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You ht think that I have earned the name Odd Thomas, but it has been h the support posts, echoing and re-echoing until it seeions of lu the entire structure

When I took a step toward the rat, the rat did not relent As I had nothing better to do, I took another step, then halted because the noise of the outboard abruptly becahy passed beloet black rubber glossy under the floodlamps

The hulk in the Hawaiian shirt sat on the sternine He piloted the boat with expertise, weaving at speed between the concrete coluer port and starboard inflation compartments that formed the rounded bulwarks of the craft, in yellow letters, were the words MAGIC BEACH/HARBOR DEPT The dinghy iant had boldly stolen it to search for me

Yet he never looked up between the floodlahy doubled as a search-and-rescue craft, waterproof flashlights would be stowed aboard; but the hulk wasn’t using one

The sered rows of coluradually dihy’ssea

I had expected to see three one

The other rat had vanished, too, but not up a leg ofballetic poise, foot in front of foot, I stepped into the junction of bea rodent had once occupied I meant to continue shoreward, but I stopped

Now that the blond giant was under the pier, betweenin that direction

Thein the mortal trajectory of a bullet, had propelled ht Now death seee of the dinghy, but less ierous rather than perilous, characterized by uncertainty and by the tyranny of chance If a bullet was coh only if Ithe horizontal beams West, over my shoulder Down into floodlit tides I looked up toward the underside of the pier deck, where the dancing sea translated itself into phrases of half-light that swelled and fluttered and shrank and swelled in an eerie choreography through geometric beams and braces

I felt as indecisive as the fecklessHenry the Sixth, Act 4, when they vacillate repeatedly between swearing loyalty to the grotesque Cade, then to the rightful king

Shakespeare again Once you let him into your head, he takes up tenancy and will not leave

The sound of the outboard engine had been waning Abruptly it cut out altogether

Briefly the silence see and the soft idiot chuckling of the sea began to echo off surrounding surfaces

In the brief period since the dinghy had passed under me, it could not have traveled all the way to the beach It had probably gone little more than half that distance

The hulk at the tiller would not surrender steering to the sea and let it pinball the dinghy from post to post He must have somehow tied up to one of the concrete coluhy unless he intended to dise into the pier support structure ahead of unh the labyrinth of posts and beaht

One in front of me Two behind The jaws of a nutcracker

FOUR

WHILE I DITHERED AT THE INTERSECTION OF support beaht

Because occasionally spirits ard for my nerves, I don’t startle easily I swayed on the timber but did not plu and former mascot of St Bartholomew’s Abbey in the California Sierra

He could be seen by no one but me, and no touch but mine could detect any substance to hi reflections sprayed up by the rolling sea played off his flanks and across his face, as if he were as solid as I was

Although he could have appeared in host of Ha the doomed prince on the platform before the castle

Well, no Boo had a tail, soft fur, and a friendly sh Hollyould no doubt eventually give hiuided adaptation

I hoped that the Hamlet comparison was inappropriate in other ways At the end of that play, the stage is littered with dead bodies

Boo stopped when he knew that I had seen hi away frolanced back at me, and then continued

Even if I had not watched a lot of old episodes of Lassie, I understood the dead well enough to know that I was expected to followTimmy in the TV show, I didn’t need to be barked into obedience

The blond hulk had not appeared in the east, nor the redheads in the west, so I hurried, if gingerly, after the ghostly shepherd, who led me toward the south side of the pier

At the end of the ti that served two flights of ascending stairs, one to the left, one to the right The landingplatform for workers of one kind or another

When Boo cliht was short, and at the top lay a four-foot-wide railed catwalk

The underside of the pier deck hung little h corridor, where only a storm wind could have stirred the air, the stink of creosote thickened

Darkness pooled deeper here than elsewhere Nevertheless, the quivering , revealed electrical conduits, junction boxes, and copper pipes that ht power to the laency floodlamps below me The copper lines served the freshwater faucets provided at regular intervals for the anglers who, on hts, fished from the pier