Relentless

eyes as pale as those of an albino, eyes that in the somber light of the storm appeared luminous, and overall an impression of tragic malformation: Here was a face met when opening a door or turning a corner in a fever dream, a face materializing from the shadows in the delirium tremens of a chronic alcoholic.

   We felt safer mobile than stationary. As we traveled a random route through the drenched afternoon, considering our options, my mind returned again and again to the deformed face.
    Penny believed that rain streaming down my window and down the window of the Maserati had distorted the countenance. He was a man like any other, perhaps ugly, but not the grotesque individual that I—and my vivid imagination—had conspired with the rain to invent.
    Her reasoning made sense, and for a while I elaborated on her theory. With all that we had so recently endured, the world had become an asylum; and when the mind dwelt in constant expectation of one new madness or another, it could conjure menace from the mundane, invoke a phantom assassin from an innocent shadow.
    Besides, we had not been followed by the Maserati or by another vehicle. If such a pale-eyed ogre existed, it had no interest in us.
    All boys are fascinated by the bizarre and the singular, that which isalone of its kind. Initially, Milo expressed keen interest in what he called the Maserati monster, but soon he retreated to his strangely high-functioning Game Boy and to whatever equations and three-dimensional blueprints currently obsessed him.
    Concerned about his emotional condition, Penny and I assured him that we would keep him safe. Remarkably, however, he seemed to have incurred no trauma from being the target of a skilled rifleman.
    I loved him without reservation but knew that I might never fully understand him, which was as poignant as any truth could be.
    We had more urgent issues to consider than the Maserati driver. Not least was how Shearman Waxx had found us so quickly, mere hours after we had taken shelter in Marty and Celine’s spec house.
    I now accepted as fact Milo’s suggestion that Waxx might have known our friends before he wrote his review of
One O’Clock Jump
. The critic researched us and prepared his assault perhaps even before I finished the novel.
    Because of my past writing, I offended him so much, he deemed me to be deserving of not only a savage review but also death.
    We were fortunate enough, however, to have many more friends than Marty and Celine. If Waxx planned our murders for months, he’d had sufficient time to learn who we saw socially; but the list was long enough that, once we fled our burning home, he would have needed a few days to discover with which of our friends we had taken refuge.
    Instead, he had shown up less than eight hours later, armed and with a plan of attack. This suggested that we revealed our location by some action, requiring little or no detective work on his part.
    “Clitherow warned you not to use credit cards,” Penny said.
    “And I didn’t.”
    “But even if you did—how would Waxx know?”
    “Maybe he’s a genius hacker, he can break into the credit-card company’s computer, monitor your activity, track your whereabouts.”
    “So he can breach security systems with impunity, he knows how to handle explosives, he’s a good rifleman, and he’s a world-class hacker. What the hell kind of book critic is this guy?”
    “One who still needs to improve his syntax.”
    Preferring to avoid lonely roads and open spaces, we cruised business and residential streets. Much of Orange County is a megaplex of cities and suburbs, from which the orange groves and strawberry fields long ago disappeared.
    “When you cashed a check earlier, what bank branch did you use?”
    I said, “It was at the upper end of the peninsula.”
    “Could he somehow track that?”
    “Wouldn’t hacking a bank’s records be harder than penetrating a credit-card company?”
    “Both hard, the bank harder,” Milo confirmed from the backseat.
    His opinion sounded suspiciously authoritative, but we didn’t worry that he was hacking bank computers. He had been born not only a prodigy but also with a tao, a sense of right and wrong, so strong that he never told us a lie. He could be evasive but not dishonest.
    This is why he dreamed of being director of the FBI instead of attorney general. Considering some of the unsavory characters who had held the latter post, Milo didn’t have the credentials for