More than once, Jilly tried to chat with Shepherd, but every effort at communication failed. He spoke only to the Lord of Teeth, dutifully making his report.
‘He’s capable of conversation,’ Dylan told her. ‘Although even at his best, what he lays on you isn’t the kind of sparkling repartee that’ll make him a hit at cocktail parties. It’s his own brand of conversation, what I call Shepspeak, but it’s not without interest.’
In the backseat, Shep tested a tooth and announced, ‘Quite as it should be, m’lord.’
‘But you won’t be able to get a dialogue going with him anytime soon,’ Dylan continued, ‘not when he’s rattled like this. He doesn’t handle commotion well, or deviation from routine. He’s best when the day goes exactly as he expects it to, right on schedule, quiet and boring. If breakfast, lunch, and dinner are always exactly on time, if every dish at every meal is on the narrow menu of foods acceptable to him, if he doesn’t encounter too many new people who try to talk to him… then you might make a connection with him and have yourself a real gabfest.’
‘Quite as it should be, m’lord,’ Shep declared, ostensibly not in confirmation of what his brother had said.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ Jilly asked.
‘He’s been diagnosed autistic, also high-functioning autistic. He’s never violent, and sometimes he’s highly communicative, so he was once even diagnosed with Asperger syndrome.’
‘Ass burger?’
‘A-S-P-E-R-G-E-R, emphasis on per. Sometimes Shep seems totally high-functioning and sometimes not so high as you would hope. Mostly, I don’t think easy labels apply. He’s just Shep, unique.’
‘Quite as it should be, m’lord.’
‘He’s said that fourteen times,’ Dylan noted. ‘How many teeth in the human mouth?’
‘I think… thirty-two, counting four wisdom teeth.’
Dylan sighed. ‘Thank God his wisdom teeth were pulled.’
‘You said he needs stability. Is it good for him to be bouncing around the country like a Gypsy?’
‘Quite as it should be, m’lord.’
‘We don’t bounce,’ Dylan replied with an edge that suggested he had taken offense at her question, though she intended none. ‘We have a schedule, a routine, goals to be attained. Focus. We have focus. We drive in style. This isn’t a horse-drawn wagon with hex signs painted on the sides.’
‘I just meant he might be better off in an institution.’
‘That’ll never happen.’
‘Quite as it should be, m’lord.’
Jilly said, ‘Not all those places are snake pits.’
‘The only thing he’s got is me. Drop him in an institution, and he won’t have anything.’
‘It might be good for him.’
‘No. It would kill him.’
‘For one thing, maybe they could keep him from hurting himself.’
‘He won’t hurt himself.’
‘He just did,’ she noted.
‘Quite as it should be, m’lord.’
‘That was a first and a fluke,’ Dylan said with what sounded more like hope than like conviction. ‘It won’t happen again.’
‘You never imagined it would happen the first time.’
Although they were already exceeding the legal limit and though traffic conditions were not conducive to even greater speed, Dylan accelerated steadily.
Jilly sensed that he was trying to outrun more than just the men in the black Suburbans. ‘No matter how fast you drive, Shep’s still in the backseat.’
‘Quite as it should be, m’lord.’
Dylan said, ‘The lunatic doctor gives you an injection, and an hour later, or whatever, you experience an altered state of—’
‘I said I want a time-out from that.’
‘And I don’t want to talk about this,’ he declared emphatically, ‘about institutions, sanitariums, care homes, places where people might as well be canned meat, where they’re put on a shelf and dusted from time to time.’
‘Quite as it should be, m’lord.’
‘All right,’ Jilly relented. ‘Sorry. I understand. It’s really none of my business anyway.’
‘That’s right,’ Dylan concurred. ‘Shep isn’t our business. He’s my business.’
‘All right.’
‘Okay.’
‘Quite as it should be, m’lord.’
‘Twenty,’ Jilly counted.
Dylan said, ‘But your altered state of consciousness is our business, not just yours, but yours and mine, because it’s related to the injection—’
‘We don’t know that for sure.’
Certain expressions took exaggerated form on his broad rubbery face, as if he were in fact a cartoon bear who had stepped out of an animated realm into the real world, had shaved his furry mug, and had set himself the tricky task of passing for human. In this instance, his disbelief pulled his features into a configuration worthy of Sylvester the cat on those occasions when the scheming feline had been tricked by Tweety bird into walking off the edge of a cliff. ‘Oh, but we do know that for sure.’