of this before it all went wrong?”
“Bills to pay, families to support?”
“Every last one of them wanted to leave his mark.”
I said, “This isn’t about ambition. I just want to know why my mom and dad had to die.”
“Your head’s as hard as an oyster shell.”
“Yeah, but there’s a pearl inside.”
“It’s not a pearl,” he assured me. “It’s a fossilized seagull dropping.”
“You’ve got a way with words. You should write a book.”
He squeezed out a sneer as thin as a shaving of lemon peel. “I’d rather screw a cactus.”
“That’s pretty much what it’s like. But rewarding.”
“This wave is going to put you through the rinse cycle and then down the drain.”
“Maybe. But it’ll be a totally cool ride. And aren’t you the one who said we’re here to enjoy the ride?”
Finally defeated, he stepped out of my way, raised his right hand, and made the shaka sign.
I held the bike with my gun hand long enough to make the
In response, he gave me the finger.
With Orson at my side, I walked the bike eastward through the sand, heading toward the rockier part of the peninsula. Before I’d gone far, I heard Bobby say something behind me, but I couldn’t catch his words.
I stopped, turned, and saw him heading back toward the cottage. “What’d you say?”
“Here comes the fog,” he repeated.
Looking beyond him, I saw towering white masses descending out of the west, an avalanche of churning vapor patinaed with moonlight. Like some silently toppling wall of doom in a dream.
The lights of town seemed to be a continent away.
FOUR. DEEP NIGHT
21
By the time Orson and I walked out of the dunes and reached the sandstone portion of the peninsula, thick clouds swaddled us. The fog bank was hundreds of feet deep, and though a pale dusting of moonlight sifted through the mist all the way to the ground, we were in a gray murk more blinding than a starless, moonless night would have been.
The lights of town were no longer visible.
The fog played tricks with sound. I could still hear the rough murmur of breaking surf, but it seemed to come from all four sides, as though I were on an island instead of a peninsula.
I wasn’t confident about being able to ride my bicycle in that cloying gloom. Visibility continuously shifted between zero and a maximum of six feet. Although no trees or other obstacles lay along the curved horn, I could easily become disoriented and ride off the edge of the beach scarp; the bike would pitch forward, and when the front tire plowed into the soft sand of the slope below the scarp, I would come to a sudden halt and take a header off the bike to the beach, possibly breaking a limb or even my neck.
Besides, to build speed and to keep my balance, I would have to steer the bike with two hands, which meant pocketing the pistol. After my conversation with Bobby, I was loath to let go of the Glock. In the fog, something could close to within a few feet of me before I became aware of it, which wouldn’t leave me time enough to tear the gun out of my jacket pocket and get off a shot.
I walked at a relatively brisk pace, wheeling the bicycle with my left hand, pretending I was carefree and confident, and Orson trotted slightly ahead of me. The dog was wary, no good at whistling in the graveyard either literally or figuratively. He turned his head ceaselessly from side to side.
The click of the wheel bearings and the tick of the drive chain betrayed my position. There was no way to quiet the bicycle short of picking it up and carrying it, which I could do with one arm but only for short distances.
The noise might not matter, anyway. The monkeys probably had acute animal senses that detected the most
