Seize the Night

wanker.”
    Releasing the hand brake, shifting the Jeep into drive, he said, “To wank is human, to forgive is the essence of Bobbyness.”
    As we rolled slowly forward, I put down the shotgun and picked up the spotlight again. “We're not going to find them like this.”
    “Better idea?”
    Before I could respond, something screamed. The cry was eerie but not entirely alien; worse, it was a disturbing hybrid of the familiar and the unknown It seemed to be the wail of an animal, yet it had a too-human quality, a forlorn note full of loss and yearning.
    Bobby braked again. “Where?”
    I had already switched on the spotlight and aimed it across the street, toward where I thought the scream had originated.
    The shadows of balusters and roof posts stretched to follow the beam of light, creating the illusion of movement across the front porch of a bungalow. The shadows of bare tree limbs crawled up a clapboard wall.
    “Geek alert,” Bobby said, and pointed.
    I swung the spotlight where he indicated, just in time to catch some thing racing through tall grass and disappearing behind a long, four-foot high boxwood hedge that separated the front lawns of four bungalows from the street.
    “What is it?” I asked.
    “Maybe—what I told you about.”
    “Big Head?”
    “Big Head.”
    During long hot months without water, the hedge had died, and the quenching rains of the recent winter had not been able to revive it.
    Although not a lick of green could be seen, a dense snarl of brittle branching remained, with wads of brown leaves lodged here and there like bits of half-masticated meat.
    Bobby kept the Jeep in the middle of the street but drove slowly forward, parallel to the hedge.
    Even stripped of new growth, the dead boxwood was so mature that its spiny skeleton effectively screened the creature crouched beyond it.
    I didn't think I was going to be able to pick out the beast at all, but then I spotted it because, although it was a shade of brown similar to the woody veil in front of it, the softer lines of its body contrasted with the jagged patterns of the bare hedge. Through the interstices in he many layers of boxwood bones, I fixed the beam on our quarry, revealing no details but getting a glimpse of eye shine as green as that of certain cats.
    This thing was too big to be any cat other than a mountain lion.
    It was no mountain lion.
    Found, the creature bleated again and raced along the shielding dead wood with such speed that I couldn't keep the light trained on it. A break in the hedgerow allowed a walkway to connect a bungalow with the street, but Big Head—or Big Foot, or the wolf man, or the Loch Ness monster in drag, or whatever the hell this was—crossed the gap fast, an instant ahead of the light. I didn't get a look at anything but its shaggy ass, and not even a clear view of that, though a clear view of its ass might not have been either informative or gratifying.
    All I had were vague impressions. The impression that it ran half erect like a monkey, shoulders sloped forward and head low, the knuckles of its hands almost dragging the ground. That it was a lot bigger than a rhesus. That it might have been even taller than Bobby had guessed, and that if it rose to its full height, it would be able to peer at us over the top of the four-foot hedge and stick its tongue out at us.
    I swept the spotlight back and forth but couldn't locate the critter along the next section of boxwood.
    “Running for it,” Bobby said, braking to a full stop, rising half out of his seat, pointing.
    When I shifted my focus beyond the hedgerow, I saw a shapeless figure loping across the yard, away from the street, toward the corner of the bungalow.
    Even when I held the spotlight high, I couldn't get an angle on the fast-moving beast, whose disappearing act was abetted by the intervening branches of a laurel and by tall grass.
    Bobby dropped back into his seat, swung toward the hedgerow, threw the Jeep into four-wheel drive, and tramped on the accelerator.
    “Geek chase,” he said.
    Because Bobby lives for the moment and because he expects ultimately to be mulched by something more immediate than melanoma, he maintains the deepest tan this side of a skin-cancer ward. By contrast, his teeth and his eyes glow as white as the plutonium-soaked bones of Chernobyl wildlife, which usually make him look dashing and exotic and full of Gypsy spirit, but which now made him look more than a little like a grinning madman.
    “Way