Desie said, "I've got a question. You don't have to answer if you don't want."

"OK."

"Two questions, actually. Have you ever killed a person?"

Twilly thought of Vecker Darby's house exploding in a chemical cloud with Vecker Darby, slow-footed toxic dumper, still inside.

"Have you?" Desie asked.

"Indirectly."

"What kind of answer is that?"

"A careful one," Twilly said.

"Would you do it again? Over toads? Honey, you arrestsomebody for mushing toads. You don't murder them."

Twilly let her hand slip from his fingers. "Desie, it's not just the toads, and you know it."

"Then what – over condos? Two lousy high-rises? You act like they're paving the whole coast."

"And you're beginning to sound like your husband."

Desie stopped in her tracks, the tail of a wave washing over the tops of her feet. A gust of wind blew the hair away from her neck, her astonishingly lovely neck, and Twilly fought the impulse to kiss her there.

She said, "This is all my fault."

"What is?"

"I should never have told you about this island, about what they're planning to do."

"Why not? It's horrible what they're planning."

"Yes, but now you're talking about killing people, which is also wrong," said Desie, "not to mention a crime, and I don't particularly want to see you go to jail. Jail would not be good for this relationship, Twilly."

He said, "If it wasn't Shearwater, it'd be something else. If it wasn't this island, it would be another. That's what you need to understand."

"And if it wasn't me with you here on this beach, it would be someone else. Right?"

"Please don't." Twilly reached for her waist but she spun away, heading back (he assumed) toward the car.

"Desie!"

"Not now," she called over her shoulder.

From the other direction came an outburst of barking. At first Twilly thought it was another big dog, because he'd never heard McGuinn make such a racket.

But it was him. Twilly could see the familiar black hulk far down the beach, alternately crouching and dashing circles around somebody on the sand. The behavior looked anything but playful.

Twilly broke into a run. A nasty dog-bite episode was the last thing he needed to deal with – the ambulance, the cops, the wailing victim. Just my luck, Twilly thought glumly. How can you possibly piss off a Labrador retriever? Short of hammering them with a baseball bat, they'd put up with just about anything. Yet someone had managed to piss off ultra-mellow McGuinn. Probably some idiot tourist, Twilly fumed, or his idiot kids.

He jogged faster, kicking up water whenever a wave slid across his path. The run reminded him of his two dreams, without all the dead birds and the panic. Ahead on the beach, McGuinn continued to carry on. Twilly now could see what was upsetting the dog – a stocky, sawed-off guy in a suit. The man was lunging with both arms at the Labrador, which kept darting out of reach.

What now? Twilly wondered.

As he drew closer, he shouted for the dog to come. But McGuinn was in manic mode and scarcely turned his head to acknowledge Twilly's voice. The stranger reacted, though. He stopped grabbing for the dog and arranged himself into a pose of calm and casual waitfulness.

Twilly prepared for trouble. He pulled up and walked the last twenty yards, to catch his breath and assess the situation. Immediately, McGuinn positioned himself between Twilly and the stranger, who clearly was no tourist. The man wore a rumpled houndstooth suit and ankle-high leather shoes with zippers. He had a blond dye job and a chopped haircut that belonged on somebody with pimples and a runny nose.

"Down!" Twilly said to McGuinn.

But the Lab kept snapping and snarling, his lush coat bristling like a boar's. Twilly was impressed. Like Desie, he believed animals possessed an innate sense of danger – and he believed McGuinn's intuition was correct about the out-of-place stranger.

"Obedience school," the man said. "Or try one of those electrified collars. That'll do the trick."

"He bite you?" Twilly's tone made it clear he was not stricken with concern for the stranger's health.

"Naw. We're just playing. What's his name?"

"You might be playing," Twilly said to the man, "but he's not."

McGuinn lowered himself on all fours. He rumbled a low growl and panted unblinkingly. His haunches remained bunched and taut, as if readying to launch at the stranger.

"What's his name?" the man asked again.

Twilly told him.

"Sounds Irish," the man remarked. His eyes cut back and forth between Twilly and the dog. "You Irish?" he said to Twilly.

"You'll have to do better than this."

The stranger acted innocent. "What do you mean? I'm just trying to be friendly."

Twilly said, "Cut the shit."

The weather was coming up on them fast. A cold raindrop hit the side of Twilly's neck. The man with the spiky hair took a fat one on the nose. He wiped it dry with the sleeve of his jacket.

"Rain'll ruin those shoes of yours," Twilly said, "in about two minutes flat."

"Let me worry about the footwear," the stranger said, but he glanced down anyway at his feet. Twilly knew he was thinking about how much the brown leather shoes had cost.

"McGuinn! Let's go." Twilly clapped his hands loudly.

The dog wouldn't move, wouldn't shift his stare from the man in the musty-smelling suit. The Labrador had retained little from his short-lived time as a hunting dog in training, but one thing that had stayed with him was an alertness to guns. A human with a gun carried himself in a distinctly different manner. The Palmer Stoat who clomped through the marsh with a 20-gauge propped on his shoulder practically was a separate species from the Palmer Stoat who each night clipped McGuinn to a leash and covertly led him next door to crap on the neighbor's garden. To Stoat and his human hunter friends, the transformation in themselves – bearing, gait, demeanor and voice – was so subtle they didn't notice, yet it was glaringly obvious to McGuinn. A visual sighting of the gun itself was superfluous; humans who carried them had an unmistakable presence. Even their perspiration smelled different – not worse, for in the ever-ripe world of dogs there was hardly such a thing as a bad odor. Just different ones.

For a moment the stranger acted as if he wanted to make friends. He reached a hand beneath his moldy-smelling coat and said, "Here, boy. I've got something you'll like ... "

McGuinn, cocking his head, licking his chops, never taking his hopeful brown eyes off the stranger's hand, which emerged from under the coat with ...

The gun. Had to be.

Now, from behind, the Labrador heard the young man say:

"Stay, boy. Don't move!"

Never had McGuinn detected such urgency in a command. He decided, on a whim, to obey.

There was another gun-toting human on Toad Island: Krimmler, who had taken to carrying a loaded .357 after Robert Clapley's hired freak accosted him in the Winnebago.

The pistol added to Krimmler's nervousness, and he had plenty of time to be nervous. Construction on the Shearwater resort project remained suspended? and the lush new quiet on the island made Krimmler restless and edgy – it was the very sound of Nature, gradually reclaiming the ground plowed up by his beloved bulldozers. One morning he was appalled to find a green shoot sprouting in the old dirt tracks of a front-end loader. A baby tree! Krimmler thought, ripping it from the soil. A baby tree that would otherwise grow to be a tall chipmunk-harboring tree!

The tranquillity that had once merely annoyed Krimmler now turned him into a paranoid basket case. At night he slept with the .357 under his pillow, half-certain he accidentally would shoot off his own ear while groping for the gun in a moment of dire need. By day he tucked it in the front of his pants, half-certain he accidentally would shoot off his genitals if danger surfaced.