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He began to walk again but went less than half a block before he heard the hurried footfalls He swung around, but as before saw no one This tih the runners had moved off a paved surface onto soft earth, then between two of the houses

Perhaps they were on another street Cold air and fog could play tricks with sound

He was cautious and intrigued, however, and he quietly stepped off the cracked and root-canted sidewalk, onto someone’s front lawn, into the smooth blackness beneath an ihborhood, and within half a minute he saw furtive ures appeared at the corner of a house, running low, in a crouch When they crossed a lawn that was patchily illuminated by a pair of hurricane lamps on iron poles, their freakishly distorted shadows leaped wildly over the front of a white stucco house They went to ground again in dense shrubbery before he could ascertain their size or anything else about theood

He didn’t knohy he was so sure they were kids, perhaps because neither their quickness nor behavior was that of adults They were either engaged on sohbor--or they were after Sa stalked

Were juvenile delinquents a probleht Cove?

Every town had a few bad kids But in the semirural atmosphere of a place like this, juvenile cri activities like assault and battery, ar

In the country, kids got into trouble with fast cars, booze, girls, and a little unsophisticated theft, but they did not prowl the streets in packs the way their counterparts did in the inner cities

Nevertheless, Sam was suspicious of the quartet that crouched, invisible, a shadow-draped ferns and azaleas, across the street and three houses west of hiht Cove, and conceivably the trouble was related to juvenile delinquents The police were concealing the truth about several deaths in the past couple ofso for a few kids froes of class too far and had gone beyond permissible, civilized behavior

Sam was not afraid of the a 38 Actually he would have enjoyed teaching the brats a lesson But a confrontation with a group of teenage hoods would mean a subsequent scene with the local police, and he preferred not to bring himself to the attention of the authorities, for fear of jeopardizing his investigation

He thought it peculiar that they would consider assaulting hihborhood like this One shout of alar people to their front porches to see as happening Of course, because he wanted to avoid calling even that e about discretion being the better part of valor was in no circumstance more applicable than in his He moved back from the cypress under which he had taken shelter, away frohtless house behind hione, he planned to slip out of the neighborhood and lose theside it, and entered a rear yard, where a loo set was so distorted by shadows andtoward hiloom At the end of the yard he vaulted a rail fence, beyond which was a narrow alley that serviced the block’s detached garages He intended to go south, back toward Ocean Avenue and the heart of town, but a shiver of prescience shook hiht across the narrow back street, past a row ofon the back lawn of another house that faced out on the street parallel to Iceberry Way

No sooner had he left the alley than he heard soft, running footsteps on that hard surface The juvies--if that’s what they were sounded as swift but not quite as stealthy as they had been

They were co in Sam’s direction fro that with some sixth sense they would be able to deterone into and that they would be on him before he could reach the next street Instinct told hiood shape, yes, but he was forty-two, and they were no doubt seventeen or younger, and any ed man who believed he could outrun kids was a fool

Instead of sprinting across the new yard, he e, hoping it would be unlocked It was He stepped into total darkness and pulled the door shut, just as he heard four pursuers halt in the alleyway in front of the big roll-up door at the other end of the building They had stopped there not because they knehere he was, but probably because they were trying to decide which way he one

In tomblike blackness Sam fumbled for a lock button or dead-bolt latch to secure the door by which he had entered He found nothing

He heard the four kidsto one another, but he could not e whispery and urgent

Saripped the knob with both hands to keep it froave it a try

They fell silent

He listened intently

Nothing

The cold air s, but he assuh he was not afraid, he was beginning to feel foolish How had he gotten hient trained in a variety of self-defense techniques, carrying a revolver hich he possessed considerable expertise, yet he was hiding in a garage frootten there because he had acted instinctively, and he usually trusted instinct i the outer wall of the garage He tensed Scraping footsteps Approaching the small door at which he stood As far as Sa back, holding the knob in both hands, Saainst the jamb

The footsteps stopped in front of him

He held his breath

A second ticked by, two seconds, three

Try the dathe kid He could pop out of the garage as if he were a jack-in-the-box, probably scare the hell out of the punk, and send hiht

Then he heard a voice on the other side of the door, inches froh he did not knohat in God’s na, he knew at once that he had been wise to trust to instinct, wise to go to ground and hide The voice was thin, raspy, utterly chilling, and the urgent cadences of the speech were those of a frenzied psychotic or a junkie long over-due for a fix:

"Burning, need, need…"

He see to hi, as a ht babble deliriously

A hard object scraped down the outside of the wooden door Saine what it was