"That's your favorite thing about me?"

"At the moment, yes."

"Well, gee, it's not something I can work on."

"Work on?"

"Things you like about me, I want to do them even better. Say instead you liked my grooming or my taste in clothes, or my pancakes. I'm always improving my pancakes, just ask Terri - they're light and fluffy yet full of taste. But I don't know how to be smart and simple at the same time better than I am now. In fact, I'm not even sure I know what you mean."

"Good. It's nothing you should think about. It's nothing you can work on. It's just who you are. Anyway, when I marry you, it won't be for money."

She offered a churro to me.

Considering how fast my heart was racing and my mind was spinning, the last thing that I needed was sugar, but I took the pastry.

We ate in silence for a minute, and then I said, "So this marriage - when do you think we should order the cake?"

"Soon. I can't wait much longer."

With relief and delight, I said, "Too much delayed gratification can be a bad thing."

She grinned. "You see what's happening here?"

"I guess I'm just looking with my eyes. What should I see?"

"What's happening is - I want a second churro, and I'm going to have it now instead of next Thursday."

"You're a wild woman, Stormy Llewellyn."

"You don't know the half of it."

This had been a bad day, what with Harlo Landerson and Fungus Man and the black room and the bodachs everywhere and Elvis in tears. Yet as I sat with Stormy, eating churros, for the moment all was right with the world.

The moment didn't last long. My cell phone rang, and I wasn't surprised to hear Chief Porter's voice.

"Son, the sacristy at St. Bart's gives new meaning to the word trashed. trashed. Someone went purely berserk in there." Someone went purely berserk in there."

"Robertson."

"I'm sure you're right. You always are. It was probably him. But he was gone by the time my men reached the church. You haven't seen him again?"

"We're sort of hiding out here but no, not a sign of him." I surveyed the parking lot, the continuous traffic coming in and out of Mexicali Rose's drive-up service lane, and the street beyond, looking for Bob Robertson's dusty Ford Explorer.

The chief said, "We've had a watch on his house for a few hours, but now we're actively looking for him."

"I might give psychic magnetism a chance," I said, referring to my ability to locate just about anyone by cruising at random for half an hour.

"Is that wise, son? I mean, with Stormy being in the car?"

"I'll take her home first."

Stormy quashed that idea: "Like h.e.l.l you will, Mulder."

"I heard that," said Chief Porter.

"He heard that," I told Stormy.

"What do I care?" she said.

Chief Porter seemed tickled: "She calls you Mulder, like on The X-Files?" The X-Files?"

"Not often, sir. Only when she thinks I'm being paternalistic."

"Do you ever call her Scully?"

"Only when I'm in the mood to be bruised."

"You ruined that show for me," the chief said.

"How'd I do that, sir?"

"You made all that weird stuff too real. I didn't find the supernatural to be entertaining anymore."

"Me neither," I a.s.sured him.

By the time Chief Porter and I finished talking, Stormy had gathered all our dinner wrappings and containers, and had stuffed them into one bag. When we left Mexicali Rose, she dropped them in a trash can that was stationed along the exit lane.

As I turned left into the street, she said, "Let's stop by my place first, so I can get my pistol."

"That's a home-defense gun. You're not licensed to carry."

"I'm not licensed to breathe, either, but I do it anyway."

"No gun," I insisted. "We'll just cruise and see what happens."

"Why're you afraid of guns?"

"They go bang."

"And why is that a question you always avoid answering?"

"I don't always avoid answering it."

"Why're you afraid of guns?" she persisted.

"I was probably shot to death in a past life."

"You don't believe in reincarnation."

"I don't believe in taxes, either, but I pay them."

"Why are you afraid of guns?"

"Maybe because I've had a prophetic dream in which I was shot."

"Have you had a prophetic dream in which you were shot?"

"No."

She can be relentless. "Why're you afraid of guns?"

I can be stupid. As soon as I spoke, I regretted my words: "Why're you afraid of s.e.x?"

From the suddenly icy and distant perch of the pa.s.senger's seat, she gave me a long, hard, marrow-freezing look.

For a moment I tried to pretend that I didn't realize the impact that my words had on her. I tried to focus on the street ahead as if I were nothing if not always a responsible driver.

I have no talent for pretense. Sooner than later, I looked at her, felt terrible, and said, "I'm so sorry."

"I'm not afraid of s.e.x," she said.

"I know. I'm sorry. I'm an idiot."

"I just want to be sure-"

I tried to hush her.

She persisted: "I just want to be sure the reason why you're in love with me has less to do with that that than with other things." than with other things."

"It does," I a.s.sured her, feeling small and mean. "A thousand other things. You know that."

"When we're together, I want it to be right and clean and beautiful."

"So do I. And it will be, Stormy. When the time is right. We have plenty of time."

Stopping for a red traffic light, I held out my right hand to her. I was relieved when she took it, touched when she held it so tightly.

The light changed to green. I drove with only one hand on the wheel.

After a while, in a voice soft with emotion, she said, "I'm sorry, Oddie. That was my fault."

"It wasn't your fault. I'm an idiot."

"I pushed you into a corner about why you're afraid of guns, and when I kept pushing, you pushed back."

That was the truth, but the truth didn't make me feel any better about what I'd done.

Six months after the deaths of her mother and father, when Stormy was seven and a half years old and still Bronwen, she was adopted by a childless, well-to-do couple in Beverly Hills. They lived on a fine estate. The future looked bright.

One night during her second week with her new family, her adoptive father came to her room and woke her. He exposed himself to her and touched her in ways that frightened and humiliated her.

Still grieving her birth parents, afraid, desperately lonely, confused, ashamed, she endured this man's sick advances for three months. Finally, she reported him to a social worker who was making a follow-up house call for the adoption agency.

Thereafter, she lived in St. Bart's Orphanage, untouched, until her high-school graduation.

She and I became an item when we were juniors. We have been together - and each other's best friend - for more than four years.

In spite of all that we had been to each other and all that we hoped to achieve together in the years to come, I had been able to hurt her - Why're you afraid of s.e.x? Why're you afraid of s.e.x? - when she pushed me too hard about my fear of guns. - when she pushed me too hard about my fear of guns.

A cynic once said that the most identifying trait of humanity is our ability to be inhumane to one another.

I am an optimist about our species. I a.s.sume G.o.d is, too, for otherwise He would have scrubbed us off the planet a long time ago and would have started over.

Yet I can't entirely dismiss that cynic's sour a.s.sessment. I harbor a capacity for inhumanity, glimpsed in my cruel retort to the person I love most in all the world.

We sailed the blacktop rivers for a while, not finding Fungus Man, but slowly finding our way back to each other.

In time she said, "I love you, Oddie."

My voice was thick when I replied. "I love you more than life."

"We'll be okay," she said.

"We are are okay." okay."

"We're weird and screwed-up, but we're okay," she agreed.

"If someone invented a thermometer that measured weirdness, it would melt under my tongue. But you - you're cool."

"So you deny me weirdness but agree that I'm screwed-up."

"I see your problem. Certain kinds of weirdness can be hip, but screwed-upness never is."

"Exactly."

"It wasn't gentlemanly of me to deny you your weirdness."

"Apology accepted."

We cruised for a while, using the car as a dowser uses his rod to seek water, until I found myself pulling into the parking lot of Green Moon Lanes. This is a bowling alley half a mile from the mall where earlier in the day I had visited Stormy at the icecream shop.

She knows about the recurring dream that has disturbed my sleep once or twice a month for the past three years. It features dead bowling-alley employees: gut-shot, limbs shattered, faces hideously disfigured not by a few bullets but by barrages. barrages.

"He's here?" Stormy asked.

"I don't know."

"Is it coming true now, tonight - the dream?"