Odd Hours

boat with expertise, weaving at speed between the concrete columns, as if late for a luau.
    On the longer port and starboard inflation compartments that formed the rounded bulwarks of the craft, in yellow letters, were the words MAGIC BEACH / HARBOR DEPT . The dinghy must have been tied up to the pier; the giant had boldly stolen it to search for me.
    Yet he never looked up between the floodlamps as he passed under me. If the dinghy doubled as a search-and-rescue craft, waterproof flashlights would be stowed aboard; but the hulk wasn’t using one.
    The small craft disappeared among the staggered rows of columns. The engine noise gradually diminished. The ripples and dimples of the dinghy’s modest wake were smoothed away by the self-ironing sea.
    I had expected to see three men in the boat. I wondered where the dead-eyed redheads had gone.
    The other rat had vanished, too, but not up a leg of my blue jeans.
    Exhibiting balletic poise, foot in front of foot, I stepped into the junction of beams, which the trembling rodent had once occupied. I meant to continue shoreward, but I stopped.
    Now that the blond giant was under the pier, between me and the beach, I was not confident of continuing in that direction.
    The mood had changed. An overwhelming sense of peril, of being in the mortal trajectory of a bullet, had propelled me into frantic flight. Now death seemed no less possible than it had before the passage of the dinghy, but less imminent.
    The moment felt dangerous rather than perilous, characterized by uncertainty and by the tyranny of chance. If a bullet was coming, I now had hope of dodging it, though only if I made the right moves.
    I looked north, east, south along the horizontal beams. West, over my shoulder. Down into floodlit tides. I looked up toward the underside of the pier deck, where the dancing sea translated itself into phrases of half-light that swelled and fluttered and shrank and swelled in an eerie choreography through geometric beams and braces.
    I felt as indecisive as the feckless mob in The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth, Act 4, when they vacillate repeatedly between swearing loyalty to the grotesque Cade, then to the rightful king.
    Shakespeare again. Once you let him into your head, he takes up tenancy and will not leave.
    The sound of the outboard engine had been waning. Abruptly it cut out altogether.
    Briefly the silence seemed perfect. Then the wordless whispering and the soft idiot chuckling of the sea began to echo off surrounding surfaces.
    In the brief period since the dinghy had passed under me, it could not have traveled all the way to the beach. It had probably gone little more than half that distance.
    The hulk at the tiller would not surrender steering to the sea and let it pinball the dinghy from post to post. He must have somehow tied up to one of the concrete columns.
    He would not have moored the dinghy unless he intended to disembark from it. Already he must be climbing into the pier support structure ahead of me.
    Certain that I knew where the redheaded gunmen were, I looked over my shoulder, through the labyrinth of posts and beams to the west. They were not yet in sight.
    One in front of me. Two behind. The jaws of a nutcracker.

 
    FOUR
    WHILE I DITHERED AT THE INTERSECTION OF support beams, a pale form loomed out of the south, to my right.
    Because occasionally spirits manifest suddenly, unexpectedly, with no regard for my nerves, I don’t startle easily. I swayed on the timber but did not plummet from it.
    My visitor proved to be Boo, good dog and former mascot of St. Bartholomew’s Abbey in the California Sierra.
    He could be seen by no one but me, and no touch but mine could detect any substance to him. Yet to my eyes at least, the shimmering reflections sprayed up by the rolling sea played off his flanks and across his face, as if he were as solid as I was.
    Although he could have appeared in midair, he walked the crossbeam toward me, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father approaching the doomed prince on the platform before the castle.
    Well, no. Boo had a tail, soft fur, and a friendly smile. Hamlet’s father had none of that, although Hollywood would no doubt eventually give him all three in some misguided adaptation.
    I hoped that the Hamlet comparison was inappropriate in other ways. At the end of that play, the stage is littered with dead bodies.
    Boo stopped when he knew that I had seen him, cocked his head, and wagged his tail. Suddenly facing