Fear Nothing

effectively vanish. Certainly, none of my fingerprints, hairs, or clothes fibers would survive.
        Another slug had passed through the chief's neck, pulverizing the window in the driver's door. It was now lying somewhere out in the parking lot or, with luck, was at rest deep in the ivy-covered slope that rose from the far end of the lot to the higher I situated Embarcadero Way, where it would be all but impossible to find.
        Incriminating powder burns marred my jacket. I should have destroyed it. I couldn't. I loved that jacket. It was cool. The bullet hole in the pocket made it even cooler.
        “Gotta give the spinster schoolteachers some chance,” I muttered as I closed the front and back doors of the car.
        The brief laugh that escaped was so humorless and bleak that it scared me almost as inuch as the possibility of imprisonment.
        I ejected the magazine from the Glock, took one cartridge from it, which left six, and then slapped it back into the pistol.
        Orson whined impatiently and picked up one end of the gauze fuse in his mouth.
        “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said - and then gave him the double take that he deserved.
        The mutt might have picked it up solely because he was curious about it, as dogs tend to be curious about everything.
        Funny white coil. Like a snake, snake, snake… hut not a snake. Interesting. Interesting. Master Snow's scent on it. Might be good to eat. Almost anything might be good to eat.
        Just because Orson picked up the fuse and whined impatiently didn't necessarily mean that he understood the purpose of it or the nature of the entire scheme I'd concocted. His interest - and uncanny timing - might be purely coincidental.
        Yeah. Sure. Like the purely coincidental eruption of fireworks every Independence Day.
        Heart pounding, expecting to be discovered at any moment, I took the twisted gauze fuse from Orson and carefully knotted the cartridge to one end of it.
        He watched intently.
        “Do you approve of the knot,” I asked, “or would you like to tie one of your own?”
        At the open fuel port, I lowered the cartridge into the tank. The weight of it pulled the fuse all the way down into the reservoir. Like a wick, the highly absorbent gauze would immediately begin to soak up the gasoline.
        Orson ran nervously in a circle: Hurry, hurry. Hurry quick. Quick, quick, quick, Master Snow.
        I left almost five feet of fuse out of the tank. It hung along the side of the patrol car and trailed onto the sidewalk.
        After fetching my bicycle from where I'd leaned it against the trunk of the laurel, I stooped and ignited the end of the fuse with my butane lighter. Although the exposed length of gauze was not gasoline-soaked, it burned faster than I expected. Too fast.
        I climbed onto my bike and pedaled as if all of Hell's lawyers and a few demons of this earth were baying at my heels, which they probably were. With Orson sprinting at my side, I shot across the parking lot to the ramped exit drive, onto Embarcadero Way, which was deserted, and then south past the shuttered restaurants and shops that lined the bay front.
        The explosion came too soon, a solid whump that wasn't half as loud as I'd anticipated. Around and even ahead of me, orange light bloomed; the initial flare of the blast was refracted a considerable distance by the fog.
        Recklessly, I squeezed the hand brake, slid through a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, came to a halt with one foot on the blacktop, and looked back.
        Little could be seen, no details: a core of hard yellow-white light surrounded by orange plumes, all softened by the deep, eddying mist.
        The worst thing I saw wasn't in the night but inside my head: Lewis Stevenson's face bubbling, smoking, streaming hot clear grease like bacon in a frying pan.
        “Dear God,” I said in a voice that was so raspy and tremulous that I didn't recognize it.
        Nevertheless, I could have done nothing else but light that fuse. Although the cops would know Stevenson had been killed, evidence of how it was done-and by whom-would now be obliterated.
        I made the drive chain sing, leading my accomplice dog away from the harbor, through a spiraling maze of streets and alleyways, deeper into the murky, nautilus heart of Moonlight Bay. Even with the heavy Glock in one pocket, my unzipped leather jacket flapped as