Strangers

wait. Don't run from it."
        Stepping in front of Ernie, putting a hand on the man's chest to halt him, Dom said, "You have nightmares. When you wake up, you can't remember what they were, except they had something to do with the moon."
        Faye gasped.
        Ernie opened his eyes in surprise. "How'd you know that?"
        "I've had nightmares for over a month," Dom said. "Every night. And I know a man who suffered from them so bad he killed himself."
        They stared at him in astonishment.
        "In October," Dom said, "I started walking in my sleep. I'd creep out of bed, hide in closets, or gather weapons to protect myself. Once, I tried to nail the windows shut to keep something out. Don't you see, Ernie, I'm afraid of something in the dark. I'll bet that's what you're afraid of, too. Not just the dark itself but something else, something specific that happened to you" - he gestured toward the windows - "out there in the darkness on that same weekend, the summer before last."
        Still baffled by this turn of events, Ernie glanced at the night beyond the windows, then immediately looked away. "I don't understand."
        "Let's go upstairs, where you can draw the drapes," Dom said. "I'll tell you what I know. The important thing is you aren't alone in this. You're not alone any more. And, thank God, neither am I."
        
        New Haven County, Connecticut.
        Clockwork. Jack Twist's heists always ticked along like clockwork mechanisms. The armored-car job was no exception.
        The night was solidly roofed with clouds. No stars, no moon. No snow was falling, but a cold moist wind swept up from the southwest.
        The Guardmaster truck rumbled past empty fields, coming from the northeast toward the knoll from which Jack had watched it Christmas Eve. Its headlights bored through thin ragged sheets of patchy winter fog. In the snow-wrapped fields, the county lane resembled a strip of black satin ribbon.
        Dressed in a white ski suit with hood, Jack lay half buried in snow, south of the roadway, across from the knoll. On the other side of the road, at the foot of the knoll, the second member of the team, Chad Zepp, also in white camouflage, sprawled in another drift.
        The third member of the team, Branch Pollard, was halfway down the knoll with a Heckler and Koch HK91 heavy assault rifle.
        The truck was two hundred yards away. Refracting the headlights, fog formations drifted across the road, into the lightless fields.
        Suddenly the muzzle of the HK91 flashed up on the hillside. A shot cracked above the sound of the grinding engine.
        The HK91, perhaps the finest combat rifle made, could fire hundreds of rounds without jamming. Extremely accurate, effective at a thousand yards, the HK91 could put a 7.62 NATO round through a tree or concrete wall, with sufficient punch left to kill someone on the other side.
        Tonight, however, they did not intend to kill anyone. Aided by an infra-red telescopic sight, Pollard put the first shot where he wanted it, blowing out the right front tire of the Guardmaster transport.
        The truck swerved wildly. Encountering ice, it began to slide.
        Even while the armored transport was sliding, its fate unsettled, Jack was up and running. He leaped a ditch and dashed onto the road in front of the vehicle, which loomed like a tank. At the last moment, when it seemed bound inexorably for the ditch, the driver regained control and brought the truck to a jerky halt thirty feet from Jack.
        He saw one of the Guardmaster crewmen talking excitedly into a radio handset. That call for help was futile. The moment Pollard had fired from the knoll, Chad Zepp, still concealed in the snow north of the road, had switched on a battery-powered transmitter, jamming the transport's radio frequency with shrill electronic static.
        As the rising wind harried fog-ghosts past Jack, he stood in the middle of the road, feeling naked in the blazing headlights, taking time to aim the tear-gas rifle at the truck's grille. The gun was of British manufacture, designed for anti-terrorist squads. Other tear-gas weapons fired grenades that spewed disabling fumes on impact, requiring the marksman to aim at windows. But upon seizing an embassy, terrorists usually boarded up the windows. The new British gun, which Jack had acquired from a black-market arms dealer in Miami, had a two-inch bore and fired a