But good and bad came at you with no rhyme or reason. One moment it was raining money; the next moment it was a shitstorm.

Cornell needed to take things as they came, not get too happy or too upset. If he got too happy or too upset, he felt oppressed, as though his feelings had weight and were crushing him, and his skin grew so tight it seemed like it might split, and his nerves crackled, and a buzzing rose in his bones, as if tiny bees had built a hive in his skeleton. Then he had to lie down in the dark and the quiet, and he had to think of a pool of water in some deep cavern, a stillness of water with no shapes of light quivering on it, nothing swimming in it; he had to let the black water soothe his tight skin, let the silent water quiet his nerves, let the cool water drown the bees in his bones, let the water buoy him, so that the weight of big emotions was lifted from him.

Anyway, after their lunch, Cornell had thought the boy would watch TV. He believed that ordinary children mostly watched TV and played video games and tormented one another relentlessly; that is, “ordinary” as compared to the abnormal child that Cornell had been.

A little satellite dish hidden on the roof of the barn fed the TV in Cornell’s library. He never watched any programs or the news, which was all depressing or lies. He turned the TV on only for a minute every day to check that the regular shows were still being aired, because that meant the end of civilization hadn’t yet begun.

This boy didn’t care about TV, either. He just wanted to see his mother, and he mostly sat on the carpet, cuddling with the dogs.

The boy would have to wait for his mother to get there, and getting there wouldn’t be easy considering that, according to Gavin, every law-enforcement agency was looking for her. She would not arrive sooner than tomorrow, maybe even later than that.

Suddenly it had occurred to Cornell that Travis’s mother might not get to them at all. She might die. Mothers died. His own mother had died of a drug overdose.

If the boy’s mother died … where would the boy go? His father had died months earlier. If Gavin and Jessica were dead and if the mother died, would the boy have anywhere to go?

The mother must not die. She must not die. She must not die.

A terrible sadness had come over Cornell as he watched his three visitors and thought how the boy might have nowhere to go.

Although Cornell was good at math and coding and designing popular apps, he wasn’t good with big emotions. Big emotions made him grow heavy and tighten up and crackle and buzz.

He had to put this terrible sadness away before it grew so heavy it weighed him down, before it forced him to leave the boy alone and go to the bunker and lie in the quiet darkness for hours.

He pictured the sadness as a gray brick of lead weighing on his heart. He pictured putting it into a FedEx box and addressing it to someone who really needed to be weighed down by sadness, like some terrorist bomber who killed people. He pictured the FedEx truck driving away, dwindling into the distance … gone from sight.

Although this made Cornell feel better, if he just sat there watching the boy cuddling with the dogs and waiting for his mother, he would get sad again. So he would have to do what he had always done to keep himself balanced and steady. He said, “I have to read.”

The boy looked up from the dogs. “What are you going to read?”

“Not Ralph Waldo Emerson. No, no, no. Not ever again. And not Sigmund Freud. He was crazier than any of his patients. I like to read novels, short stories. Fiction makes me feel better.”

“I can read a little,” the boy said.

“That’s very good. Being able to read a little at your age, that is very good,” Cornell said as he got up from his armchair.

“Would you read to me, Mr. Jasperson?”

Halfway out of the chair, Cornell froze. He was in an awkward posture, one hand on a chair arm, still pushing himself up, one foot on the floor, one leg in the air to swing it over the footstool, but nevertheless he locked in that configuration, as if his joints had fused. He blinked at the boy and opened his mouth to speak, but he had been struck speechless.

Reading was a personal matter to Cornell, more personal than anything else. When drawn into a story, he was free. He could become the central character—male or female, child or adult—and live a different life from his own, no longer abnormal in either appearance or behavior. No one ever read aloud to him; he was an autodidact. He had never conceived of the possibility of reading aloud to another person. It seemed to be a dangerous sharing of himself—and a rude intrusion into the interior life of the listener.

“My mother sometimes reads to me,” the boy said.

Supported by one hand and one leg, still with one leg in the air, Cornell said, “Really?”

“My dad used to read to me, too. And Uncle Gavin.”

“How very strange,” Cornell said.

The boy frowned. “It’s not strange at all.”

“It isn’t?”

“No. It’s nice. Parents read to kids all the time.”

“Not my parents.”

“I’d read to you if I could read better.”

Cornell’s raised leg came down to the floor, and whatever the cause of his paralysis, it passed. He stood thinking for a while and then said, “We wouldn’t be on a sofa? We’d be in separate chairs? At a distance?”

“Sure. Whatever. Can I sit in the La-Z-Boy and can the dogs get in the chair with me when they want?”

“They have not attacked me,” Cornell said. “They have not attacked me. They have not attacked. They’re good dogs. They can have their own chair or share yours.”

“Great! So what are you going to read?”

“Give me a moment to decide, please and thank you.”

Intrigued by the novelty of reading aloud, Cornell went off to prowl the shelves.

The boy was smart, though maybe not yet ready for Dostoyevsky. Cornell hadn’t been ready for Dostoyevsky until he was thirteen. Dickens? Maybe. He moved along the shelves, reading titles, and finally selected one.

He settled his considerable frame into his armchair and said, “I’ve read this one four times. You’ll like this one.” He opened the book and began to read: “ ‘First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren’t rare. But there be bad and good, as the pirates say.’ ”

“What book is it?” the boy asked.

Cornell held up the novel so that the boy could see the jacket and the author’s name. “Something Wicked This Way Comes by Mr. Ray Bradbury. It sounds very scary, but it’s not really. It’s magic.”

“Scary is okay,” the boy said. “Scary is just the way things are sometimes.”

And in this manner they had passed the long afternoon: Cornell reading and the boy listening and the dogs—sometimes one, sometimes both—sharing the La-Z-Boy with their young master. At first reading aloud to someone was the strangest thing, though after a while it wasn’t strange at all.

What a nice day it had been.

Now night fell on Borrego Valley.

47

AFTER STRIPPING OUT of her clothes and removing the wig, she took her pistol into the bathroom and put it on the vanity. Although the shower was gloriously hot, she didn’t linger in the spray.

She dressed in fresh clothes. The pixie-cut wig smelled less of smoke than did the garments she’d shed. New contact lenses made her blue eyes brown. She put on stage-prop glasses with dark frames.

After washing her underwear and T-shirt in the bathroom sink, she hung them to dry on the shower-curtain rod.

She paged through an issue of Palm Springs Life magazine and found an ad for a dry cleaner. She drove there and paid an express charge to be able to pick up her sport coat and jeans the next morning.

She thought it darkly amusing: the most-wanted fugitive in America tending to such mundane tasks. In the movies, a protagonist on the run never took a break from the chase to buy toothpaste.

In a restaurant, she ordered a twelve-ounce filet mignon. Hold the baked potato. Double vegetables. A glass of Caymus cabernet.

After ordering dinner, she took a pill from a bottle of acid reducer and chased it with water. From a pocket, she retrieved the cameo that Travis had given her. Waiting for the wine, she worked the soapstone carving between thumb and forefinger, as a penitent might caress the beads of a rosary while petitioning for mercy.

48

THE TRAILWAYS BUS STATION in Killeen, Texas, is so thinly sketched that only a fool would believe it’s real. A single-story white metal building with a minimum-pitch roof. Not even a pretense of style. There is no landscaping whatsoever, unless you are of the opinion that half an acre of medium-gray asphalt paving mottled with darker oil stains is the equivalent of greenery, predicated on the fact that blacktop and plants are both carbon-based.