Relentless

after me, and somehow that was his undoing.
    We swept past a vehicle parked on the shoulder of the highway. I got only a rain-blurred glimpse of it, but I thought it was a black SUV. Not a Cadillac Escalade, surely not. Waxx couldn’t be everywhere at once. No headlights appeared behind us in the side mirror.
    Over the open phone line, from the scene of the murder, other noises arose: the killer in motion. He fumbled the phone when he picked it up. Then came his slow steady breathing.
    Determined not to be the first to speak, I listened to him as he listened to me. My resolution did not hold, and although I knew who he must be, I said, “Who is this?”
    His voice was low and gravelly, ripe with a false good humor that could not conceal the underlying menace: “Hello there, brother.”
    This was not Shearman Waxx, unless he was a man of many voices.
    “Brother,” he said, “are you with me?”
    “I’m not your brother,” I said.
    “All men are my brothers,” he assured me.
    “Waxx? Is that you? Who are you?”
    “I am my brothers’ reaper,” he said. His soft laugh was ugly.
    I put down the passenger-door window, pressed END on my cell phone, and threw it into the night.

   Twenty minutes before midnight, Penny exited the interstate at the first truck stop that appeared after I tossed away the phone. Bad weather put the long-haulers behind schedule, and they did not linger at the diner. The parking lot was mostly empty, and business slow.
    She stopped under the shelter of one of several service islands, where ours was the sole vehicle at the pumps. We got out, leaving Milo and Lassie asleep in the backseat.
    Neither of us thought it wise to run one of our credit cards through the scanner. Loath to leave her and Milo, I nevertheless hurried inside to put down the cash to get the pump unlocked.
    The cashier was a good old boy with a plug of chaw tucked in his cheek, the kind who could talk the quills off a porcupine, and who was no doubt full of entertaining stories. He was great material for a novelist, but I was neither in Florida nor doing book research.
    I pretended to be unable to speak English and invented a quasi-Slaviclanguage of my own, which complicated communication enough to discourage him without insulting him. By the time I got back to the Mountaineer, Penny had the hose nozzle in the tank, and the numbers were spinning on the totalizers.
    Beyond the service-island overhang, in the windless night, the rain came down in such straight skeins that the rigorous lines should have proved the law of gravity to any disbeliever, of which I’m sure there are multitudes, considering we live in an age of enthusiastic ignorance, when anything well-known for centuries is not only suspect but also considered worthy of being rejected in favor of a new theory more appealing to movie stars and deep-thinking rock musicians.
    In spite of Milo’s admonition that he was a kid but not a kid, I had not wanted him to hear about John Clitherow’s brutal murder or what the writer had told me about the fate of his wife and two daughters. Now I gave Penny a condensed version but spared her none of the grim truth.
    Although she didn’t say my story had given her an appetite, she took the grisly details well, glancing worriedly at the backseat windows of the Mountaineer, in the direction of our sleeping son, only thirty or forty times.
    She pumped all the gasoline we paid for and racked the hose in the nozzle boot, but we remained standing under the shelter, pale plumes of our breath smoking in the chilly air.
    “So Waxx has a partner,” she said, “a psycho best friend.”
    “And he sounds like a real peach, too.”
    “That explains why he was able to do so much, so fast.”
    “John Clitherow called him relentless. Easier to be relentless when you’ve got a posse.”
    “What the hell is this all about, Cubby? This morning, Clitherow told you Waxx was not just a critic with opinions but a critic with an agenda.
What
agenda?”
    “I don’t think he knew. It’s just what he felt. But can a madman have an agenda that’s anything else but mad? If we knew his agenda, we still wouldn’t understand him or be able to deal more effectively with him. He’d still be nuts, and nutcases are unpredictable.”
    “I’m not so sure he’s certifiably insane.”
    “Careful, sugar, or I’m going to think
you’re
certifiable.”
    “Oh,” she said, “he’s freaking insane, all right, but he’s pretty much one