By the light of the moon

returned to Great
Expectations . He seemed remarkably calm.
    The restaurant fronted on Federal Highway 70, the route that
Dylan wanted. He headed northwest.
    After using the telephone keypad, Jilly listened, then said,
'Guess the town's too small for nine-one-one service.' She keyed in
the number for directory assistance, asked for the police, and
passed the phone back to Dylan.
    Succinctly, he told the police operator about Lucas Crocker,
half drunk and fully thrashed, waiting for an ambulance in the
restaurant parking lot.
    'May I have your name?' she asked.
    'That's not important.'
    'I'm required to ask your name—'
    'And so you have.'
    'Sir, if you were a witness to this assault—'
    'I committed the assault,' Dylan said.
    Law-enforcement routine seldom took a strange turn here in the
sleepy heart of the desert. The unsettled operator was reduced to
repeating his statement as a question. 'You committed the
assault?'
    'Yes, ma'am. Now, when you send that ambulance for Crocker, send
an officer, too.'
    'You're going to wait for our unit?'
    'No, ma'am. But before the night's out, you'll arrest
Crocker.'
    'Isn't Mr. Crocker the victim?'
    'He's my victim, yes. But he's a perpetrator in his own right. I
know you're thinking it's me you'll want to be arresting, but trust
me, it's Crocker. You also need to send another patrol
car—'
    'Sir, filing a false police report is—'
    'I'm not a hoaxer, ma'am. I'm guilty of assault, phone theft,
breaking a car window with a man's face – but I'm not into
pranks.'
    'With a man's face?'
    'I didn't have a hammer. Listen, you also need to send a second
patrol car and an ambulance to the Crocker residence out on...
Fallon Hill Road. I don't see a house number, but as small as this
town is, you probably know the place.'
    'You're going to be there?'
    'No, ma'am. Who's out there is Crocker's elderly mother. Noreen,
I think her name is. She's chained in the basement.'
    'Chained in the basement?'
    'She's been left in her own filth for a couple weeks now, and
it's not a pretty situation.'
    'You chained her in the basement?'
    'No, ma'am. Crocker wrangled a power of attorney, and he's
starving her to death while he gradually loots her bank accounts
and sells off her belongings.'
    'And where can we find you, sir?'
    'Don't you worry about me, ma'am. You're going to have your
hands full enough tonight.'
    He pushed END, then switched the phone off and handed it to
Jilly. 'Wipe it clean and throw it out the window.'
    She used a Kleenex and disposed of it with the phone.
    A mile later, he handed the keys to the Corvette to her, and she
tossed those out the window, as well.
    'It'd be ironic if we were stopped for littering,' she said.
    'Where's Fred?'
    'While I was waiting for you, I moved him into the cargo space,
so I could have legroom.'
    'You think he's okay back there?'
    'I braced him between suitcases. He's solid.'
    'I meant psychologically okay.'
    'Fred's highly resilient.'
    'You're pretty resilient yourself,' he said.
    'It's an act. Who was the old cowboy?'
    As he was about to answer her question, Dylan suffered a delayed
reaction to the confrontation with Lucas Crocker and to the purity
of evil that he'd experienced so intimately from contact with the
wad of money. He felt as though clouds of frenzied moths swarmed
within him, seeking a light they couldn't find.
    Already he had driven through the dusty outskirts of Safford and
into relatively flat land that in the night, at least, seemed
almost as devoid of the human stain as it had been in the Mesozoic
Era, tens of millions of years ago.
    He pulled onto the shoulder of the highway and stopped. 'Give me
a minute. I need to get... to get Crocker out of my head.'
    When he closed his eyes, he found himself in a cellar, where an
old woman lay in chains, caked with filth. With an artist's
attention to minutiae and to the meaning of it, Dylan furnished the
scene with baroque details as significant as they were
disgusting.
    He had never actually seen Lucas Crocker's mother when he had
touched her son's dropped money in the parking lot. This cellar and
this wretchedly abused woman were constructs of his imagination and
they most likely in no way resembled either the real cellar or the
real Noreen Crocker.
    Dylan didn't see things with his sixth sense, not any
more than he heard or smelled or tasted them. He simply, instantly
knew things. He touched an object rich with psychic spoor, and
knowledge arose in his mind as though summoned from memory,