Fear Nothing

his black coat, reveling in his panting, in the fast thudding of his heart, in the swish of his tail, reveling even in the dampish reek of him and in the stale-cereal smell of his biscuit-scented breath.
        I didn't trust myself to speak. My voice was a keystone mortared in my throat. If I managed to break it loose, an entire dam might collapse, a babble of loss and longing might pour out of me, and all the unshed tears for my father and for Angela Ferryman might come in a flood.
        I do not allow myself to cry. I would rather be a bone worn to dry splinters by the teeth of sorrow than a sponge wrung ceaselessly in its hands.
        Besides, even if I could have trusted myself to speak, words weren't important here. Though he was certainly a special dog, Orson wasn't going to join me in spirited conversation-at least not if and until I shed enough of my encumbering reason to ask Roosevelt Frost to teach me animal communication.
        When I was able to let go of Orson, I retrieved the Glock and rose to my feet to survey the marina parking lot. The fog concealed most of the few cars and recreational vehicles owned by the handful of people who lived on their boats. No one was in sight, and the night remained silent except for the idling car engine.
        Apparently the sound of gunfire had been largely contained in the patrol car and suppressed by the fog. The nearest houses were outside the commercial marina district, two blocks away. If anyone aboard the boats had been awakened, they'd evidently assumed that those four muffled explosions had been nothing more than an engine backfiring or dream doors slamming between the sleeping and the waking worlds.
        I wasn't in immediate danger of being caught, but I couldn't cycle away and expect to escape blame and punishment. I had killed the chief of police, and though he had no longer been the man whom Moonlight Bay had long known and admired, though he had metamorphosed from a conscientious servant of the people into someone lacking all the essential elements of humanity, I couldn't prove that this hero had become the very monster that he was sworn to oppose.
        Forensic evidence would convict me. Because of the identity of the victim, first-rate police-lab technicians from both county and state offices would become involved, and when they processed the patrol car, they wouldn't miss anything.
        I could never tolerate imprisonment in some narrow candlelit cell. Though my life is limited by the presence of light, no walls must enclose me between the sunset and the dawn. None ever will. The darkness of closed spaces is profoundly different from the darkness of the night; the night has no boundaries, and it offers endless mysteries, discoveries, wonders, opportunities for joy. Night is the flag of freedom under which I live, and I will live free or die.
        I was sickened by the prospect of getting back into the patrol car with the dead man long enough to wipe down everything on which I might have left a fingerprint. It would be a futile exercise, anyway, because I'd surely overlook one critical surface.
        Besides, a fingerprint wasn't likely to be the only evidence that I'd left behind. Hairs. A thread from my jeans. A few tiny fibers from my Mystery Train cap. Orson's hairs in the backseat, the marks of his claws on the upholstery. And no doubt other things equally or more incriminating.
        I'd been damn lucky. No one had heard the shots. But by their nature, both luck and time run out, and although my watch contained a microchip rather than a mainspring, I swore that I could hear it ticking.
        Orson was nervous, too, vigorously sniffing the air for monkeys or another menace.
        I hurried to the back of the patrol car and thumbed the button to release the trunk lid. It was locked, as I'd feared.
         Tick, tick, tick.
        Steeling myself, I returned to the open front door. I inhaled deeply, held my breath, and leaned inside.
        Stevenson sat twisted in his seat, head tipped back against the doorpost. His mouth shaped a silent gasp of ecstasy, and his teeth were bloody, as though he had fulfilled his dreams, had been biting young girls.
        Drawn by a meager cross-draft, entering through the shattered window, a scrim of fog floated toward me, as if it were steam rising off the still-warm blood that stained the front of the dead man's uniform.
        I had to lean in farther than I