tramped on the accelerator.
“Geek chase,” he said.
Because Bobby lives for the moment and because he expects ultimately to be mulched by something more immediate than melanoma, he maintains the deepest tan this side of a skin-cancer ward. By contrast, his teeth and his eyes glow as white as the plutonium-soaked bones of Chernobyl wildlife, which usually make him look dashing and exotic and full of Gypsy spirit, but which now made him look more than a little like a grinning madman.
“Way stupid,” I protested.
“Geek, geek, geek chase,” he insisted, leaning into the steering wheel.
The Jeep jumped the curb, flashed under the low-hanging branches of two flanking laurels, and crashed through the boxwood hard enough to rattle the bottles of beer in the slush-filled cooler, spitting broken hedge branches behind it. As we crossed the lawn, a raw, sweet, green odor rose from the crushed grass under the tires, which was lush from the winter rains.
The creature had disappeared around the side of the bungalow even as we were blasting through the hedge.
Bobby went after it.
“This has nothing to do with Orson or Jimmy,” I shouted over the engine roar.
“How do you know?”
He was right. I didn’t know. Maybe there was a connection. Anyway, we didn’t have any better leads to follow.
As he swung the Jeep between two bungalows, he said, “
I had recently told him my new motto. Already, I regretted having revealed it. I had the feeling that it was going to be quoted to me, at inopportune moments, until it had less appeal than a mutton milkshake.
About fifteen feet separated the bungalows, and there were no shrubs in this narrow sward. The headlights would have revealed the critter if it was here; but it was gone.
This vanishment didn’t give Bobby second thoughts. Instead, he pressed harder on the accelerator.
We rocketed into the backyard in time to see our own private Sasquatch as it sprang across a picket fence and disappeared into the next property, once more revealing no more of itself than a fleeting glimpse of its hirsute buttocks.
Bobby wasn’t any more intimidated by the line of spindly wooden pickets than he had been by the hedgerow. Speeding toward it, he laughed and said, “Skeggin’,” meaning
Although Bobby is laid back and tranquility-loving, ranking as high in the annals of slackerhood as Saddam Hussein ranks in the Insane Dictator Hall of Fame, he’s another dude altogether, a huge macking tsunami, once he’s committed himself to a line of action. He will sit on a beach for hours, studying wave conditions, looking for sets that will push him to and maybe past his personal threshold, oblivious even to the passing contents of bun-floss bikinis, so focused and patient that he makes one of those Easter Island stone heads seem positively jittery, but when he sees what he needs and paddles his board out to the lineup, he doesn’t wallow there like a buoy; he becomes a true raging slashmaster, ripping the waves, domesticating even the hugest thunder crushers, going for it so totally that if any shark mistook him for chum, he’d flip it upside down and ride it like a longboard.
“Skeggin’, my ass,” I said as we hit the fence.
Weathered white pickets exploded over the hood of the Jeep, rattled across the windshield, clattered against the roll bar, and I was sure that one of them would ricochet at precisely the right angle to skewer one of my eyes and make brain shish kebab, but that didn’t happen. Then we were crossing the rear lawn of the house that faced out on the next street in the grid.
The yard we had left behind was smooth, but this one was full of troughs and mounds and chuckholes, over which we rollicked with such exuberance that I had to clamp one hand on my cap to keep it from flying off.
In spite of the serious risk of biting all the way through my tongue if we suddenly bottomed out too hard, I said, in a stutter worthy of Porky Pig, “You see it?”
“On it!” he assured me, though the headlights were arcing up and down so radically with the wildly bucking Jeep that I didn’t believe he could see anything smaller than the house around which he was steering us.
I’d switched off the spotlight, because I wasn’t illuminating anything except my knees and various galactic nebulae, and if I threw up in my lap, I didn’t care to scrutinize the mess under a high beam.
The terrain between bungalows was as rugged as the backyard, and the ground in front of the house proved to be no better. If someone hadn’t been burying dead cows on this property, then the gophers must be as big as Holsteins.
We rocked to a halt before reaching the street. There were no hedgerows to hide behind, and the trunks of the Indian laurels weren’t thick enough to entirely conceal a bulimic supermodel, let alone Sasquatch.
I switched on the spotlight and swept it left and right along the street. Deserted.
“I thought you were on it,” I said.
“Was.”
“Now?”
“Not.”
“So?”
“New plan,” he said.
“I’m waiting.”
“
Another weird scream — like fingernails scraping on a chalkboard, the dying wail of a cat, and the sob of a terrified child all woven together and re-created on a malfunctioning synthesizer by a musician whacked on crystal meth — brought us out of our seats, not merely because it was eerie enough to snap our veins like rubber bands, but because it came from behind us.
I was not aware of pulling my legs up, swiveling, gripping the roll bar, and standing on my seat. I must have done so, and with the swift grace of an Olympic gymnast, because that was where I found myself as the scream reached a crescendo and abruptly cut off.
Likewise, I wasn’t consciously aware of Bobby grabbing the shotgun, flinging open his door, and leaping out of the Jeep, but there he was, holding the 12-gauge Mossberg, facing back the way we had come.
“Light,” he said.
The spotlight was still in my hand. I clicked it on even as he spoke.
No missing link loomed behind the Jeep.
The knee-deep grass swooned as a bare whisper of wind romanced it. If any predator had been trying to squirm toward us, using the grass as cover, it would have disturbed the courtly patterns drawn by the gentle caress of the breeze, and it would have been easy to spot.
The bungalow was one of those that lacked a porch, fronted only by two steps and a stoop, and the door was closed. The three windows were intact, and no boogeyman glowered at us from behind any of those dusty panes.
Bobby said, “It sounded right here.”
“Like right under my butt.”
He had a solid grip on the shotgun. Looking around at the night, as creeped out as I was by the deceptive peacefulness of it, he said, “This sucks.”
“It sucketh,” I agreed.
A look of high suspicion crimped his face, and he backed slowly away from the Jeep.
I didn’t know if he had glimpsed something under the vehicle or if he was just operating on a hunch.
Dead Town was even more silent than its name implied. The faint breeze was expressive but mute.
Still standing on the passenger seat, I glanced down along the side of the Jeep, at the lazily undulating blades of grass. If some foul-tempered freak erupted from beneath the vehicle, it could climb the door and be at my neck before I would be able to locate either a crucifix or an even halfway attractive necklace of garlic.
I needed only one hand for the spotlight. I slipped the Glock out of my shoulder holster.
When Bobby had backed off three or four steps from the Jeep, he knelt on one knee.
