Fear Nothing

here?” she asked. “The whole skeleton of a T-Rex?”
        “Last night,” I said, “I thought all the digging was just a grief reaction to Dad's death, a way for Orson to work off negative energy.”
        “Grief reaction?” she said, frowning.
        She'd seen how smart Orson was, but she still didn't have a full grasp on the complexity of his inner life or on its similarity to our own.
        Whatever techniques were used to enhance the intelligence of these animals, it had involved the insertion of some human genetic material into their DNA. When Sasha finally got a handle on that, she would have to sit down for a while; maybe for a week.
        “Since then,” I said, “it's occurred to me that he was searching for something that he knew I needed to have.”
        I knelt on the grass beside Orson. “Now, bro, I know you were in a lot of distress last night, grieving over Dad. You were rattled, couldn't quite remember where to dig. He's been gone a day now, and it's a little easier to accept, isn't it?”
        Orson whined thinly.
        “So give it another try,” I said.
        He didn't hesitate, didn't debate where to start, but went to one hole and worked to enlarge it. In five minutes, his claws clinked against something.
        Sasha directed the flashlight on a dirt-caked Mason jar, and I worked it the rest of the way out of the ground.
        Inside was a roll of yellow pages from a legal tablet, held together by a rubber band.
        I unrolled them, held the first page to the light, and at once recognized my father's handwriting. I read only the first paragraph : If you're reading this, Chris, I am dead and Orson has led you to the jar in the yard, because only he knows of its existence. And that's where we should begin. Let me tell you about your dog…
         “ Bingo,” I said.
        Rolling up the papers and returning them to the jar, I glanced at the sky. No moon. No stars. The scudding clouds were low and black, touched here and there by a sour-yellow glow from the rising lights of Moonlight Bay.
        “We can read these later,” I said. “Let's move. Bobby's alone out there.”

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    33
        
        As Sasha opened the tailgate of the Explorer, shrieking gulls wheeled low overhead, tumbling inland toward safer roosts, frightened by a wind that shattered the sea and flung the wet fragments across the point of the horn.
        With the box from Thor's Gun Shop in my arms, I watched the white wings dwindle across the turbulent black sky.
        The fog was long gone. Under the lowering clouds, the night was crystalline.
        Around us on the peninsula, the sparse shore grass thrashed. Tall sand devils whirled off the tops of the dunes, like pale spirits spun up from graves.
        I wondered if more than the wind had harried the sea gulls from their shelter.
        “They're not here yet,' Bobby assured me as he took the two pizza-shop boxes from the back of the Explorer. ’It's early for them.”
        'Monkeys are usually eating at this hour.” I said. “Then a little dancing.'
        'Maybe they won't even come at all tonight,' Sasha hoped.
        “They'll come,' I said.
        'Yeah. They'll come,' Bobby agreed.
        Bobby went inside with our dinner. Orson stayed close by his side, not out of fear that the murderous troop might be among the dunes even now but, in his role as food cop, to guard against the unfair distribution of the pizza.
        Sasha removed two plastic shopping bags from the Explorer. They contained the fire extinguishers that she'd purchased at Crown Hardware.
        She closed the tailgate and used the remote on her key chain to lock the doors. Since Bobby's Jeep occupied his one-car garage, we were leaving the Explorer in front of the cottage.
        When Sasha turned to me, the wind made a glorious banner of her lustrous mahogany hair, and her skin glowed softly, as if the moon had managed to press one exquisite beam through the clotted clouds to caress her face. She seemed larger than life, an elemental spirit.
        “What?” she said, unable to interpret my stare.
        “You're so beautiful. Like a wind goddess drawing the storm to you.”
        “You're so full of shit,” she said, but she smiled.
        “It's one of my most charming qualities.”
        A sand devil did a dervish dance around us, spitting grit in our faces, and we hurried into the house.
        Bobby was