‘And where can we find you, sir?’
‘Don’t you worry about me, ma’am. You’re going to have your hands full enough tonight.’
He pushed END, then switched the phone off and handed it to Jilly. ‘Wipe it clean and throw it out the window.’
She used a Kleenex and disposed of it with the phone.
A mile later, he handed the keys to the Corvette to her, and she tossed those out the window, as well.
‘It’d be ironic if we were stopped for littering,’ she said.
‘Where’s Fred?’
‘While I was waiting for you, I moved him into the cargo space, so I could have legroom.’
‘You think he’s okay back there?’
‘I braced him between suitcases. He’s solid.’
‘I meant psychologically okay.’
‘Fred’s highly resilient.’
‘You’re pretty resilient yourself,’ he said.
‘It’s an act. Who was the old cowboy?’
As he was about to answer her question, Dylan suffered a delayed reaction to the confrontation with Lucas Crocker and to the purity of evil that he’d experienced so intimately from contact with the wad of money. He felt as though clouds of frenzied moths swarmed within him, seeking a light they couldn’t find.
Already he had driven through the dusty outskirts of Safford and into relatively flat land that in the night, at least, seemed almost as devoid of the human stain as it had been in the Mesozoic Era, tens of millions of years ago.
He pulled onto the shoulder of the highway and stopped. ‘Give me a minute. I need to get… to get Crocker out of my head.’
When he closed his eyes, he found himself in a cellar, where an old woman lay in chains, caked with filth. With an artist’s attention to minutiae and to the meaning of it, Dylan furnished the scene with baroque details as significant as they were disgusting.
He had never actually seen Lucas Crocker’s mother when he had touched her son’s dropped money in the parking lot. This cellar and this wretchedly abused woman were constructs of his imagination and they most likely in no way resembled either the real cellar or the real Noreen Crocker.
Dylan didn’t see things with his sixth sense, not any more than he heard or smelled or tasted them. He simply, instantly knew things. He touched an object rich with psychic spoor, and knowledge arose in his mind as though summoned from memory, as though he were recalling events that he had once read in a book. Thus far this knowledge had usually been the equivalent of a sentence or two of linked facts; at other times, it equaled paragraphs of information, pages.
Dylan opened his eyes, leaving the imagined Noreen Crocker in that squalid cellar even as the real woman might at this very moment be listening to the approaching sirens of her rescuers.
‘You okay?’ Jilly asked.
‘I’m maybe not quite as resilient as Fred.’
She smiled. ‘He’s got the advantage of not having a brain.’
‘Better get moving.’ He popped the handbrake. ‘Put some distance between ourselves and Safford.’ He drove onto the two-lane highway. ‘For all we know, the guys in the black Suburbans have a statewide alert out to law-enforcement agencies, asking to be informed of any unusual incidents.’
At Dylan’s request, Jilly got an Arizona map out of the glove box and studied it with a penlight while he drove northwest.
North and south of them, the black teeth of different mountain ranges gnawed at the night sky, and as they traveled the intervening Gila River Valley here between those distant peaks, they seemed to be traversing the jaw span of a yawning leviathan.
‘Seventy-eight miles to the town of Globe,’ Jilly said. ‘Then if you really think it’s necessary to avoid the Phoenix area – ‘
‘I really think it’s necessary,’ he said. ‘I prefer not to be found charred beyond recognition in a burnt-out SUV.’
‘At Globe, we’ll have to turn north on Highway 60, take it all the way up to Holbrook, near the Petrified Forest. From there, we can pick up Interstate 40, west toward Flagstaff or east toward Gallup, New Mexico – if it matters which way we go.’
‘Negative Jackson, vortex of pessimism. It’ll matter.’