Cliff shook his head. “With all due respect, sir, the more I hear you quote your father, the more I think he must’ve been just about the gloomiest man who ever lived.”

Looking around at the wallowing boats and wind-chopped water, feeling as if he was moving instead of standing still in a moving world, a little queasy, Lem said, “Yeah… my dad was a great guy in his way, but he was also… impossible.”

Hank Gorner shouted, “Hey!” He was running along the dock from the Cheoy Lee where he and Cliff had been stationed all day. “I’ve just been on

With the Guard cutter. They’re playing their searchlight over the Amazing Grace, intimidating a little, and they tell me they don’t see Dilworth. Just the woman.”

Lem said, “But, Christ, he’s running the boat!”

“No,” Gorner said. “There’s no lights in the Amazing Grace, but the Guard’s searchlight brightens up the whole thing, and they say the woman’s at the wheel.”

“It’s all right. He’s just below deck,” Cliff said.

“No,” Lem said as his heart started to pound. “He wouldn’t be below deck at a time like this. He’d be studying the cutter, deciding whether to keep going or turn back. He’s not on the Amazing Grace.”

“But he has to be! He didn’t get off before she pulled out of the dock.”

Lem stared out across the crystalline-clear harbor, toward the light near the end of the northern breakwater. “You said the damn boat swung out close to the north point, and it looked as if he was going north, but then he suddenly swung south.”

“Shit,” Cliff said.

“That’s where he dropped off,” Lem said. “Out by the point of the northern breakwater. Without a rubber boat. Swimming, by God.”

“He’s too old for that crap,” Cliff protested.

“Evidently not. He went around the other side, and he’s headed for a phone on one of the northern public beaches. We’ve got to stop him, and fast.”

Cliff cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted the first names of the four agents who were positioned on other boats along the docks. His voice carried, echoing flatly off the water, in spite of the wind. Men came running, and even as Cliff’s shouts faded away across the harbor, Lem was sprinting for his car in the parking lot.

The worst happens when you least expect it.

As Travis was rinsing dinner dishes, Nora said, “Look at this.”

He turned and saw that she was standing by Einstein’s food and water dishes. The water was gone, but half his dinner remained.

She said, “When have you known him to leave a single scrap?”

“Never.” Frowning, Travis wiped his hands on the kitchen towel. “The last few days… I’ve thought maybe he’s coming down with a cold or something, but he says he feels fine. And today he hasn’t been sneezing or coughing like he was.”

They went into the living room, where the retriever was reading Black Beauty with the help of his page-turning machine.

They knelt beside him, and he looked up, and Nora said, “Are you sick, Einstein?”

The retriever barked once, softly: No.

“Are you sure?”

A quick wag of the tail: Yes.

“You didn’t finish your dinner,” Travis said.

The dog yawned elaborately.

Nora said, “Are you telling us you’re a little tired?”

Yes.

“If you were feeling ill,” Travis said, “you’d let us know right away, wouldn’t you, fur face?”

Yes.

Nora insisted on examining Einstein’s eyes, mouth, and ears for obvious signs of infection, but at last she said, “Nothing. He seems okay. I guess even Superdog has a right to be tired once in a while.”

The wind had come up fast. It was chilly, and under its lash the waves rose higher than they had been all day.

A mass of gooseflesh, Garrison reached the landward end of the north flank of the harbor’s northern breakwater. He was relieved to depart the hard and sometimes jagged stones of that rampart for the sandy beach. He was sure he had scraped and cut both feet; they felt hot, and his left foot stung with each step, forcing him to limp.

At first he stayed close to the surf, away from the tree-lined park that lay behind the beach. Over there, where park lamps lit the walkways and where spotlights dramatically highlighted the palms, he would be more easily seen from the street. He did not think anyone would be looking for him; he was sure his trick had worked. However, if anyone was looking for him, he did not want to call attention to himself.

The gusting wind tore foam off the incoming breakers and flung it in Garrison’s face, so he felt as if he was continuously running through spiders’ webs. The stuff stung his eyes, which had finally stopped tearing from his dunk in the sea, and at last he was forced to move away from the surf line, farther up the beach, where the softer sand met the lawn but where he was still out of the lights.

Young people were on the darkish beach, dressed for the chill of the night: couples on blankets, cuddling; small groups smoking dope, listening to music. Eight or ten teenage boys were gathered around two all-terrain vehicles with balloon tires, which were not allowed on the beach during the day and most likely weren’t allowed at night… They were drinking beer beside a pit they’d dug in the sand to bury their bottles if they saw a cop approaching; they were talking loudly about girls, and indulging in horseplay. No one gave Garrison more than a glance as he hurried by. In California, health-food-and-exercise fanatics were as common as street muggers in New York, and if an old man wanted to take a cold swim and then run on the beach in the dark, he was no more remarkable or noteworthy than a priest in a church.

As he headed north, Garrison scanned the park to his right in search of pay phones. They would probably be in pairs, prominently illuminated, on islands of concrete beside one of the walkways or perhaps near one of the public comfort stations.

He was beginning to despair, certain that he must have passed at least one group of telephones, that his old eyes were failing him, but then he saw what he was looking for. Two pay phones with winglike sound shields. Brightly lighted. They were about a hundred feet in from the beach, midway between the sand and the street that flanked the other side of the park.

Turning his back to the churning sea, he slowed to catch his breath and walked across the grass, under the wind-shaken fronds of a cluster of three stately royal palms. He was still forty feet from the phones when he saw a car, traveling at high speed, suddenly break and pull to the curb with a squeal of tires, parking in a direct line from the phones. Garrison didn’t know who they were, but he decided not to take any chances. He sidled into the cover provided by a huge old double-boled date palm that was, fortunately, not one of those fitted with decorative spotlights. From the notch between the trunks, he had a view of the phones and of the walkway leading out to the curb where the car had parked.

Two men got out of the sedan. One sprinted north along the park perimeter, looking inward, searching for something.

The other man rushed straight into the park along the walkway. When he reached the lighted area around the phones, his identity was clear-and shocking.

Lemuel Johnson.

Behind the trunks of the Siamese date palms, Garrison drew his arms and legs closer to his body, sure that the joined bases of the trees provided him with plenty of cover but trying to make himself smaller nevertheless.

Johnson went to the first phone, lifted the handset-and tried to tear it out of the coinbox. It had one of those flexible metal cords, and he yanked on it hard, repeatedly, with little effect. Finally, cursing the instrument’s toughness, he ripped the handset loose and threw it across the park. Then he destroyed the second phone.