By the Light of the Moon

looked at this moment in the dialed-down, bevel-sheared light from the cut-glass ceiling fixtures, for he wanted to paint her eventually just as she stood now.

Always preferring to remain in motion in any public place, lest a hesitation should encourage a stranger to speak to him, Shepherd allowed no slightest pause, and Dylan was drawn after his brother by their invisible chain.

Bringing hand to hat brim, a departing customer graciously tipped his Stetson to Jilly as she stepped aside to give him easier access to the door.

When she looked up and saw Dylan and Shep approaching, palpable relief chased the pensive expression from her face. Something had happened to her in their absence.

'What's wrong?' he asked when he reached her.

'I'll tell you in the truck. Let's get out of here. Let's go.'

Opening the door, Dylan put his hand on fresh spoor. Bleakness, an oppressive sense of solitude, a dark- night-of-the-soul loneliness pierced him and filled him with an emotional desolation as blasted, burnt, and ash- shrouded as a landscape in the aftermath of an all-consuming fire.

He tried immediately to insulate himself from the power of the latent psychic print on the door handle, as he had learned to do with the restaurant menu. This time, however, he wasn't able to resist the influx of energy.

With no memory of crossing the threshold, Dylan found himself outside and on the move. Even hours past sundown, the mild desert night withdrew the banked heat of the day from the blacktop, and he detected the faint scent of tar under the kitchen odors that rose from the restaurant roof vents.

Glancing back, he saw Jilly and Shep standing in the open door, already ten feet behind him. He had dropped Shep's book, which lay on the pavement between him and them. He wanted to retrieve the book and return to Shep and Jilly. He could not. 'Wait here for me.'

Car to pickup to SUV, he was impelled to venture farther into the parking lot, not with the urgency that had earlier caused him to turn the Expedition on a dime and leave nine cents change, but with a nonetheless motivating perception that an important opportunity would shortly be foreclosed if he didn't act. He knew that he wasn't out of control, that on a subconscious level he understood exactly what he was doing, and why, as he had subconsciously understood his purpose when he had driven pell-mell and hell-bent to the house on Eucalyptus Avenue, but he felt out of control just the same.

This time the magnet proved to be not a grandmotherly woman in a candy-striped uniform, but an aging cowboy wearing tan Levi's and a chambray shirt. Arriving just as the guy settled behind the wheel of a Mercury Mountaineer, Dylan prevented him from shutting the door.

From the psychic trace on this door handle, he again encountered the heart-deadening loneliness familiar from the imprint back at the restaurant, a despondency bordering on despair.

A lifetime of outdoor work had given the man in the Mountaineer a cured-leather face, but the decades of sun that crimped and cockled his skin had not left any light in him, and the years of wind had not piped much life into his bones. Burnt out, worn thin, he seemed to be a scraggy gnarl of tumbleweed tenuously rooted to the earth, waiting only for the gust that would break him loose from life.

The old man didn't tip his Stetson as he'd tipped it at Jilly upon leaving the restaurant, but he didn't react with irritation or alarm, either, when Dylan blocked the door. He had the look of a guy who had always been able to take care of himself, regardless of the nature of the threat or tribulation – but there was also about him the aura of a man who didn't much care what happened next.

'You've been searching for something,' Dylan said, although he had no idea what words were coming from him until he'd spoken them and could afterward review their meaning.

'Don't need Jesus, son,' the cowboy replied. 'Already found him twice.' His azurite-blue eyes took in more light than they gave out. 'Don't need trouble, either, nor do you.'

'Not something,' Dylan corrected. 'You're looking for someone.'

'Isn't just about everybody, one way or another?'

'You've been looking a long time,' Dylan said, though he still had no idea where this might be leading.

Through a squint that seemed wise enough to filter truth from illusion, the old man studied him. 'What's your name, son?'

'Dylan O'Conner.'

'Never heard of you. So how'd you hear of me?'

'Didn't hear of you, sir. I don't know who you are. I just…' Words that had come without volition now failed him on command. After a hesitation, he realized that he would have to tell a piece of the truth, reveal part of his secret, if they were to proceed. 'You see, sir, I have these moments of… intuition.'

'Don't count on it at the poker table.'

'Not just intuition. I mean… I know things when there's no way to know. I feel, I know, and… I make connections.'

'Some sort of spiritist, you're sayin'?'

'Sir?'

'You're a diviner, soothsayer, psychic – that sort of thing?'

'Maybe,' Dylan said. 'It's just this weirdness that's happened to me lately. I don't make money at it.'

Those worn features that seemed incapable of a smile might have formed one, although it was drawn lightly, as with a feather on the weathered sandstone of his face, and was so short-lived that it might have been only the tic of a wince. 'If what I'm hearin' is your usual pitch, I'm amazed you don't have to pay folks to listen.'

'You think you've come to the end of whatever road you've been following.' Once more Dylan was unaware of what he would say before he said it. 'You think you've failed. But maybe you haven't.'

'Go on.'

'Maybe she's near right now.'

'She?'

'I don't know, sir. That just came to me. But whoever she is, you know who I mean.'

That analytic squint fixed Dylan once more, this time with a certain merciless quality like the piercing scrutiny of a police detective. 'Step back a piece. Give me room to get out.'

As the old man exited the big Mercury SUV, Dylan surveyed the night for Jilly and Shep. They had ventured a few feet farther from the restaurant since he'd last seen them, but only far enough for Jilly to retrieve the copy of Great Expectations that Dylan had dropped. She stood at Shepherd's side, watchful, in the wound-tight posture of one who wondered if this time, too, there would be knives.

He looked out toward the street, as well. No black Suburbans. Nonetheless, he sensed they had stayed too long in Safford.

'Name's Ben Tanner.'

When Dylan looked away from Shep and Jilly, he discovered the old man offering one worn and callused hand.

He hesitated, concerned that a handshake would expose him to a supercharged version of the bleak loneliness and the despondency that he had sensed in Tanner's psychic imprint, emotion a thousand times more intense by direct contact than what he'd experienced by exposure to the spoor, so powerful that it would knock him to his knees.

He couldn't remember if he had touched Marjorie when he'd found her standing beside the pill-littered kitchen table, but he didn't believe he had. And Kenny? After administering baseball-bat justice, Dylan demanded handcuff and padlock keys from the pants-wetting knife maniac; however, after producing the keys from a shirt pocket, Kenny had given them to Jilly. To the best of Dylan's recollection, he had not touched the vicious little coward.

No strategy to avoid Tanner's hand would leave their fragile rapport undamaged, so Dylan shook it – and discovered that what he had felt so poignantly in the man's latent psychic imprint could not be felt in equal measure, or at all, in the man himself. The mechanism of his sixth sense was no less mysterious than the source of it.

'Come down from Wyoming near a month ago,' Tanner said, 'with some leads, but they had no more substance than gnat piss.'

Dylan reached past Tanner to touch the handle on the driver's door.