By the Light of the Moon (7 page)

Shep fell silent.

Referring to the lunatic doctor who had warned that violent men would follow in his wake, Dylan said, “Maybe he wasn’t a lying sack of excrement, after all.”

Chapter Nine

T
HESE WERE EXTRAORDINARY TIMES, PEOPLED BY
ranting maniacs in love with violence and with a violent god, infested with apologists for wickedness, who blamed victims for their suffering and excused murderers in the name of justice. These were times still hammered by the utopian schemes that had nearly destroyed civilization in the previous century, ideological wrecking balls that swung through the early years of this new millennium with diminishing force but with sufficient residual power to demolish the hopes of multitudes if sane men and women weren’t vigilant. Dylan O’Conner understood this turbulent age too well, yet he remained profoundly optimistic, for in every moment of every day, in the best works of humanity as in every baroque detail of nature, he saw beauty that lifted his spirit, and everywhere he perceived vast architectures and subtle details that convinced him the world was a place of deep design as surely as were his own paintings. This combination of realistic assessment, faith, common sense, and enduring hope ensured that the events of his time seldom surprised him, rarely struck terror in him, and never reduced him to despair.

Consequently, when he discovered that Jillian Jackson’s friend and traveling companion, Fred, was a member of the stonecrop family of succulents, native to southern Africa, Dylan was only mildly surprised, not in the least terrified, and encouraged rather than despondent. Dealing with any other Fred, not a plant, would almost certainly have entailed more inconvenience and greater complications than would coping with the little green guy in the glazed terra-cotta pot.

Mindful of the three black Suburbans circling the motel, a trio of hungry sharks cruising a sea of asphalt, Jilly hurriedly packed her toiletries. Dylan loaded her train case and her single suitcase in his Expedition, through the tailgate.

Commotion of any kind always distressed poor Shepherd, and when anxious, he could be at his most unpredictable. Now, cooperative when cooperation might have been least expected from him, the boy climbed docilely into the SUV. He sat beside the canvas tote bag that contained a variety of items to occupy him during long road trips, on those occasions when he grew bored after hours of staring into empty space or studying his thumbs. Because Jilly insisted that she would hold Fred on her lap, Shep had the backseat to himself, a solitude that would moderate his anxiety.

Arriving at the Expedition with the pot in both hands, for the first time appearing free of the lingering effects of anesthesia, the woman had second thoughts about getting into a vehicle with two men whom she’d met only minutes ago. “For all I know, you could be a serial killer,” she told Dylan as he held open the front passenger’s door for her and Fred.

“I’m not a serial killer,” he assured her.

“That’s exactly what a serial killer would say.”

“It’s exactly what an innocent man would say, too.”

“Yes, but it’s exactly what a serial killer would say.”

“Come on, get in the truck,” he said impatiently.

Reacting sharply to his tone, she said, “You’re not the boss of me.”

“I didn’t say I was the boss of you.”

“Nobody in my family’s been bossed in any recent century.”

“Then I guess your real last name must be Rockefeller. Now will you
please
get in the truck?”

“I’m not sure I should.”

“You remember those three Suburbans that looked like something the Terminator might drive?”

“They weren’t interested in us, after all.”

“They will be soon,” he predicted. “Get in the truck.”

“‘Get in the truck, get in the truck.’ The way you say it is so totally serial killer.”

Frustrated, Dylan demanded, “Do serial killers generally travel with their disabled brothers? Don’t you think that would get in the way of doing a lot of grisly work with chain saws and power tools?”

“Maybe he’s a serial killer, too.”

From the backseat, Shep peered at them: head cocked, wide-eyed, blinking in bewilderment, looking less like a psychopath than like a big puppy waiting to be driven to the park for a session of Frisbee.

“Serial killers don’t always look crazy-violent,” Jilly said. “They’re cunning. Anyway, even if you’re not a killer, you might be a rapist.”

“You’re a wonderfully cordial woman, aren’t you?” Dylan said sourly.

“Well, you might be a rapist. How would I know?”

“I’m not a rapist.”

“That’s just what a rapist would say.”

“For God’s sake, I’m not a rapist, I’m an artist.”

“They aren’t mutually exclusive.”

“Listen, lady,
you
approached
me
for help. Not the other way around. How do I know what
you
are?”

“One thing for sure, you know I’m not a rapist. That’s not anything men have to worry about, is it?”

Nervously surveying the night, expecting the black Suburbans to reappear with a roar at any moment, Dylan said, “I’m not a serial killer, a rapist, a kidnapper, bank robber, mugger, pickpocket, cat burglar, embezzler, counterfeiter, shoplifter, or jaywalker! I’ve had two speeding tickets, paid a fine on an overdue library book last year, kept a quarter and two dimes I found in a pay phone instead of returning them to the telephone company, wore wide neckties for a while after skinny ones were in fashion, and once in a park I was accused of not picking up my dog’s crap when it wasn’t even my dog,
when in point of fact I didn’t even have a dog!
Now you can get in this truck and we can scram, or you can stand here dithering about whether I do or whether I don’t look like Charles Manson on a bad- hair day, but with or without you, I am getting out of Dodge City before those stunt drivers come back and the bullets start to fly.”

“You’re amazingly articulate for an artist.”

He gaped at her. “What’s
that
supposed to mean?”

“I’ve just always found artists far more visually than verbally oriented.”

“Yeah, well, I’m plenty verbal.”

“Suspiciously so for an artist.”

“What, you still think I’m Jack the Ripper?”

“Where’s the proof you aren’t?”

“And a rapist?”

“Unlike me, you
could
be,” she observed.

“So I’m a raping, killing itinerant artist.”

“Is that a confession?”

“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.

Chapter Ten

E
VEN 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.