The Shore Read Online Free PDF Page A

on the gas pedal.
    The gulls wheeled, their silhouettes like sickles, the erratic spatter of their sharpest screams glancing off the surface of the bay. Earlier they had feasted, descending in droves to the banquet. Now, driven from their roosts by vans and cars and flashing lights, they circled, shrilling.
    All day, men in uniforms had milled along the old dock, and whenever a gull settled, drawn by morsels still drifting along the surface, the men threw stones or bits of shell. Once, a shot had been fired, and birds had thundered away to hover and swoop in the frozen sky.
    Drifting on currents of air now, they pivoted, wailing in the twilight, awaiting their chance to glean whatever scraps the nets and hooks would miss.
    The chill quickened his step. He’d left the Volks on a side street and had followed the children on foot to a playground. The older girl had watched the boys toss a football until encroaching dusk had forced them away to nearby homes. These were the only children he’d seen in the entire town, this tiny group. He’d observed carefully, but they’d met no one else, spoken to no one else.
    In the fading light, the scratchy planks of the boardwalk seemed a natural barrier between sea and town, sand lapsing into dun wood, then into a granulating wedge of concrete. From the town side, a hotel pressed up against the boards, its tattered banner rustling overhead. He turned away. So close. Pain thundered in his head. Above the beach, gulls slowly spun, suspended in the vaporous twilight.
    Tide’s in. Choppy shadows flickered in the waves, but the roar he heard was in his head, in his chest. He walked on, trying to think.
    At last, vision blurring with exhaustion, face blazing from the cold, he crossed the boards and headed down the ramp. Patches of ice pocked the sidewalk with the same dull hue as the sky.
    Down the block, a lamp winked through the drapes of the house the little girls had entered. No lights showed in any of the other houses, and no curtains parted. Yet the sensation of being watched intensified as he headed into the center of town.
    Hiking past darkened storefronts, he peered constantly back over his shoulder. A fleeting shape trailed always just beyond his sight—he felt sure of it. Another sepulchral hotel glowered, boarded as tightly as the one on the boardwalk, and starlings cycloned above its roof. A few street lamps glimmered to life.
    With a growl, a jeep bounced past him down the street. Traces of metallic green bled through the white paint around the word POLICE, and he glimpsed a pale, sharp face through the windshield. The jeep slowed at the corner, and he studied it with his peripheral vision. Pretty amateurish, he decided. The revolving light on the hood looked like the sort that attached magnetically. He sauntered past, hands crammed deep in his pockets.
    Hunching his shoulders, he turned onto a small residential street, then hurried past shriveled hedges. The jeep didn’t follow. He smelled smoke from a wood fire, and his breath spiraled in mist as dead leaves rasped and scuttled across the sidewalk. Keeping his face down, he studied the sidewalk. Past winters had wracked the terrain. Cracks in the street had heaved a foot above the roadbed, as though from an earthquake. He’s holed up here. A skin of ice on a puddle crunched beneath his shoe, and his cough felt like a hook in his chest. I know it.
    I can feel it. He should get the car, he told himself, begin patrolling the roads that led to the highway. Even now, the boy might be sneaking away, and he would have to begin his search again, going from town to town, looking for…
    No, he’s gone to ground here. Yesterday, he’d gotten lucky…and blown it. So now he knows I’m after him. A trembling rage convulsed him as debris spun about his head. A dried leaf lifted from the ground and rushed against his chest, held there by the wind. He tried to brush it away, but it clung with brittle tenacity, edges curling sharply,