From the Corner of His Eye

Nonsense.
        Even if such ignorant superstitions could be true, the visitor was far too quiet and too patient to be the living-dead incarnation of a murdered wife. This was a predatory silence, an animal cunning, not a supernatural hush. This was the elegant stillness of a panther in the brush, the coiled tension of a snake too vicious to give a warning rattle.
        Suddenly Junior intuited the identity of the man in the chair. Beyond question, this was the plainclothes police officer with the birthmark.
        The salt-and-pepper, brush-cut hair. The pan-flat face. The thick neck.
        Instantly to Junior's memory came the eye floating in the port-wine stain, the hard gray iris like a nail in the bloody palm of a crucified man.
        Draped across his midsection, the terrible cold weight had chilled his flesh; but now his bone marrow prickled with ice at the thought of the birthmarked detective sitting silently in the dark, watching. Junior would have preferred dealing with Naomi, dead and risen and seriously pissed, rather than with this dangerously patient man.

Chapter 10
        
        WITH A CRASH as loud as the dire crack of heaven opening on Judgment Day, the Ford pickup broadsided the Pontiac. Agnes couldn't hear the first fraction of her scream, and not much of the rest of it, either, as I the car slid sideways, tipped, and rolled.
        The rain-washed street shimmered greasily under the tires, and the intersection lay halfway up a long hill, so gravity was aligned with fate against them. The driver's side of the Pontiac lifted. Beyond the windshield, the main drag of Bright Beach tilted crazily. The passenger's side slammed against the pavement.
        Glass in the door next to Agnes cracked, dissolved. Pebbly blacktop like a dragon flank of glistening scales hissed past the broken window, inches from her face.
        Before setting out from home, Joey had buckled his lap belt, but because of Agnes's condition, she hadn't engaged her own. She rammed against the door, pain shot through her right shoulder, and she thought, Oh, Lord, the baby!
        Bracing her feet against the floorboards, clutching the seat with her left hand, fiercely gripping the door handle with her right, she prayed, prayed that the baby would be all right, that she would live at least long enough to bring her child into this wonderful world, into this grand creation of endless and exquisite beauty, whether she herself lived past the birth or not.
        Onto its roof now, the Pontiac spun as it slid, grinding loudly against the blacktop, and regardless of how determinedly Agnes held on, she was being pulled out of her seat, toward the inverted ceiling and also backward. Her forehead knocked hard into the thin overhead padding, and her back wrenched against the headrest.
        She could hear herself screaming once more, but only briefly, because the car was either struck again by the pickup or hit by other traffic or perhaps it collided with a parked vehicle, but whatever the cause, the breath was knocked out of her, and her screams became ragged gasps.
        This second impact turned half a roll into a full three-sixty. The Pontiac crunched onto the driver's side and jolted, at last, onto its four tires, jumped a curb, and crumpled its front bumper against the wall of a brightly painted surfboard shop, shattering a display window.
        Worry Bear, big as ever behind the steering wheel, slumped side a s in his seat, with his head tipped toward her, his eyes rolled to one and his gaze fixed upon her, blood streaming from his nose. He said, "The baby?"
        "All right, I think, all right," Agnes gasped, but she was terrified that she was wrong, that the child would be stillborn or enter the world damaged.
        He didn't move, the Worry Bear, but lay in that curious and surely uncomfortable position, arms slack at his sides, head lolling as though it were too heavy to lift. "Let me… see you."
        She was shaking and so afraid, not thinking clearly, and for a moment she didn't understand what he meant, what he wanted, and then she saw that the window on his side of the car was shattered, too, and that the door beyond him was badly torqued, twisted in its frame. Worse, the side of the Pontiac had burst inward when the pickup plowed into them. With a steel snarl and sheet-metal teeth, it had bitten into Joey, bitten deep, a mechanical shark swimming out of the wet day, shattering