“Yale,” Willis said.

“Your mom is doing so much better now, Willis.”

   “Look, T.C. , we do not have time to talk about my mother,” Willis said, getting angry. “Now I’m going to tell you a story. I want you to listen to it. I want you to listen very carefully. Down there in Sacramento, you know I’ll just be another guy in a police car. You’re my last chance. You’re everybody’s last chance. “I think I know what happened,” Willis said. “Ann got a job down at Genesoft. She was there all week, no break. They had some new products to launch. She came home yesterday at mid-morning. She said she was feeling funny. That’s when it happened. She changed. She became something—something monstrous.” He tried to say the word “monstrous” in a way that would sound sane.

“Willis, you killed Ann and the kids,” T.C. said.

Willis stopped speaking. The pain of the accusation shot through him. He tried to control his anger when people said that, but it was becoming more and more difficult. He wanted to scream into the nightmare, but didn’t let himself. Instead of yelling, he made himself speak very quietly, and very carefully.

“No. No, you see, that’s not what happened at all. I tried to save the children, but Ann was too strong for me. I couldn’t manage it. We fought out there on the driveway. I tried to stop her . . .  she killed the children.”

The deputy drove on, not answering.

T.C. lit a cigarette and inhaled, carrying the smoke deep into his lungs, savoring it. It was against the law to smoke in the patrol car but he couldn’t help himself. The storm raged around them, but neither of them mentioned it. The blinding glare of the patrol car’s headlights reflected back at him from the ugly white face of what was becoming a major blizzard. He leaned forward, reinserting the car’s cigarette lighter into the dash, the deputy’s big shoulders rolling forward. It was almost completely white outside. Inside the patrol car, the lights of the console gave a greenish tint to T.C.’s face. It would take another hour to get to the freeway at Emigrant Gap, another good hour from there to drive to the State’s facility for the criminally insane in Sacramento. He had listened to Willis’ story for the last half hour without saying a word.

“Do you believe me?” Willis asked, his voice slightly muffled by the plastic shield that separated the patrol car’s backseat from the driver. The snowstorm outside, the handcuffs, the dirty worn interior of the sheriff’s car, the ugly plastic divider between him and the deputy, were all making it seem hopeless. The Valium Dr. Poole had given Willis back in Timberline had sucked the life out of him. His throat was dry, his voice weak because he’d talked so much since he’d gotten in the car, almost nonstop.

“Can’t say that I do, Willis,” T.C. said. Crazy fucker.  McCauley’s eyes fixed on the rearview mirror. The deputy had carried a lot of men to the county jail. He’d heard a lot of stories. And he’d heard a lot of weird things from the back of the patrol car. He was used to it. But Willis’ story was the craziest he’d ever heard.

It’s the ones who look like choirboys that are the worst, the ones that look normal, T.C.  thought. And then he was sorry he’d thought it. He still liked Willis; he couldn’t help it. When you’ve known someone since you were kids, it’s impossible not to think you really know them. Knowing someone always makes for empathy, the deputy thought.

“You have to believe me. Don’t you understand? I’m just like you. You would have done the same thing, T.C. I’m not crazy! You have to believe me. For God’s sake!” Willis realized he was yelling, and stopped himself.

“Willis, look. There isn’t a lot I can do. You understand. I would save it for the doctors. Try to convince them—right?”

“There isn’t time for all that. It’s happening too fast,” Willis said. “I didn’t have any choice.” Willis looked through the milky-looking plastic divider at his last hope. “Ann was going to hurt us. They get very strong, you see. I don’t pretend to understand exactly what happened to her.” Willis’ voice trailed off. He understood suddenly that it was hopeless. No one was going to believe him. He looked at the T.C.’s eyes peering back at him in the mirror, unconvinced; they moved away.

The patrol car, its top carpeted with inches of hardened snow, its sides mud-spattered from the back country, turned off the busy frontage road into a halogen-lit gas station at Emigrant Gap. The gas station was crowded and oddly surreal-looking, the pump area brightly lit and busy.

McCauley turned off the engine. The car’s radio, playing a country-western station stayed on, the music playing over the sound of the moving windshield wipers. “Jesus, kick me through the goal posts of life!” The song’s lyrics seemed oddly humorless in the early morning.

All the deputy’s twenty-seven years—three, very hard ones, spent in Iraq—showed as he glanced into the rearview mirror. He pulled on his cheap Sears winter gloves, then opened his car door. A cold wind was blowing straight off the Sierra. As T.C. walked, he pulled out his cell phone. He could make out traffic below on Highway 50 as he lifted the cell phone to his face. He’d dialed his home number in Timberline.

“Are you okay?” T.C. said. All the talk of dead wives had scared him. The deputy heard his wife’s sleepy voice come on the line. “I just felt like talking to someone,” he said. “I’m at the Denny’s at Emigrant Gap. I’m taking Willis to Sacramento.”  He could barely hear his wife’s voice over the wind. “Just wanted to say hi. I’ll call again when I get to the facility. I should be home around four, if the roads stay plowed.”

“There’s been a lot of strange news,” his wife said. “T.C., a lot of people are going missing here in town.”

The deputy held the phone and looked out at his patrol car. “That’s what Willis said would happen.”

“What?” his wife said. She worked as a fourth-grade teacher at the elementary school.

“Willis said that was going to start happening,” T.C. said into the phone. He had to speak up because the wind was gusting so hard.

“What?” his wife said again.

“The one who killed his wife and children. Willis Good. You know,” T.C. said. “He said his wife turned into some kind of monster.”

“What’s Willis got to do with this? Poor man,” his wife said.

“I don’t know.”

“T.C., I’m scared. I called my brother’s house in Reno this morning, and no one answered.”

“Well, the phone lines are probably down because of the storm last night,” T.C. said.

“No . . .  the lines are okay. I checked,” his wife said. T.C. didn’t hear the last part because of the wind, and the blaring of a big semi-truck’s horn, passing below on the freeway.

“I love you, baby,” she said. “Did Willis do it?”

“Yeah, he did it. I love you, too,” T.C. said. “I’ll see you for dinner.” He lowered his phone. He turned and looked at the sheriff’s car. If I start believing Willis’ story, I might as well follow him into the nut house myself.

T.C. got back in the patrol car. He looked in the mirror. Willis looked at him.

“You heard something, didn’t you?” Willis said. “I can see it in your face.”

“My wife’s people have gone missing in Reno,” T.C. said.

“I told you, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, you told me. I think it’s the phones. The lines are probably down,” T.C. said. “You know, because of the storm, so they don’t answer. Cell towers aren’t working, I mean.”

“It’s not the phones, God damn it!” Willis said. “It’s them. They’re turning into them!”

“Monsters, right?” T.C. said.

“I didn’t say that exactly. But yes, if you want to call them that: monsters. All right. Call them anything you want. What difference does it make what you call them?”