By the light of the moon

as
though he were recalling events that he had once read in a book.
Thus far this knowledge had usually been the equivalent of a
sentence or two of linked facts; at other times, it equaled
paragraphs of information, pages.
    Dylan opened his eyes, leaving the imagined Noreen Crocker in
that squalid cellar even as the real woman might at this very
moment be listening to the approaching sirens of her rescuers.
    'You okay?' Jilly asked.
    'I'm maybe not quite as resilient as Fred.'
    She smiled. 'He's got the advantage of not having a brain.'
    'Better get moving.' He popped the handbrake. 'Put some distance
between ourselves and Safford.' He drove onto the two-lane highway.
'For all we know, the guys in the black Suburbans have a statewide
alert out to law-enforcement agencies, asking to be informed of any
unusual incidents.'
    At Dylan's request, Jilly got an Arizona map out of the glove
box and studied it with a penlight while he drove northwest.
    North and south of them, the black teeth of different mountain
ranges gnawed at the night sky, and as they traveled the
intervening Gila River Valley here between those distant peaks,
they seemed to be traversing the jaw span of a yawning
leviathan.
    'Seventy-eight miles to the town of Globe,' Jilly said. 'Then if
you really think it's necessary to avoid the Phoenix area –
'
    'I really think it's necessary,' he said. 'I prefer not to be
found charred beyond recognition in a burnt-out SUV.'
    'At Globe, we'll have to turn north on Highway 60, take it all
the way up to Holbrook, near the Petrified Forest. From there, we
can pick up Interstate 40, west toward Flagstaff or east toward
Gallup, New Mexico – if it matters which way we go.'
    'Negative Jackson, vortex of pessimism. It'll matter.'
    'Why?'
    'Because by the time we get there, something will have happened
to make it matter.'
    'Maybe by the time we get up to Holbrook, we'll have gotten so
good at positive thinking that we'll have thought ourselves into
being billionaires. Then we'll go west and buy a mansion
overlooking the Pacific.'
    'Maybe,' he said. 'One thing I'm buying for sure, soon as the
stores open in the morning, wherever we are.'
    'What's that?'
    'Gloves.'

22
    Outside Globe, Arizona, past midnight, they stopped
at a service station where the night man had almost finished
closing. Nature had given him an unfortunately thin fox face, which
he failed to enhance with a hedgehog haircut. In his twenties, he
had the surly manner of a fourteen-year-old with a severe hormonal
imbalance. According to the tag on his shirt, his name was
SKIPPER.
    Perhaps Skipper would have switched on the pumps again and would
have filled the Expedition's tank if Dylan had offered a credit
card, but no bookmaker in Vegas would have been naive enough to
quote odds in favor of that outcome. At the mention of cash,
however, his crafty eyes sharpened on the promise of an easy skim,
and his poor attitude improved from surly to sullen.
    Skipper turned on the pumps but not the exterior lights. In the
dark, he filled the tank while Dylan and Jilly cleaned bug
splatters and dust off the windshield and the tailgate glass, no
more likely to offer assistance than he was likely to start
reciting Shakespeare's sonnets with a perfect seventeenth-century
English accent.
    When Dylan caught Skipper watching Jilly with obvious lascivious
interest, a low-grade fever of anger warmed his face. Then, with
some surprise, he wondered when he'd become possessive of her
– and why he thought he had any reason or right to be
possessive.
    They had known each other less than five hours. True, they had
been subjected to great danger, enormous pressures, and
consequently they had discovered more about each other's character
than they might have learned during a long acquaintance under
ordinary circumstances. Nevertheless, the only fundamental thing he
knew about Jilly was that she could be depended upon in a pinch,
that she did not back down. This wasn't a bad thing to know about
anyone, but it wasn't a full portrait, either.
    Or was it?
    As he finished cleaning the windshield, angered by Skipper's
leer, Dylan wondered if this one thing he knew about Jilly might be
all he needed to know: She deserved his trust. Perhaps everything
else that mattered in a relationship grew from trust – from a
tranquil faith in the courage, integrity, and kindness of the other
person.
    He decided that he was losing his mind. The psychotropic stuff had affected his brain in more ways