Fear Nothing

watery note, and I twitched at the sudden rataplan of fat droplets beating on the car, half surprised that what streamed down the windshield and across the hood was not blood.
        In my jacket pocket, I closed my right hand more tightly around the Glock. After what Stevenson had told me, I couldn't imagine any circumstances in which he could allow me to leave this car alive. I shifted slightly in my seat, the first of several small moves that shouldn't make him suspicious but would put me in a position to shoot him through my jacket, without having to draw the pistol from the pocket.
        “Last week,” the chief whispered, “Kyra and Rebecca came over for dinner with us, and I had trouble taking my eyes off the girl. When I looked at her, in my mind's eye she was naked, as she is in used by the dreams. So slim. So fragile. Vulnerable. I became aroused by her vulnerability, by her tenderness, her weakness, and had to hide my condition from Kyra and Rebecca. From Louisa. I wanted… wanted to… needed to… “
        His sudden sobbing startled me: Waves of grief and despair swept through him once more, as they had washed through him when first he had begun to speak. His eerie needfulness, his obscene hunger, was drowned in this tide of misery and self-hatred.
        “A part of me wants to kill myself,” Stevenson said, “but only the smaller part, the smaller and weaker part, the fragment that's left of the man I used to be. This predator I've become will never kill himself. Never. He's too alive .”
        His left hand, clutched into a fist, rose to his open mouth, and he crammed it between his teeth, biting so fiercely on his clenched fingers that I wouldn't have been surprised if he had drawn his own blood; he was biting and choking back the most wretched sobs that I'd ever heard.
        In this new person that Lewis Stevenson seemed to have become, there was none of the calm and steady bearing that had always made him such a credible figure of authority and justice. At least not tonight, not in this bleak mood that plagued him. Raw emotion appeared always to be flowing through him, one current or another, without any intervals of tranquil water, the tide always running, battering.
        My fear of him subsided to make room for pity. I almost reached out to put a comforting hand on his shoulder, but I restrained myself because I sensed that the monster I'd been listening to a moment ago had not been vanquished or even chained.
        Lowering his fist from his mouth, turning his head toward me, Stevenson revealed a face wrenched by such abysmal torment, by such agony of the heart and mind, that I had to look away.
        He looked away, too, facing the windshield again, and as the laurel shed the scattershot distillate of fog, his sobs faded until he could speak. “Since last week, I've been making excuses to visit Kyra, to be around Rebecca.” A tremor distorted his words at first, but it quickly faded, replaced by the hungry voice of the soulless troll. “And sometimes, late at night, when this damn mood hits me, when I get to feeling so cold and hollow inside that I want to scream and never stop screaming, I think the way to fill the emptiness, the only way to stop this awful gnawing in my gut… is to do what makes me happy in the dreams. And I'm going to do it, too. Sooner or later, I'm going to do it. Sooner than later.” The tide of emotion had now turned entirely from guilt and anguish to a quiet but demonic glee. “I'm going to do it and do it. I've been looking for girls Rebecca's age, just nine or ten years old, as slim as she is, as pretty as she is. It'll be safer to start with someone who has no connection to me. Safer but no less satisfying. It's going to feel good. It's going to feel so good, the power, the destruction, throwing off all the shackles they make you live with, tearing down the walls, being totally free, totally free at last. I'm going to bite her, this girl, when I get her alone, I'm going to bite her and bite her. In the dreams I lick their skin, and it's got a salty taste, and then I bite them, and I can feel their screams vibrating in my teeth.”
        Even in the dim light, I could see the manic pulse throbbing in his temples. His jaw muscles bulged, and the corner of his mouth twitched with excitement. He seemed to be more animal than human - or something less than both.
        My hand clutched the Glock so ferociously that my arm ached all the way to