Odd Hours

able to get roles in a few comedies. I can be quite funny in my own way.”
    “I’m well aware.”
    “Barbara Stanwyck was consumed by flesh-eating bacteria, and Bogart was hit by an asteroid.”
    “I’ll bet the audience didn’t see that coming.”
    Picking up the book again, Hutch said, “Do you enjoy the fog so much that you want to take a second walk in it, or is there something else I should know?”
    “There’s nothing else you should know, sir.”
    “Then I will wait for the doorbell and denounce you as a fiend to anyone who asks.”
    “Thank you.”
    In the kitchen, I emptied the ice-filled OneZip bag into the sink and tossed it in the trash.
    The lump on my head remained the size of half a plum, but it no longer throbbed.
    On two yellow Post-its, with a blue pen, I wrote directions for heating the enchiladas and the rice salad. With a red pen, I printed REMOVE THIS TAG BEFORE PUTTING IN OVEN .
    Standing at the kitchen island, I went through the contents of the wallet that I had taken off Flashlight Guy.
    In his California driver’s-license photo, I recognized the man I had left lying on the beach, although he only slightly resembled something conjured out of a witch’s cauldron. His name was Samuel Oliver Whittle. Thirty years old, he had an address in Magic Beach.
    In his Nevada driver’s-license photo, he smiled broadly at the camera, which was a mistake. His smile transformed his face, and not in a good way. He looked like a lunatic villain from a Batman movie.
    Nevada, where he had an address in Las Vegas, knew him as Samuel Owen Bittel. In Vegas, he was two years older than he claimed to be in his California incarnation, but perhaps a Las Vegas lifestyle aged a person prematurely.
    He had no credit cards. This made him suspicious in a country that not only looked to the future but lived on the earnings from it.
    The wallet contained no insurance card, no Social Security card, nor any of the other ID you might have expected.
    An employee-identification card revealed that he worked for the Magic Beach Harbor Department.
    Suddenly a theme had developed. Perhaps the hulk with the chin beard had not taken the inflatable dinghy without permission; maybe he had the authority to use it because he, too, worked for the harbor department, which also had responsibility for the beaches and the town’s one pier.
    I found it difficult to believe that the redheads were also on the municipal payroll. Thugs who worked for the government usually tried not to look like thugs.
    After returning the cards to Sam Whittle’s wallet, I tucked it in my left hip pocket.
    Whatever trouble I found in the coming hours, at least some of it would involve men with guns. I did not have a gun of my own and did not want one. On occasion I have used a bad guy’s firearm after taking it away from him, but only in desperation.
    When I was a child, my mother spoiled guns for me, not because she disapproved of them, but because she had a psychotic attachment to a pistol. Guns spook me.
    In a clutch or a corner, I tend to make a weapon out of what is near at hand. That can be anything from a crowbar to a cat, though if I had a choice, I would prefer an angry cat, which I have found to be more effective than a crowbar.
    Although weaponless, I left the house by the back door, with two chocolate-pumpkin cookies. It’s a tough world out there, and a man has to armor himself against it however he can.

 
    TWELVE
    PAW AFTER PAW SILENT ON WET BLACKTOP, THE fog crept along the alleyway behind Hutch’s house, rubbing its furry flanks against the garages on both sides, slipping through fence pickets, climbing walls, licking into every niche and corner where mouse or lizard might have taken shelter.
    These earthbound clouds swathed nearby things in mystery, made objects half a block away appear to be distant, dissolved the world entirely past the one-block mark, and raised in the mind a primitive conviction that the edge of the earth lay near at hand, a precipice from which I would fall forever into eternal emptiness.
    Slowly turning in a circle, turning again, I ate one cookie and concentrated on Annamaria: on her long hair the color of molasses, on her face, on her too-pale skin. In my mind, I saw her delicate hand close around the ocean-polished orb of green bottle glass and retreat with it into the long sleeve of her sweater….
    My imperfect gift has one more imperfect aspect, which I have discussed before, though not in this