Two young women with skinny waists and big breasts walked by. Jensen asked, "Real or fake?"

"Fake."

"Right. You get to move to the front of the class. And you can stop looking now."

They sipped their drinks until a song came on that Jensen liked. She stood and said, "I wanna dance."

"Uh-uh, not this guy. I can't dance." He leaned back.

"Everyone can dance, Lawless. Some know how and some don't, but everyone can dance. Come on, I need to burn some calories."

"Go for a run, then," he said, as she pulled on him. "Someone will take our seats."

"Not if we leave half-full glasses they won't. And if they do, you can flash your shield and tell them to get lost. Now come on," pulling, "you're gonna dance with me."

He grumbled, but let her pull him up.

She led him through the twisting jumping crowd into the middle of the dance floor, and it occurred to Lawless that he'd been to one dance his entire life, his high school senior prom, and he couldn't recall whether he'd even danced then. He had no idea what to do. He looked around and decided to try and copy the moves of a black guy dancing next to them. Ten seconds later he gave up, thinking it would be easier to paint the Mona Lisa. He shuffled his feet back and forth, trying to feel the rhythm, failing miserably.

Jensen was wearing tight black Bongo jeans and a simple white blouse unbuttoned to show cleavage, but nothing like what the other women were showing. Her eyes were closed and she moved with the music, blending in with the other young dancers. She opened her eyes, made eye contact, and put her arms over her head, gyrating her hips. Embarrassed she would do something so suggestive in public, he glanced around to see if everyone was staring.

No one was; they were all dancing like her, except that Jensen's moves were tame compared to what he saw. Several couples, if they were naked, would be having sex on the dance floor. Others were locked in what looked like a hip embrace: thighs thrust into the groins of their partners, grinding in-and-out, around-and-around. Men and women were taking turns sliding their hands up and down the bodies of their partners, lingering in places, making suggestive motions. He stared at one couple, his mouth wide open, until the guy noticed and shot him a dirty look.

Distracted, he hadn't seen Jensen coming in so when she closed his mouth with her hand, he jumped. She laughed and said, her mouth close to his ear, "Wanna try some of that?"

His eyes grew big. "Here? With all these people looking?"

She laughed again and turned her back to him, arms high over her head. She moved in, slow, hips swaying with the beat, until her buttocks nestled into his crotch. He shuffled, trying to keep in step with her, trying not to knock her down. What the hell is she doing? She leaned her head back into his chest and closed her eyes. He could smell her hair. He looked down her blouse. Her buttocks caressed him and he stiffened. Sweat rolled down his forehead. She danced against him for half a minute, a minute.

He glanced to his left and saw a young woman staring at them, drunken lust in her eyes. She started copying Jensen's moves, tried to get her partner to follow. He threw up, splattering his date and scattering everyone within a twenty-foot radius, including Jensen and Lawless.

Taking him by the hand, she led him to their table, which, as she predicted, was still vacant. She kissed him on the mouth like she had at her apartment, only this time she lingered and probed with her tongue. She pressed her hips against him. He pressed back, almost out of control.

"And you thought you couldn't dance," she said, breaking the kiss.

Exasperated, he said, "That wasn't dancing, that was foreplay."

Jensen laughed and they sat.

Lawless downed his drink. "I can't believe I just did that in public." Then he grinned.

Jensen was still laughing. "Welcome to the twenty-first century, Detective. Now you can say you've dirty-danced."

He looked around. "Isn't there another dance floor, one that's not been puked on?"

She laughed again, and he saw how her eyes twinkled when she laughed ,and he thought he loved her, again.

Later that night, after their lovemaking, Lawless held Jensen in his arms, in a position very much like the one they had danced in at Big City. His ears still buzzed.

They had left the club at eleven-thirty in a big hurry to get back to her place. An hour and a half of drinking and dancing in a sexually stimulating manner was more than Lawless could take. Jensen had said she wanted to stay longer but her behavior in the car on the way home said different; they pawed at each other, as much as Lawless could without wrecking the car, kissing and groping at red lights. Like high school kids. At her place, their lovemaking had been brief but vigorous.

He'd asked her to set the alarm so they wouldn't be late for their meeting with the Modesto cops, but she refused.

"I don't need an alarm. I just tell myself what time I need to get up and that's when I wake up. Besides," she added, snuggling into him, sleepy and content, "your dream will wake us up by five anyway."

"No. I'm not dreaming tonight. I'm sleeping."

"Whatever." She was asleep thirty seconds later.

Lawless fought sleep for a while, tried to concentrate on the creature, to reach out to it mentally. At least he thought that's what he was doing. He hoped to link up to it again, see if he could find out what it was up to. He tried everything he could think of, even clearing his mind of all thought, thinking it would come to him, or he to it, or something. He got nothing and fell asleep.

The creature felt him probing, like ship's sonar searching for a submarine in the vast ocean beneath it. It had no intention of letting him in again.

When he'd been with it before, swimming in the canal, it didn't detect his presence because nothing like that had ever happened. After it sensed him and sent him away, it recorded his frequency in its nervous system. Then, as a programmer rewrites software to block a particular virus, it reprogrammed its nervous system to watch for him. Now, when it felt him pinging, the new program threw up a psychic wall that kept him out.

The creature did not derive joy from this victory, this adaptation. It did not know joy or sadness, happiness or grief. It could sense the impressions these emotions made in the psychic tide of life, but could not experience them. It knew only hunger.

Another adaptation had occurred after it fed on the human the night before. When it first struck, it knew there was another human prey nearby. It left that prey alive because it was programmed to kill and flee, but when it decided to finish feeding on the human it had killed, it felt the live prey's fear increase ten-fold. The combination of the nourishing flesh, already infused with rich emotional sustenance, and the heightened fear of the live prey made the feeding many times more satisfying.

The creature made note of this and rewrote its code.

Now, as it left the quiet of the country to begin its nightly hunt, it would test the new program.

It was just after one in the morning when Gunther Burke parked the 97 Ford Escort rental on Cheyenne, near the upscale Whitegate subdivision in north Modesto. He hopped a brick wall and walked north on the bank of Lateral No. 7, toward Kampen, where he planned on robbing a house next to the canal. The moon was almost full and lit up the night.

He wore two layers of clothing; the outside layer lightweight black nylon, easy to remove. Underneath, a jogging outfit. If seen he could lose the nylon layer, in the canal if possible, and become a jogger out for a midnight run.

Burke was a thief because his parents were thieves, two of the best. The police never caught them and now, with five million in the bank, they lived modest but carefree lives in the Bahamas. He spent three months a year with them, relaxing on a white beach, and worked the other nine. He planned on retiring at forty and was right on schedule with almost two million in an off-shore account.

He'd just celebrated his thirty-second birthday, yet, like his parents, had no police record, not even a traffic ticket. The secret to his success was his strict adherence to four ironclad rules his parents had taught him.

Rule number one: never stay in the same town you're working in. The less the locals saw your face, the better. He'd been working Modesto for three weeks, staying in out-of-town motels, never sleeping in the same place more than three consecutive nights.

Rule number two: never work in any one city or area more than a month. That meant moving a lot and spending more on motels and rental cars, but it was money he was willing to part with. The police worked with profiles they largely kept to themselves. They might share information with other jurisdictions on murder cases, but rarely on burglaries.

Rule number three: always work alone. Partners had a way of turning on each other, his parents a rare exception. Thieves are thieves, after all, crooks at heart.

This rule, working alone, applied to any relationship. During his nine working months he was a loner; no girlfriends, no one-night-stands, no drinking buddies, no anybody. He used three different fences to move his merchandise, each in a different city.

Rule number four: rent vehicles from agencies that did not put identification stickers on their cars. Rental cars raise red flags if the police see them more than once, especially at night. He rented small, inexpensive cars from local rent-a-junker lots; they were invisible. He used fake ids when registering for the cars, different ids than those he used to check in and out of the motels, so that anyone cross-checking names would never see the same name twice.

He enjoyed working in Central California, in part because the people were less suspicious than their cousins in big cities like L.A., a city he refused to work at all. Big-city dwellers were used to crime; many slept with loaded guns at their side or owned vicious dogs.

He also enjoyed working the Central Valley because of the canals. Alleys were risky, regularly patrolled by police. Most burglaries were committed by junkies who used alleys to access the homes they broke into, and that's where they usually got caught. The police rarely patrolled canal banks, he could only imagine why not. He would have. The canals allowed him to park his nondescript rental car in one subdivision, hop a wall, jog along the canal bank to an adjacent subdivision, hop another wall, and enter a house from the front, or, even better, from the back. He would also use the canals for daytime robberies, posing as a jogger. No one gave him a second look.

He walked at an easy pace, enjoying the cool night air. There was no need to hurry, the owners of the house he intended to rob were on vacation. They'd been lazy, forgetting to ask a neighbor to pick up their newspapers. Why should they? They lived on a cozy, safe cul-de-sac, in a nice part of town.

Burke marveled at how easy it was to see who was away, especially in the Central Valley, where people were more trusting.

The creature came to the diversion station where Lateral No. 7 split off Lateral No. 6. It moved into Lateral No. 7, sensing prey.

Rounding a bend in the canal, it quickened its pace; the prey was close. It detected little emotion in the psychic field near the waterway. It was programmed to change that tonight.

It rose out of the water, soundless, saw the prey and bit its leg. The instructions for the new routine executed: instead of biting off as much as it could before swimming away, it pulled the prey into the water, then bit its leg off.

The prey's psychic output spiked, rewarding the creature for its restraint. The new programming instructed it to run several tests to see how much psychic energy the prey would give before it was eaten.

Something sharp and powerful grabbed Burke by the leg and dragged him to the canal. His first thought was he'd somehow gotten his leg tangled up in a steel cable, or something. What he couldn't understand how was that cable, or whatever it was, could now be dragging him. The pain in his leg was immense, the grip strong, so he did what he could: fell on his back, flailed his arms, and screamed.

As he went into the canal, the vise around his leg increased its hold, then gone: he was free. He thought he would just climb out of the canal, call it a night, find the Ford, go back to the motel and change into something dry and go to bed. Maybe get a beer.

Then the fire started in his leg and he screamed. He threw his arms against the canal wall, clawing the cement with his fingers, trying to grab onto something, trying to pull himself out of the freezing water. His hands slipped on the smooth concrete, so he kicked down with his legs, trying to push up enough to grab the top of the wall. Only one foot struck the canal wall. He kicked again, got the same result. The fire in his leg became an inferno and he screamed again. The current rolled him onto his back and he panicked in earnest.

He looked down at his right leg, to see why it hurt so badly, and saw that it was gone below the knee. His panic cranked up a notch.

But what he saw next came very close to stopping his heart.

This was good: the prey's psychic output had increased ten-fold, exciting the creature. It fed on the rich emotions.

Were it not for the new program, its new adaptation, the creature's instincts would demand that it now devour its prey and flee. Instead, the program instructed it to do something it never would have otherwise thought to do: reveal itself to the prey. It was not by accident that its species had survived for a million years; they were masters in the art of stealth. Their enemies could not destroy what they did not know existed or could not see. Revealing itself went against this most basic of instincts.

But it promised great potential psychic rewards.

It rose out of the water, revealing its ancient face to the prey. The reward the new programming had promised was realized, in greater abundance than imagined; it gorged itself on the prey's fear.

It opened its mouth and bared its teeth, to see how the prey would respond. It was again rewarded.

Burke almost died of fear when a large black, thing, rose up from the canal. It floated with him for a few seconds, then opened its eyes; three yellow slashes in its forehead blinked, and he screamed louder than he ever thought he could scream.

He slapped and kicked at the water, trying to distance himself from the thing. Fear galvanized him, flooding his body with adrenaline. His mind momentarily shut down the pain pathway in his spinal cord so he wouldn't feel the throbbing leg; he couldn't afford the distraction.

He bumped up against the canal wall and flung his arms behind him, trying to crabwalk up the wall. His hands slipped. Panic threatened to consume him and he searched frantically for a possible solution, some way to survive, to get away from this impossible thing.

The creature opened its mouth, revealing eight-inch-long silvery teeth that flashed and sparkled in the moonlight; jagged and wicked: he understood how he had lost his leg, and he knew he would not be leaving the canal alive.

His mind slipped toward insanity.

It could no longer deny itself some of the prey's flesh: it bit an arm off and pulled back to observe the reaction.

He screamed and screamed. Then, almost without him seeing it, the monster bit his left arm off. Blood squirted out in rhythmic bursts.

Survival instincts took over again and he kicked and flailed with his remaining arm and leg. Weak from blood loss and fear, the will to live was all he had left. He pictured his parents on a white sandy beach, cool drinks in their hands, congratulating him on his successes. If he could somehow escape this madness and get help, he could still survive. His parents would take him in and he could live on the islands as he had planned.

After a minute of splashing and flailing, he gave up.

He was so tired. He just wanted it to be over, so he allowed the current to pull him under.

The prey floundered in the water while the creature fed on its desperation and fear. The prey's movements slowed, followed by an abrupt drop in its emotional release. It stopped splashing and slipped under the water. The creature wanted to finish its meal, slice its teeth through flesh and bone and feel the prey's blood wash down its throat, but the new routine would not permit it.

It grabbed the prey in its jaws and dropped it on the canal bank. Its sharp teeth could not help but sink into the prey's flesh, but the wounds were not fatal. It hovered, baring its teeth, waiting to see what the prey would do.

Once again, it feasted on the rich emotions.

Just as Burke slipped into the water, welcoming the calm death would bring, he was lifted into the air by what felt like a giant pinchers made of knives. Sharp steel pierced his clothes and skin, penetrating an inch into his flesh. He screamed in new agony.

The creature dropped him onto the ground and he screamed and thrashed. It backed off and watched him, baring its bloody, silver teeth. Almost insane now, he thought it was smiling at him and a glimmer of hope pierced the pall of dread that cloaked his mind. Incredibly, he thought a miracle was going to happen: the beast was letting him go. If someone had heard his screams - surely all of Modesto must have heard him - the police would be on the way and he might be found in time, before he bled to death.

He stopped screaming; the image of a white beach entered his mind. He smiled.

The beast opened its mouth and came at him. He kicked at it with his one leg, meaning to give it at least one good blow before it finished him off.

The creature was pleased when the prey filled the air with physical vibrations and rich emotions, but it was time for another provocation.

It reached down to bite, and the prey struck at it, so it bit the prey's leg off. It rose again to observe, glutting itself with the emotions the prey so willingly gave as well as its flesh.

The new routine noted the prey's response and rewrote itself.

The metallic glinting teeth clamped down over his leg and bit it off, the thick muscle and bone providing no resistance.

Terrified, he pushed at the ground with his arm, trying to move all that was left of him away from the hellish creature devouring him limb-by-limb. Blood leaked from his hip, no longer in spurts; he had lost so much blood his heart had little to push through his arteries.

Too weak to scream, he gasped for air and made one last move to try and save his life. He flopped onto his stomach and began a one-armed crawl toward the brick wall.

He felt a now-familiar, immense piercing pressure around his waist; as he rose into the air, he thought he heard sirens.

It watched the prey's pitiful attempts at escape and sensed its death was imminent. The creature did not want to devour dead flesh, for it lost some of its sweetness after the life-force left, so it bent down and picked the prey up in its jaws.

As it was about to bite the prey in half, it felt a small but piercing vibration. It could not identify the vibration but knew it was out of place; it needed to leave soon.

After it finished feeding.

It bit the prey in two and let the top half fall to the ground.

The sirens were too late to give him hope; the beast had him in its jaws. After a moment of hesitation, it parted him mid-waist.

He, the half his head was connected to, fell to the ground, landing on his one arm; a bone snapped but he was past feeling. In his last moments of consciousness, and life, he saw his intestines spill into the dirt.

A curtain fell over his vision, but did not beat the beast.

Lusting for more flesh, it swallowed and moved to strike again. The program - the "new" routine was no longer new, it was now permanent - caused it to pause, noting and feasting on the new emotion the prey was releasing: submission. It was yielding up its life and flesh.

The creature picked the prey up in its jaws, tossed it into the air and swallowed it whole.

Slipping into the water, it swam east into town. Sated, it could tolerate the psychic din of the many potential nearby prey.

Billy Poloosha and Vijay Williamson took the call from dispatch: several people had reported hearing screams in the vicinity of Kampen Street in north Modesto.

"Screaming in the high-rent district, whoop-de-freaking-do," Billy said as he turned north. He was bored. He was always bored when sober. They were a mile from Kampen when the call came in, but Billy took his time. Why rush? Screaming in nice areas of town rarely meant anything other than a party.