This instruction baffled Marj. ‘But you are nine-one-one.’
Jilly fielded that peculiar question: ‘We’re one of the ones, Marj, but we’re not the other one or the nine.’
Although this further baffled Marj, it amused Travis. The boy said, ‘We’ll give you time to split. But this is fully weird, it’s practically mojo. Who the heck are you two?’
Dylan couldn’t summon a reply, but Jilly said, ‘Damned if we know. This afternoon we could have told you who we are, but right now we don’t have a clue.’
In one sense her answer was true and grimly serious, but it only puckered Marj’s face in deeper bafflement and widened the boy’s grin.
Upstairs, Kenny pleaded loudly for help.
‘Better get movin’,’ Travis advised.
‘You don’t know what we were driving, never saw our wheels.’
‘That’s true,’ Travis agreed.
‘And you’ll do us the favor of not watching us leave.’
‘As far as we know,’ said Travis, ‘you took a running leap and flew away.’
Dylan had asked for three minutes because Marj and Travis would have difficulty explaining a greater delay to the cops; but if Shep had wandered off, they were ruined. Three minutes wouldn’t be long enough to find him.
Except for the breeze in the olive trees, the street was quiet. In the house, Kenny’s muffled shouts wouldn’t carry to a neighbor.
At the curb, driver’s door open, the Expedition waited. Jilly had doused the headlights and switched off the engine.
Even as they crossed the front lawn, Dylan saw Shepherd in the backseat, face illuminated by the reflected glow of a battery-powered book light bouncing up at him from the page he was reading.
‘Told you,’ Jilly said.
Relieved, Dylan didn’t snap at her.
Through the dusty window at Shepherd’s side, the title of the book could be seen: Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens. Shep was a fiend for Dickens.
Dylan settled behind the wheel, slammed the door, figuring more than half a minute had passed since they’d left Travis to watch the wall clock in the kitchen.
Legs folded on the passenger’s seat to spare her jade plant on the floor, Jilly held out the keys, then snatched them back. ‘What if you go nuts again?’
‘I didn’t go nuts.’
‘Whatever it was you did, what if you do it again?’
‘I probably will,’ he realized.
‘I better drive.’
He shook his head. ‘What did you see upstairs, on the way to Travis’s room? What did you see when you looked toward the window at the end of the hall?’
She hesitated. Then she surrendered the keys. ‘You drive.’
As Travis counted off the first minute in the kitchen, Dylan executed a U-turn. They followed the route they had taken earlier on Eucalyptus Avenue, with its dearth of eucalyptuses. By the time Travis would have called 911, they had traveled surface streets to the interstate.
Dylan took I-10 east, toward the end of town where by now the Cadillac might have stopped smoldering, but he said, ‘I don’t want to stay on this. I have a hunch it won’t be safe a whole lot longer.’
‘Tonight’s not a night for ignoring hunches,’ she noted.
Eventually he departed the interstate in favor of U.S. Highway 191, an undivided two-lane blacktop that struck north through dark desolation and carried little traffic at this hour. He didn’t know where 191 led, and right now he didn’t care. For a while, where they went didn’t matter, as long as they kept moving, as long as they put some distance between themselves and the corpse in the Coupe DeVille, between themselves and the house on Eucalyptus Avenue.
For the first two miles on 191, neither he nor Jilly spoke, and as the third mile began to clock up on the odometer, Dylan started to shake. Now that his adrenaline levels were declining toward normal and now that the primitive survivalist within him had returned to his genetic subcellar, the enormity of what had happened belatedly hit him. Dylan strove to conceal the shaking from Jilly, knew that he was unsuccessful when he heard his teeth chatter, and then realized that she was trembling, too, and hugging herself, and rocking in her seat.