Relentless

books.
    Embedded in that second intention was a clue to Waxx’s agenda,the reason why—besides the thrill of murder—he wanted to kill John and Tom Landulf and me.
    As I motored on through the night and rain, I became aware of Penny murmuring in what seemed to be a pleasant dream and of Milo snoring in the backseat—and just then Lassie orchestrated their noises into a serenade by adding a series of odorless toots.
    This humble interval not only amused me but also struck me as immeasurably precious, one of those prosaic moments from which so much delight can be taken that the world
must
have been created as a place of joy. No machine universe, stupidly cranking onward, could produce moments of grace from such lowly material.
    Here was why Waxx and men like him must not be allowed to achieve their ends. The world wasn’t theirs. They could claim it only with the use of lies, intimidation, and violence. If we let them win, there would be no moments of grace, humble or glorious, ever again.
    For most of my life, I had a covenant with Death to spare others as once I was spared, to be a man of peace. Such a covenant ceased to be noble and in fact became a shameful thing if it required that I not defend my life or the lives of the innocent.
    Soon after dawn, we needed to find a lonely place where Penny could teach me rudimentary marksmanship.
    Then, too, she would learn that early in our relationship, I deceived her by omission, and also deceived myself by pretending that withholding information from her was not a kind of lie, when indeed it could be nothing else.
    She knew my parents died when I was six. She misunderstood that they perished in a car accident, and I allowed her misunderstanding to go uncorrected.
    She knew that I had been raised thereafter by a wise and caring maiden aunt—Edith Greenwich—who had died of a swift-moving cancer when I was twenty.
    Penny assumed that Aunt Edith must be my father’s sister. I did not correct her assumption.
    Gentle Edith, my mother’s only sister, adopted me to ensure that I would not grow up as a figure of either pity or suspicion, bearing a notorious surname associated in the nation’s mind with horror and extreme violence.
    Because I had no living relatives except a couple of second cousins with whom I was not in contact, Penny also assumed that I came from a small family, the branches of which had withered away over the generations. I allowed that assumption to go uncorrected.
    Once I had a brother, Phelim, who was six years my senior. The name Phelim is Irish and means “constantly good.” As much as I can remember of him, he was true to his name, a kind brother.
    My father’s first name was Farrel, which is Celtic and means “valiant man.” My most vivid memory of him proves that he was worthy of that designation.
    My mother was Kirsten, which is a name from the Old English word meaning “church,” which itself is derived from the Greek word meaning “of the Lord.” After twenty-eight years, I recall most clearly three things about her: the beauty of her green eyes, the tenderness with which she treated me and Phelim, and her rich and contagious laugh.
    My father had three brothers: Ewen, a name that is a Welsh form of John; Kenton, which derives from a Gaelic word for “handsome;” and Trahern, called Tray, which is Old Welsh meaning “strong as iron.”
    Of Ewen and Kenton, my father’s older brothers, I remember too little. They were businessmen and, like my father, always working.
    Trahern, the youngest of the four brothers, had a close-cropped stubble of blond hair, a two-inch livid scar slanting across his forehead, bloodshot blue eyes, chapped lips, sour breath, grime under his fingernails, and icy hands.
    I vividly remember those things about him from that long-ago day in September, but I recall nothing about him from prior encounters. For me, he seems to have been reborn on that autumn evening, so new and singular that his past was washed out of time’s record, much as a born-again man of faith will say that his sins were washed away in baptism, though Tray baptized himself that evening, not in water but in blood.
    Tray’s last name—also my father’s, also mine back in that September—was Durant, which may ring a bell less loudly now than it did in the day when it was above the fold on all newspapers for weeks, in six-inch letters on the covers of the sleazier tabloids, and repeated like an evil mantra on TV news.
    I opened the door