By the light of the moon

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.

11
    Having gotten out of the Expedition to allow Dylan
O'Conner a degree of privacy with his brother, Jilly parked her
not-yet-big butt on the guardrail. She sat with her unprotected
back to a vastness of desert, where venomous snakes slithered in
the heat of the night, where tarantulas as hairy as the maniacal
mullahs of the Taliban scurried in search of prey, and where the
creepiest species native to this cruel realm of rock and sand and
scraggly scrub were even more fearsome than serpents or
spiders.
    The creatures that might be stalking Jilly from behind were of
less interest to her than those that might approach on the
eastbound lanes in synchronized black Suburbans. If they would blow
up a mint-condition '56 Coupe DeVille, they were capable of any
atrocity.
    Although no longer nauseated or lightheaded, she didn't feel
entirely normal. Her heart wasn't jumping like a toad in her chest,
as it had been during their flight from the motel, but it wasn't
beating as calm as a choirgirl's, either.
    As calm as a choirgirl . That was a saying Jilly had
picked up from her mother. By calm , Mom hadn't meant merely quiet and composed ; she had also meant chaste and God-loving , and much more. When as a child Jilly had fallen
into a pout or had flung herself high into a fit of pique, her
mother reliably recommended to her the shining standard of a
choirgirl, and when Jilly had been a teenager excited by the smooth
moves of any acne-stippled Casanova, her mother had suggested
somberly that she live up to the moral model of the oft-cited and
essentially mythical choirgirl.
    Eventually Jilly in fact became a member of their church choir,
partly to convince her mother that her heart remained pure, partly
because she fantasized that she was destined to be a world-famous
pop singer. A surprising number of pop-music goddesses had sung in
church choirs in their youth. A dedicated choirmaster – who
was also a voice coach – soon convinced her that she was born
to sing backup, not solo, but he changed her life when he asked,
'What do you want to sing for anyway, Jillian, when you've got such
a big talent for making people laugh? When they just can't laugh, people turn to music to lift their spirits, but laughter is
always the preferred medicine.'
    Here, now, along the interstate, far from church and mother, but
longing for both, sitting as straight-backed on a steel guardrail
as ever she had sat on a choir bench, Jilly put one hand to her
throat and felt the systolic throb in her right carotid artery.
Although the beat was faster than the pulse of a devout choirgirl
calmed by hymns of divine love and by a beautifully raised Kyrie
eleison , it didn't race with outright panic. Instead it counted
a quick cadence familiar to Jilly from several early turns on
comedy-club stages, when her material had not connected with the
audience. This was the hurried heartbeat of a rejected performer
when humiliating minutes remained in the spotlight before a hostile
crowd. Indeed, she felt that telltale clamminess on her brow, that
damp chill on the nape of her neck, in the small of her back, and
on her palms – an icy moistness that had but one name dreaded
from the high proscenium arches of Broadway to the lowest stages of
boondocks honkytonks: flop sweat .
    The difference this time was that the troubled heartbeat and the
cold sweat weren't merely the consequences of her standup-comedy
act collapsing under her, but arose from a dreadful suspicion that
her life might be falling apart. Which would make this the ultimate flop sweat.
    Of course, maybe she was being melodramatic. More than once she
had been accused of that tendency. Yet undeniably here she sat in a
desolate desert, far from anyone who loved her, in the company of a
decidedly odd pair of strangers,