Fear Nothing

sure he had almost said before catching himself. because of who your mother was .
        “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 ponk-pank-ping against the roof and hood of the car.
        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