danger was in their difference.
Although all their heads were turned in our direction, I didn’t feel we were the primary focus of their attention. They seemed to be raptly gazing past us, toward something in the distance, though for its eight-or ten- block length, the alley was quiet and deserted.
Abruptly, the pack moved.
Although living in families, coyotes are nonetheless fierce individualists, driven by personal needs, insights, moods. Their independence is evident even when they hunt together, but this pack moved with uncanny coordination, with the instinctive synchronization of a cruising school of piranhas, as though they shared one mind, one purpose.
Ears laid back flat against their skulls, jaws cracked wide as if to bite, heads lowered, hackles raised, shoulders hunched, tails tucked in and held low, the coyotes raced in our direction but not directly toward us. They kept to the east half of the alley, most of them on the blacktop but some on the dusty verge, gazing past us and straight ahead, as if focused intently on prey that was invisible to human eyes.
Neither Bobby nor I came close to firing on the pack, because we were at once reminded of the behavior of the flock of nighthawks in Wyvern. At first the birds seemed to have gathered with malicious intent, then for the purpose of celebration, and in the end their only violent impulse was to self-destruction. With these coyotes, I didn’t sense the bleak aura of sorrow and despair that had radiated from the nighthawks; I didn’t feel they were searching for their own final solution to whatever fever gripped them. They appeared to be a danger to someone or something, but not to us.
Sasha held her revolver in a two-hand grip as the pack streamed toward us. But as they began to pass without turning a single yellow eye in our direction and without issuing one bark or snarl, she slowly lowered the weapon until the muzzle was aimed at the pavement near her feet.
These predators, breath steaming from their mouths, appeared ectoplasmic here on the cusp of dawn. If not for the slap of paws on blacktop and a musky odor, they might have been only ghosts of coyotes, engaged in one last haunt during the final minutes of this spirit-friendly night, before making their way back to the rough fields and vales in which their moldering bones awaited them.
As the final ranks of the pack poured past us, we turned to stare after the swift procession. They dwindled into the distance, chased by the gray light from the east, as though following the night toward the western horizon.
Quoting Paul McCartney — after all, she was a songwriter as well as a deejay — Sasha said, “Baby, I’m amazed.”
“I’ve got a lot to tell you,” I said. “We’ve seen way more than this tonight, stranger stuff.”
“A catalog of the mondo weird,” Bobby assured her.
In the darker distance, the coyotes seemed to shimmer out of existence, though I suspect that they slipped from the alleyway, over the canyon crest, returning to the deeper realms from which they had ascended.
“We haven’t seen the last of them,” Sasha predicted, and her voice was shaded by a disquieting note of precognition.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Definitely,” she insisted with quiet conviction. “And the next time they come around, they’ll be in an uglier mood.”
Breaking open the shotgun and shaking the shell from the chamber into the palm of his hand, Bobby said, “Here comes the sun.”
He was not to be taken literally; the day was overcast. The relentless morning slowly stripped off the black hood of the night and turned its dead, gray face upon us.
A solid cloud cover affords me no substantial protection against the destructive force of the sun. Ultraviolet light penetrates even black thunderheads, and while the burn may build more slowly than on a searingly bright day, the irreparable damage to my skin and eyes nevertheless accumulates. Sunscreen lotions protect well against the less serious forms of skin cancer, but they have little or no ability to prevent melanoma. Consequently, I have to seek shelter from even a daytime sky as gray-black as the char and ashes in the cold bowl of Satan’s pipe after he’s smoked a handful of souls.
To Bobby, I said, “We’re no good without a little sleep. Grab some mattress time, then meet Sasha and me at my house between noon and one o’clock. We’ll put together a plan and a search party.”
“You can’t go back to Wyvern till sundown, but maybe some of us ought to get moving sooner,” he said.
“I’m for that. But there’s no point in quartering off Wyvern and searching every foot of it. That would take too long, forever. We’d never find them in time,” I said, leaving unspoken the thought that we might already be too late. “We don’t go back until we’ve got the tracker we need.”
“Tracker?” Sasha asked, fitting her revolver into the holster under her denim jacket.
“Mungojerrie,” I said, tucking away my 9-millimeter.
Bobby blinked. “The cat?”
“He’s more than a cat,” I reminded Bobby.
“Yeah, but—”
“And he’s our only hope.”
“Cats can track?”
“I’m sure this one can.”
Bobby shook his head. “I’m never gonna be at home in this brave new smart-animal world, bro. It’s like I’m living in a maximum-wacky Donald Duck cartoon, but one where, between the laughs, dudes get their guts ripped out.”
“The world according to Edgar Allan Disney,” I said. “Anyway, Mungojerrie hangs out around the marina. Pay a visit to Roosevelt Frost. He should know how to find our tracker.”
Out of the pool of shadows in the canyon east of us, the eerie ululant cries of coyotes rose, a sound like no other on earth, like the tormented and hungry voices that banshees would have if banshees existed.
Sasha put her right hand under her jacket, as if she might draw her revolver again.
Such a frenzied choir of coyotes is a common sound at night, usually signifying that a hunt has reached its bloody end, that some prey as large as a deer has been brought down by the pack, or that the full moon is exerting its peculiar pull, but you rarely hear such a chilling chorus on this side of the sunrise. As much as anything that we had yet experienced, this sinister serenade, which escalated in volume and passion, filled me with foreboding.
“Sharky,” Bobby said.
“White pointers,” I said, which is surfer lingo for great whites, the most dangerous of all sharks.
I climbed into the passenger seat of the Explorer, and by the time Sasha started the engine, Bobby pulled past us in his Jeep, heading for Jenna Wing’s house across town.
I didn’t expect to see him for at least seven hours, but here at the dawn of April 12, we didn’t realize that we were entering a day of epic bad news. The nasty surprises were coming at us like a long series of triple overhead monoliths churned up by a typhoon in the far Pacific.
17
Sasha parked the Explorer in the driveway, because my father’s car was in the garage, as were boxes of his clothing and his personal effects. The day would come, with his death far enough in the past, when I would not feel that disposing of his belongings would diminish him in my memory. I was not at that day yet.
In this matter, I know I’m being illogical. My memories of my dad, which give me sustaining strength every day, are not related to what clothes he wore on any particular occasion, to his favorite sweater or his silver-rimmed reading glasses. His
