"Which would be what?"

"There's one kind of ignorance that is the very essence of enlightenment, and I won't tell you what it is, because it is an ignorance that makes you so beautiful."

Evidently, I hadn't embarra.s.sed her, but the word beautiful embarra.s.sed me because it had no relationship to the mug I see in mirrors. "Another riddle," I said.

"If you want to think it is."

The hardest crack of thunder yet shook the afternoon, as if the sky were stone that had fractured clean through. Either echoes of the thunder rattled the sheet metal or something in the heating duct was agitated by the storm.

I said, "What frightens me is, there's a difference in what's happening today, this time, this situation... ."

"Yes," Annamaria said, as if she knew of my recent experiences.

I said, "The spirits who seek me out aren't for the most part malevolent, just lost. The evil that comes my way is mostly stuff we might see in the newspapers and wouldn't find unusual. An old high-school friend turned child-killer, cops gone bad, terrorists with a boatload of nukes ... But what I've seen today is different in kind and magnitude. Stranger. Darker. More terrifying."

"Anyone who learns the true and hidden nature of the world will be terrified, Oddie, but there's a safe harbor past the terror."

"Is that what I'm learning today-the true and hidden nature of the world?"

"Tim promises he'll save two cookies for you. They're very good, if I say so myself. Listen, because of who you are, it's inevitable that eventually you will peel the onion, so to speak, and see the truth of everything."

"I'd rather just chop the onion, fry it with a dribble of olive oil, and put it on top of a cheeseburger. Sometimes I have a dream in which I'm nothing but a fry-cook, with a paycheck every Friday, good books to read, and all my friends in Pico Mundo."

She said, "But that is only a dream. Your life has always been a journey metaphorically. And since you left Pico Mundo, it has become also a literal journey from which you can't turn back."

I watched the grille over the ventilation duct and thought about the quartet of rats abandoning the Phoenix palm in formation, but no pointed twitching nose or radiant blood-drop eyes appeared.

She continued: "Every journey has a destination, known or unknown. In a journey of discovery like yours, the pace quickens and the disclosures mount steadily toward the end."

"Am I nearing the end of mine?"

"I'd guess that what's behind you is much more than what lies ahead, though you have a way to go yet. But I'm not a fortune-teller, odd one."

I said, "You're something."

"Be afraid in proportion to the threat," Annamaria said, "but if you trust yourself, we will see each other again-"

"'-when the wind blows the water white and black,'" I finished, quoting her words from earlier in the day. "Whatever that means."

"It means what it means, Oddie. Remember, there are cookies waiting here for you."

She disconnected, and I switched off the disposable cell phone.

When I stood up from the bench and stared at the grille near the ceiling, all grew quiet in the duct beyond.

I tucked the pistol in a deep pocket of the raincoat and opened the changing-room door, prepared-though not eager-to learn the true and hidden nature of the world. But first I stopped in the thrift-shop men's room. Even the most urgent journey of discovery must allow time for the journeyer to pee.

Sixteen.

PERCHED ON HER PILLOW, MRS. EDIE FISCHER PILOTED the Mercedes limousine northeast on Interstate 15, into a steadily darkening day, leaving the city and its suburbs well behind us, outracing the storm but not yet the sullen clouds that paved the sky in advance of the downpour. Between Victorville and Barstow, meadows made green by the four-month rainy season gave way to fields of wild golden gra.s.s on the brink of the Mojave, where that season had been shorter and drier than it had been across the lower lands closer to the coast. Mile by mile, the gilded gra.s.s cheapened to silver, soon the silver grayed, and at last plush meadows succ.u.mbed to gnarled and bristling desert scrub.

Twelve cylinders of internal combustion powered us, and psychic magnetism guided us as I held the face of the rhinestone cowboy in my mind's eye. I'd taken off the hooded raincoat and dropped it through the open privacy panel between the front seat and the pa.s.senger compartment.

The cell phone was tucked in one of the two cup holders in the center console, in case it rang again, though that seemed unlikely. Annamaria's meaning might be as puzzling as a five-thousand-piece jigsaw of one of M. C. Escher's most intricate drawings, but she always said succinctly what she wanted to say. She wasn't given to long, chatty conversations about the weather or celebrities, or the aches and pains of a life in gravity.

In such a short time, Mrs. Fischer and I had achieved a degree of friendship that allowed periods of silence without awkwardness. I felt comfortable with her. I was reasonably sure that she would never shoot me or stab me, or set me on fire, or throw acid in my face, or lock me in a room with a hungry crocodile, or dump me in a lake after chaining me to two dead men. Such confidence in a new acquaintance is more rare these days than it once was.

Twenty-six miles south of Barstow, I said, "Now we've driven out of the rain, we could switch places without you getting wet."

"I'll keep driving. I'm not tired. Haven't been tired since the thingumajig."

"What thingumajig?"

"The implant doohickey with the three little lithium batteries. I shouldn't talk about it."

I frowned. "Implant? Like a heart pacemaker or something?"

"Oh, don't you be concerned, child. It's nothing like that. My ticker's fine."

"Good. I'm glad to hear it."

"They put this gismo in your b.u.t.tocks. Well, in one b.u.t.tock, on the right. Used to worry it might be uncomfortable on long rides, but I don't even ever know it's there."

I half suspected that my chain was being pulled. "Whyever would they implant anything there?"

"Because that's where it needs to go, of course."

"What does?"

"The doohickey gismo."

"What does it do?"

"Everything they said it would. This is all a little indelicate, dear. I'd rather not discuss it anymore."

Generally speaking, when someone asks me not to inquire further about his or her b.u.t.t implant, whether it's a little old lady or not, I politely refrain from posing additional questions, but I was sorely tempted to seek more information in this case.

Instead, I said, "Sure. All right. But I still don't think you should do all the driving. We might have a long way to go."

She deployed her legendary dimples to take the sting out of what she had to say. "No offense, sweetie, but you make me a little crazy when you drive."

I was surprised to hear my reply: "But I'm your chauffeur."

"Well, what I think maybe we should do is, we should give you a different job description."

"Such as what?"

"How about-male secretary?"

"I have no secretarial skills, ma'am."

Driving with one hand, Mrs. Fischer reached out to pinch my cheek affectionately. "G.o.d love you, child, you don't have the best chauffeuring skills, either."

"Back at the truck stop you said I was a good driver."

"You are a good driver, dear. But you dawdle." Her sudden smile was radiant. "I know! You can be my fry-cook."

"You said you didn't need a fry-cook. But really ... dawdle?"

"Well, I've changed my mind. I need a fry-cook. Yes, you dawdle. You're no Steve McQueen, dear. In fact, you're no Matt Damon."

"Matt Damon is no Jason Bourne. He has a stunt driver in those movies."

"Well, it seems silly to hire a full-time stunt driver for my chauffeur, sweetie. Fry-cook it is."

"Ma'am, I had this beauty up to ninety back there."

"My point exactly. How do you expect ever to catch this nasty rhinestone cowboy of yours that way?"

"Look, Mrs. Fischer-"

"Call me Edie."

"Yes, ma'am. Anyway, you don't need a fry-cook. You said you're always on the road, you eat at restaurants all the time."

"I'll buy some restaurants here and there, so whenever we're near one, we'll stop and you can cook for me."

"You're not serious."

"It makes perfect sense to me."

"Good grief, how much money do you have?"

"Oh, gobs and gobs of it. Don't you worry." She reached across the console to pat me on the shoulder. "My delightful fry-cook."

I don't know why I couldn't let go of it, but I said, "You're not even doing ninety now."

"One hundred and four miles an hour, child."

I leaned to my left to look more directly at the speedometer. "Wow. It sure doesn't feel like we're going that fast. I guess that's one of the pluses of a Mercedes."

"It's partly Mercedes, but also the aftermarket work that went into it. This baby is souped."

We rocketed past a guy in a Ferrari, probably on his way to Vegas. I think he was wearing a poofy cap, though it wasn't green and black.

"Hundred and ten," Mrs. Fischer said, "and smooth as b.u.t.ter."

"It really is souped," I acknowledged.

"Radically souped. There's this nice man in Arizona, everybody calls him One-Ear Bob, though his name's Larry. He's such a big handsome bruiser, you hardly notice the ear thing, except you tend to tilt your head to one side when you're talking to him. His front business is a combination real-estate brokerage, insurance agency, souvenir shop, and roadside cafe. But he makes his real money in secret, in the buildings far at the back end of his property, where he can do anything you want done to a vehicle and then some."

"Why secret?"

In a dramatic but unnecessary whisper, she said, "Because a lot of what One-Ear Bob does to cars breaks the law."

"What law?"

"Oh, all kinds of laws, sweetie. Idiot safety laws, bone-headed environmental laws that actually contribute to pollution, the laws of physics, you name it."

"Arizona, huh? Wouldn't be Lonely Possum, Arizona, would it?"

Suddenly coy, she said, "Might be, might not."

"What happened there sixty years ago on that oven-hot night?"

"Never you mind. Now let me tend to my driving. With all this conversation, my speed's fallen to a hundred."

From the console between the front seats, I fetched a box of 9-mm ammunition about which Mrs. Fischer had told me earlier. I had emptied the magazine of the pistol while resisting my a.s.sailant on the roof of the building in Elsewhere. Now I pressed ten rounds into it and locked it into the b.u.t.t of the weapon.

Mile by mile, the desert grew more stark, a vastness of sand and rock, mesquite and sage and withered bunchgra.s.s, with here and there low shapes of rock that looked like the serrated backs and long, flat heads of Jura.s.sic-era crocodiles immense in size, petrified now and half buried in the earth.

The low clouds were gray in the east, darker overhead, nearly black in the west. Ahead of us, a wedge of birds flew high across the interstate, winging southeast.

Pico Mundo, my hometown, lay more than a hundred miles in that direction. Perhaps I might soon be led back there. If patterns exist in our seemingly patternless lives-and they do-then the law of harmony insists that the most harmonious of all patterns, circles within circles, will most often a.s.sert itself. If my end was coming, it might find me in those familiar streets that I loved and through which I had been haunted for so much of my life. But we were racing away from Pico Mundo at the moment, and I sensed that the case of the man who would burn children was not the one that would lead me home.

I put ten rounds of ammunition in each front pocket of my jeans. For one who dislikes guns as thoroughly as I do, I strangely find myself resorting to them more frequently as I make steady progress on my circular journey from loss to acceptance of loss, from failure to possible redemption.

A sign announced the interstate exits to Barstow, a community of military installations, railyards, warehouses, outlet stores, and chain motels. Although I intuited that I would find my quarry much deeper in the Mojave than this place, I suddenly said, "Here. Exit here. He's done something in Barstow. Something terrible."

By the grace of Mrs. Fischer's expert driving and One-Ear Bob's improvements to the vehicle, we decelerated as efficiently as if we had reverse rocket thrusters, crossed three lanes in an exquisite arc that brought us to the foot of the exit ramp, and swept into Barstow, home of the Mojave River Valley Museum.

We had come now to one of those times in my life when humor was no longer an armor, when any joke would have been an abomination, the slightest smile a transgression.

"The children," I said. "The two girls and the boy. They lived here."

"You mean live here," Mrs. Fischer corrected.

Taken by a sudden chill, I said, "No, I don't believe I do."