know what’s going to happen?”
“I’m not callin’ nobody.”
“Some cop pulls me over, he better kill me quick. ’Cause if he doesn’t, I’ll kill him, then come back here and shove a pistol up your fat ass.”
“I’m not callin’ nobody,” the old man repeats.
Shacket walks out to the Dodge Demon. Under the driver’s seat, snugged in a belt holster, is a Heckler & Koch Compact .38. He needs all of his willpower not to retrieve it, return to the store, and empty the magazine into the old man.
On the road again, past the jerkwater called Warm Springs, heading toward Tonopah on federal highway 6, Shacket accelerates to 120 miles per hour, then 130, the Dodge roaring, gobbling blacktop. He’s agitated, excited, electrified, and he needs the speed to work off his agitation, to calm himself.
Ever since Springville, Utah, something has been happening to his mind. For his entire life, there’s been a Dorian Purcell to whom he has had to answer, a Purcell by one name or another, from whom he has taken shit when it is shoveled at him. Well, no longer. He is free at last. He’s in control of his life. No one is the boss of him anymore. Something is happening to his mind, and he loves it.
Thirty-five miles from Warm Springs, about ten miles short of Tonopah, the buzzing in his head stops, and he is able to slow down.
The state line is maybe ninety miles away. He will soon be in California. On his way to lovely Megan.
He is hungry. Nothing had tasted good at dinner the previous evening. He had skipped breakfast. The candy bar really had tasted like shit. He is exceedingly hungry. Ravenous. He’ll stop to eat as soon as he’s in California. He doesn’t know what he wants to eat; nothing he can think of makes his mouth water; he’ll figure it out when he gets there.
The highway rises into the White Mountains and Inyo National Forest, the wastelands falling away behind him, the past falling away with them, the past and all restraints.
11
When the mortician came to collect the body, Kipp at last got off Dorothy’s bed.
While others were too busy to notice him, he made his way down through the house, through his special door, and into the backyard.
The September morning had come. The day was warm and bright and like unto other mornings, as if nothing terrible had happened.
He howled silently, mentally howled to others in the Mysterium, that they might know his grief and share it, wherever they were and on whatever task they might be engaged.
There were only eighty-six, all golden retrievers or Labradors.
Now and then a new, young member found his or her way to others of their kind, for they could speak to one another on the Wire, a mental communication medium unique to them.
Their origin and history remained a deep mystery to them, but they sought to plumb it.
They were dogs unlike all other dogs, changed as only humankind had the power to reshape other species.
But who had done it? Where had it been done? Why?
And how had they come to be roaming a few counties in north and central California, in search of their meaning?
On the Wire, the peculiar murmur that wasn’t tinnitus increased slightly in volume.
Kipp began to suspect that the insistent sound was not coming from some new member of the Mysterium, not from another canine.
A human being. He thought it might be a young boy.
This was a new thing. Kipp had never heard such a call from a human being before.
Then again, it wasn’t really a call. The boy, if it was a boy, very likely didn’t know he was transmitting.
Kipp stood for a while, looking at the house to which he’d been brought as a puppy.
He expected to regret leaving it. But with Dorothy gone, it was just a house, no place special.
She’d been seventy-three and in good health when she brought him home. She’d expected to outlive him. Then the cancer.
He avoided leaving by the side of the house where the hearse was in the driveway. He didn’t want to see her being taken away.
The murmuring boy, if it was a boy, lived somewhere west by northwest of Lake Tahoe.
As if it were a radio, he could turn off the Wire. But then what would he do? He needed something to do.
This might be a perilous journey for a stray dog, but Kipp felt compelled to undertake it.
He wasn’t afraid of dogcatchers. He was