CHAPTER ONE
 
 
Just after three in the morning, Sam Dryden surrendered the night to insomnia and went running on the boardwalk. Cool humidity clung to him and filtered the lights of El Sedero to his left, the town sliding past like a tanker in the fog. To his right was the Pacific, black and silent as the edge of the world tonight. His footfalls on the old wood came back to him from every part of the darkness.
It was just as well not to sleep. Sleep brought dreams of happier times, worse than nightmares in their own way.
Mercury lights over the boardwalk shone down into the mist. They snaked away in a chain to the south, the farthest all but lost in the gloom where the boardwalk terminated at the channel. Dryden passed the occasional campfire on the beach and caught fragments of conversations amplified in the fog. Soft voices, laughter, huddled silhouettes haloed by firelight. Shutter glimpses of what life could be. Dryden felt like an intruder, seeing them. Like a ghost passing them in the dark.
These nighttime runs were a new thing, though he’d lived in El Sedero for years. He’d started taking them a few weeks before, at all hours of the night. They came on like fits—compulsions he wasn’t sure he could fight. He hadn’t tried to, so far. He found the exertion and the cold air refreshing, if not quite enjoyable. No doubt the exercise was good for him, too, though outwardly he didn’t seem to need it. He was lean for his six-foot frame and looked at least no older than his thirty-six years. Maybe the jogs were just his mind’s attempt to kick-start him from inertia.
Inertia. That was what a friend had called it, months ago. One of the few who still came around. Five years back, right after everything had happened, there had been lots of friends. They’d been supportive when they were supposed to be, and later they’d been insistent—they’d pushed him the way people did when they cared. Pushed him to start his life again. He’d said he appreciated it, said they were right—of course you had to move on after a while. He’d agreed and nodded, and watched the way their eyes got sad when they understood he was only saying those things to make them stop talking. He hadn’t tried to explain his side of it. Hadn’t told them that missing someone could feel like a watch you’d been assigned to stand. That it could feel like duty.
He passed the last of the fires. Here the beach beneath the walk became rocky and damp, the moisture catching the glow from each lamppost. The shore lay vacant for the next several hundred yards. A minute later, in the middle of the dead stretch, Dryden came to an intersection in the boardwalk; a second branch led away inland.
He slowed and stopped. He almost always did, at this spot. He wasn’t sure what drew him to it—maybe just the emptiness of it. The junction lay in the darkness between lights, and there was never anyone around. Nights like this, with no moon and no surf, this place was the equivalent of a sensory deprivation chamber.
He leaned on the wooden rail with his elbows, facing the sea. As his breathing slowed, faint sounds finally came to him. The hiss of tires on the freeway, a mile inland beyond the dunes. Tiny animals moving in the beach grass behind the walk. Dryden had been standing there for over a minute when he heard another sound: running footsteps on the boardwalk’s planking.
For a moment he thought it was another jogger. Then he knew otherwise—the cadence was too fast. This was someone sprinting full-out. In the saturated air, the sound’s origin was hard to trace. He looked left and then right along the shoreline stretch of the walk, but against the light glow he saw nobody coming. He was just stepping back from the rail, turning to look down the inland route, when the sprinting figure crashed into him from that direction.
He heard a gasp—the voice of a young girl. Instantly she was fighting, pushing back from him in a panic, already turning to bolt away along the shoreline course.
“Hey,” Dryden said. “Are you alright?”
She stopped and faced him. Even in the faint light, Dryden could see that she was terrified of something. She regarded him with nothing but caution and kept herself balanced to sprint again, though she seemed too out of breath to go much farther. She wore jeans and a T-shirt but no shoes or socks. Her hair—dark brown, hanging below her shoulders—was clean but uncombed. The girl could not have been more than twelve. For the briefest moment her eyes intensified; Dryden could see the calculation going on behind them.
Just like that, her defensive posture changed. She remained afraid, but not of him. She turned her gaze inland instead, back the way she’d come from, and scrutinized the darkness there. Dryden looked, too, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. The inland run of the boardwalk led to the harbor road, across which lay the dune ridge, shrouded in the thick night. All appeared calm and quiet.
“You live near here?” the girl asked.
“Who’s after you?”
She turned to him again and moved closer.
“I need somewhere to hide,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything, but please get me out of here first.”
“I’ll take you to the police station, kid, but I can’t—”
“Not the police,” she said, so abruptly that Dryden felt an impulse to turn and continue his jog. Whatever the girl was in trouble for, getting caught up in it was not going to improve his night.
Seeing his change of expression, she stepped forward fast and grabbed his hand, her eyes pleading. “I’m not running from the police. It’s not like that.”
Her gaze snapped to the side again, in the same moment that Dryden sensed movement in his peripheral vision. He followed her stare, and for a moment couldn’t make sense of what he saw. Somehow he could discern the shapes of the dunes now, invisible in the gloom only moments earlier. They were rimmed with a faint, shifting light. The girl’s breathing trembled.
“Yes or no,” she said. “I can’t wait any longer.”
Dryden knew the sound of real terror in a person’s voice. This girl wasn’t afraid of getting busted for some misdemeanor; she was afraid for her life.
The light around the dunes sharpened, and Dryden suddenly understood what he was seeing: People with flashlights were about to crest the ridge from the far side. The urge to distance himself from the girl was gone, replaced by a sense that something was very wrong here, and that she wasn’t lying.
“Come on,” Dryden said.
Still holding her hand, he ran north along the boardwalk, back in the direction of his house. He had to slow his pace only slightly for her. As they ran, Dryden kept looking to the dunes. He and the girl had gone no more than fifty yards when the first sharp spike of light topped the ridge. Within seconds, three more appeared. He was surprised by how close they were; the night had been playing tricks on his sense of distance.
Directly ahead along the boardwalk, one of the overhead mercury lights was coming up fast. Dryden stopped, the girl almost pulling his arm off as she stopped with him.
“What are you doing?” she asked. She watched the pursuers as tensely as Dryden did.
He nodded to the cone of light on...