Forever Odd

that I was gaining now because they had to slow to take the tight turn, I fumbled the cell phone from my pocket.
        When I arrived where alley met alley, the van had vanished, also every glimmer and glow of it. Surprised, I looked up, half expecting to see it levitating into the desert sky.
        I speed-dialed Chief Porter’s mobile number-and discovered that no charge was left in the battery. I hadn’t plugged it in overnight.
        Dumpsters in starlight, hulking and odorous, bracketed back entrances to restaurants and shops. Most of the wire-caged security lamps, managed by timers, had switched off in this last hour before dawn.
        Some of the two- and three-story buildings featured roll-up doors. Behind most would be small receiving rooms for deliveries of merchandise and supplies; only a few might be garages, but I had no way to determine which they were.
        Pocketing the useless phone, I hurried forward a few steps. Then I halted: unsettled, uncertain.
        Holding my breath, I listened. I heard only my storming heart, the thunder of my blood, no engine either idling or receding, no doors opening or closing, no voices.
        I had been running. I couldn’t hold my breath for long. The echo of my exhalation traveled the narrow throat of the alleyway.
        At the nearest of the big doors, I put my right ear to the corrugated steel. The space beyond seemed to be as soundless as a vacuum.
        Crossing and recrossing the alley, from roll-up to roll-up, I heard no clue, saw no evidence, but felt hope ticking away.
        I thought of the snake man driving. Danny must have been in back, with Simon.
        Again I was running. Out of the alley, into the next street, right to the intersection, left onto Palomino Avenue, before I fully understood that I had given myself to psychic magnetism once more, or rather that it had seized me.
        As reliably as a homing pigeon returns to its dovecote, a dray horse to its stable, a bee to its hive, I sought not home and hearth, but trouble. I left Palomino Avenue for another alley, and surprised three cats into hissing flight.
        The boom of a gun startled me more than I had frightened the cats. I almost tucked and rolled, but instead dodged between two Dumpsters, my back to a brick wall.
        Echoes of echoes deceived the ear, concealed the source. The report had been loud, most likely a shotgun blast. But I couldn’t determine the point of origin.
        I had no weapon at hand. A dead cell phone isn’t much of a blunt instrument.
        In my strange and dangerous life, I have only once resorted to a gun. I shot a man with it. He had been killing people with a gun of his own.
        Shooting him dead saved lives. I have no intellectual or moral argument with the use of firearms any more than I do with the use of spoons or socket wrenches.
        My problem with guns is emotional. They fascinate my mother. In my childhood, she made much grim use of a pistol, as I have recounted in a previous manuscript.
        I cannot easily separate the rightful use of a gun from the sick purpose to which she put hers. In my hand, a firearm feels as if it has a life of its own, a cold and squamous kind of life, and also a wicked intent too slippery to control.
        One day my aversion to firearms might be the death of me. But I’ve never been under the illusion that I will live forever. If not a gun, a germ will get me, a poison or a pickax.
        After huddling between the Dumpsters for a minute, perhaps two, I came to the conclusion that the shotgun blast had not been meant for me. If I’d been seen and marked for death, the shooter would have approached without delay, pumping another round into the chamber and then into me.
        Above some of these downtown businesses were apartments. Lights had bloomed in a few of them, the shotgun having made moot the later settings of alarm clocks.
        On the move again, I found myself drawn to the next intersection of alleyways, then left without hesitation. Less than half a block ahead stood the white van, this side of the kitchen entrance to the Blue Moon Cafe.
        Beside the Blue Moon is a parking lot that runs through to the main street. The van appeared to have been abandoned at the rear of this lot, nose out toward the alleyway.
        Both front doors stood open, spilling light, no one visible beyond the windshield. As I drew cautiously closer, I heard