'I'm Dylan.'

He didn't look like a Dylan. He looked like a Bruno or a Samson, or a Gentle Ben.

'Shep has a condition,' Dylan explained. 'Harmless. Don't worry. He's just… not normal.'

'Well, who is these days?' Jilly said. 'Normality hasn't been attainable since maybe 1953.' Woozy, she leaned against one of the posts that supported the walkway cover. 'Gotta call the cops.'

'You said "smiley bastard."'

'Said it twice.'

'What smiley bastard?' he asked with such urgency that you would have thought the missing Cadillac had been his, not hers.

'The smiley, peanut-eating, needle-poking, car-stealing bastard, that's what bastard.'

'Something's on your arm.'

Curiously, she expected to see the beetle resurrected. 'Oh. A Band-Aid.'

'A bunny,' he said, his broad face cinching with worry.

'No, a Band-Aid.'

'Bunny,' he insisted. 'The son of a bitch gave you a bunny, and I got a dancing dog.'

The walkway was well enough lighted for her to see that both she and Dylan sported children's Band-Aids: a colorful capering rabbit on hers, a jubilant puppy on his.

She heard Shep say, 'Lumen, candle-hour, lumen-hour,' before she tuned him out again.

'I have to call the cops,' she remembered.

Dylan's voice, thus far earnest, grew more earnest still, and quite grave, as well: 'No, no. We don't want cops. Didn't he tell you how it is?'

'He who?'

'The lunatic doctor.'

'What doctor?'

'Your needle-poking bastard.'

'He was a doctor? I thought he was a salesman.'

'Why would you think he was a salesman?'

Jilly frowned. 'I'm not sure now.'

'Obviously, he's some sort of lunatic doctor.'

'Why's he knocking around a motel, attacking people and stealing Coupe DeVilles? Why isn't he just killing patients in HMOs like he's supposed to?'

'Are you all right?' Dylan asked, peering more closely at her. 'You don't look well.'

'I almost puked, then I didn't, then I almost did again, but then I didn't. It's the anesthetic.'

'What anesthetic?'

'Maybe chloroform. The lunatic salesman.' She shook her head. 'No, you're right, he must be a doctor. Salesmen don't administer anesthetics.'

'He just clubbed me on the head.'

'Now that sounds more like a salesman. I gotta call the cops.'

'That's not an option. Didn't he tell you professional killers are coming?'

'I'm glad they're not amateurs. If you have to be killed, you might as well be killed efficiently. Anyway, you believe him? He's a thug and a car thief.'

'I think he was telling the truth about this.'

'He's a lying sack of excrement,' she insisted.

Shep said, 'Lucence, refulgency, facula,' or at least that's what it sounded like, although Jilly wasn't entirely sure that those collections of syllables were actually words.

Dylan shifted his attention from Jilly to something beyond her, and when she heard the roar of engines, she turned in search of the source.

Past the parking lot lay a street. An embankment flanked the far side of the street, and atop that long slope, the interstate highway followed the east-to-west trail of the moon. Traveling at a reckless speed, three SUVs descended the arc of an exit ramp.

'-light, illumination, radiance, ray-'

'Shep, I think you've started repeating yourself,' Dylan noted, though he remained riveted on the SUVs.

The three vehicles were identical black Chevrolet Suburbans. As darkly tinted as Darth Vader's face shield, the windows concealed the occupants.

'-brightness, brilliance, beam, gleam-'

Without even a token application of brakes, the first Suburban exploded past the stop sign at the bottom of the exit ramp and angled across the heretofore quiet street. This was the north side of the motel, and the entrance to the parking lot lay toward the front of the enterprise, to the east. At the stop sign, the driver had shown no respect for the uniform highway-safety code; now, with gusto, he demonstrated a lack of patience with traditional roadway design. The Suburban jumped the curb, churned through a ten-foot-wide landscaping zone, spitting behind it a spray of dirt and masticated masses of flowering lantana, briefly took flight off another curb, made a hard four-tire landing in the parking lot, about sixty feet from Jilly, executed a sliding turn at the cost of considerable rubber, and raced west toward the back of the motel.

'-effulgence, refulgence, blaze-'

The second Suburban followed the first, and the third pursued the second, chopping up additional servings of lantana salad. But once in the parking lot, the second turned east instead of continuing to pursue the first, and sped toward the front of the motel. The third streaked straight toward Jilly, Dylan, and Shep.

'-glint, glimmer-'

Just when Jilly thought the oncoming SUV might run them down, as she was deciding whether to dive to the left or to the right, as she considered again the possibility that she might puke, the third driver proved to be as flamboyant a showman as the first two. The Suburban braked so hard that it nearly stood on its nose. Upon its roof, a rack of four motorized spotlights, previously dark, suddenly blazed, swiveled, tilted, took perfect aim, and shed enough wattage on its quarry to bake the marrow in their bones.

'-luminosity, fulgor, flash-'

Jilly felt as though she were standing not before a mere earthly vehicle, but in the awesome presence of an extraterrestrial vessel, being body-scanned, mind-sucked, and soul-searched by data-gathering rays that, in six seconds flat, would count the exact number of atoms in her body, review her entire lifetime of memories beginning with her reluctant exit from her mother's birth canal, and issue a printed chastisement for the deplorably frayed condition of her underwear.

After a moment, the spots switched off, and ghost lights like luminous jellyfish swam before her eyes. Even if she hadn't been dazzled, she wouldn't have been able to get a glimpse of the driver or of anyone else in the Suburban. The windshield appeared not merely to be tinted, but also to be composed of an exotic material that, while perfectly transparent to those within the SUV, appeared from the outside to be as impenetrable to light as absolute-black granite.

Because Jilly, Dylan, and Shep were not the quarry of this search – not yet – the Suburban turned away from them. The driver stomped on the accelerator, and the vehicle shot eastward, toward the front of the motel, once more following the second SUV which had already rounded the corner of the building with a shriek of tires and had vanished from sight.

Shep fell silent.

Referring to the lunatic doctor who had warned that violent men would follow in his wake, Dylan said, 'Maybe he wasn't a lying sack of excrement, after all.'