By the light of the moon

listen to any more of
his droning monologue.
    By focusing her attention and by bringing all her Amazonian
strength to bear, she managed to lever herself off the floor and
sit on the edge of the bed. This was a fine thing. She smiled,
suddenly suffused with pride. Baby could sit up by herself.
    Emboldened by this success, Jilly attempted to rise to her feet.
She swayed on the way up, pressing her left hand against the
nightstand to steady herself, but although she sagged slightly at
the knees, she didn't collapse. Another fine thing. Baby could
stand upright, as erect as any primate and more fully erect than
some.
    Best of all, she hadn't puked, as earlier she'd been sure she
would. She no longer felt nauseated, just... peculiar.
    Confident that she could stand without supportive furniture and
that she would remember how to walk as soon as she tried, Jilly
made her way from the bed to the door in a parabolic arc that
compensated for the movement of the floor, which rolled lazily like
the deck of a ship in mild seas.
    The doorknob presented a mechanical challenge, but after she
fumbled the door open and navigated the threshold, she found the
warm night to be surprisingly more invigorating than the cool motel
room. The thirsting desert air sucked moisture from her, and along
with the moisture went some of her wooziness.
    She turned right, toward the motel office, which lay at the end
of a distressingly long and complicated series of covered walkways
that seemed to have been patterned after any laboratory's rat
maze.
    Within a few steps, she realized that her Coupe DeVille had
vanished. She had parked the car twenty feet from her room; but it
no longer stood where she recalled leaving it. Empty blacktop.
    She weaved toward the vacant parking slot, squinting at the
pavement as though she expected to discover an explanation for the
vehicle's disappearance: perhaps a concise but considerate memo
– IOU one beloved, midnight-blue Cadillac Coupe DeVille,
fully loaded.
    Instead she found an unopened bag of peanuts, evidently dropped
by the smiling salesman-who-wasn't-a-salesman, and a dead but still
formidable beetle the size and shape of half an avocado. The insect
lay on its glossy shell, six stiff legs sticking straight in the
air, eliciting a far less emotional response from Jilly than would
have a kitten or puppy in the same condition.
    Harboring little interest in entomology, she left the bristling
beetle untouched, but she stooped to pluck the bag of peanuts from
the pavement. Having read her share of Agatha Christie mysteries,
she had been convinced instantly upon spotting the peanuts that
here lay a valuable clue for which the police would be
grateful.
    When she rose to her full height once more, she realized that
the warm dry air had not purged her of the lingering effects of the
anesthetic as completely as she'd thought. As a whirl of dizziness
came and passed, she wondered if she had been mistaken about where
she'd parked the Coupe DeVille. Perhaps it had been twenty feet to
the left of her motel room instead of to the right.
    She peered in that direction and saw a white Ford Expedition,
just twelve or fifteen feet away. The Cadillac might be parked on
the far side of the SUV.
    Stepping over the beetle, she returned to the covered walkway.
She approached the Expedition, realizing that she was headed in the
direction of the vending-machine alcove where she would find more
of the root beer that had gotten her in all this trouble in the
first place.
    When she passed the SUV and didn't find her Coupe DeVille, she
became aware of two people hurrying toward her. She said, 'The
smiley bastard stole my car,' before she realized what an odd
couple she had encountered.
    The first guy – tall, as solid as an NFL linebacker
– carried a box approximately the size of a pizza container
with a pair of shoes balanced on top. In spite of his intimidating
size, he didn't seem the least threatening, perhaps because he had
a bearish quality. Not a rip-your-guts-out grizzly bear, but a
burly Disney bear of the
gosh-how-did-I-get-my-butt-stuck-in-this-tire-swing variety. He
wore rumpled khaki pants, a yellow-and-blue Hawaiian shirt, and a
wide-eyed worried expression that suggested he'd recently robbed a
hive of honey and expected to be hunted down by a swarm of angry
bees.
    With him came a smaller and younger man – maybe five feet
nine or ten, about 160 pounds – in blue jeans and a white
T-shirt featuring a portrait of Wile E.