Fear Nothing

cooled.
        Although I could hear the voices of the two men, I could not make out their words. An onshore breeze still romanced the trees and quarreled against all the works of man, and this ceaseless whisper and hiss screened the conversation from me.
        I realized that the vehicle to my right, the one with the hot engine, was the white Ford van in which the bald man had driven away from Mercy Hospital earlier in the night. With my father's mortal remains.
        I wondered if the keys might be in the ignition. I pressed my face to the window in the driver's door, but I couldn't see much of the interior.
        If I could steal the van, I would most likely have possession of crucial proof that my story was true. Even if my father's body had been taken elsewhere and was no longer in this van, forensic evidence might remain-not least, some of the hitchhiker's blood.
        I had no idea how to hot-wire an engine.
        Hell, I didn't know how to drive .
        And even if I discovered that I possessed a natural talent for the operation of motor vehicles that was the equivalent of Mozart's brilliance at musical composition, I wouldn't be able to drive twenty miles south along the coast or thirty miles north to another police jurisdiction. Not in the glare of oncoming headlights. Not without my precious sunglasses, which lay broken far away in the hills to the east.
        Besides, if I opened the van door, the cab lights would wink on. The two men would notice.
        They would come for me.
        They would kill me.
        The back door of the police station opened. Manuel Ramirez stepped outside.
        Lewis Stevenson and his conspirator broke off their urgent conversation at once. From this distance, I wasn't able to discern whether Manuel knew the bald man, but he appeared to address only the chief.
        I couldn't believe that Manuel - good son of Rosalina, mourning widower of Carmelita, loving father of Toby - would be a part of any business that involved murder and graverobbing. We can never know many of the people in our lives, not truly know them, regardless of how deeply we believe that we see into them. Most of them are murky ponds, containing infinite layers of suspended particles, stirred by strange currents in their greatest depths. But I was willing to bet my life that Manuel's clear-water heart concealed no capacity for treachery.
        I wasn't willing to bet his life, however, and if I called out to him to search the back of the white van with me, to impound the vehicle for an exhaustive forensics workup, I might be signing his death warrant as well as mine. In fact, I was sure of it.
        Abruptly Stevenson and the bald man turned from Manuel to survey the parking lot. I knew then that he had told them about my telephone call.
        I dropped into a crouch and shrank deeper into the gloom between the van and the water-department truck.
        At the back of the van, I tried to read the license plate. Although usually I am plagued by too much light, this time I was hampered by too little.
        Frantically, I traced the seven numbers and letters with my fingertips. I wasn't able to memorize them by Braille reading, however, at least not quickly enough to avoid discovery.
        I knew that the bald man, if not Stevenson, was coming to the van. Was already on the move. The bald man, the butcher, the trader in bodies, the thief of eyes.
        Staying low, I retraced the route by which I had come through the ranks of parked trucks and cars, returning to the alley and then scurrying onward, using rows of trash cans as cover, all but crawling to a Dumpster and past it, to a corner and around, into the other alleyway, out of sight of the municipal building, rising to my full height now, running once more, as fleet as the cat, gliding like an owl, a creature of the night, wondering if I would find safe shelter before dawn or would still be afoot in the open to curl and blacken under the hot rising sun.

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    10
        
        I assumed that I could safely go home but that I might be foolish to linger there too long. I wouldn't be overdue at the police station for another two minutes, and they would wait for me at least ten minutes past the appointed time before Chief Stevenson realized that I must have seen him with the man who had stolen my father's body.
        Even then, they might not come to the house in search of me. I was still not a