By the light of the moon

it was still traveling so fast
that no sane person would have tried to execute a hard turn at this
velocity. Evidently, Dylan O'Conner fully embraced madness: He let
up on the brakes, pulled the steering wheel hand-over-hand to the
left, pumped the brakes again, swung the truck off the pavement,
and cranked it through a rubber-burning spin.
    Whirling up a cloud of dust, the Expedition rotated on the wide
shoulder of the highway. Gravel tattooed the undercarriage: a
fierce ponk-plink-crack as unnerving as machine-gun fire.
Spinning into the glare of approaching headlights, Jilly inhaled a
lung-stretching breath with the desperate greediness for life of a
condemned woman hearing the thin whistle of a descending guillotine
blade. She shrieked as they came around to their starting position,
and she failed to use a polite synonym for feces as they
spun yet another 120 degrees and jolted to a stop facing
northwest.
    Here the eastbound and westbound lanes of the interstate were
separated by a sixty-foot-wide median without a guardrail, relying
solely on a center swale to prevent out-of-control vehicles from
crossing easily into oncoming traffic. The instant that the SUV
rocked to a stop, as Jilly sucked in another
here-comes-the-death-blow breath deep enough to sustain her during
an underwater swim across the English Channel, Dylan abandoned the
brake pedal for the accelerator and drove down the slope,
diagonally crossing the median.
    'What're you doing?' she demanded.
    He was extraordinarily focused, as she'd never seen him before,
concentrating more intensely on the descent into the shallow swale
than he had on the sight of her blazing Coupe DeVille, than he had
concentrated on self-battered Shep in the backseat confessional.
Bruin big, he filled his half of the front seat to overflowing.
Even in normal circumstances – or in as normal as any
circumstances under which Jilly had known him – he hulked over the steering wheel, but now he hulked more
aggressively than before, head thrust toward the windshield, face
screwed into a bearish scowl, stare fixed on the bright swaths that
the headlights cut through the dark depression into which he
piloted the SUV.
    He failed to answer her question. His mouth hung open as if in
astonishment, as though he couldn't quite believe that he had put
the Expedition through a controlled spin or that he was barreling
across the median toward the westbound lanes.
    All right, he wasn't barreling yet, but the truck continued to
accelerate as it reached the low point of the swale. If they
crossed the declivity and hit the rising slope at the wrong angle
and at too high a speed, the SUV would roll because rolling was
something that SUVs did well when they were badly driven and when
the terrain was, like this, composed of shifting sand and loose
shale.
    She shouted – 'Don't!' – but he did. As the
Expedition churned across the crumbling face of the upgrade, Jilly
jammed her feet harder against the dashboard, wondering where the
impact air bag might be stowed, dreading what would happen if the
bag was in the dashboard and if it exploded around her feet,
wondering whether it would jam her knees into her face, whether it
would rupture around her shoes and spew skin-peeling hot gas at
high pressure across her entire body. Those grotesque images and
worse flashed through her mind, instead of the standard replay of
her life to date (with the Looney Tunes soundtrack that
would have been most appropriate), but she couldn't block them, so
she held fast to the seat and to the assist bar and shouted – 'Don't!' – again to no avail.
    Riddling the night behind them with twin barrages of tire-cast
shale and sand, Dylan forced the Expedition up the northern incline
of the median at an oblique angle, putting the vehicle to the
ultimate roll test. Judging by the relentlessness with which
gravity pulled Jilly toward the driver, just one more degree of
tilt would tumble the SUV back into the swale.
    Repeatedly as they ascended, four-wheel drive seemed to be at
least two wheels shy of an adequate number to maintain traction.
The truck lurched, rocked, but finally topped the rise onto the
shoulder of the westbound lanes.
    Dylan checked the rearview mirror, glanced at the side mirror,
and rocketed into a gap in traffic, heading back the way they had
come. Toward town. Toward the motel where the Coupe DeVille no
doubt still smoldered. Into the trouble they had been trying to
outrun.
    Jilly had the crazy notion