‘Why?’
‘Because by the time we get there, something will have happened to make it matter.’
‘Maybe by the time we get up to Holbrook, we’ll have gotten so good at positive thinking that we’ll have thought ourselves into being billionaires. Then we’ll go west and buy a mansion overlooking the Pacific.’
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘One thing I’m buying for sure, soon as the stores open in the morning, wherever we are.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Gloves.’
22
Outside Globe, Arizona, past midnight, they stopped at a service station where the night man had almost finished closing. Nature had given him an unfortunately thin fox face, which he failed to enhance with a hedgehog haircut. In his twenties, he had the surly manner of a fourteen-year-old with a severe hormonal imbalance. According to the tag on his shirt, his name was SKIPPER.
Perhaps Skipper would have switched on the pumps again and would have filled the Expedition’s tank if Dylan had offered a credit card, but no bookmaker in Vegas would have been naive enough to quote odds in favor of that outcome. At the mention of cash, however, his crafty eyes sharpened on the promise of an easy skim, and his poor attitude improved from surly to sullen.
Skipper turned on the pumps but not the exterior lights. In the dark, he filled the tank while Dylan and Jilly cleaned bug splatters and dust off the windshield and the tailgate glass, no more likely to offer assistance than he was likely to start reciting Shakespeare’s sonnets with a perfect seventeenth-century English accent.
When Dylan caught Skipper watching Jilly with obvious lascivious interest, a low-grade fever of anger warmed his face. Then, with some surprise, he wondered when he’d become possessive of her – and why he thought he had any reason or right to be possessive.
They had known each other less than five hours. True, they had been subjected to great danger, enormous pressures, and consequently they had discovered more about each other’s character than they might have learned during a long acquaintance under ordinary circumstances. Nevertheless, the only fundamental thing he knew about Jilly was that she could be depended upon in a pinch, that she did not back down. This wasn’t a bad thing to know about anyone, but it wasn’t a full portrait, either.
Or was it?
As he finished cleaning the windshield, angered by Skipper’s leer, Dylan wondered if this one thing he knew about Jilly might be all he needed to know: She deserved his trust. Perhaps everything else that mattered in a relationship grew from trust – from a tranquil faith in the courage, integrity, and kindness of the other person.
He decided that he was losing his mind. The psychotropic stuff had affected his brain in more ways than he yet knew. Here he was thinking about committing his life to a woman who already thought he was a Disney comic book, all sugar and talking chipmunks.
They were not an item. They weren’t even friends. You didn’t make a true friend in mere hours. They were at most fellow survivors, victims of the same shipwreck, with a mutual interest in staying afloat and remaining alert for sharks.
Regarding Jilly Jackson, he wasn’t feeling possessive. He was only protective, just as he felt toward Shep, just as he would feel toward a sister if he had one. Sister. Yeah, right.
By the time he accepted cash for the gasoline, Skipper brightened from surliness to sullenness to peevishness. Making no pretense of adding the currency to the station receipts, he tucked the money in his wallet with a pinched look of spiteful satisfaction.
The total had been thirty-four dollars; but Dylan paid with two twenties and suggested that the attendant keep the difference. He did not want the change, because those bills would carry Skipper’s spoor.
He had been careful not to touch the fuel pumps or anything else on which the attendant might have left a psychic imprint. He didn’t want to know the nature of Skipper’s soul, didn’t want to feel the texture of his mean life of petty thefts and petty hatreds.
Regarding the human race, Dylan was as much of an optimist as ever. He still liked people, but he’d had enough of them for one day.