Seize the Night

what is it?”
    “Somebody took Lilly Wing's boy.”
    “Who?”
    “Some abb,” I said, meaning an abnormal type, a sleazeball.
    “Woofy,” he said, which is Australian surfer lingo for waves contaminated by a sewage spill, but which has evolved other, related meanings, none positive.
    I said, “Boosted Jimmy right out of his bedroom, through a window.”
    “So Lilly called you?”
    “I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, biking by right after the abb did the deed.”
    “How'd you get from there to here?”
    “Orson's nose.”
    I told him about the abb, the kidnapper, whom I'd encountered under the warehouse.
    He frowned. “You said yellow eyes?”
    “Yellow-brown, I guess.”
    “Shine-in-the-dark yellow?”
    “No. Brownish yellow, burnt amber, but the natural color.”
    Recently, we'd encountered a couple of men in whom radical genetic changes had occurred, guys in the process of becoming something more or less than human, who appeared for the most part normal but whose otherness was betrayed by brief but detectable flashes of animal eye shine. These people are driven by strange, hateful needs, and they are capable of extreme violence. If Jimmy was in the hands of one of these, then the list of outrages to which he might be subjected was even longer than the savageries that a standard-issue sociopath might have in mind.
    “You recognize this abb?” I asked Bobby.
    “You say about thirty, black hair, yellow eyes, built like a fireplug?”
    “Neat little baby teeth.”
    “Not my type.”
    “I never saw him before, either,” I said.
    “Twelve thousand people in town.”
    “And this isn't a dude who's a beachhead,” I said, meaning we wouldn't have seen him hanging out with surfers. “So he could still be local and we wouldn't know.”
    For the first time all night, a breeze sprang up, a gentle onshore flow that brought to us a faint but bracing scent of the sea. In the park across the street, the oaks became conspiratorial, plotting together in whispers.
    Bobby said, “Why did this abb bring Jimmy here of all places?”
    “Maybe privacy. To do his thing.”
    “I'd like to do my thing, Cuisinart the creep.”
    “Plus the weirdness of this place probably feeds his dementia.”
    “Unless it's more directly connected to Wyvern.”
    “Unless. And Lilly's worried about the guy on the news.”
    “What guy?”
    “Kidnaps kids, locks them away. When he gets three or five or whatever from one community, then he burns them all at once.”
    “Stuff like this is why I don't listen to news these days.”
    “You've never listened to news.”
    “I know. But I used to have different reasons.”
    Looking around at the night, Bobby said, “So where would they be now?”
    “Anywhere.”
    “Maybe this is more anywhere than we can handle.” He hadn't looked at the rearview mirror recently, so I turned in my seat to check things out behind us.
    Bobby said casually, “Saw a monkey on the way in.”
    Taking the air freshener off my ear and looping its string over the mirror again, I said, “Just one? I didn't know they traveled alone.”
    “Me neither. I turned a corner in Dead Town, and there it was, run rung across the street, caught in the headlights. This little freakin' dude. Not your ordinary evolutionary link, missing or otherwise.”
    “Different?”
    “Maybe four feet tall.”
    Apparently, there were refrigeration coils in my spine.
    All the rhesuses we had seen thus far had been about two feet tall.
    They were trouble enough. At four feet, they would constitute a different magnitude of threat.
    “Major head,” Bobby said.
    “What?”
    “Four feet tall, big head.”
    “How big?”
    “I didn't try to measure it for a hat.”
    “Give me a guess.”
    “Maybe as big as yours or mine.”
    “On a four-foot body.”
    “Top-heavy. And misshapen.”
    “Grisly,” I said.
    “Hard-core grisly.”
    Bobby leaned forward over the steering wheel, squinting through the windshield.
    About a block away, something was moving. About the size of a monkey.
    Slowly and fitfully approaching.
    Putting one hand on the shotgun, I said, “What else?”
    “That's all I saw, bro. It was way fast.”
    “Something new.”
    “Maybe soon there's gonna be a bunch of that.”
    “Tumbleweed,” I said, identifying the approaching object.
    Neither of us relaxed.
    With the moon down, it was easy to imagine that the park across the street was swarming with phantasmagorical figures underand high in the