Breathless

obsession. Murder would be no less addictive than tequila or weed, or the other drugs that he consumed so recklessly when he could get them.
    He was a lot of things, none of them good. He dreaded adding
murderer
to the list of words that described him.
    As he ate the sandwich, his mind reeled back more than once to the incident in the bluff-top rest area.
    Initially, he had been astonished. Astonishment turned to shock that rendered him bewildered and emotionally numb. On the walk from his cave to the town, numbness relented to a creeping disquiet.
    Watching the passing traffic, Tom saw a bumper sticker that proclaimed I STOP SUDDENLY JUST FOR THE HELL OF IT .
    Across the street, a multiplex was playing a movie about the end of the world.
    In memory, he heard a fragment of what at the time had seemed to be a perpetual argument, conflict without end.
    “Why are you doing this, Tommy?”
    “Just for the hell of it.”
    “You’re throwing away your life, your future.”
    “There isn’t a future. It’s the end of the world.”
    “It isn’t the end of the world.”
    “Bastards like you are the ones destroying it.”
    “How can you talk to me like that?”
    “How can you be the shit you are?”
    The fitful breeze brought a handbill to his feet. In the wan lamplight he saw that it was for a restaurant called Magic Pizza.
    After a moment of consideration, he carried the handbill, the sandwich wrapper, the empty bag of potato chips, and the half-empty bottle of Coke to the nearest trash can and threw everything away.
    He needed a joint of sinsemilla. Local authorities were tolerant of the discreet use of pot. He took the tin of hand-rolleds from his backpack, fished a joint from the supply, and put the tin away.
    Deeper in the park, he found a more secluded bench.
    He had a butane lighter. He struck the flame but didn’t light the joint.
    If he smoked one, he would smoke a second, perhaps a third. He would wash away the pot taste with tequila. In the morning, he would wake up behind a screen of bushes, with dirt matted in his beard stubble and spiders in his hair.
    The creeping disquiet inspired by the incident on the bluff was growing into a motivating apprehension.
    He put away the lighter. Instead of returning the joint to the stash in the tin, he shredded it in his fingers and scattered it on the breeze.
    This action so surprised him that for a moment he seined the air with his fingers, trying to recapture the debris that he’d cast away an instant earlier.
    Already, the disquiet that thickened into apprehension was further thickening into dread.
    While he’d been eating a late dinner on the first bench, he was given signs from which he deduced where he must go. He suspected that time was running out for him to do what he must do.
    The thought of riding for three hours in a bus chilled him. If this weight of dread became too heavy, he would feel oppressed in a bus. Claustrophobia would overwhelm him.
    Intuition told him to begin the journey on foot. He set out for the coastal highway.

Thirty-five

A fter watching Merlin drink from his large water bowl, Puzzle and Riddle attended Grady’s preparations with interest as he chose two bowls from a cabinet and filled each with cold water from the kitchen tap.
    As she extracted the memory stick from Grady’s camera and tucked it in a side compartment of her medical bag to take home, Cammy said, “Neither of us seems to want to speculate.”
    “About what?”
    “About what do you think?”
    “You said earlier—you do medicine, you don’t do theory.”
    “Speculation isn’t theory,” she said. “It’s not even up to the level of hypothesis. It’s just blue-skying. It’s what-if, if-maybe, could-it-be stuff.”
    “I don’t want to speculate about them.”
    “That’s what I just said. Neither of us wants to speculate.”
    “All right, then. Good. We’re agreed.”
    “But why do you think that is?”
    He said, “I don’t do self-analysis.”
    She watched him put the two bowls of water on the floor.
    Immediately, Puzzle and Riddle went to the bowls, lowered their heads to the water, smelled it, and drank.
    Cammy said, “I think the reason we don’t want to speculate about them is because most of the what-ifs we come up with are likely to be scary, one way or another.”
    “There’s nothing scary about Puzzle and Riddle.”
    “I didn’t say there was. I just said speculating about their origins is going to lead to some scary