“Your mom and sister are doing well,” Monks said.

“I don’t want to hear about my perfect sister, okay?” Glenn sucked hard on the cigarette, managing to look disdainful. Stephanie was in her third year of medical school at UCSF. That would probably be a sore point to bring up to a high school dropout. But, then, it seemed like just about anything would be.

“You mind telling me how you hooked up with these folks?” Monks said.

“I was junked out. Shrinkwrap found me and took me home. She cares about people like me,” Glenn added accusingly.

“Are you one of the, uh, maquis?”

“Nope. Those guys are the muscle. I do the complicated computer stuff.”

“Such as?”

Glenn shook his head. “It’s none of your fucking business, Rasp, okay?” His tone had the same sense of superiority, of being the elite guardian of secret knowledge, that Monks had sensed in Freeboot and the maquis.

Glenn started playing again, another blues. This one was jazzier, involving complex fingerpicking, with the sound of Robert Johnson’s knife guitar.

“You’ve gotten good,” Monks said.

Glenn nodded, continuing to play, and for a few seconds Monks sensed his son’s pride in showing off for his father. Glenn had become a man, at least in his own eyes, and he handled the guitar with genuine feeling and talent.

Then his hands moved abruptly, the right slashing down across the strings with a discordant clash.

“Take this, brother, may it serve you well,” he growled, in the deepest bass he could muster. They were the same words that Captain America had spoken ceremoniously when he came into the lodge last night.

“Tell me what that means,” Monks said.

Instead, Glenn started chanting in a high-pitched nasal tone, playing the same strident chord over and over:

“Number nine, number nine, number nine…”

It took Monks a moment to recognize the source-an old Beatles song called “Revolution No. 9.” He remembered it as being nonsensical and noisy.

Glenn kept up the chanting, rotating his head to it like a parody of a marionette controlled by a stuck record.

“Number nine, number nine…”

Monks stepped forward, dropped to one knee, and clamped his hand around the guitar neck. Glenn stared at him in outrage.

“Look. I can understand why you helped them bring me here,” Monks said. “I’m willing to let it go, I won’t press charges. But that little boy’s going to die if he doesn’t get help. This isn’t some kind of game.”

“Game? What the fuck do you know about it? I was living on the streets, man. My friends were dying.”

“You were living on the streets by your own choice,” Monks said. “You could have come home anytime you wanted. And a lot of people have seen a lot more people die than you have, including me.”

Glenn wrested the guitar away from Monks and scrambled to his feet.

“Freeboot’s doing something that nobody else in the fucking world can do, and I’m part of it. He needs me, man. You got that? For the first time in my life, I matter. And the way I live is up to me, and nobody else, okay?”

“You think you’re smart and cool, but you don’t know shit,” Monks said, his own voice rising fiercely.

Then he stopped, and lowered his face into his right hand, thumb and forefinger squeezing his eyes shut. This was how it had always gone between them, and it was the signature of his own failure-his own immaturity, his intolerance of a kid’s outbursts, when a father’s love should have prevailed and made him just take the punch. It was true that Glenn had demanded unconditional love-the freedom to do whatever he pleased-and Monks was incapable of giving that.

But for a few terrible seconds, he wondered if he had ever loved Glenn at all-if Glenn had somehow sensed that from an early age, and all of his problems stemmed from it.

Maybe what Glenn had said last night was true: Monks did owe him bigtime.

He raised his head to face his son. “I’m sorry, Glenn,” he said.

“Yeah, well, being sorry doesn’t do anybody any good,” Glenn said, with angry sarcasm. “Remember how you used to tell me that?”

Feeling suddenly leaden, Monks nodded. He sought for some line of conversation that might get Glenn to open up.

“This cause that you and Freeboot are involved in,” Monks said. “Will you tell me about it?”

“I just did. Now get out of my place.” Glenn slung the guitar down onto the pillow and pushed past Monks to the door.

“You can still come home,” Monks said. “No judgment, just help. Don’t forget that.”

“I don’t need your fucking help! Get out, man!” Glenn yanked open the door.

Revealing Shrinkwrap, who apparently had been standing outside, listening.

Glenn stared at her, looking shocked, then bolted past her, vanishing into the dusk.

“Proud of yourself?” she said to Monks.

“I could ask you the same thing.”

Her lips formed a tight, mean line. “Don’t bother. I’ve heard it plenty.”

She stepped into the cabin, walking past Monks carefully, almost circling him. She looked more sure of herself than she had last night-attractive in a gaunt way. She had a fine facial bone structure with an aquiline nose. Her skin was smooth, almost translucent, and her auburn hair was thick and glossy. Along with the hard edge, there was a cool seductiveness.

“You can think whatever you want,” she said. “The truth is, he’d probably be dead by now if not for me.”

“Yes, he told me. You pulled him out of hell.”

“Out of a serious emotional disturbance. I happen to be a psychologist.”

“Oh, really? Is that where all this is coming from, about his abused childhood? You’ve been helping him recover memories?”

“He doesn’t need help remembering an alcoholic, domineering father.”

“Domineering?” Monks said wearily. “Because I used to interrupt his tantrums where he threw dishes at his mother when he didn’t get his way? He was still doing it at seventeen.”

“He was expressing the anger he got from you. Just like he got your addictive personality.”

“Is that a clinical assessment? Or you telling him what he wants to hear, so you can keep a hold on him?”

“Ah, yes, the physician dismisses psychology as a soft science,” she said sarcastically.

“I’ve got great respect for psychologists who don’t use convenient labels to blame everything on somebody else,” Monks said. “We sent him to two of them. A psychiatrist, too, in case there was a neurological problem or a chemical imbalance. The consensus was, ‘Well, we can keep treating him as long as you want, but all he’s going to do is play games with us. This is just the way he is.’”

“And instead of supporting him, you undermined him. Like you’re doing now.”

“His mother and I did everything we knew how, Doctor. With plenty of pain involved, believe me. I finally decided the only way I could deal with it was to call it by its real name. Try to keep the hurt from spreading too much. Glenn’s very good at getting people to believe what he wants them to. Especially women. He was doing it as soon as he could talk.”

“If he was such a charmer, how come he never had a good relationship with a girl?”

“Is that what he told you? There were plenty who were willing. But he’d lose interest as soon as they fell for him. He left a string of poor little broken hearts.”

She put her hands on her hips, one foot pointing toward him, a pose that was tough but provocative.

“I guess he needed a grown-up,” she said.

Right, Monks thought. Mother and lover in one package-and glad to let him do all the drugs he wanted.

“I have no desire to go into my son’s bedroom,” Monks said. “If he’s happy, I’m happy for him. Like I told him, I’ll leave here and never say a word about it, if Mandrake comes with me.”

“That’s up to Freeboot.”

“Surely you don’t believe a four-year-old can heal himself of diabetes through willpower.”