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 the boardwalk. “They’ll see us if we run through the light.”
“We can’t stay here,” the girl said.