The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

truck you stole. Don't try to follow, okay?"
    Theo nodded. "Molly, don't let it kill anybody else. Promise me that."
    "Promise to leave us alone?"
    "I can't do that."
    "Okay. Take care of yourself." She grabbed rifle, kicked open the door, and stepped out.
    Theo heard her go down the steps, pause, back up. She popped her head in the door, "you never felt special, Theo," she said.
    Theo forced a smile. "Thanks, Molly."
    Gabe Gabe stood in the foyer of Valerie Riordan's home, looking at his hiking boots, then the white carpet, then his boots again. Val had gone into the kitchen to get some wine. Skinner was wandering around outside.
    Gabe sat down on the marble floor, unlaced his boots,then slipped them off. He'd once been into a level-nine clean room at a biotech facility inSan Jose, a place where the air was scrubbed and filtered down to the micron and you had to wear a plastic bunny suit with its own air umbilical to avoid contaminating the specimens. Strangely, he'd had a similar feeling to the one he was feeling now, which was: I am the harbinger of filth. Thank God Theo had made him shower and change before his date.
    Val came into the sunken living room carrying a tray with a bottle of wine and two glasses. She looked up at Gabe, who was standing at the edge of the stairs as if ready to wade into molten lava.
    "Well, come on in and have a seat," Val said.
    Gabe took a tentative step. "Nice place," he said.
    "Thanks, I still have a lot to do on it. I suppose I should just hire a decorator and have done with it, but I like finding pieces myself."
    "Right," Gabe said, taking another step. You could play handball in this room if you didn't mind destroying a lot of antiques.
    "It's a cabernet from Wild Horse Vineyard over the hill. I hope you like it." Val poured the wine into stemmed bubble glasses. She took hers and sat down on the velvet couch, then raised her eyebrows as if to say, "Well?"
    Gabe joined her at the other end of the couch,then took a tentative sip of the wine. "It's nice."
    "For a local cheapie," Val said.
    An awkward silence passed between them. Val made a show of tasting the wine again, then said,
    "You don't really believe this stuff about a sea monster, do you, Gabe?"
    Gabe was relieved. She wanted to talk about work. He'd been afraid that she would want to talk about something else – anything else – and he didn't really know how. "Well, there are the tracks, which look very authentic, so if they arefake, whoever did them studied fossil tracks and replicated them perfectly. Then there's the timing of the rat migration, plus Theo and your patient. Estelle, was it?"
    Val set down her wine. "Gabe, I know you're a scientist, and a discovery like this could make you rich and famous, but I just don't believe there's a dinosaur in town."
    "Rich and famous?I hadn't thought about it. I guess there would be some recognition, wouldn't there?"
    "Look, Gabe, you deal in hard facts, but every day I deal with the delusions and constructions of people's minds. They are just tracks on the ground, probably like that Bigfoot hoax inWashington a few years ago. Theo is a chronic drug user, and Estelle and her boyfriend Catfish are artist types. They all have overactive imaginations."
    Gabe was put off by her judgment of Theo and the others. He thought for a second,then said, "As a biologist I have a theory about imagination. I think it's pretty obvious that fear – fear of loud noises, fear of heights, the capacity to learn fear – is something that we've adapted over the years as a survival mechanism, and so is imagination. Everyone thinks that it was the big strong caveman who got the girl and for the most part that may have been true, but physical strength doesn't explain how our species
    created civilization. I think there was always some scrawny dreamer sitting at the edge of the firelightwho had the ability to imagine dangers, to look into the future in his imagination and see possibilities, and therefore survived to pass his genes on to the next generation. When the big ape men ended up running off the cliff or getting killed while trying to beat a mastodon into submission with a stick, the dreamer was standing back thinking, 'Hey, that might work, but you need to run the mastodon off the cliff.' And, then he'd mate with the women left over after the go-getters got killed."
    "So nerds rule," Val said with a smile. "But if fear and imagination make you more highly evolved, then someone with paranoid