“Molly, I’ve been waiting for you.”

“How’d you like it?” She nodded toward the television.

“Loved it. I never realized. I was just so tired…”

Molly nodded. “I won’t be long, I just came to get some clean clothes. You’re welcome to stay here.”

Theo didn’t know what to do. It didn’t seem like the time to grab one of the pistols off the table. He felt more embarrassed than threatened.

“Thanks,” he said.

“He’s the last one, Theo. After him there aren’t any more of his kind. His time has passed. I think that’s what we have in common. You don’t know what it is to be a has-been, do you?”

“I think I’m what they call a never-was.”

“That’s easier. At least you’re always looking up the ladder, not down. Coming down is scarier.”

“How? Why? What is he?”

“I’m not sure, a dragon maybe. Who knows?” She leaned back against the doorway and sighed. “But I can kinda tell what he’s thinking. I guess it’s because I’m nuts. Who would have thought that would come in handy, huh?”

“Don’t say that about yourself. You’re saner than I am.”

Molly laughed, and Theo could see her movie-star teeth shine in the light of the television. “You’re a neurotic, Theo. A neurotic is someone who thinks something is wrong with him, but everyone else thinks he is normal; a psychotic thinks something’s wrong with her. Take a poll of the locals, I think I’d come out in the latter category, don’t you?”

“Molly, this is really dangerous stuff you’re messing with.”

“He won’t hurt me.”

“It’s not just that. You could go to jail just for having that machine gun, Molly. People are getting killed, aren’t they?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“That’s what happened to Joseph Leander, and the guys working the drug lab, right? Your pal ate them?”

“They were going to hurt you, and Steve was hungry. Seemed like great timing to me.”

“Molly, that’s murder!”

“Theo! I’m nuts. What are they going to do to me?”

Theo shrugged his shoulders and sat back on the couch. “I don’t know what to do.”

“You’re not in a position to do anything right now. Get some rest.”

Theo cradled his head in his hands. His cell phone, still in the pocket of his flannel shirt, began ringing. “I could sure use a hit right now.”

“There’s some Smurfs of Sanity in the cupboard over the sink—neuroleptics Dr. Val gave me, antipsychotics—they’ve done wonders for me.”

“Obviously.”

“Your phone is ringing.”

Theo pulled out the phone, flipped it open, hit the answer button and watched as the incoming number ap peared on the display. It was Sheriff Burton’s cell phone number. Theo hit disconnect.

“I’m fucked,” Theo said.

Molly picked up Theo’s .357 Magnum from the table, held it on Theo, then picked up Joseph Leander’s automatic. “I’ll give these back before I go. I’m going to get some clean clothes and some girlie things out of my bedroom. You be okay here?”

“Yeah, sure.” His head was still hung. He spoke into his lap.

“You’re bumming me out, Theo.”

“Sorry.”

Molly was gone from the room for only five minutes, in which time Theo tried to get a handle on what had happened. Molly returned with a duffel bag slung over her shoulder. She was wearing the Kendra costume, com-plete with thigh-high boots. Even in the dim light from the television, Theo could see a ragged scar over her breast. She caught him looking.

“Ended my career,” she said. “I suppose now they could fix it, but it’s a little late.”

“I’m sorry,” Theo said. “I think you look beautiful.”

She smiled and shifted both of the pistols to one hand. She’d left the assault rifle by the door and Theo hadn’t even noticed. “You ever feel special, Theo?”

“Special?”

“Not like you’re better than everyone else, just that you’re different in a good way, like it makes a difference that you’re on the planet? You ever feel that way?”

“I don’t know. No, not really.”

“I had that for a while. Even though they were cheesy B movies and even though I had to do some humiliating things to get into them, I felt special, Theo. Then it went away. Well, now I feel that way again. That’s why.”

“Why what?”

“You asked me why before. That’s why I’m going back to Steve.”

“Steve? You call him Steve?”

“He looked like a Steve,” Molly said. “I have to go. I’ll leave your guns in the bed of that red 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 the assault rifle, kicked open the door, and stepped out.

Theo heard her go down the steps, pause, then come back up. She popped her head in the door. “I’m sorry you never felt special, Theo,” she said.

Theo forced a smile. “Thanks, Molly.”

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 in San 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 are fake, 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 in Washington 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 cre-ated civilization. I think there was always some scrawny dreamer sitting at the edge of the firelight, who had the ability to imagine dangers, to look into the future in his imagination and see possibilities, and therefore sur-vived 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 mas-todon 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.”