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the pier, was slowly thickening into a heartier brew.
    The fog would cloak me quicker than the darkness alone. The poles creaked in the locks and the paddles sometimes struck splashes from the black water, but no one shouted behind me, and moment by moment, I felt more confident of escaping.
    My arms began to ache, my shoulders and my neck, but I rowed another minute, another. I was increasingly impressed by the power of the sea, and grateful for the low sluggish waves.
    When I allowed myself to look back, the shrouded glow of some of the pier lamps could still be discerned. But when I saw that the pier itself was lost to view in gray murk, I brought both oars aboard and dropped them on the sectioned floorboards.
    Under a novice seaman, an inflatable dinghy can be a slippery beast, almost as bad as riding the back of an angry and intoxicated crocodile that wants to thrash you off and eat your
cojones
. But that’s a story for another time.
    Fearful of falling overboard or capsizing the craft, I crept on my hands and knees to the rear thwart. I sat there with one hand on the steering arm of the outboard.
    Instead of a starter rope, there was an electronic ignition, which I found by reading the engine as a blind man reads a line of Braille. A push of the button brought a roar, and then a whoosh of propeller blades chopping surf.
    The engine noise prevented me from hearing any shouts that rose from the pier, but now the demonic trinity knew where I had gone.

CHAPTER 6
    S TEERING STRAIGHT TO SHORE SEEMED UNWISE. The gunman who had been positioned at the landward end of the pier would race north along the beach, using the engine noise to maintain a fix on me.
    The fog was not dense enough to bury all of Magic Beach. I could see some fuzzy lights from shoreside businesses and homes, and I used these as a guide to motor north, parallel to the coast.
    For the first time since it had happened, I allowed myself to wonder why the big man’s hand upon my shoulder had cast me back into the previous night’s apocalyptic dream. I couldn’t be sure that he had shared my vision. But he had experienced
something
that made him want to take me somewhere private for the kind of intense questioning during which the interrogator acquires a large collection of the interrogee’s teeth and fingernails.
    I thought of those yellow eyes. And of the voice that belonged to something that would eat Goldilocks with or without gravy:
Who the
hell
are you?
    My current circumstances were not conducive to calm thought and profound reasoning. I could arrive at only one explanation for the electrifying effect of his hand upon my shoulder.
    My dream of that horrendous but unspecified catastrophe was not a dream but, beyond doubt now, a premonition. When the hulk touched me, he triggered a memory of the nightmare, which backwashed into him
because the mysterious cataclysm that I had inadequately foreseen was one that he would be instrumental in causing.
    The waves were too low to turn my stomach, but when my stomach turned nevertheless, it felt as viscous as an oyster sliding out of its shell.
    When I had gone perhaps half a mile from the pier, I set the outboard’s steering arm, locked the throttle, stripped off the sodden sweatshirt that had encumbered me on my previous swim, and dived overboard.
    Having worked up a sweat with my exertions, I had forgotten how cold the water was: cold enough to shock the breath out of me. I went under. A current sucked me down. I fought upward, broke the surface, spat out a mouthful of seawater, and gasped for air.
    I rolled onto my back, using a flutter kick and a modified butterfly stroke to make for land at an easy pace. If one of the redheads waited on the shore for me, I wanted to give him time to hear the dinghy proceeding steadily north and to decide either to follow it or to return to the pier.
    Besides, maybe a shark, a really huge shark, a giant mutant shark of unprecedented size would surface under me, kill me