Vijay had one hand on the door handle and the other poised to grab the wheel should it appear Billy was steering them into the canal, sweating despite the cool evening breeze.

"I don't see a damned thing but black water," Billy grumbled, and passed gas: the patrol car filled with the stench of bowel rot. Vijay's eyes watered and he gagged, but did not take his eyes off the road; he knew if he did, they would be in the canal.

"Damn, Billy," he said, struggling to breathe.

They were only going ten miles an hour, but to Vijay they were hurtling down the road, out of control. "Let me hold the wheel," he said, trying to keep his nerves out of his voice, trying to breathe.

"What for? I got it, Vijay. I'm not the one green around the collar here. I can do two things at once you know."

Billy passed gas again. It was such a part of his life he never said pardon me or oops or anything, nor did he ever acknowledge the smell. Vijay thrust his head out the window and gasped for air.

They rolled along the canal bank, tires inches from the water, until Vijay's shirt was soaked with sweat and the car smelled like an outhouse. Billy turned the wheel to the right, seconds before Vijay was sure their left tires would slip into the canal.

"If this isn't the biggest damn waste of taxpayer's money -" Billy starting saying.

"I think sitting in the parking lot behind Krispy Kremes, stuffing my face with donuts, is a bigger waste of time," Vijay cut in, between gasps.

"You're too young to know how police work is really done, Vijay, that's your problem. Did I ever tell you about that time we caught that guy robbing Mr. T's Donuts?"

"Yeah, five times. It's the highlight of your career."

More gas rumbled out of Billy and Vijay was bathed by a fine mist of burritos and broccoli gone bad; a rotten, sulfury, earthy smell. He gagged.

"Old Gonzales and I - you're too young to remember Gonzales. He was a good cop, God rest his soul. Died of a heart attack two years after retirement." Billy rambled, unfazed by the foul air. "That's gotta suck. Anyway, we were having ourselves a donut or two at Mr. T.'s when..."

Vijay tuned him out and kept an eye on the road, every breath a struggle. Now and then he'd reach over and pull the steering wheel to the right, Billy's Get your damn hands off the wheel! notwithstanding.

They followed the canal until it went under Lakewood. While waiting for traffic to clear, Billy spotted a Quik Stop across the road. "Let's stop and get a snack. Gotta keep my blood sugar up."

Normally Vijay would have protested, but his nerves were shot, and he needed to get away from the stench. He hoped the rest of Billy's gas would work its way out while they walked around the store, but doubted he would be that lucky.

The creature quickened its pace and activated its senses; it was nearing the concentration of humans and needed to be alert. Its program tonight called for it to strike and move, strike and move.

Detecting all nearby vibration, it ignored any not made by living entities and focused on emotional emanations; the frequency of human life.

It sensed prey ahead. Were it able to interpret the prey's emotion, it would see it as profound sadness.

Baskel shook three aspirins out of the bottle and chewed them dry, cringing at the bitter taste. He wiped his face on the back of a shirtsleeve and turned to watch Jensen talk to Lawless. He now knew why she was always at his side: it was like she was his caretaker.

"He's still not doing anything," Lawless said. "No wait. He's getting something out of his shirt pocket. A Band-Aid. A cigarette. He's lighting a cigarette."

"Forget the cigarette. What else can you see?"

Lawless's eyes moved back and forth, as if searching the roof of the car for some clue of the boy's whereabouts.

"What's going on? What's he seeing?" Baskel asked Jensen, too loud. He'd spoken only to her after Lawless's vision started.

"You don't need to yell Detective. You can hear what he says as well as I can, and if you want to ask a question, ask him, not me. He can hear you, you know."

"There's a wide road on the other side of the canal, and a brick wall. Trees off to one side."

"What about cars, are there any cars driving by?" Jensen prompted.

Baskel looked at the roof for the sixth time, thinking maybe this time he could see what Lawless was seeing. He didn't, so he turned around and looked out the windshield, again. Three kids were skateboarding through the empty parking lot: here was a scene he knew. They passed close to Lawless's car and saw Baskel looking at them. The third one gave Baskel the bird as he floated by. Baskel held his shield out the window; the kid saw it, sneered, and raised his hand higher.

Baskel sighed. "The world is full of punks"

"Wait a minute," Lawless said. "I hear a train, fairly close."

"Do you see anything different? Has anything changed?" Jensen asked.

"No."

Jensen said to Baskel, "Where's that canal map?"

Baskel fumbled around and found it on the floor. "Here." He went to hand it to her, but she said, "Look on the map and see if you can find where a canal runs by a railroad track."

Baskel stared at the map, trying to comprehend her instructions. He found what looked like a railroad track but it was difficult to tell on the little map.

"There's one by 99. Five or six canals cross those tracks."

"The train stopped," Lawless said, excited. "It sounded like it stopped not too far from where the boy's at."

"No," Jensen said to Baskel. "It's not downtown. Keep looking."

A drop of sweat dropped off Baskel's face onto the map and his hands started shaking. Sweat got in his eyes, stinging them and blurring his vision. He swore and wiped his eyes with a damp shirtsleeve.

"Did you find anything?" Jensen asked him.

"I can't find a damn thing on this map! Where the hell is your regular one?"

Wilber Cotton was smoking his second cigarette when he heard the Amtrak whistle as the train pulled into the station a half-mile away. He looked toward the sound and wondered how much it cost to ride Amtrak. Probably a lot more than twelve dollars. Wilber had twelve dollars hidden in a another Band-Aid tin in the backyard. He didn't hide money in his room anymore because his mother always found it and took it to buy beer or cigarettes or McDonald's cheeseburgers. She didn't find where he hid it outside.

He talked to a boy at school named Quentin Boozer about running away. He and Quentin were sort of friends because they both hated their names except Quentin had two names to hate. Quentin was not as bad as Wilber but Boozer was a lot worse than Cotton. They talked about running away to Los Angeles where Quentin's grandpa lived by the beach. They could stay with the grandpa and play on the beach every day and stay up as late as they wanted and not go to stupid school or do stupid homework.

They talked about running away and Quentin pretended he wanted to but he really didn't because he didn't hate his parents except for naming him Quentin. When Quentin told Wilber he really didn't want to run away Wilber pretended he didn't want to run away either but he did.

Quentin said they always find kids who run away and take them back to their parents. Wilber's parents would be really mad if he ran away and the police brought him back because that would mean the police would come to their house and they always got mad when the police came to their house.

Quentin also told Wilber that sometimes bad people find kids who run away and do bad things to them and kill them. He didn't want bad things to happen to him but he wondered what it would be like to be killed and what happened after you were killed. Some kids say you go to heaven or you go to hell after you die. He wondered what heaven would be like but he thought he would probably be sent to hell because he had never did anything nice or important. He was just a kid who had a bad name that other kids made fun of and who had loser parents.

He took a puff on his cigarette and took in more smoke than he usually did because he wanted to feel dizzy. He coughed and the world spun.

"Ah jeez, it still stinks in here," Vijay complained as they piled back into the patrol car. "Damn Billy, what've you been eating that makes you stink so bad?"

They each had a soda and a bag of chips, the difference was Billy had a sixty-four ounce flagon of Mountain Dew and a full-sized bag of Fritos while Vijay had a snack-sized bag of Sun Chips and a twenty-ounce Diet Coke.

"Must be Brenda's chili," Billy said, acknowledging his gas problem for the first time. "She made a big pot of it a coupla' days ago. It kinda' smells funny but it tastes good. This batch didn't have any beans in it, though. She said they give me gas."

"What doesn't?" Vijay said.

Vijay kept his nose pointed out the window while Billy drove across the street to the canal. The radio squawked just after they pulled onto the canal bank.

The collective experience of its ancestors told it that once it revealed itself to more than a few of its prey, there would be no turning back; they would come hunting for it, and while it did not fear them, its survival instincts still warned against taking this step.

So it drifted in the canal, upstream from the human, weighing the potential risk of its new programming against the rich feeding it felt certain it would receive.

The program initiated and it rose out of the water, showing its glinting silvery teeth.

Baskel was comparing Lawless's police-issued roadmap, unfolded on his lap, to the smaller canal map, when he realized that while he was usually adept at reading maps, tonight he couldn't have pointed out the street he lived on if someone held a gun to his head.

"What do you see? What's different?" Jensen asked Lawless, again. She heard Baskel and wanted to grab the maps out of his hands and look at them herself, but knew her job was to keep Lawless focused.

"He's just sitting there, smoking and coughing."

"What do you see at the edge of the picture?"

"Nothing new," Lawless said, after a moment. "Canal, brick wall, occasional cars. No more train sounds."

Using a trick he learned from his wife, which she probably got from Oprah, Baskel took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. It helped, a little. Then he closed his eyes and thought about trains. They were everywhere, blocking traffic, blasting their horns in the middle of night. He'd been stopped by one in every small town around Modesto in the last twenty years, but he was having trouble picturing where they ran through town, or if they even did.

He thought of the rail yards in Empire, east of Modesto: there were dozens of tracks there. Where did they run? He found Empire on the map, saw tracks all over the place, and a canal, Lateral No. 1, intersecting four or five of them.

"Hey," he said to Jensen, excited. "Tons of tracks come out of Empire and Lateral No. 1 cuts through most of them."

"Does the canal run next to a wide, busy street?"

Baskel looked. "

Yosemite Boulevard's fairly close."

"I hear the train again!" Lawless said.

"That part of town is industrial, isn't it?" Jensen asked Baskel. "Isn't that where Frito Lay and all those other plants are?"

Baskel nodded, then realized she might not have been looking at him and said, "Yeah, I think so."

"Would trains be stopping and going there this time of night?"

"I don't know. How would I know? Maybe."

"What about Santa Fe?" Jensen asked. "Doesn't it go through Empire and Escalon?"

Baskel consulted the map. "I found it. It's the 'Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad.' " He put a finger on the railroad and followed the line up the map through Modesto.

Then he saw it.

"Amtrak!" he shouted, startling Jensen. "I'll bet the kid is sitting by the canal somewhere on East Briggsmore."

"Excellent," Jensen said. "Lawless, what do you-"

"Oh no! Look out! It has three eyes! Three eyes! Huge, huge metal teeth. Oh no, it's going to ... Run! Run!!! Don't just stand there, run! Ahhhhhh!"

Lawless threw his arms over his face and shrieked with terror.

"Get on the radio and get some cops on that canal!" Jensen ordered Baskel. Baskel fumbled for the radio and dropped it on the floor.

Wilber Cotton took the last drag from his cigarette. He breathed in too deep again and started coughing but not enough to puke. He was getting used the smoke and that was okay because he thought smoking was cool. At school they told you it was bad for you and you could die from cancer or heart attacks but he thought if it was so bad for you and everyone knew that how come so many grown-ups smoked. He never heard of any kids dying from smoking only grown-ups.

He stopped coughing and put the glowing butt between his middle finger and his thumb so he could flick it into the canal.

When he reached his arm out to flick the cigarette he got really confused. Something came out of the water that looked like a giant snake but it must have been a mutant snake because it had three eyes. He couldn't ever remember seeing a picture of a snake with three eyes before but thought it was possible because he heard chickens could be born with three legs.

At first the giant snake didn't scare him because he's seen lots of monster movies and he didn't think it was real. He flicked his cigarette butt at the giant snake and that seemed to make it mad because it opened its mouth and showed Wilber its big silver teeth.

Then Wilber got scared because the giant snake's mouth kept opening and opening and opening until it was wide enough for him to crawl into and he had to look up to see it because it was so big. He knew he shouldn't have flicked his cigarette butt at the giant snake because it was mad and was probably going to eat him.

He decided it wouldn't be okay to die just yet and that he didn't want to be eaten by a giant snake. He stood to run but the giant snake brought its big mouth full of silver teeth down on top of him. He screamed into the giant snake's mouth but it didn't matter.

When the silver teeth cut through his stomach Wilber Cotton felt a jolt of electricity shoot from his back to his brain. Silver teeth cut his arms and he couldn't feel his hands. When the giant snake swallowed Wilber Cotton his head was still alive and he knew he was being swallowed and he opened his eyes but it was black.

Then Wilber Cotton was being burned alive. His skin felt like it had burning gasoline on it and the white stuff in his eyes bubbled out of their sockets. He opened his mouth to scream again and the burning liquid went into his mouth and ran down his throat and burned his lungs.

Wilber Cotton's brain died ten seconds later.

"I've never heard Baskel so upset," Vijay said. "What was he yelling about?"

"I don't know," Billy said, accelerating to twenty. He didn't dare go faster. "Something about somebody getting attacked somewhere around the canal. Something like that."

"You think it could be the alligator they told us to look out for?"

"Alligator my ass. Alligators couldn't crawl outta' these canals any better'n we could, and we got longer arms."

Vijay unlocked their shotgun and pumped a shell into the chamber.

"What the hell you doing with that?" Billy barked.

"They said have your shotguns ready and point the spot at the canal."

Billy turned the spotlight on and pointed it at the water, looking for whatever, not looking straight ahead, when Vijay grabbed his arm and shouted, "Stop! Stop!"

Billy slammed on the brakes, nearly sending the patrol car into a slide and into the canal.

"I told you not to grab-" Billy started saying, then he looked through the windshield and saw something that stopped him in mid-sentence.

Vijay was pointing at what appeared to be the lower half of a child laying on the canal bank, twenty feet ahead. The patrol car's headlights lit the canal well and Billy could see coils of bloody intestines steaming in the dirt.

"Holy shit," Billy said, whispering. "I never heard of any alligator biting someone in half."