By the light of the moon

of
murder, mayhem, and derring-do to discuss instead.
    Below, looking up at Jilly, at Dylan, at Shep, the radiant young
woman in the fabulous white dress raised the bridal bouquet in her
right hand, as though in tribute, in thanks, and the flowers blazed
like the flames in a white-hot torch.
    Perhaps the bride had been about to say something, but Jilly
spoke first, with genuine sympathy. 'Honey, I'm so sorry about your
wedding.'
    Dylan said, 'Let's go.'
    'Okay,' said Shep, and he folded them.

45
    Here lay a true desert so seldom washed by rain that
even the few small cactuses were stunted by an enduring thirst. The
widely scattered and thinly grown bunch-grass colonies would be a
seared blackish green in the winter; here in the summer, they were
silver-brown and as crisp as parchment.
    The landscape offered considerably more sand than vegetation,
and significantly more rock than sand.
    They stood on the western slope of a hill that terraced gently
in serried layers of charred-brown and rust-red rock. Before them,
in the near distance and at least to the midpoint of a wide plain,
curious natural rock formations rose like remnants of a vast
ancient fortress: here, three sort-of columns thirty feet in
diameter and a hundred high, perhaps part of a might-have-been
entry portico; there, the hundred-foot-long, eighty-foot-high,
crumbling crenelated ruins of use-your-imagination battlements from
which skilled bowmen might have defended the castle keep with rains
of arrows; here, turreted towers; there, ramparts, bastions, a
half-collapsed barbican.
    Men had never lived in this hostile land, of course, but Nature
had created a vista that encouraged fantasy.
    'New Mexico,' Dylan told Jilly. 'I came here with Shep, painted
this scene. October, four years ago this autumn, when the weather
was friendlier. There's a dirt road just the other side of this
hill, and a paved highway four miles back. Not that we'll need
it.'
    Currently this rockscape was a glowing forge where the white sun
hammered into shape horseshoes of fire for those ghost riders in
the sky that supposedly haunted these desert realms by night.
    'If we get in the shade,' Dylan said, 'we can endure the heat
long enough to gather our wits and figure out what the hell we're
going to do next.'
    Painted in dazzling shades of red, orange, purple, pink, and
brown, the castellated formations were at this hour east of the
sun, which had descended well past its apex. Their refreshing
shadows, reaching toward this hillside, were the color of ripe
plums.
    Dylan led Jilly and Shepherd down the slope, then two hundred
feet across flat land, to the base of an almost-could-be turreted
tower suitable for an Arthurian tale. They sat side by side on a
low bench of weather-smoothed stone, their backs to the tower.
    The shade, the windless silence, the stillness of lifeless plain
and birdless sky were such a relief that for a few minutes, none of
them spoke.
    Finally, Dylan raised what seemed to him to be if not the most
immediate issue before them, then certainly the most important.
'Back there after he fell into the pews, when you said you were
pissed, you meant it like you've never meant it before in your life
– didn't you?'
    She breathed the stillness for a while, gradually quelling the
tumult within. Then: 'I don't know what you mean.'
    'You know.'
    'Not really.'
    'You know,' he insisted quietly.
    She closed her eyes under the weight of the shade, tipped her
head back against the tower wall, and tried to hold fast to her
tiny piece of property in the great state of denial.
    Eventually she said, 'Such a rage, such a white-hot fury, but
not consuming, not stupid-making like anger can be, not negative...
It was... it was...'
    'A cleansing, exhilarating, righteous anger,' he
suggested.
    She opened her eyes. She looked at him. A bloodied demigoddess
resting in the shade of the palace of Zeus.
    Clearly, she didn't want to talk about this. She might even be afraid to talk about it.
    She could no more avoid this subject, however, than she could go
back to the comedy-club life that she had been leading less than
one day ago. 'I wasn't just furious at those three evil
bastards.... I was...'
    When she reached for words and didn't at once find them, Dylan
finished her thought, for he'd been the first of them to experience
this righteous rage, all the way back on Eucalyptus Avenue, where
Travis had been shackled and Kenny had hoped to put his collection
of knives to bloody use; therefore,