man, woman, and child traveling together, but I’m a man alone.”
“Alone?” Penny said. “Where are the woman and child?”
“And the dog?” Milo added.
“You’ll be riding in the trunk,” I said. “Won’t that be fun?”
From the lay-by where we abandoned the Mountaineer, I turned south, away from the Landulf house and Smokeville.
Within moments, a sign announced TITUS SPRINGS—4 MILES. Waxx had told Brock that the southern roadblock was established this side of Titus Springs.
I traveled less than a quarter of a mile before I began to miss Penny, Milo, and Lassie. I wished that somebody else would have been available to drive, so I could be in the trunk with my family.
The road rose and fell through geography that might have struck me as grand and harmonious at another time but that seemed portentous now, and as full of pending violence as missiles in their launchers. Every unusual shadow was an augury to be interpreted, the westward-racing fog an omen of fast-approaching chaos, the suffocated morning light a presentiment of mortality. Cedars and hemlocks and pines stood on both sides of the pavement, like ranked armies waiting only for a trumpet blast to signal the start of an epic engagement.
A low growl behind me instantly—and irrationally—brought to mind the deformed face of the man in Henry Casas’s painting, but when I glanced over my shoulder with alarm, I saw only our Lassie on the backseat.
I smiled, said “Good girl,” and returned my attention to the roadway before realizing that Lassie in the backseat was no less astonishing than if the Maserati monster had been there.
Only a couple of minutes earlier, I had lifted the dog into the trunk of the sedan. I had closed the lid on her.
Certain that I must have imagined her impossible liberation, I glanced back once more. She grinned at me.
My confidence in the reliability of my senses was so shaken that when, five seconds later, I decided to check on her presence one more time, I tilted down the rearview mirror with the expectation that a figment of my imagination would cast no reflection. But she regarded me with cocked-head insouciance.
She had not jumped out of the trunk before the lid slammed. I would stake a fortune on that wager.
Behind me, Lassie again issued a long, low growl.
Having been saved by something like a miracle when I was six years old, I decided two things: first, that a refusal to accept this phenomenon was not merely healthy self-doubt but was instead cynical skepticism that was unworthy of me; second, that young Milo had some explaining to do.
The land was repaying its debt of fog to the sea with such dispatch that already I could see much farther than when I had left the lay-by.
Downhill, on the left, headlights stabbed across the roadway and then arced toward me as an SUV appeared between trees and turned onto the pavement from a narrow dirt road, heading north. As the vehicle approached, I saw that it was an Explorer.
Clearly, the driver was interested in me. As he came uphill, he rode closer and closer to the center line until he had edged a few inches into my lane.
Suspecting that Waxx’s protocols for his current operation required agents to acknowledge one another when they crossed paths, I remained close to the center line, reduced speed, and rolled down the window in the driver’s door.
In the lower corner of the windshield, on the driver’s side of the Explorer, was a square decal of a size suspiciously like that on the windshield of my sedan, but I could not at first discern what it might be. As we closed on each other, however, I recognized the red triskelion, three fisted arms forming a wheel.
His window was open, too, and as we coasted past each other, the driver gave me a thumbs-up sign with his left hand.
He had a blocky head suitable for breaking boards in a martial-arts exhibition, the bulging jaws of someone who might pull nails out of lumber with his teeth, the nose of a pugilist who had let down his guard too often, and the eyes of a pit viper. The guy riding shotgun was not nearly so good-looking.
After the briefest hesitation, I returned the driver’s thumbs-up sign with my left hand, and as we glided past each other, I sighed with relief, eased down on the accelerator, and rolled up my window.
In my side mirror, I thought I saw the Explorer come to a halt in the middle