By the light of the moon

than he yet knew.
Here he was thinking about committing his life to a woman who already thought he was a Disney comic book, all sugar and
talking chipmunks.
    They were not an item. They weren't even friends. You didn't
make a true friend in mere hours. They were at most fellow
survivors, victims of the same shipwreck, with a mutual interest in
staying afloat and remaining alert for sharks.
    Regarding Jilly Jackson, he wasn't feeling possessive. He was
only protective , just as he felt toward Shep, just as he
would feel toward a sister if he had one. Sister. Yeah, right.
    By the time he accepted cash for the gasoline, Skipper
brightened from surliness to sullenness to peevishness. Making no
pretense of adding the currency to the station receipts, he tucked
the money in his wallet with a pinched look of spiteful
satisfaction.
    The total had been thirty-four dollars; but Dylan paid with two
twenties and suggested that the attendant keep the difference. He
did not want the change, because those bills would carry Skipper's
spoor.
    He had been careful not to touch the fuel pumps or anything else
on which the attendant might have left a psychic imprint. He didn't
want to know the nature of Skipper's soul, didn't want to feel the
texture of his mean life of petty thefts and petty hatreds.
    Regarding the human race, Dylan was as much of an optimist as
ever. He still liked people, but he'd had enough of them for one
day.
    * * *
    Traveling north from Globe, through the Apache Mountains, with
the San Carlos Indian Reservation to the east, Jilly gradually
became aware that something had changed between her and Dylan
O'Conner. He wasn't relating to her quite as he had previously. He
glanced away from the road more frequently than before, studying
her in what he believed to be a surreptitious manner, and so she
pretended not to notice. A new energy flowed between them, but she
couldn't define it.
    Finally she decided she was just tired, too exhausted and too
stressed to trust her perceptions. After this eventful night,
lesser mortals than Jillian Jackson, Southwest Amazon, might have
lost their sanity altogether, so a little paranoia was nothing to
worry about.
    From Safford to Globe, Dylan had told her about the encounter
with Lucas Crocker. He'd also recounted the story of Ben Tanner and
his granddaughter, which revealed an application of his sixth sense
that was more appealing than being drawn into the depraved
psychotic worlds of people like Crocker and like Kenny of the Many
Knives.
    Now, as the lights of Globe receded, as Shep remained quietly
engaged with Great Expectations , Jilly brought Dylan up to
speed on the unsettling incident in the women's restroom at the
restaurant.
    At one of the sinks, as she'd washed her hands, she had looked
up at the mirror and had seen a reflection of the bathroom that was
accurate in every detail except one. Where the toilet stalls should
have been, three dark wood confessionals stood instead; the carved
crosses on the doors were brightened by gold leafing.
    'I turned around to look directly, and there were only toilet
stalls, as there should have been. But when I looked at the mirror
again... the confessionals were still reflected in it.'
    Rinsing her hands, unable to take her eyes off the mirror, she
had been watching when the door of one of the confessionals slowly
opened. A priest came out of the booth, not with a smile, not with
a prayer book, but in a sliding heap, dead and drenched in
blood.
    'I got the hell out of the bathroom,' she said, shivering at the
memory. 'But I can't turn this off, Dylan. These visions keep
coming at me, and they mean something.'
    'Visions,' he said. 'Not mirages ?'
    'I was in denial,' she admitted. She slipped one fingertip under
the gauze pad of the Band-Aid that covered the point of injection
in her arm, and she gently fingered the sore, slightly swollen
puncture wound. 'But I'm not playing that game anymore. These are
visions, all right. Premonitions.'
    The first town ahead was Seneca, thirty miles away. Twenty-eight
miles beyond Seneca lay Carrizo. Both were just wide spots in the
road. Dylan was driving deeper into one of those many areas in the
Southwest known separately and collectively as the Big Lonely.
    'In my case,' he said, 'I seem to be making connections between
people and places, regarding events that happened in the past or
that are already underway in current time. But you think you're
seeing some event in the future.'
    'Yeah. An incident