After forty minutes, the rain still isn't easing off, but a flock of cars leaves. The Honda is the only vehicle parked on the driver's side of the Road King.

Taking the pistol, he gets out of the car and walks quickly to the motorhome, watching the side windows in case Frannie or Jack parts the curtains and peers out at this most inopportune moment.

He glances toward the restrooms. No one in sight.

Perfect.

He grips the cold chrome door handle. The lock isn't engaged.

He scrambles inside, up the steps, and looks over the driver's seat.

The kitchen is immediately behind the open cab, a dining nook beyond the kitchen, then the living room. Frannie and Jack are in the nook, eating, the woman with her back toward the killer.

Jack sees him first, starts simultaneously to rise and slide out of the narrow booth, and Frannie looks back over her shoulder, more curious than alarmed. The first two rounds take Jack in the chest and throat.

He collapses over the table. Spattered with blood, Frannie opens her mouth to scream, but the third hollow-point round drastically reshapes her skull.

The silencer is attached to the muzzle, but it isn't effective any more.

The baffles have been compressed. The sound accompanying each shot is only slightly quieter than regular gunfire.

The killer pulls the driver's door shut behind him. He looks out at the sidewalk, the rainswept picnic area, the restrooms. No one in sight.

He climbs over the gear-shift console, into the passenger's seat, and peers out the front window on that side. Only four other vehicles share the parking lot. The nearest is a Mack truck, and the driver must be in the men's room because no one is in the cab.

It's unlikely that anyone could have heard the shots. The roar of the rain provides ideal cover.

He swivels the command chair around, gets up, and walks back through the motorhome. He stops at the dead couple, touches Jack's back.. then Frannie's left hand, which lies on the table in a puddle of blood beside her lunch plate.

"Goodbye," he says softly, wishing he could take more time to share this special moment with them.

Having come this far, however, he is nearly frantic to exchange his clothes for those of Frannie's husband and get on the road again.

He has convinced himself that a transmitter is, indeed, concealed in the rubber heels of his Rockport shoes, and that its signal is even now leading dangerous people to him.

Beyond the living room is a bathroom, a large closet crammed with Frannie's clothes, and a bedroom with a smaller closet filled with Jack's wardrobe. In less than three minutes he strips naked and dresses in new underwear, white athletic socks, jeans, a red-and brown-checkered shirt, a pair of battered sneakers, and a brown leather jacket to replace his black one. The inseam of the pants is just right, the waist is two inches too big, but he cinches it in with a belt.

The shoes are slightly loose though wearable, and the shirt and jacket fit perfectly.

He carries the Rockport shoes into the kitchen. To confirm his suspicion, he takes a serrated bread knife from a drawer and saws off several thin layers of the rubber heel on one shoe until he discovers a shallow cavity packed tightly with electronics. A miniaturized transmitter is connected to a series of watch batteries that seems to extend all the way around the heel and perhaps the sole as well.

Not paranoid after all.

They're coming.

Abandoning the shoes in a litter of rubber shavings on the kitchen counter, he urgently searches Jack's body and takes the money out of the old man's wallet. Sixty-two bucks. He searches for Frannie's purse, finds it in the bedroom. Forty-nine dollars.

When he leaves the motorhome, the mottled gray-black sky is convex, bent low with the weight of the thunderheads. Rain by the megaton batters the earth.

Coils of fog serpentine among the trunks of the pine trees and seem to be reaching for him as he splashes to the Honda.

On the interstate again, speeding through the perpetual twilight beneath the storm, he turns the car heater to its highest setting and soon crosses the state line into Texas, where the flat land becomes impossibly flatter. Having shed the last of the meager belongings from his old life, he feels liberated. Soaked by the cold rain, he shivers uncontrollably, but he is also trembling with anticipation and excitement.

His destiny lies somewhere to the west.

He peels the plastic wrapper off a Slim Jim and eats while he drives.

A subtle flavor, threaded through the primary taste of the cured meat, reminds him of the metallic odor of blood in the house in Kansas City, where he left the nameless dead couple in their enormous Georgian bed.

The killer pushes the Honda as fast as he dares on the rain-slick highway, prepared to kill any cop who pulls him over. Reaching Amarillo, Texas, just after dusk on Sunday evening, he discovers that the Honda is virtually running on empty. He pulls into a truckstop only long enough to tank up, use the bathroom, and buy more food to take with him.

After Amarillo, rocketing westward into the night, he passes Wildorado, with the New Mexico border ahead, and suddenly he realizes that he is crossing the badlands, in the heart of the Old West, where so many wonderful movies have been set. John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red Riler, Walter Brennan stealing scenes left and right. Rio Bravo. And Shane was set back there in Kansas-wasn't it. -Jack Palance blowing away Elisha Cook, Jr. decades before Dorothy took the tornado to Oz.

Stagecoach, The Gunfighter, True Grit, Destry Rides Again, The Unforgi2en, High Plains Drifter, Yellow Sky, so many great movies, not all of them set in Texas but at least in the spirit of Texas, with John Wayne and Gregory Peck and Jimmy Stewart and Clint Eastwood, legends, mythical places now made real and waiting out there beyond the highway, obscured by rain and mist and darkness. It was almost possible to believe that those stories were being played out right now, in the frontier towns he was passing, and that he was Butch Cassidy or the Sundance Kid or some other gunman of an earlier century, a killer but not really a bad guy, misunderstood by society, forced to kill because of what had been done to him, a posse on his trail*

Memories from theater screens and late-night movies on TV-which constitute by far the largest portion of the memories he possesses-flood lost so completely in those fantasies that he pays too little attention to his driving. Gradually he becomes aware that his speed has fallen to forty miles an hour. Trucks and cars explode past him, the wind of their passage buffeting the Honda, splashing dirty water across his windshield, their red taillights swiftly receding into the gloom.

Assuring himself that his mysterious destiny will prove to be as great as any that John Wayne pursued in films, he accelerates.

Empty and half-empty packages of food, crumpled and smeary and full of crumbs, are heaped on the passenger seat. They cascade onto the floor, under the dashboard, completely filling the leg space on that side of the car.

From the litter, he extracts a new box of doughnuts. To wash them down he opens a warmish Pepsi.

Westward. Steadily westward.

An identity awaits him. He is going to be someone.

Later Sunday, at home, after huge bowls of popcorn and two videos, Paige tucked the girls into bed, kissed them goodnight, and retreated to the open doorway to watch Marty as he settled down for that moment of the day he most cherished. Story time.

He continued with the poem about Santa's evil twin, and the girls were instantly enraptured.

"Reindeer sweep down out of the night.

See how each is brimming with fright?

Tossing their heads, rolling their eyes, these gentle animals are so very wise they know this Santa isn't their friend, but an imposter and far 'round the bend.

They would stampede for all they're worth, dump this nut off the edge of the earth.

But Santa's bad brother carries a whip, a club, a harpoon, a gun at his hip, a blackjack, an Uzi-you better run!-and a terrible, horrible, wicked raygun.

"Raygun?" Charlotte said. "Then he's an alien!"

"Don't be silly," Emily admonished her. "He's Santa's twin, so if he's an alien, Santa is an alien too, which he isn't."

With the smug condescension of a nine-year-old who had long ago discovered Santa Claus wasn't real, Charlotte said, "Em, you have a lot to learn. Daddy, what's the raygun do? Turn you to mush?"

"To stone," Emily said. She withdrew one hand from under the covers and revealed the polished stone on which she had painted a pair of eyes.

"That's what happened to Peepers."

"They land on the roof, quiet and sneaky.

Oh, but this Santa is fearfully freaky.

He whispers a warning to each reindeer, leaning close to make sure they hear, You have relatives back at the Pole-antlered, gentle, quite innocent souls.

So if you fly away while I'm inside, back to the Pole on a plane I will ride.

I'll have a picnic in the midnight sun, reindeer pie, pate, reindeer in a bun, reindeer salad and hot reindeer soup, oh, all sorts of tasty reindeer goop."

"I hate this guy," Charlotte announced emphatically. She pulled her covers up to her nose as she had done the previous evening, but she wasn't genuinely frightened, just having a good time pretending to be spooked.

"This guy, he was just born bad," Emily decided. "For sure, he couldn't be this way just 'cause his mommy and daddy weren't as nice to him as they should've been."

Paige marveled at Marty's ability to strike the perfect note to elicit the kids' total involvement. If he'd given her the poem to review before he'd started reading it, Paige would have advised that it was a little too strong and dark to appeal to young girls.

So much for the question of which was superior-the insights of the psychologist or the instinct of the storyteller.

"At the chimney, he looks down the bricks, but that entrance is strictly for hicks.

With all his tools, a way in can be found for a fat bearded burglar out on the town.

From roof to yard to the kitchen door, he chuckles about what he has in store for the lovely family sleeping within.

He grins one of his most nasty grins. oh, what a creeh a scum, and a louse.

He's breaking into the Stillwater house."

"Our place!" Charlotte squealed.

"I knew!" Emily said.

Charlotte said, "You did not."

"Yes, I did."

"Did not."

"Did too. That's why I'm sleeping with Peepers, so he can protect me until after Christmas."

They insisted that their father read the whole thing from the beginning, all verses from both nights. As Marty began to oblige, Paige faded out of the doorway and went downstairs to put away the leftover popcorn and straighten up the kitchen.

The day had been perfect as far as the kids were concerned, and it had been good for her as well. Marty had not suffered another episode, which allowed her to convince herself that the fugue had been a singularity-frightening, inexplicable, but not an indication of a serious degenerative condition or disease.

Surely no man could keep pace with two such energetic children, entertain them, and prevent them from getting cranky for an entire busy day unless he was in extraordinarily good health. Speaking as the other half of the Fabulous Stillwater Parenting Machine, Paige was exhausted.

Curiously, after putting away the popcorn, she found herself checking window and door locks.

Last night Marty had been unable to explain his own heightened sense of a need for security. His trouble, after all, was internal.

Paige figured it had been simple psychological transference. He had been reluctant to dwell on the possibility of brain tumors and cerebral hemorrhages because those things were utterly beyond his control, so he had turned outward to seek enemies against which he might be able to take concrete action.

On the other hand, perhaps he had been reacting on instinct to a real threat beyond conscious perception. As one who incorporated some Jungian theory into her personal and professional worldview, Paige had room for such concepts as the collective unconscious, synchronicity, and intuition.

Standing at the French doors in the family room, staring across the patio to the dark yard, she wondered what threat Marty might have sensed out there in a world that, throughout her lifetime, had become increasingly fraught with danger.

His attention deviates from the road ahead only for quick glances at the strange shapes that loom out of the darkness and the rain on both sides of the highway. Broken teeth of rock thrust from the sand and scree as if a behemoth just beneath the earth is opening its mouth to swallow whatever hapless animals happen to be on the surface.

Widely spaced clusters of stunted trees struggle to stay alive in a stark land where storms are rare and drenching downpours rarer still, gnarled branches bristle out of the mist, as jagged and chitinous as the spiky limbs of insects, briefly illuminated by headlights, thrashing in the wind for an instant but then gone.

Although the Honda has a radio, the killer does not switch it on because he wants no distraction from the mysterious power which pulls him westward and with which he seeks communion. Mile by dreary mile, the magnetic attraction increases, and it is all that he cares about, he could no more turn away from it than the earth could reverse its rotation and bring tomorrow's sunrise in the west.

He leaves the rain behind and eventually passes from under the ragged clouds into a clear night with stars beyond counting. Along part of the horizon, luminous peaks and ridges can be seen dimly, so distant they might define the edge of the world, like alabaster ramparts protecting a fairy-tale kingdom, the walls of Shangri-la in which the light of last month's moon still glimmers.

Into the vastness of the Southwest he goes, past necklaces of light that are the desert towns of Tucumcari, Montoya, Cuervo, and then across the Pecos River.

Between Amarillo and Albuquerque, when he stops for oil and gasoline, he uses a service-station restroom reeking of insecticide, where two dead cockroaches lie in a corner. The yellow light and dirty mirror reveal a reflection recognizably his but somehow different. His blue eyes seem darker and more fierce than he has ever seen them, and the lines of his usually open and friendly face have hardened.

"I'm going to become someone," he says to the mirror, and the man in the mirror mouths the words in concert with him.

At eleven-thirty Sunday night, when he reaches Albuquerque, he fuels the Honda at another truckstop and orders two cheeseburgers to go.

Then he is off on the next leg of his journey-three hundred and twenty-five miles to Flagstaff, Arizona eating the sandwiches out of the white paper bags in which they came and into which drips fragrant grease, onions, and mustard.

This will be his second night without rest, yet he isn't sleepy. He is blessed with exceptional stamina. On other occasions he has gone seventy-two hours without sleep, yet has remained clear-headed.

From movies he has watched on lonely nights in strange towns, he knows that sleep is the one unconquerable enemy of soldiers desperate to win a tough battle. Of policemen on stakeout. Of those who must valiantly stand guard against vampires until dawn brings the sun and salvation.

His ability to call a truce with sleep whenever he wishes is so unusual that he shies away from thinking about it. He senses there are things about himself that he is better off not knowing, and this is one of them.

Another lesson he has learned from movies is that every man has secrets, even those he keeps from himself. Therefore, secrets merely make him like all other men. Which is precisely the condition he most desires.

To be like other men.

In the dream, Marty stood in a cold and windswept place, in the grip of terror. He was aware that he was on a plain as featureless and flat as one of those vast valley floors out in the Mojave Desert on the drive to Las Vegas, but he couldn't actually see the landscape because the darkness was as deep as death. He knew something was rushing toward him through the gloom, something inconceivably strange and hostile, immense and deadly yet utterly silent, knew in his bones that it was coming, dear God, yet had no idea of the direction of its approach.

Left, right, in front, behind, from the ground beneath his feet or from out of the sable-black sky above, it was coming. He could feel it, an object of such colossal size and weight that the atmosphere was compressed in its path, the air thickening as the unknown danger drew nearer. Closing on him so rapidly, faster, faster, and nowhere to hide.

Then he heard Emily pleading for help somewhere in the unrelenting blackness, calling for her daddy, and Charlotte calling, too, but he could not get a fix on them. He ran one way, then another, but their increasingly frantic voices always seemed to be behind him.

The unknown threat was closer, closer, the girls frightened and crying, Paige shouting his name in a voice so freighted with terror that Marty began to weep with frustration at his inability to find them, oh dear Jesus, and it was almost on top of him, the thing, whatever it was, as unstoppable as a falling moon, worlds colliding, a weight beyond measure, a force as primal as the one that had created the universe, as destructive as the one that would someday end it, Emily and Charlotte screaming, screaming-West of the Painted Desert, outside Flagstaff, Arizona, shortly before five o'clock Monday morning, flurries of snow swirl out of the predawn sky, and the cold air is a penetrating scalpel that scrapes his bones. The brown leather jacket that he took from the dead man's closet in the motorhome less than sixteen hours ago in Oklahoma is not heavy enough to keep him warm in the early-morning bitterness.

He shivers as he fills the tank of the Honda at a self-service pump.

On Interstate 40 again, he begins the three-hundred-fifty-mile trip to Barstow, California. His compulsion to keep moving westward is so irresistible that he is as helpless in its grip as an asteroid captured by the earth's tremendous gravity and pulled inexorably toward a cataclysmic impact.

Terror propelled him out of the dream of darkness and unknown menace, Marty Stillwater sat straight up in bed. His first waking breath was so explosive, he was sure he had awakened Paige, but she slept on undisturbed. He was chilled yet sheathed in sweat.