"In me?" I asked.

"Very much so."

"For being a wrong number?"

"This is pathetic," she said, and terminated the call.

The woman's caller ID was blocked. No number had appeared on my screen.

The telecom revolution does not always facilitate communication.

I stared at the phone, waiting for her to misdial again, but it didn't ring. I flipped it shut.

The wind seemed to have swirled down a drain in the floor of the desert.

Beyond the motionless limbs of the brugmansia, which were leafy but flowerless until late spring, in the high vault of the night, the stars were sterling-bright, the moon a tarnished silver.

When I checked my wristwatch, I was surprised to see 3:17 a.m. Only thirty-six minutes had passed since I had awakened to find Dr. Jessup in my bedroom.

I had lost all awareness of the hour and had assumed that dawn must be drawing near. Fifty thousand volts might have messed with my watch, but it had messed more effectively with my sense of time.

If the tree branches had not embraced so much of the sky, I would have tried to find Cassiopeia, a constellation with special meaning for me. In classic mythology, Cassiopeia was the mother of Andromeda.

Another Cassiopeia, this one no myth, was the mother of a daughter whom she named Bronwen. And Bronwen is the finest person I have ever known, or ever will.

When the constellation of Cassiopeia is in this hemisphere and I am able to identify it, I feel less alone.

This isn't a reasoned response to a configuration of stars, but the heart cannot flourish on logic alone. Unreason is an essential medicine as long as you do not overdose.

In the alley, a police car pulled up at the gate. The headlights were doused.

I rose from the yard under the tree of death, and if my buttocks had been poisoned, at least they hadn't yet fallen off.

When I got into the front passenger's seat and pulled the door shut, Chief Porter said, "How's your tongue?"

"Sir?"

"Still itch?"

"Oh. No. It stopped. I hadn't noticed."

"This would work better if you took the wheel, wouldn't it?"

"Yeah. But that would be hard to explain, this being a police car and me being just a fry cook."

As we drifted along the alleyway, the chief switched on the headlights and said, "What if I cruise where I want, and when you feel I should turn left or right, you tell me."

"Let's try it." Because he had switched off the police radio, I said, "Won't they be wanting to reach you?"

"Back there at the Jessup house? That's all aftermath. The science boys are better at that than I am. Tell me about the guy with the Taser."

"Mean green eyes. Lean and quick. Snaky."

“Are you focusing on him now?"

"No. I only got a glimpse of him before he zapped me. For this to work, I've got to have a better mental picture-or a name."

"Simon?"

"We don't know for certain that Simon's involved."

"I'd bet my eyes against a dollar that he is," Chief Porter said. "The killer beat on Wilbur Jessup long after he was dead. This was a passionate homicide. But he didn't come alone. He's got a kill buddy, maybe someone he met in prison."

"Just the same, I'll try for Danny."

We drove a couple of blocks in silence.

The windows were down. The air looked clear yet carried the silica scent of the Mojave vastness by which our town is embraced.

Scatterings of crisp leaves, shed by Indian laurels, crunched under the tires.

Pico Mundo appeared to have been evacuated.

The chief glanced sideways at me a couple times, then said, "You ever going back to work at the Grille?"

"Yes, sir. Sooner or later."

"Sooner would be better. Folks miss your home fries."

"Poke makes good ones," I said, referring to Poke Barnett, the other short-order cook at the Pico Mundo Grille.

"They're not so bad you have to choke them down," he admitted, "but they're not in the same league with yours. Or his pancakes."

"Nobody can match the fluff factor in my pancakes," I agreed.

"Is it some culinary secret?"

"No, sir. It's a born instinct."

"A gift for pancakes."

"Yes, sir, it seems to be."

"You feel magnetized yet or whatever it is you feel?"

"No, not yet. And it would be better if we don't talk about it, just let it happen."

Chief Porter sighed. "I don't know when I'm ever going to get used to this psychic stuff."

"I never have," I said. "Don't expect I ever will."

Strung between the boles of two palm trees in front of the Pico Mundo High School, a large banner declared GO, MONSTERS!

When I attended PMHS, the sports teams were called the Braves. Each cheerleader wore a headband with a feather. Subsequently, this was deemed an insult to local Indian tribes, though none of the Indians ever complained.

School administrators engineered the replacement of Braves with Gila Monsters. The reptile was said to be an ideal choice because it symbolized the endangered environment of the Mojave.

In football, basketball, baseball, track, and swimming, the Monsters haven't equaled the winning record of the Braves. Most people blame it on the coaches.

I used to believe that all educated people knew an asteroid might one day strike the earth, destroying human civilization. But perhaps a lot of them haven't heard about it yet.

As though reading my mind, Chief Porter said, "Could've been worse. The Mojave yellow-banded stink bug is an endangered species. They could've called the team Stink Bugs."

"Left," I suggested, and he turned at the next intersection.

"I figured if Simon was ever coming back here," Chief Porter said, "he would've done it four months ago, when he was released from Folsom. We ran special patrols in the Jessup neighborhood during October and November."

"Danny said they were taking precautions at the house. Better door locks. An upgraded security system."

"So Simon was smart enough to wait. Gradually everyone let down their guard. Fact is, though, when the cancer took Carol, I didn't expect Simon would come back to Pico Mundo."

Seventeen years previously, jealous to the point of obsession, Simon Makepeace had become convinced that his young wife had been having an affair. He'd been wrong.

Certain that assignations had occurred in his own home, when he had been at work, Simon tried to coax the name of any male visitor from his then four-year-old son. Because there had been no visitor to identify, Danny had not been able to oblige. So Simon picked up the boy by the shoulders and tried to shake the name out of him.

Danny's brittle bones snapped. He suffered fractures of two ribs, the left clavicle, the right humerus, the left humerus, the right radius, the right ulna, three metacarpals in his right hand.

When he couldn't shake a name out of his son, Simon threw the boy down in disgust, breaking his right femur, his right tibia, and every tarsal in his right foot.

Carol had been grocery shopping at the time. Returning home, she found Danny alone, unconscious, bleeding, a shattered humerus protruding through the flesh of his right arm.

Aware that charges of child abuse would be filed against him, Simon had fled. He understood that his freedom might be measured in hours.

With less to lose and therefore with less to constrain him, he set out to take vengeance on the man whom he most suspected of being his wife's lover. Because no lover existed, he merely perpetrated a second act of mindless violence.

Lewis Hallman, whom Carol had dated a few times before her marriage, was Simon's prime suspect. Driving his Ford Explorer, he stalked Hallman until he caught him on foot, then ran him down and killed him.

In court, he claimed that his intention had been to frighten Lewis, not to murder him. This assertion seemed to be contradicted by the fact that after running down his victim, Simon had turned and driven over him a second time.