By the light of the moon

boy's
grin.
    Upstairs, Kenny pleaded loudly for help.
    'Better get movin',' Travis advised.
    'You don't know what we were driving, never saw our wheels.'
    'That's true,' Travis agreed.
    'And you'll do us the favor of not watching us leave.'
    'As far as we know,' said Travis, 'you took a running leap and
flew away.'
    Dylan had asked for three minutes because Marj and Travis would
have difficulty explaining a greater delay to the cops; but if Shep
had wandered off, they were ruined. Three minutes wouldn't be long
enough to find him.
    Except for the breeze in the olive trees, the street was quiet.
In the house, Kenny's muffled shouts wouldn't carry to a
neighbor.
    At the curb, driver's door open, the Expedition waited. Jilly
had doused the headlights and switched off the engine.
    Even as they crossed the front lawn, Dylan saw Shepherd in the
backseat, face illuminated by the reflected glow of a
battery-powered book light bouncing up at him from the page he was
reading.
    'Told you,' Jilly said.
    Relieved, Dylan didn't snap at her.
    Through the dusty window at Shepherd's side, the title of the
book could be seen: Great Expectations , by Charles Dickens.
Shep was a fiend for Dickens.
    Dylan settled behind the wheel, slammed the door, figuring more
than half a minute had passed since they'd left Travis to watch the
wall clock in the kitchen.
    Legs folded on the passenger's seat to spare her jade plant on
the floor, Jilly held out the keys, then snatched them back. 'What
if you go nuts again?'
    'I didn't go nuts.'
    'Whatever it was you did, what if you do it again?'
    'I probably will,' he realized.
    'I better drive.'
    He shook his head. 'What did you see upstairs, on the way to
Travis's room? What did you see when you looked toward the window
at the end of the hall?'
    She hesitated. Then she surrendered the keys. 'You drive.'
    As Travis counted off the first minute in the kitchen, Dylan
executed a U-turn. They followed the route they had taken earlier
on Eucalyptus Avenue, with its dearth of eucalyptuses. By the time
Travis would have called 911, they had traveled surface streets to
the interstate.
    Dylan took I-10 east, toward the end of town where by now the
Cadillac might have stopped smoldering, but he said, 'I don't want
to stay on this. I have a hunch it won't be safe a whole lot
longer.'
    'Tonight's not a night for ignoring hunches,' she noted.
    Eventually he departed the interstate in favor of U.S. Highway
191, an undivided two-lane blacktop that struck north through dark
desolation and carried little traffic at this hour. He didn't know
where 191 led, and right now he didn't care. For a while, where
they went didn't matter, as long as they kept moving, as long as
they put some distance between themselves and the corpse in the
Coupe DeVille, between themselves and the house on Eucalyptus
Avenue.
    For the first two miles on 191, neither he nor Jilly spoke, and
as the third mile began to clock up on the odometer, Dylan started
to shake. Now that his adrenaline levels were declining toward
normal and now that the primitive survivalist within him had
returned to his genetic subcellar, the enormity of what had
happened belatedly hit him. Dylan strove to conceal the shaking
from Jilly, knew that he was unsuccessful when he heard his teeth
chatter, and then realized that she was trembling, too, and hugging
herself, and rocking in her seat.
    'D-d-d-damn,' she said.
    'Yeah.'
    'I'm not W-w-wonder Woman,' she said.
    'No.'
    'For one thing, I don't have big enough hooters for the
job.'
    He said, 'Me neither.'
    'Oh, man, those knives .'
    'They were honking big knives,' he agreed.
    'You with your baseball bat. What – were you out of your
mind, O'Conner?'
    'Must've been out of my mind. You with your ant spray –
that didn't strike me as the epitome of rationality, Jackson.'
    'Worked, didn't it?'
    'Nice shot.'
    'Thanks. Where we lived when I was a kid, I got lots of practice
with roaches. They move faster than Miss Becky. You must've been
good at baseball.'
    'Not bad for an effete artist. Listen, Jackson, it took guts to
come upstairs after you knew about the knives.'
    'It took stupidity, is what it took. We could've been
killed.'
    'We could've been,' he acknowledged, 'but we weren't.'
    'But we could've been. No more of that run-jump-chase-fight
crap. No more, O'Conner.'
    'I hope not,' he said.
    'I mean it. I'm serious. I'm tellin' you, no more.'
    'I don't think that's our choice to make.'
    'It's sure my choice.'
    'I mean, I don't