By the Light of the Moon

21

Even drunk and stumbling, this Lucas Crocker should be feared. After casting aside the wad of cash saturated in repulsive spoor, Dylan rushed him from behind, with no further warning.

Crocker looked flabby in his loose-fitting slacks and jacket, but he was as solid as a whiskey keg, which in fact he smelled like. Body-checked forcefully, he slammed against the Corvette hard enough to rock it, and slobbered a final word of Beatles' lyrics against the glass even as he broke the driver's-side window with his face.

Most men would have gone down, stayed down, but Crocker roared in rage and reared back with such Brahman power that he appeared to have been invigorated by the rib-cracking impact with the sports car. He pistoned his arms, jabbed with his elbows, thrashed, bucked, and rolled his meaty shoulders like a rodeo beast casting off a flyweight rider.

Far from flyweight, Dylan was nonetheless cast off. He staggered backward, almost fell, but stayed on his feet, and wished that he had kept the baseball bat.

Nose broken, face cracked in a crimson grin, Crocker rounded on his adversary with diabolic delight, as though stimulated by the prospect of having his teeth knocked out, excited by the certainty of greater pain, as if this were just the kind of entertainment that he preferred. He charged.

The advantage of size would not have been enough to spare Dylan ruinous injury, and perhaps the advantage of sobriety wouldn't have been enough, either; but size and sobriety and raw anger gave him a precious edge. When Crocker charged with drunken enthusiasm, Dylan lured the man by making a come-on gesture, stepped aside almost too late, and kicked him in the knee.

Crocker sprawled, rapped the pavement with his forehead, and found it less accommodating than a car window. Nevertheless, his fighting spirit proved less breakable than his face, and he pushed at once onto his hands and knees.

Dylan drew courage from the volcanic anger that he'd first felt upon seeing the beaten boy shackled to the bed in that room divided between books and knives. The world was full of victims, too many victims and too few defenders of them. The hideous images that had passed into him from the wad of cash, sharp images of Lucas Crocker's singular depravity and cruelty, still ricocheted through his mind, like destructive radioactive particles. The righteous anger that flooded Dylan washed before it all fear regarding his own safety.

For a painter of idyllic nature scenes, for an artist with a peaceful heart, he could deliver a remarkably vicious kick, place it with the accuracy of any mob enforcer, and follow it with another. Sickened by this violence, he nonetheless remained committed to it without compunction.

As Crocker's broken ribs tested how resistant his lungs were to puncture, as his smashed fingers fattened into unclenchable sausages, as his rapidly swelling lips transformed his fierce grin into the goofy smile of a stocking doll, the drunk evidently decided that he'd had enough fun for one evening. He stopped trying to get to his feet, collapsed onto his side, rolled onto his back, lay gasping, groaning.

Breathing hard but unhurt, Dylan surveyed the parking lot. He and Crocker were alone. He was pretty sure that no traffic had passed in the street during the altercation. No one had seen.

His luck wouldn't hold much longer.

The keys to the Corvette gleamed on the pavement near the car. Dylan confiscated them.

He returned to the bloodied, gasping man and noticed a phone clipped to his belt.

In Crocker's boiled-ham face, cunning little pig eyes watched for an easy opportunity.

'Give me your phone,' Dylan said.

When Crocker made no move to obey, Dylan stepped on his broken hand, pinning the swollen fingers to the blacktop.

Cursing, Crocker used his good hand to detach the phone from his belt. He held it out, eyes wet with pain but as cunning as before.

'Slide it across the pavement,' Dylan directed. 'Over there.'

When Crocker did as instructed, Dylan stepped off his injured hand without doing further damage.

Spinning, the telephone came to rest about a foot from the wad of currency. Dylan went to the phone, plucked it off the blacktop, but left the money untouched.

Spitting out broken teeth or window glass along with words as mushy as his smashed lips, Crocker asked, 'You aren't robbing me?'

'I only steal long-distance minutes. You can keep your money, but you're going to get one hell of a phone bill.'

Having been sobered by pain, Crocker was now bleary-eyed only with bewilderment. 'Who are you?'

'Everybody's been asking me that same question tonight. I guess I'll have to come up with a name that resonates.'

Half a block north, Jilly stood beside the Expedition, watching. Perhaps, if she'd seen Dylan getting his ass kicked, she would have come to his aid with a can of insecticide or aerosol cheese.

Hurrying toward the SUV, Dylan glanced back, but Lucas Crocker made no attempt to get up. Maybe the guy had passed out. Maybe he had noticed the bats feeding greedily on the moths in the lamplight: That spectacle would appeal to him. It might even be the kind of thing he found inspiring.

By the time Dylan reached the Expedition, Jilly had returned to the front passenger's seat. He got in and shut his door.

Her psychic trace upon the steering wheel felt pleasant, rather like immersing work-sore hands in warm water enhanced with curative salts. Then he became aware of her anxiety. As if a live electrical wire had been dropped into the hand bath. With an act of will, he tuned out all those vibrations, good and bad.

'What the hell happened back there?' Jilly asked.

Handing the phone to her, he said, 'Get me the police.'

'I thought we didn't want them.'

'Now we do.'

Headlights appeared in the street behind them. Another slow-moving SUV. Maybe the same one that had earlier drifted by well below the speed limit. Maybe not. Dylan watched it pass. The driver didn't appear to be interested in them. A true professional, of course, would conceal his interest well.

In the backseat, Shepherd had returned to Great Expectations. He seemed remarkably calm.

The restaurant fronted on Federal Highway 70, the route that Dylan wanted. He headed northwest.

After using the telephone keypad, Jilly listened, then said, 'Guess the town's too small for nine-one-one service.' She keyed in the number for directory assistance, asked for the police, and passed the phone back to Dylan.

Succinctly, he told the police operator about Lucas Crocker, half drunk and fully thrashed, waiting for an ambulance in the restaurant parking lot.

'May I have your name?' she asked.

'That's not important.'

'I'm required to ask your name-'

'And so you have.'

'Sir, if you were a witness to this assault-'

'I committed the assault,' Dylan said.

Law-enforcement routine seldom took a strange turn here in the sleepy heart of the desert. The unsettled operator was reduced to repeating his statement as a question. 'You committed the assault?'

'Yes, ma'am. Now, when you send that ambulance for Crocker, send an officer, too.'

'You're going to wait for our unit?'

'No, ma'am. But before the night's out, you'll arrest Crocker.'

'Isn't Mr. Crocker the victim?'

'He's my victim, yes. But he's a perpetrator in his own right. I know you're thinking it's me you'll want to be arresting, but trust me, it's Crocker. You also need to send another patrol car-'

'Sir, filing a false police report is-'

'I'm not a hoaxer, ma'am. I'm guilty of assault, phone theft, breaking a car window with a man's face – but I'm not into pranks.'

'With a man's face?'

'I didn't have a hammer. Listen, you also need to send a second patrol car and an ambulance to the Crocker residence out on… Fallon Hill Road. I don't see a house number, but as small as this town is, you probably know the place.'

'You're going to be there?'

'No, ma'am. Who's out there is Crocker's elderly mother. Noreen, I think her name is. She's chained in the basement.'

'Chained in the basement?'

'She's been left in her own filth for a couple weeks now, and it's not a pretty situation.'

'You chained her in the basement?'

'No, ma'am. Crocker wrangled a power of attorney, and he's starving her to death while he gradually loots her bank accounts and sells off her belongings.'

'And where can we find you, sir?'

'Don't you worry about me, ma'am. You're going to have your hands full enough tonight.'

He pushed END, then switched the phone off and handed it to Jilly. 'Wipe it clean and throw it out the window.'

She used a Kleenex and disposed of it with the phone.

A mile later, he handed the keys to the Corvette to her, and she tossed those out the window, as well.

'It'd be ironic if we were stopped for littering,' she said.

'Where's Fred?'

'While I was waiting for you, I moved him into the cargo space, so I could have legroom.'

'You think he's okay back there?'

'I braced him between suitcases. He's solid.'

'I meant psychologically okay.'

'Fred's highly resilient.'

'You're pretty resilient yourself,' he said.

'It's an act. Who was the old cowboy?'

As he was about to answer her question, Dylan suffered a delayed reaction to the confrontation with Lucas Crocker and to the purity of evil that he'd experienced so intimately from contact with the wad of money. He felt as though clouds of frenzied moths swarmed within him, seeking a light they couldn't find.

Already he had driven through the dusty outskirts of Safford and into relatively flat land that in the night, at least, seemed almost as devoid of the human stain as it had been in the Mesozoic Era, tens of millions of years ago.

He pulled onto the shoulder of the highway and stopped. 'Give me a minute. I need to get… to get Crocker out of my head.'

When he closed his eyes, he found himself in a cellar, where an old woman lay in chains, caked with filth. With an artist's attention to minutiae and to the meaning of it, Dylan furnished the scene with baroque details as significant as they were disgusting.

He had never actually seen Lucas Crocker's mother when he had touched her son's dropped money in the parking lot. This cellar and this wretchedly abused woman were constructs of his imagination and they most likely in no way resembled either the real cellar or the real Noreen Crocker.

Dylan didn't see things with his sixth sense, not any more than he heard or smelled or tasted them. He simply, instantly knew things. He touched an object rich with psychic spoor, and knowledge arose in his mind as though summoned from memory, as though he were recalling events that he had once read in a book. Thus far this knowledge had usually been the equivalent of a sentence or two of linked facts; at other times, it equaled paragraphs of information, pages.

Dylan opened his eyes, leaving the imagined Noreen Crocker in that squalid cellar even as the real woman might at this very moment be listening to the approaching sirens of her rescuers.

'You okay?' Jilly asked.

'I'm maybe not quite as resilient as Fred.'

She smiled. 'He's got the advantage of not having a brain.'

'Better get moving.' He popped the handbrake. 'Put some distance between ourselves and Safford.' He drove onto the two-lane highway. 'For all we know, the guys in the black Suburbans have a statewide alert out to law-enforcement agencies, asking to be informed of any unusual incidents.'

At Dylan's request, Jilly got an Arizona map out of the glove box and studied it with a penlight while he drove northwest.

North and south of them, the black teeth of different mountain ranges gnawed at the night sky, and as they traveled the intervening Gila River Valley here between those distant peaks, they seemed to be traversing the jaw span of a yawning leviathan.

'Seventy-eight miles to the town of Globe,' Jilly said. 'Then if you really think it's necessary to avoid the Phoenix area – '

'I really think it's necessary,' he said. 'I prefer not to be found charred beyond recognition in a burnt-out SUV.'

'At Globe, we'll have to turn north on Highway 60, take it all the way up to Holbrook, near the Petrified Forest. From there, we can pick up Interstate 40, west toward Flagstaff or east toward Gallup, New Mexico – if it matters which way we go.'

'Negative Jackson, vortex of pessimism. It'll matter.'

'Why?'

'Because by the time we get there, something will have happened to make it matter.'

'Maybe by the time we get up to Holbrook, we'll have gotten so good at positive thinking that we'll have thought ourselves into being billionaires. Then we'll go west and buy a mansion overlooking the Pacific.'

'Maybe,' he said. 'One thing I'm buying for sure, soon as the stores open in the morning, wherever we are.'

'What's that?'

'Gloves.'