By the light of the moon

blink, but
more often than not, he flicked or twiddled his fingers for hours
on end or jiggled his legs, or tapped his feet.
    Dylan, on the other hand, had been so securely taped to a
straight-backed chair that he couldn't easily wave, rock, or
twiddle anything. Inch-wide strips of electrician's tape wound
around and around his ankles, lashing them tightly to the chair
legs; additional tape bound his wrists and his forearms to the arms
of the chair. His right arm was taped with the palm facing down,
but his left palm was upturned.
    A cloth of some kind had been wadded in his mouth when he'd been
unconscious. His lips had been taped shut.
    Dylan had been conscious for two or three minutes, and he hadn't
connected any pieces of the ominous puzzle that had been
presented for his consideration. He remained clueless as to who had
assaulted him and as to why.
    Twice when he'd tried to turn in his chair to look toward the
twin beds and the bathroom, which lay behind him, a rap alongside
the head, delivered by his unknown enemy, had tempered his
curiosity. The blows weren't hard, but they were aimed at the
tender spot where earlier he had been struck more brutally, and
each time he nearly passed out again.
    If Dylan had called for help, his muffled shout wouldn't have
carried beyond the motel room, but it would have reached his
brother less than ten feet away. Unfortunately, Shep wouldn't
respond either to a full-throated scream or to a whisper. Even on
his best days, he seldom reacted to Dylan or to anyone, and when he
became obsessed with a jigsaw puzzle, this world seemed less real
to him than did the two-dimensional scene in the fractured
picture.
    With his calm right hand, Shep selected an ameba-shaped piece of
pasteboard from the box, glanced at it, and set it aside. At once
he plucked another fragment from the pile and immediately located
the right spot for it, after which he placed a second and a third
– all in half a minute. He appeared to believe that he sat
alone in the room.
    Dylan's heart knocked against his ribs as though testing the
soundness of his construction. Every beat pushed a pulse of pain
through his clubbed skull, and in sickening syncopation, the rag in
his mouth seemed to throb like a living thing, triggering his gag
reflex more than once.
    Scared to a degree that big guys like him were never supposed to
be scared, unashamed of his fear, entirely comfortable with being a
big frightened guy, Dylan was as certain of this as he had ever
been certain of anything: Twenty-nine was too young to die. If he'd
been ninety -nine, he'd have argued that middle age began
well past the century mark.
    Death had never held any allure for him. He didn't understand
those who reveled in the Goth subculture, their abiding romantic
identification with the living dead; he didn't find vampires sexy.
With its glorification of murder and its celebration of cruelty to
women, gangsta-rap music didn't start his toes tapping, either. He
didn't like movies in which evisceration and decapitation were the
primary themes; if nothing else, they were certain popcorn
spoilers. He supposed that he'd never be hip. His fate was to be as
square as a saltine cracker. But the prospect of being eternally
square didn't bother him a fraction as much as the prospect of
being dead.
    Although scared, he remained cautiously hopeful. For one thing,
if the unknown assailant had intended to kill him, surely he would
already have assumed room temperature. He had been bound and gagged
because the attacker had some other use for him.
    Torture came to mind. Dylan had never heard about people being
tortured to death in the rooms of national-chain motels, at least
not with regularity. Homicidal psychopaths tended to feel awkward
about conducting their messy business in an establishment that
might at the same time be hosting a Rotarian convention. During his
years of traveling, his worst complaints involved poor
housekeeping, unplaced wake-up calls, and lousy food in the coffee
shop. Nevertheless, once torture opened a door and walked into his
mind, it pulled up a chair and sat down and wouldn't leave.
    Dylan also took some comfort from the fact that the sap-wielding
assailant had left Shepherd untapped, untouched, and untaped.
Surely this must mean that the evildoer, whoever he might be,
recognized the extreme degree of Shep's detachment and realized
that the afflicted boy posed no threat.
    A genuine sociopath would have disposed of poor Shepherd