She peered in that direction and saw a white Ford Expedition, just twelve or fifteen feet away. The Cadillac might be parked on the far side of the SUV.
Stepping over the beetle, she returned to the covered walkway. She approached the Expedition, realizing that she was headed in the direction of the vending-machine alcove where she would find more of the root beer that had gotten her in all this trouble in the first place.
When she passed the SUV and didn’t find her Coupe DeVille, she became aware of two people hurrying toward her. She said, ‘The smiley bastard stole my car,’ before she realized what an odd couple she had encountered.
The first guy – tall, as solid as an NFL linebacker – carried a box approximately the size of a pizza container with a pair of shoes balanced on top. In spite of his intimidating size, he didn’t seem the least threatening, perhaps because he had a bearish quality. Not a rip-your-guts-out grizzly bear, but a burly Disney bear of the gosh-how-did-I-get-my-butt-stuck-in-this-tire-swing variety. He wore rumpled khaki pants, a yellow-and-blue Hawaiian shirt, and a wide-eyed worried expression that suggested he’d recently robbed a hive of honey and expected to be hunted down by a swarm of angry bees.
With him came a smaller and younger man – maybe five feet nine or ten, about 160 pounds – in blue jeans and a white T-shirt featuring a portrait of Wile E. Coyote, the hapless predator of the Road Runner cartoons. Shoeless, he accompanied the larger man with reluctance; his right sock appeared to be snugly fitted, but his loose left sock flapped with each step.
Although the Wile E. fan shuffled along with his arms dangling limply at his sides, offering no resistance, Jilly assumed he would have preferred not to go with the bearish man, because he was being pulled by his left ear. At first she thought she heard him protesting this indignity. When the pair drew closer and she could hear the younger guy more clearly, however, she couldn’t construe his words as a protest.
‘—electroluminescence, cathode luminescence—’
The bearish one halted in front of Jilly, bringing the smaller man to a stop as well. In a voice much deeper – but no less gentle – than that of Pooh, of Pooh Corners, he said, ‘Excuse me, ma’am, I didn’t hear what you said.’
Head tilted under the influence of the hand that gripped his left ear, the younger man kept talking, though perhaps not either to his burly keeper or to Jilly: ‘—nimbus, aureola, halo, corona, parhelion—’
She couldn’t be certain whether this encounter was in reality as peculiar as it seemed to be or whether the lingering anesthetic might be distorting her perceptions. The prudent side of her argued for silence and for a sprint toward the motel office, away from these strangers, but the prudent side of her had hardly more substance than a shadow, so she repeated herself: ‘The smiley bastard stole my car.’
‘—aurora borealis, aurora polaris, starlight—’
Seeing the focus of Jilly’s attention, the giant said, ‘This is my brother, Shep.’
‘—candlepower, foot-candle, luminous flux—’
‘Pleased to meet you, Shep,’ she said, not because she was in fact pleased to meet him, but because she didn’t know what else to say, never having been in precisely this situation before.
‘—light quantum, photon, bougie decimale,’ said Shep without meeting her eyes, and continued rattling out a meaningless series of words as Jilly and the older brother conversed.
‘I’m Dylan.’
He didn’t look like a Dylan. He looked like a Bruno or a Samson, or a Gentle Ben.
‘Shep has a condition,’ Dylan explained. ‘Harmless. Don’t worry. He’s just… not normal.’
‘Well, who is these days?’ Jilly said. ‘Normality hasn’t been attainable since maybe 1953.’ Woozy, she leaned against one of the posts that supported the walkway cover. ‘Gotta call the cops.’
‘You said “smiley bastard.”‘
‘Said it twice.’
‘What smiley bastard?’ he asked with such urgency that you would have thought the missing Cadillac had been his, not hers.
‘The smiley, peanut-eating, needle-poking, car-stealing bastard, that’s what bastard.’
‘Something’s on your arm.’
Curiously, she expected to see the beetle resurrected. ‘Oh. A Band-Aid.’