“Why didn’t you pull it on me?”

He looked aghast. “Pull a pistol on a girl as pretty as you? Enough already!”

“They call me a monster. What if I had been?”

“Bubeleh, I needed about a minute to know your heart is maybe half your body weight. Am I right, Sheriff?”

“Never more so, Mr. Riggowitz. And call me Luther.”

“Mr. Riggowitz was my father. Call me Bernie.”

Luther’s smile was the first that Jane had seen since he’d boarded the motor home. He said, “We have a dream team here.”

She put an arm around Bernie and kissed his cheek and said, “Okay, Eliot Ness. You drive the motor home, sneak Luther and me into Borrego Valley, then be ready to sneak us out. If you need the gun, use it. But if you have to start shooting, it’ll mean we’re over the cliff.”

5

SHE RAGED WITH HER MATE through the house—overturning, tearing, smashing—driven by the rapid rant inside her head, a fierce voice in a language half remembered both by the unknown raver and she who received his tirade, not just words but also hatreds that were not her own but became hers, too, upon receipt. Vivid images were transmitted into her mind’s eye from elsewhere: enormous overhead blades whisking the wind; a savagely bitten, eyeless face; a cleaver raised in a clenched fist; again the huge blades whirling faster, faster, flashing with reflections of silvery sunshine; a human head rolling as if toward an array of tenpins; dolphins leaping on a lampshade; storm-tossed ships hung on a wall; a burst of fragile bones and feathers as a winging bird encounters the bright, spinning blades and disintegrates like a clay target shotgunned from the sky.… Those continuing visions thrilled her as she wrenched open the door of a display cabinet with enough force to tear it from its hinges. She flung the cabinet door, and the misshapen discus clattered against a wall with a shattering of glass. Within the cabinet were cups and saucers, plates and bowls. From a shelf, she scooped up gold-rimmed china chargers and threw the stack onto the dining table. She grabbed a gravy boat in her left hand, a small cream pitcher in her right, and smashed them together as if they were a pair of cymbals; as the porcelain disintegrated, she cut the ball of her thumb. Blood welled, and with something like vampiric need, she put her mouth to the cut, sucked, and drank of herself. Having seen this, her mate relented in his rampage and took her hand and brought it to his mouth and sampled the essence of her. The taste inflamed in them a fierce desire, a rutting frenzy, which the ranting voice in her head encouraged, so that she found herself upon a table from which most of the broken china had been swept away, half their clothes somehow gone, and he upon her. They rocked the table with carnal rhythm, copulation without tenderness or love, so ferocious that it was both thrilling and terrifying. They were incapable of language, their animal voices resounding from the walls of the ravaged room. At the peak of her excitement, an image came into her mind’s eye that was not from the ranting Other, that arose from her own experience, a remnant of her faded memory: a dead woman slouched in a wheelchair, her once-pretty face grossly distorted. With that memory, a dark wave of grief washed through her, and in the throes of coitus she suddenly spoke: “I am … I am … Minette.” But she could not sustain the grief, nor the memory. In the wake of the grief rose a tide of rage that swept away the name forever, and with the name went the last of her memories, all human purpose, all hope, all promise of transcendence. The male finished and rolled off her, off the dining table, stood sweating and swaying and satiated. Among the few shards of broken china still on the table, she gripped a pointed sharp-edged chunk of porcelain ware and, with pleasure greater than that of copulation, used it to attack and kill the male.

6

AS CARTER JERGEN AND RADLEY DUBOSE CRUISE the town of Borrego Springs, alert for telltale stains on the fabric of normalcy that might be a clue to the whereabouts of the Hawk boy, many pedestrians do a double take at the sight of the formidable black VelociRaptor. Jergen reads envy in the faces of many of the men, who would no doubt forfeit a year of their stunted desert lives to drive such a thrilling vehicle. He knows how they feel.

A Sphinx in sunglasses, his stony face carved by solemnity, Dubose says, “I don’t like what I’m feeling.”

“Then keep your hand off your crotch,” Jergen replies.

“This is no time for frivolity, my friend. I possess a highly developed intuition, almost a sixth sense, if you will, especially regarding trouble pending. At this very moment, I feel something portentous imminent. Something momentous and ominous. I can feel it in the ether, see it in the slant of sunlight, smell it in the dry desert air.”

In Carter Jergen’s mind, the hills of West Virginia, from which Dubose hails, are populated with rustic soothsayers and grizzled old men who, with a forked stick, can divine what they claim is the best place to drill for water, toothless old women who call themselves haruspices and foretell the future from the entrails of slaughtered animals, bible-thumping prophets of Apocalypse, and other backwoods Cassandras in great variety. Growing up among such occult-oriented hayseeds, Radley Dubose’s mind, such as it is, must be woven through with so many threads of superstition that the dons of Princeton had no chance of instilling in him the secular superstitions that they prefer.

“So will it be a plague of locusts, frogs, flies, boils?” Jergen asks.

After a thoughtful silence, Dubose says, “It’s something about Ramsey Corrigan.…”

“The one in ten thousand. Reptile consciousness. What about him?”

“Something …”

“So you said.”

“We overlooked something.”

“Something?”

“Yeah, something.” Dubose pulls to the curb and stops. As still as stone, the beefy lion-bodied man stares through his wraparound shades, through the tinted windshield, gazing at the Anza-Borrego wasteland as if it is an Egyptian desert in which some ancient truth lies buried in a sea of sand.

After a minute, Jergen says, “Okay if I turn on some music?”

Just then, a siren wails. A county sheriff’s patrol car turns the corner ahead, its lightbar flashing, and accelerates, heading south.

Dubose pulls the steering wheel hard to the left, arcs across two lanes, and follows the black-and-white, riding its tail as if it’s a police escort sent specifically for him.

“This is it,” he says.

“This is what?”

“The something.”

“How can you know that?” Jergen asks.

With evident pity, Dubose says, “How can you not know, my friend? How can you not?”

7

THE LOW BARRENS, A WILDERNESS OF SAND, where in summer there will be no surcease from heat, as there sometimes can be in high deserts, the sun already merciless here on the brink of spring, quivery thermals rising from the blacktop, like spirits liberated from graves beneath the pavement …

Out of Indio, cruising south on State Highway 86, boosted on his doughnut-shaped prostate-friendly foam pillow, Bernie Riggowitz handled the big motor home with confidence. Sitting high above the roadway seemed to empower him. When other motorists displeased him, he expressed his frustration colorfully. “Look at that schmo, going twenty miles over the limit. From the way he drives, a person could think he wears his buttocks for earmuffs.”

In the copilot’s seat beside him, Jane said, “Twenty-seven more miles to Salton City, then west on County Highway 22 for about thirty miles.”

Behind Jane, in the free-standing Euro recliner between her seat and the door, Luther said, “I’m looking at the sofa. You sure it’s the right fit?”

“I wouldn’t want to spend the night there, but maybe it’ll get me through a roadblock if there is one.”

Another speeder, faster than the first, inspired Bernie to say, “That schmo shouldn’t wreck himself and wind up with wheels for legs, but it’ll be a regular miracle if he doesn’t.”

Jane felt safe with Bernie at the wheel and Luther at her back, but the world beyond the windshield seemed more hostile than ever. The Salton Sea came into view on the left, a reminder that the land on this side of the Santa Rosa Mountains was depressed, the water surface more than two hundred feet below sea level. The sun made quicksilver of the salt water, which glimmered less like a mirror than like some toxic lake in a dream peopled by drowning victims who, breathless and salt-blinded, swam forever through the depths, searching for living swimmers to drag down and suffocate.

8