Strangers

the road from the motel.
        He was seeking satori, which was a Zen word meaning "sudden enlightenment," a profound revelation. But enlightenment eluded him.
        All day he had used the rearview mirror, hoping to spot a tail. During dinner, he surreptitiously watched the other customers. But if he was being followed, his tail was masterful, invisible.
        At nine o'clock, rather than use the telephone in his room, he walked to a nearby service station pay phone. With his credit card, he placed a call to the number of another pay phone in Laguna Beach. By prearrangement, Parker Faine was waiting there with a report on the mail that he had collected for Dom earlier in the day. There was little chance that either of their phones was tapped; however, after receiving those two disturbing Polaroid snapshots, Dom had decided (and Parker had agreed) that in this case prudence and paranoia were synonymous.
        "Bills," Parker said, "advertisements. No more strange messages, and no more Polaroids. How's it going at your end?"
        "Nothing so far," Dom said, leaning wearily against the Plexiglas and aluminum wall of the phone booth. "Didn't sleep well last night."
        "But you didn't go for a walk?"
        "Didn't even get one knot untied. Had a nightmare, though. The moon again. Anybody follow you to that pay phone?"
        "Not unless he was as thin as a dime and a master of camouflage," Parker said. "So you can call me here again tomorrow night and not have to worry that they've tapped the line."
        "We sound like two madmen," Dom said.
        "I'm kind of having fun," Parker said. "Cops and robbers, hide and seek, spies-I was always good at games like that when I was a kid. You just hang in there, my friend. And if you need help, I'll come fast."
        "I know," Dom said.
        He walked back to the motel through a cold damp wind. As in the hotel in Portland, he woke three times before dawn, always surfacing from an unremembered nightmare, always shouting about the moon.
        

    ***
        
        Tuesday, January 7, Dom rose early and drove to Sacramento, then took Interstate 80 east toward Reno. Rain fell, silvery and cold, for most of the drive, and by the time he reached the foothills of the Sierras, it was snowing. He stopped at an Arco station, bought tire chains, and put them on before heading into the mountains.
        The summer before last, he had taken more than ten hours to get from Grants Pass to Reno, and this time the drive took even longer. When he finally checked in at Harrah's Hotel where he had stayed before, called Parker Faine from a pay phone, and had a bite of dinner in the coffee shop, he was too tired to do anything but pick up a copy of the Reno newspaper and return to his room. So at eight-thirty that evening, sitting in bed in his underwear, he saw the story about Zebediah Lomack.
        
    MOON MAN'S ESTATE
    WORTH HALF A MILLION DOLLARS
        
        RENO-Zebediah Harold Lomack, 50, whose suicide on Christmas Day led to the discovery of his bizarre obsession with the moon, left an estate valued at more than $500,000. According to documents filed with the probate court by Eleanor Wolsey, sister of the deceased and executrix of Lomack's will, most of the funds are in accounts at various savings and loan associations and in treasury bills. The modest house in which Lomack lived at 1420 Wass Valley Road, has an appraised value of only $35,000.
        Lomack, a professional gambler, is said to have amassed his wealth primarily from the game of poker. "He was one of the best players I ever knew," said Sidney "Sierra Sid" Garfork of Reno, another professional gambler and winner of last year's World Championship of Poker at Binion's Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas. "He took to cards when he was just a kid the way some others might have a natural knack for baseball or math or physics." According to Garfork and other friends of Lomack, the gambler's estate would have been even larger if he had not had a weakness for dice games. "He lost back more than half his winnings at the craps tables, and the IRS took a big chunk, of course," Garfork said.
        On Christmas night, responding to a neighbor's report of shotgun fire, Reno police officers found Lomack's body in the garbage-strewn kitchen of his home. Upon further investigation, they found thousands of photographs of the moon decorating walls, ceilings, and