Frank Moore is a psychopath who has come up with a diabolical plan, one which will drown goodness and grace in a river of blood. After a frustrating search he has finally found the key to its success. Frank has found his look-alike, a close-enough double who lives in San Pedro: John Kirk.

It’s January in the harbor city of San Pedro. A time when the foggy nights have a way of turning dreams into nightmares.

Auto-mechanic John Kirk is buckling under the weight of his troublesome relationships. Troubles that fall by the wayside when Frank Moore comes to town. Frank has switched their identities and fingerprints, an act that will send the innocent John Kirk through 48-hours of betrayal, violence, and murder.

But wait. What about the other characters affected by Frank’s malevolence, and where are all the twists and turns in this crime-thriller? Sorry, these are gifts, only to be opened by the readers of “Dangerous Times.”

Frank sat on a bench under a dock light, the salty air thick with mist. Satchel at his side he waited for the arrival of Eddie’s speedboat. Same as usual, he supposed, Eddie sending two bodyguards to pick up his errand boy.
Frank faced a schooner berthed ghostlike in the mist. Seawater splashed against its hull. Frank listened to the rhythmic sound and thought about his recent pledge. To fill the waterways of the world with the blood of God’s children.
Where had the idea come from? He shifted on the bench and wondered what was happening to him: taking this giant step toward what he saw now as his preordained purpose.
Preordained by what—by who… God? No, Frank smirked, definitely not God. God was too busy working on His own schedule of slaughter.
Frank was struck with the recurring nightmare he’d had as a child. His foster parents telling him the scary dream was a sign, a good sign that he would come to understand someday.
Foster parents. An odd but interesting pair, Frank recalled. Caretakers who had replaced the mother and father he had never known. Letting his cruelty to others go unpunished, seemingly proud of his malevolent behavior.
Then the two of them vanishing during the summer of his 18th birthday. Gone from the planet, never to be heard from again.
Frank dug into the past, unable to remember if he’d had anything to do with their disappearance…
That’s all right, he thought. He was shedding the past, about to be reborn and take flight toward new horizons. “All of God’s children,” Frank spoke into the mist.
Thinking then that his foster parents had been right. He had misunderstood the nightmare. How was he to know the man in his dream was his real father. Rising from the underworld, eyes red with firelight, strong arms reaching out—not to harm him as he had feared at the time, but to embrace him.
Funny, Frank smiled. Maybe that was why he was unaffected by the cold.
“Stop it!” he whispered harshly. It had been a dream without any reality to it, and that’s that.
Or was it? No reason he couldn’t dance around it, look at it as a theorem in the geometry of the unknown.
Proof is what he needed.
Frank got up off the bench. He walked to the far end of the dock and faced the sea. He gazed through the rolling mist and saw an unearthly bank of fog over the breakwater.
“Show yourself!” he called out. “Show yourself!” he commanded the enemy of God. And there in the distance his father’s fiery eyes emerged from the fog.
Frank heard a snap in his head, as if his mind had short-circuited, and he broke into laughter.
The approaching eyes were the running lights on Eddie’s speedboat.