Relentless

comfortable, undemanding, and pat.
    I didn’t know John well enough to feel his grief as sharply as perhaps I should have, or to grieve properly for him. I had never met him except through the mail, and I had not even seen photos of his wife and daughters.
    Inhibiting grief, of course, my growing apprehension not only darkened my mind and heart but also inspired a physical agitationthat drove me into the hallway—then to the sidelights flanking the front door, in expectation of seeing a black Cadillac Escalade in the street.
    In lieu of pity, I felt a nervous sympathy for John, and when I tried—inadequately—to express my condolences, I did so with a commiseration as tender as compassion but more remote and hopeless.
    I don’t think he needed or wanted commiseration. He had lost too much to be able to take consolation from anyone’s sympathy.
    John listened only until he regained his composure. In a voice fractured but not shattered, he interrupted me, speaking with greater urgency than ever: “Waxx has resources that seem supernatural. You can’t overestimate his capabilities. He doesn’t give you breathing room. He keeps coming back and back, and back. He’s relentless. Kill him if he gives you the opportunity, because killing him is your only chance. And don’t think going to the cops will help. Funny things happen when you go to the cops about Waxx. Right now, for God’s sake, just run. Buy yourself time. As soon as you can, abandon your car, don’t use your credit cards or cell phone, don’t give him any way to find you. Get out of there. Get the hell out of there.
Go!”
    He terminated the call.
    I keyed in ⋆69, with no expectation that he would answer but with the hope that this call-back function would display his number. If he did not discard his disposable phone in favor of another, as he said that he would, I might be able to reach him later, when we were safely away from the house.
    He proved to be as cautious as he had urged me to be. He could not be reached by ⋆69, and no number appeared on the screen of my cell phone.
    Turning away from the front-door sidelight and the view of the street, heading toward the stairs, I shouted, “Penny! We gotta go!”
    Her reply came from the ground floor, from the back of the house.
    Off the kitchen, in the laundry room, I found her with a pile of luggage. She was pulling a big wheeled suitcase into the garage.
    I grabbed two bags and followed her. “Something’s happened, it’s worse than we thought.”
    She didn’t waste a precious second asking what the something might be, but instead muscled the suitcase into the back of the Ford Explorer.
    In a crisis, she functioned more like a Boom than a Greenwich, very much the daughter of Grimbald and Clotilda, working quickly but calmly, confident that she would be well out of the zone of destruction when the end of the countdown came.
    Other luggage had already been loaded. With the bags remaining in the laundry room, the cargo space of the SUV would be packed from end to end and side to side.
    “We need to travel light,” I said, as Penny headed back toward the laundry room. “What is all this?”
    Materializing beside me as I shoved two more suitcases into the Explorer, Milo said, “Stuff.”
    “What stuff?”
    “Important stuff.”
    “Your stuff?”
    Suddenly cagey, he said, “Could be.”
    He wore black sneakers with red laces, black jeans, and a long-sleeved black T-shirt on the chest of which, in white block letters, was the word PURPOSE .
    Already, Penny returned, pulling another trunk-size suitcase with wheels.
    “Where’s Lassie?” I asked as I hurried toward the laundry room.
    “Backseat,” Penny said.
    I fetched the last two bags and brought them to the Explorer.
    “There’s one more thing upstairs,” she said.
    “No. Leave it.”
    “Can’t. I’ll be just a minute.”
    “Penny, wait—”
    “You can close the tailgate.” She dashed from the garage into the house.
    Loading the last of the suitcases, I said to Milo, “Get in the backseat with Lassie.”
    “What’s going on?”
    “I told you. A little trip.”
    “Why the hurry?”
    Closing the tailgate, I said, “Maybe we have a plane to catch.”
    “Do we have a plane to catch?”
    Giving him a dose of his own inscrutability, I said, “Could be.”
    “Is it the Northern Hemisphere?” he asked.
    “Is what?”
    “Where we’re going.”
    “What does it matter?” I asked.
    “It matters.”
    “Get in the