Scorn as dry as old bones and as thick as blood lent a dangerous new texture to her voice: 'Do you have issues with people like me?'

'People like you? What is that – crazy people? Unfunny comedians? Women who have unnatural relationships with plants?'

Her scowl was storm-cloud dark. 'I want my bags back.'

'Delighted,' he assured her, at once heading for the back of the Expedition. 'And how fitting – bags for the bag.'

Following him, carrying Fred, she said, 'I've been hanging out with grown men too long. I've forgotten how delectable the wit of twelve-year-old boys can be.'

That stung. Raising the tailgate, he glared at her. 'You can't begin to imagine how much I wish right now I was a serial killer.'

'Were,' she said.

'What?'

'You wish you were a serial killer. In English grammar, when a statement is in obvious contradiction to reality, the subjunctive mood requires a plural verb after a singular noun or pronoun in conditional clauses beginning with if, but also in subordinate clauses following verbs like wish.'

Working up a mouthful of sarcasm, Dylan spat out his reply: 'No shit?'

'None whatsoever,' she assured him.

'Yeah, well, I'm a semiarticulate, visually oriented artist,' he reminded her as he removed her suitcase from the Expedition and put it down hard on the pavement. 'I'm no more than half a step above a barbarian, one step above a monkey.'

'Another thing—'

'I knew there would be.'

'If you put your mind to it, I'm sure you'll be able to think of plenty of acceptable synonyms for feces. I'd be grateful if you wouldn't use crude language around me.'

Plucking her train case out of the cargo space, Dylan said, 'I don't intend to use much more language of any kind around you, lady. Thirty seconds from now, you'll be a dwindling speck in my rearview mirror, and the instant you're out of sight, I'll forget you ever existed.'

'Fat chance. Men don't forget me easily.'

He dropped her train case, not actually aiming for her foot, but characteristically hopeful. 'Hey, you know, I stand corrected. You're absolutely right. You are every bit as unforgettable as a bullet in the chest.'

An explosion shook the night. Motel windows rattled, and the aluminum awning over the walkway thrummed softly as pressure waves traveled through it.

Dylan felt the shock of the blast in the blacktop under his feet, as if a fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex in deep rock strata were stirring in its eternal sleep, and he saw the dragon's breath of fire in the east-southeast, toward the front of the motel.

'Show time,' said Jillian Jackson.

10

Even as the dragon turned over deep in the earth and as the echo of its roar continued to wake motel guests, Dylan returned Jillian Jackson's two pieces of luggage to the cargo space in the Expedition. Before he quite realized what he was doing, he'd closed the tailgate.

By the time he climbed in behind the steering wheel, his feisty passenger was in the seat beside him, holding Fred on her lap. They slammed their doors in unison.

He started the engine and glanced over his shoulder to be sure that his brother was wearing a seat belt. Shep sat with his right hand flat on top of his head and his left hand atop his right, as though this ten-finger helmet would protect him from the next explosion and from falling debris. His stare matched Dylan's for an instant, but the connection proved too intense for the boy. When Shep closed his eyes and found insufficient privacy in self-imposed blindness, he turned his head toward the window beside him and faced the night, with his eyes still squeezed shut.

'Go, go,' Jilly urged, suddenly eager to commit herself to a road trip with a man who might be a cannibalistic sociopath.

Too law-abiding to jump curbs and destroy landscaping, Dylan drove to the front of the sprawling motel to reach the exit lane. Not far from the portico that overhung the entrance to the registration office, he discovered the source of the fire. A car had exploded.

This was not your typical aesthetically pleasing motion-picture kind of exploded car: not dressed by a set designer, not carefully positioned according to the artistic sensibilities of a director, the pattern and size and color of the flames not calculated for maximum prettiness by a pyrotechnics specialist collaborating with a stunt coordinator. These less than cinematic flames were a sour muddy orange as dark as bloodied tongues, and out of the many mouths of the blaze spewed a vomitus of greasy black smoke. The trunk lid had blown off, crumpling into a snarled mass as ugly as any example of modern sculpture, and had landed on the roof of one of the three black Suburbans that surrounded the burning wreckage at a distance of twenty feet. Having been pitched partway through the windshield by the force of the blast, the dead driver lay half in and half out of the vehicle. His clothes must have been reduced to ashes by a storm of fire during the few seconds following the explosion. Now his very substance fueled the pyre, and the seething flames that he produced by sacrifice of fat and flesh, of marrow, were unnervingly different from those that consumed the automobile: rancid yellow veined with red as dark as vinegary Cabernet, with somber green reminiscent of things putrescent.

Unable to look away from this horror, Dylan was ashamed of his inability to break free of the grip of grisly curiosity. Truth resided in ugliness as well as in beauty, and he blamed his macabre fascination on the curse of the artist's eye, although he recognized that this excuse was self-serving. Setting aside self-deception, the ugly truth might be that an enduring fault in the human heart made death perversely attractive.

'That's my Coupe DeVille,' Jilly said, sounding more shocked than angry, visibly stunned by the realization that her life had so abruptly gone wrong in a sleepy Arizona town that was little more than an interstate-highway rest stop.

Ten or twelve men had gotten out of the matched Suburbans, which stood with all the doors flung open. Instead of being dressed in dark suits or in paramilitary gear, these guys wore desert-resort clothes: white or tan shoes, white or cream-yellow pants, regular shirts and polo shirts in a variety of pastels. They appeared to have spent a relaxing day on a golf course and the early evening in a clubhouse bar, cooked by a day of sun and stewed in gin, but not one of them exhibited the alarm or even the surprise that you would expect of average duffers who had just witnessed a catastrophe.

Although Dylan didn't have to drive past the burning Cadillac to reach the exit lane from the motel, a few of these sporty types turned from the fire to stare at the Expedition. They didn't look like accountants or business executives, or like doctors or real-estate developers: They looked rougher and even more dangerous than attorneys. Their faces were expressionless, hard masks as lacking in animation as carved stone except for the reflections of firelight that flickered from ear to ear and chin to brow. Their eyes glittered darkly, and though they tracked the Expedition as it departed, none demanded that it halt; none gave pursuit.

Their hard-chased prey had been brought down. The lunatic doctor had perished in the Cadillac, evidently before they could capture and question him. With him must have been consumed what he referred to as his life's work, as well as all evidence that vials of his mysterious stuff were missing. For now this posse or pack – or whatever these men were – believed that the hunt had reached a successful conclusion. If fortune favored Dylan, they would never learn otherwise, and he would be spared a bullet in the head.

He slowed the SUV, then brought it to a full stop, gawking with obvious morbid curiosity at the blazing car. Proceeding without pause might have seemed suspicious.

Beside him, Jilly understood the strategy of his hesitant departure. 'It's hard to play the ghoul when you know the victim.'

'We didn't know him, and just a couple minutes ago, you called him a sack of excrement.'

'He's not the victim I'm talking about. I'm glad that smiley bastard's dead. I'm talking about the love of my life, my beautiful midnight-blue Coupe DeVille.'

For a moment, some of the make-believe golfers watched Dylan and Jilly goggling at the burning wreckage. God knew what they might make of Shepherd, who sat in the backseat with his hands still flattened atop his head, as disinterested in the fire as in everything else beyond his own skin. When the men turned away from the Expedition, dismissing its driver and passengers as the usual crash-scene oafs, Dylan took his foot off the brake and moved on.

At the end of the exit lane lay the street across which he had ventured not an hour ago to purchase cheeseburgers and French fries, heart disease on the installment plan. Though he'd never had a chance to eat that dinner.

He turned right on the street and headed toward the freeway as the caterwaul of sirens rose in the distance. He didn't speed.

'What're we going to do?' Jillian Jackson asked.

'Get away from here.'

'And then?'

'Get farther away from here.'

'We can't just run forever. Especially when we don't know who or what we're running from – or why.'

Her observation contained too much truth and common sense to allow argument, and as Dylan searched for a reply, he found that he'd become as verbally challenged as she believed all artists were.

Behind Dylan, as they reached the ramp to the interstate, his brother whispered, 'By the light of the moon.'

Shepherd breathed those words only once, which was a relief, considering his penchant for repetition, but then he began to cry. Shep was not a weepy kid. He had wept seldom in the past seventeen years, since he'd been a child of three, when his retreat from the pains and disappointments of this world had become all but complete, since he had begun to live most of each day in a safer world of his own creation. Yet now: tears twice in one night.

He didn't shriek or wail, but cried quietly: thick sobs twined with thin mewling, sounds of misery swallowed before they were fully expressed. Although he labored to stifle his emotion, Shep could not entirely conceal the terrible power of it. Some unknowable grief or anguish racked him. As revealed by the rearview mirror, his usually placid countenance – under his hat of stacked hands, framed by his elbows – was wrenched by a torment as disturbing as that on the face in Edvard Munch's famous painting, The Scream.

'What's wrong with him?' Jilly asked as they arrived at the top of the ramp.

'I don't know.' Dylan worriedly shifted his attention between the road ahead and the mirror. 'I don't know.'

As though melting, Shepherd's hands slid slowly from the top of his head, down his temples, but firmed up again, hardening into fists just below his ears. He ground his knuckles against his cheekbones, as though he were resisting a fearsome inner pressure that threatened to fracture his facial structure, stretch his flesh, and forever balloon his features into a freak-show face.

'Dear God, I don't know,' Dylan repeated, aware of the tremor of distress in his voice as he transitioned from the entrance ramp onto the first eastbound lane of the interstate.

Traffic, all of it faster than the Expedition, raced through the Arizona night toward New Mexico. Distracted by his brother's whimpers and groans of despair, Dylan couldn't match the pace set by the other motorists.

Then good Shep – docile Shep, peaceful Shep – did something that he had never done before: With his clenched fists, he began to strike himself hard in the face.

Awkwardly balancing the potted jade plant on her lap, turned halfway around in her seat, Jilly cried out in dismay. 'No, Shep, don't. Honey, don't!'

Although putting distance between themselves and the men in the black Suburbans was imperative, Dylan signaled a right turn, drove onto the wide shoulder of the highway, and braked to a stop.

Pausing in his self-administered punishment, Shep whispered, 'You do your work,' and then he hit himself again, again.

11

Having gotten out of the Expedition to allow Dylan O'Conner a degree of privacy with his brother, Jilly parked her not-yet-big butt on the guardrail. She sat with her unprotected back to a vastness of desert, where venomous snakes slithered in the heat of the night, where tarantulas as hairy as the maniacal mullahs of the Taliban scurried in search of prey, and where the creepiest species native to this cruel realm of rock and sand and scraggly scrub were even more fearsome than serpents or spiders.

The creatures that might be stalking Jilly from behind were of less interest to her than those that might approach on the eastbound lanes in synchronized black Suburbans. If they would blow up a mint-condition '56 Coupe DeVille, they were capable of any atrocity.

Although no longer nauseated or lightheaded, she didn't feel entirely normal. Her heart wasn't jumping like a toad in her chest, as it had been during their flight from the motel, but it wasn't beating as calm as a choirgirl's, either.

As calm as a choirgirl. That was a saying Jilly had picked up from her mother. By calm, Mom hadn't meant merely quiet and composed; she had also meant chaste and God-loving, and much more. When as a child Jilly had fallen into a pout or had flung herself high into a fit of pique, her mother reliably recommended to her the shining standard of a choirgirl, and when Jilly had been a teenager excited by the smooth moves of any acne-stippled Casanova, her mother had suggested somberly that she live up to the moral model of the oft-cited and essentially mythical choirgirl.

Eventually Jilly in fact became a member of their church choir, partly to convince her mother that her heart remained pure, partly because she fantasized that she was destined to be a world-famous pop singer. A surprising number of pop-music goddesses had sung in church choirs in their youth. A dedicated choirmaster – who was also a voice coach – soon convinced her that she was born to sing backup, not solo, but he changed her life when he asked, 'What do you want to sing for anyway, Jillian, when you've got such a big talent for making people laugh? When they just can't laugh, people turn to music to lift their spirits, but laughter is always the preferred medicine.'

Here, now, along the interstate, far from church and mother, but longing for both, sitting as straight-backed on a steel guardrail as ever she had sat on a choir bench, Jilly put one hand to her throat and felt the systolic throb in her right carotid artery. Although the beat was faster than the pulse of a devout choirgirl calmed by hymns of divine love and by a beautifully raised Kyrie eleison, it didn't race with outright panic. Instead it counted a quick cadence familiar to Jilly from several early turns on comedy-club stages, when her material had not connected with the audience. This was the hurried heartbeat of a rejected performer when humiliating minutes remained in the spotlight before a hostile crowd. Indeed, she felt that telltale clamminess on her brow, that damp chill on the nape of her neck, in the small of her back, and on her palms – an icy moistness that had but one name dreaded from the high proscenium arches of Broadway to the lowest stages of boondocks honkytonks: flop sweat.