planet.
Never before had Stevenson disclosed this malevolent aspect of himself. He hadn’t seemed capable of unkindness, let alone senseless hatred. If suddenly he had revealed that he wasn’t the real Lewis Stevenson but an alien life-form mimicking the chief, I would have believed him.
Gesturing with the gun, Stevenson spoke to Orson: “Get in the car, fella.”
“He’ll be all right out here,” I said.
“Get in,” he urged the dog.
Orson peered suspiciously at the open car door and whined with distrust.
“He’ll wait here,” I said. “He never runs off.”
“I want him in the car,” Stevenson said icily. “There’s a leash law in this town, Snow. We never enforce it with you. We always turn our heads, pretend not to see, because of…because a dog is exempted if he belongs to a disabled person.”
I didn’t antagonize Stevenson by rejecting the term disabled. Anyway, I was interested less in that one word than in the six words I was sure he had almost said before catching himself:
“But this time,” he said, “I’m not going to sit here while the damn dog trots around loose, crapping on the sidewalk, flaunting that he isn’t on a leash.”
Although I could have noted the contradiction between the fact that the dog of a disabled person was exempt from the leash law and the assertion that Orson was flaunting his leashlessness, I remained silent. I couldn’t win any argument with Stevenson while he was in this hostile state.
“If he won’t get in the car when I tell him to,” Stevenson said, “you make him get in.”
I hesitated, searching for a credible alternative to meek cooperation. Second by second, our situation seemed more perilous. I’d felt safer than this when we had been in the blinding fog on the peninsula, stalked by the troop.
“Get the goddamn dog in the goddamn car now!” Stevenson ordered, and the venom in this command was so potent that he could have killed snails without stepping on them, sheerly with his voice.
Because his gun was in his hand, I remained at a disadvantage, but I took some thin comfort from the fact that he apparently didn’t know that I was armed. For the time being, I had no choice but to cooperate.
“In the car, pal,” I told Orson, trying not to sound fearful, trying not to let my hammering heart pound a tremor into my voice.
Reluctantly the dog obeyed.
Lewis Stevenson slammed the rear door and then opened the front. “Now you, Snow.”
I settled into the passenger seat while Stevenson walked around the black-and-white to the driver’s side and got in behind the wheel. He pulled his door shut and told me to close mine, which I had hoped to avoid doing.
Usually I don’t suffer from claustrophobia in tight spaces, but no coffin could have been more cramped than this patrol car. The fog pressing at the windows was as psychologically suffocating as a dream about premature burial.
The interior of the car seemed chillier and damper than the night outside. Stevenson started the engine in order to be able to switch on the heater.
The police radio crackled, and a dispatcher’s static-filled voice croaked like frog song. Stevenson clicked it off.
Orson stood on the floor in front of the backseat, forepaws on the steel grid that separated him from us, peering worriedly through that security barrier. When the chief pressed a console button with the barrel of his gun, the power locks on the rear doors engaged with a hard sound no less final than the thunk of a guillotine blade.
I had hoped that Stevenson would holster his pistol when he got into the car, but he kept a grip on it. He rested the weapon on his leg, the muzzle pointed at the dashboard. In the dim green light from the instrument panel, I thought I saw that his forefinger was now curled around the trigger guard rather than around the trigger itself, but this didn’t lessen his advantage to any appreciable degree.
For a moment he lowered his head and closed his eyes, as though praying or gathering his thoughts.
Fog condensed on the Indian laurel, and drops of water dripped from the points of the leaves, snapping with an unrhythmical
Casually, quietly, I tucked both hands into my jacket pockets. I closed my right hand around the Glock.
I told myself that, because of my overripe imagination, I was exaggerating the threat. Stevenson was in a foul mood, yes, and from what I had seen behind the police station, I knew that he was not the righteous arm of justice that he had long pretended to be. But this didn’t mean that he had any violent intentions. He might, indeed, want only to talk, and having said his piece, he might turn us loose unharmed.
When at last Stevenson raised his head, his eyes were servings of bitter brew in cups of bone. As his gaze flowed to me, I was again chilled by an impression of inhuman malevolence, as I had been when he’d first stepped out of the gloom beside the marina office, but this time I knew why my harp-string nerves thrummed with fear. Briefly, at a certain angle, his liquid stare rippled with a yellow luminance similar to the eyeshine that many animals exhibit at night, a cold and mysterious inner light like nothing I had ever seen before in the eyes of man or woman.
25
The electric and electrifying radiance passed through Chief Stevenson’s eyes so fleetingly, as he turned to face me, that on any night before this one, I might have dismissed the phenomenon as merely a queer reflection of the instrument-panel lights. But since sundown, I had seen monkeys that were not merely monkeys, a cat that was somehow more than a cat, and I had waded through mysteries that flowed like rivers along the streets of Moonlight Bay, and I had learned to expect significance in the seemingly insignificant.
His eyes were inky again, glimmerless. The anger in his voice was now an undertow, while the surface current was gray despair and grief. “It’s all changed now, all changed, and no going back.”
“What’s changed?”
“I’m not who I used to be. I can hardly remember what I used to be like, the kind of man I was. It’s lost.”
I felt he was talking as much to himself as to me, grieving aloud for this loss of self that he imagined.
“I don’t have anything to lose. Everything that matters has been taken from me. I’m a dead man walking, Snow. That’s all I am. Can you imagine how that feels?”
“No.”
“Because even you, with your shitty life, hiding from the day, coming out only at night like some slug crawling out from under a rock — even you have reasons to live.”
Although the chief of police was an elected official in our town, Lewis Stevenson didn’t seem to be concerned about winning my vote.
I wanted to tell him to go copulate with himself. But there is a difference between showing no fear and begging for a bullet in the head.
As he turned his face away from me to gaze at the white sludge of fog sliding thickly across the windshield, that cold fire throbbed in his eyes again, a briefer and fainter flicker than before yet more disturbing because it could no longer be dismissed as imaginary.
Lowering his voice as though afraid of being overheard, he said, “I have terrible nightmares, terrible, full of sex and blood.”
I had not known exactly what to expect from this conversation; but revelations of personal torment would not have been high on my list of probable subjects.
“They started well over a year ago,” he continued. “At first they came only once a week, but then with increasing frequency. And at the start, for a while, the women in the nightmares were no one I’d ever seen in life, just pure fantasy figures. They were like those dreams you have during puberty, silken girls so ripe and eager to surrender…except that in these dreams, I didn’t just have sex with them….”
His thoughts seemed to drift with the bilious fog into darker territory.
