Relentless

minutes and counting.
    In spite of her childhood and adolescent experience of colossal destruction, Penny made no attempt to disarm the device but hissed “Waxx” as if it were a curse word, and plunged down the back stairs, two at a time, and across the kitchen, with me so close behind that the toes of my shoes might have scuffed the heels of hers.
    Bursting from the laundry room into the garage, she slapped a wall switch, and the roll-up door began to rise.
    As I clambered in behind the steering wheel, Penny swung up into the passenger seat, tossed the Explorer keys to me, glanced in the back, and said, “Where’s Milo?”
    The dog sat in the backseat, ears pricked and alert, but the boy was gone.

   Shouting for Milo, Penny and I flew from the Explorer as if we had been ejected by a device installed by James Bond’s favorite car customizer.
    If the boy was in the garage, he apparently was in no condition to answer our calls. Penny hurried to search in, under, and around the sedan in the second parking stall, while I returned to the house.
    I thought of John Clitherow. He had been Waxx’s primary target, but the critic had first taken John’s family.
    The greatest punishment is not your own death but instead the loss of those you love. How much worse that loss must be if you have to live with the bitter knowledge that those who trusted and relied on you had been dealt early deaths as surrogates for you, punished for your offenses.
    Waxx was not merely a homicidal sociopath but also, in the fullest sense, a terrorist.
    In the doomed house, in the sparkling laundry room that would soon be filthy rubble, in the kitchen that momentarily would itself be cooked, in response to my ever more frantic shouts, Milo finally called out—“Yo, Dad!”—and entered at a run from the downstairs hall.
    He carried Lassie’s favorite toy, which we had inadvertently left behind: a plush purple bunny with huge startled eyes and floppy ears and a white puffball tail. It was cute, and it had a squeaker in its tummy, and the dog adored it, but it wasn’t a toy worth dying for.
    With more athletic grace than I had ever before exhibited, I scooped Milo off the kitchen floor and into my arms, swiveled toward the laundry room, and ran.
    Giggling and exuberantly squeaking the bunny, Milo said, “What’s happening?”
    “The place is gonna blow,” I said.
    The squeaking alerted Penny. By the time we reached the garage, she stood by the open driver’s door of the Explorer.
    Her eyes were even wider than those of the startled rabbit. “No time to belt him in, Cubby, hold him in your lap!”
    Even though the door had rolled all the way up and offered no obstacle, I felt relieved that she would be driving. Two facts—that the SUV had a reverse gear, that the back wall of the garage remained intact—seemed to tempt Fate too much for me to drive.
    Milo had wanted to ride shotgun, and now he shared that position with me. He sat in my lap, and I wrapped both arms around him.
    Folding his arms around the bunny and holding it against his chest, the boy said to the toy, “Don’t worry. Dad won’t let anything happen to us.”
    Geniuses, even six-year-old prodigies, don’t believe that toys live any kind of life. Milo talked not to the rabbit, but reassured himself.
    I had left the key in the ignition. When Penny tried to start the engine, she got from it a cough, a cough, a groan.
    She glanced at me as I glanced at her, and we didn’t need to be telepathic to know we shared the same thought: Waxx had sabotaged the vehicle.

   The stumpy, bow-tied, elbow-patched, Hush-Puppied, horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing, white-wine-sipping, pretentious, thick-necked, wide-assed intellectual fraud must have been in our house from at least midnight, planting explosives and tampering with the cars before at last venturing to our bedroom after four o’clock in the morning to torture us with a Taser.
    For once, however, we had overestimated his capacity for villainy. On Penny’s third try, the engine of the Explorer turned over, roared.
    Pressing back hard in my seat, bracing my feet against the floorboard, I cradled Milo as best I could, expecting to be blown out of the garage as if from a circus cannon, in a plume of fire and debris.
    But Penny sped the length of the driveway and braked only slightly to make a left turn into the street. Morning traffic had not yet appeared. She drove half a block before letting up on the accelerator and