By the Light of the Moon

'What do you do – drum up business for psychiatrists? You go around all the time making people crazy so the shrinks will always have business?'

'I'm a comedian,' she declared.

'You're amazingly unfunny for a comedian.'

She bristled as obviously as a porcupine. 'You've never seen me perform.'

'I'd rather eat nails.'

'Judging by your teeth, you've eaten enough to build a house.'

He flinched from the insult. 'That's unfair. I've got nice teeth.'

'You're a heckler. Anything's fair with hecklers. Hecklers are lower than worms.'

'Get out of my truck,' he demanded.

'I'm not in your truck.'

'Then get into it so I can drag you out.'

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