Relentless

stuff?”
    Rolling my eyes to indicate Milo in the backseat, I said, “Dumbo, Despereaux, Pistachio.”
    Milo said, “Good grief.”
    “All right, all right. He says he’ll cut out your heart and feed it to your mother. Are you both happy to know that? Mmmmm?”
    “Don’t worry, Milo,” Penny said. “I absolutely won’t eat it.”
    “What else did he say?” Milo asked.
    “Then he’ll cut out your mother’s heart and feed it to me.”
    “This guy,” Milo judged, “is a major sicko.”
    Lassie growled agreement.
    We traveled several blocks in silence.
    Some of the intersections featured pavement swales that were overflowing with swift-moving water. Passing through those rushing streams, the cars ahead of us sprouted white wings and seemed for a moment about to fly up into the storm.
    Finally Penny said, “Not everything is a joke, Cubby.”
    “I know.”
    “We’re in serious trouble.”
    “I know.”
    “But I have to say …”
    I waited, then asked, “What?”
    She laughed softly. “Hoity-toity snob.”
    “Well, he called me a hack again.”
    “He’s not only a psychotic killer—he’s also rude.”
    “He is very rude,” I agreed. “I’d like to meet his mother.”
    “What would you say to his mother?”
    “I would severely chastise her for poor parenting.”
    “Our Milo is never rude,” Penny said.
    “Because he’s been properly raised.”
    “There was that one experiment that exploded,” she said.
    “Well, that’s just the Boom side of him coming out. It’s in his genes.”
    Behind us, Milo said, “This is so better.”
    “What is?” I asked.
    “You guys—the way you are now.”
    “How are we now?”
    “Not scared silent anymore. I like it this way.”
    I liked it better that way, too, and when I smiled at Penny, she smiled at me.
    We would not have been smiling if we had known that eventually one of the three of us would be shot dead and that life would never be the same.

   At the eastern end of Orange County, many of the canyons are still home to more coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions, and deer than people. Carved into the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains, some are mere ravines, others less narrow, all thick with trees and brush, a refuge for the contemplative, for those who dislike urban and suburban life, and for various eccentrics.
    The serpentine, undulatory tossed-ribbon of a road unraveled as if it were the last feeble construction of the declining civilization that had built it. Huge California live oaks overhung the pavement, trunks and limbs char-black in our headlights.
    The houses were well separated even at the civilized end of the road. They grew farther apart the deeper we penetrated the canyon, the name of which I will not provide, for reasons soon obvious.
    With isolation came a different mood. Geological details seemed more dramatic, slopes steeper and rock formations more suggestive of violence. The woods thrust at us and the brush bristled aggressively,as though we had passed through a membrane, leaving benign Nature, entering a preternatural place in which a malevolent consciousness lived in the darkness,
was
the darkness, watched, and waited.
    When I saw lamplit windows back among the trees, they no longer appeared warm and welcoming, but eerie and forbidding, as though the unseen structures were not houses but abattoirs, temples of torture, and fiery forges in which were cast images of strange gods.
    The two-lane blacktop continued, but we turned onto a narrower gravel road that looped a few miles before rejoining the paved route. This one-lane track, which climbed the lower slopes of the canyon wall, was used largely by agents of the state forestry department.
    Wet weeds swished against the sides of the Mountaineer, and some semitropical plant, with pale leaves as large as hands, slid its many palms across the passenger-side windows.
    After some distance—for reasons soon obvious, I will not say how far—we came to a lay-by, where I could park alongside the track. When I switched off the engine and headlights, the darkness was as absolute as if we were in a windowless building. Only the drumming of the rain proved we remained outdoors.
    The Boom house faced the paved road that we had departed. But we were not entering by the front door.
    “We’ll be eaten alive, going in this way,” Milo predicted.
    “No mountain lion will attack a group of people,” Penny assured him. “They stalk what’s smaller than they are—and