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No one but the cleaning creould be working in the courthouse at that hour; and the police in the adjacent building were too busy dealing with an X-Files moment for any of them to step outside for a quick smoke
I ran to the end of the walk and into Civic Center Park, which--in opposition to Magic Beach tradition--was actually surrounded by the governs that justified its nareens dripped with condensed mist Fallen pine cones crunched underfoot, and others tried to roll me offprocessional, appeared periodically, forcing an to explode in the building from which I had fled One, two, three, a half-dozen The tintinnabulation of glass raining on stoneas as char as an orchestra of fairy bells, which I was able to enjoy because I had gotten safely beyond the zone of raining shards
Shouting drew , di a broad and brightly lighted set of stairs to a public plaza Although I was not a psychic prie by encies, I so their headquarters
Fro squad cars, perhaps also fire engines or a olden retriever again as a kind of Seeing Eye dog A fewput sufficient distance between myself and Civic Center Park, I slowed to a walk for two blocks
Only then did I think to check ht if not before, Chief Hoss Shackett and Utgard Rolf intended to bring nuclear weapons onto United States soil by way of Magic Beach Harbor
If the chief and the hulk had been killed or at least disabled in the chaos at the station, perhaps the plot would collapse But I did not think I could count on that If more than four hundred million dollars had been provided for bribes alone, this operation would have been developed withthat two stopped clocks constituted an ouess was that the nukes would not be delivered to the harbor at a ht, but that they would instead be picked up at sea before that hour The nunified the last minute that the plan could be foiled: the time when the bombs were taken from the harbor and placed aboard one truck or several, when they would be ht subsequently be transferred again to other vehicles bound for doomed cities unknown
THIRTY
SINCE THE ENCOUNTER WITH UTGARD AND THE redheaded gunmen on the pier, so much had happened that I’d had little ti with the torrent of events, allowing ely by instinct and by those paranor, so co
I needed fifteenwhich neitheron ht that I had never experienced previously, moments of a supernatural nature that mystified me They required a quality of reflection that I could not achieve while sprinting fro with a sadistic police chief in a less rooradually catching ht a place to rest, where I was not likely to be disturbed Usually a church would have appealed to me, but not after Reverend Moran
My lower lip felt swollen at the right corner of ue, I found a split that stung, and I prudently decided not to lick it again The bleeding seeard’s backhand bloas lucky not to have spat out a tooth or two
The blinding e precincts Shrouded objects looked not like what they turned out to be, but like unearthly flora and alien structures on a world circling a star other than our own
I found nize, not the one near the pier nor the one around the harbor, nor the one in the vicinity of the civic center
Ornate laht have hailed froht and been converted to electricity Their glass panes poured forth a sour yellow light that had about it no quality of ro into smoke and lent to every shadow the character of a cloud of soot
The concrete sideas cracked, canted, stained, and streith litter that our tourist town usually did not tolerate In the breathless night, the larger wads of crumpled paper occasionally resembled the corpses of birds, and the smaller scraps reminded me of dead insects
At this hour, the stores were closed Most of their s offered a browser only darkness, although a feere colored by all-night neon that spelled nareen, red--for so, inducing dyspepsia, giving rise to thoughts of botto too freakish for any freak shoaited in the ultimate tent
Some shabby storefronts housed businesses I was surprised to find in Magic Beach, which for the most part was an upscale coastal town Here was a pawnshop, there another one Here a tattoo parlor had gone out of business; and here an operation with dirty s offered payday advances
Behind the plate glass of a secondhand-clothing store that advertised a one-dollar bin, eight dressed mannequins--as secondhand as the clothes they wore--watched the street with dead eyes and joyless faces
Traffic had been light elsewhere in town In this neighborhood, no vehicles whatsoever traveled the streets I saw no pedestrians, either, no shopkeepers working late
In the apartlowed No faces could be seen at either the dark or lighted s
When I came to an open-air bus stop, I sat on the bench to think At the sound of an engine or the first sight of headlights, I could retreat to a serviceway between buildings and wait until the vehicle had passed
I love novels about road trips, about characters alk out of their lives, who get on a bus or in a car and go Just go They leave the world behind and find so new
In my case, such a solution would never work No , the world would find me
On the worst day of my life, I disabled onespree in unman, they had wounded forty-one people and had killed nineteen
They had parked a truck boe I found it and prevented it froree A hero would have saved everyone Everyone A hero would have saved the one person in the world who most mattered to him and who trusted him without reservation