Fear Nothing

quick chat. Let's make sure we understand each other.”
        The last thing I wanted to do was get in a patrol car with Stevenson. If I refused, however, he might make his invitation more formal by taking me into custody.
        Then, if I tried to resist arrest, if I climbed on my bicycle and pumped the pedals hard enough to make the crank axle smoke - where would I go? With dawn only a few hours away, I had no time to flee as far as the next town on this lonely stretch of coast. Even if I had ample time, XP limited my world to the boundaries of Moonlight Bay, where I could return home by sunrise or find an under standing friend to take me in and give me darkness.
        “I'm in a mood here,” Lewis Stevenson said again, through half-clenched teeth, the hardness returning to his voice. “I'm in a real mood. You coming with me?”
        “Yes, sir. I'm cool with that.”
        Motioning with his pistol, he indicated that Orson and I were to precede him.
        I walked my bike toward the end of the entrance pier, loath to have the chief behind me with the gun. I didn't need to be an animal communicator to know that Orson was nervous, too.
        The pier planks ended in a concrete sidewalk flanked by flower beds full of ice plant, the blooms of which open wide in sunshine and close at night. In the low landscape lighting, snails were crossing the walkway, antennae glistening, leaving silvery trails of slime, some creeping from the right-hand bed of ice plant to the identical bed on the left, others laboriously making their way in the opposite direction, as if these humble mollusks shared humanity's restlessness and dissatisfaction with the terms of existence.
        I weaved with the bike to avoid the snails, and although Orson sniffed them in passing, he stepped over them.
        From behind us rose the crunching of crushed shells, the squish of jellied bodies tramped underfoot. Stevenson was stepping on not only those snails directly in his path but on every hapless gastropod in sight. Some were dispatched with a quick snap, but he stomped on others, came down on them with such force that the slap of shoe sole against concrete rang like a hammer strike.
        I didn't turn to look.
        I was afraid of seeing the cruel glee that I remembered too well from the faces of the young bullies who had tormented me throughout childhood, before I'd been wise enough and big enough to fight back. Although that expression was unnerving when a child wore it, the same look - the beady eyes that seemed perfectly reptilian even without elliptical pupils, the hate-reddened cheeks, the bloodless lips drawn back in a sneer from spittle-shined teeth-would be immeasurably more disturbing on the face of an adult, especially when the adult had a gun in his hand and wore a badge.
        Stevenson's black-and-white was parked at a red curb thirty feet to the left of the marina entrance, beyond the reach of the landscape lights, in deep night shade under the spreading limbs of an enormous Indian laurel.
        I leaned my bike against the trunk of the tree, on which the fog hung like Spanish moss. At last I turned warily to the chief as he opened the back door on the passenger side of the patrol car.
        Even in the murk, I recognized the expression on his face that I had dreaded seeing: the hatred, the irrational but unassuageable anger that makes some human beings more deadly than any other beast on the 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 label . Anyway, I was interested less in that one word than in the six words I was