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of recovery aren't improving, I assure you. So I'd suggest we roll along."

"What if I just walk away?" I asked. "What if I go to the police?" I darted a look into the backseat. Sarah slept on peacefully.

"Well, two things will happen. First, you'll be arrested, because of course I'll have to give a statement that you shot this poor man and stole his money. Second, your sister will be dead, and it'll look as if you had quite a bit to do with it. Did you know that statistically most murders are committed by a person close to the victim? Shocking." He said it flatly, without any emphasis, but I believed him. "All right, even if you've lost your memory, you know exactly who I am and what I can do, because there's ample evidence in the trunk with a bullet in his head. So let's stop dancing around the proprieties and get on with it, shall we? I need your particular talents for one thing and one thing only, and then, as far as I'm concerned, you can go to hell and take Sarah with you. Are we clear?"

His eyes glittered. There was something feral in him, something pushed into a corner. I didn't doubt he'd kill. He was right. The body in the trunk was proof enough of that.

I didn't answer him. I held his stare long enough to promise him a whole lot of things, most of them violent, and then I opened the front driver's-side door, got in, and started the engine. I considered gunning it and leaving him there in the dust, but all he had to do was make a phone call, and I was a wanted felon with a body in the trunk.

Play along. Find an opportunity. Wait for Venna.

It was risky, but it was the only card in my hand at the moment.

Chapter Nine

NINE

We buried Mr. Hunter, whatever his name might have actually been, in a shallow, sandy grave six miles from Ares, in a stretch of desert that probably hadn't had human visitors for ten years, and wouldn't again for ten more. Eamon and I buried him, that is; Sarah slept on in the backseat, the sleep of the OxyContin-coddled innocent. By the time it was done I felt sick, angry, filthy, and gritty with sweat and sand. I wanted to kill Eamon, in a figurative if not literal sense. He had, apparently, saved my life, even though he'd shot someone to do it. Once again, the sticky gray center with him. I wanted to be able to hate him with a whole heart.

Well, of course, there was the threat against my sister. That helped keep me from doing anything stupid.

We didn't talk, except that he directed me along Highway 95 to 160, where we turned west. He wasn't telling me the final destination.

I hated the car about as much as I hated him. The pedal was sluggish, the steering was loose, and it shimmied through curves. Looked good on the outside, rotten on the inside, just like Eamon himself.

I didn't draw Eamon's attention to it, but somewhere outside of Pahrump we picked up a tail. Of course, it was hard to be sure-highways by definition had a lot of people traveling the same direction, especially in the boonies-but I did some experimenting with speed, and the white panel van stayed right with me, whether I sped up, changed lanes, or slowed down. He was hanging back, and he was covering up with other traffic, but he was a fixture in my rearview mirror.

He hadn't been there when we'd dumped the body, though. That had been a clear road for miles, and no chance of being spotted by anything but a high-flying eagle. So if he was hoping to catch us red-handed, literally, he was out of luck. No doubt the trunk would sink us with forensics, if it came to that, and of course I was driving, wasn't I? And Eamon had made sure that my fingerprints had stayed on the wallet, which was safely in his coat pocket. Insurance.

The weather was shifting. I felt it rather than saw it, a sensation like pressure in my head. I tried to focus on it as I drove, and before I knew what I was doing, I was looking at the world through the lenses that David had shown me. Oversight, he and Lewis had called it. And the world was different when you knew how to interpret the clues.

The