As she drained the last of the beer, she glared at Dylan over the upturned bottle.

He said, 'No argument – you've got good self-esteem. I never said different. It's not you that you're negative about. It's the rest of the world.'

She looked as if she might hit him with the empty bottle, but then she put it down, slid it aside, and surprised him: 'That's fair enough. It's a hard world. And most people are hard, too. If you call that negative thinking, I call it realism.'

'Lots of people are hard, but not most. Most are just scared or lonely, or lost. They don't know why they're here or what's the purpose, the reason, so they wind up half dead inside.'

'I suppose you know the purpose, the reason,' she said.

'You make me sound smug.'

'Don't mean to. Just curious what you think it is.'

'Everyone has to figure it out for himself,' he said, which was in truth how he felt. 'And you're one who will because you want to.'

'Now you sound smug.' She looked as if she might whack him with the bottle, after all.

Shepherd picked up one of the three pats of unwrapped butter and popped it in his mouth.

When Jilly grimaced, Dylan said, 'Shep likes bread and butter, but not in the same bite. You don't want to see him eat a mayonnaise-and-bologna sandwich.'

'We're doomed,' she said.

Dylan sighed, shook his head, said nothing.

'Get real, okay? They start shooting at us, what rules will Shep have about how we're allowed to dodge the bullets? Always dodge left, never right. You can weave but you can't duck – unless it's a day of the week that has the letter u in it, in which case you can duck, but you can't weave. How fast can he run while reading, and what happens when you try to take the book away from him?'

'It won't be that way,' Dylan said, but he knew she was right.

Jilly leaned toward him, her voice lowering, but gaining in intensity what it lost in volume: 'Why won't it? Listen, you've got to admit, even if it were just you and me in this mess together, we'd be on a greased slope in glass shoes. So then hang a hundred-sixty-pound, butter-munching millstone around our necks, and what chance do we have?'

'He's not a millstone,' Dylan said stubbornly.

To Shep, she said, 'Sweetie, no offense, but if we have any hope of getting through this, the three of us, we've got to face facts, speak the truth. We lie to ourselves, we're dead. Maybe you can't help being a millstone, but maybe you can, and if you can, then you've got to work with us.'

Dylan said, 'We've always been a great team, me and Shep.'

'Team? Some team. You two couldn't run a three-legged sack race without the sack ending up on somebody's head.'

'He ain't heavy-'

'Oh, don't say it,' she interrupted. 'Don't you dare say it, O'Conner. don't you dare, you hope-drunk lunatic, you power-of-positive-thinking nutball.'

'He ain't heavy, he's my-'

'-idiot-savant brother,' she finished for him.

Patiently, quietly, Dylan explained: 'No. An idiot savant is mentally defective with a low IQ, but with an exceptional talent in one special field, such as the ability to solve complex mathematical problems at lightning speed or to play any musical instrument upon first picking it up. Shep's got a high IQ, and he's exceptional in more ways than one. He's just… some kind of autistic.'

'We're doomed,' she repeated.

Shepherd chewed another pat of butter with enthusiasm, all the while staring at his plate from a distance of just ten inches, as though he, like Dylan, had discovered the purpose of life, and as though that purpose were meat loaf.

Each time the door opened and a customer entered, Dylan tensed. The SUV crowd couldn't have tracked them this fast. And yet…

The waitress brought the second round of beers, and after Jilly drew cold comfort from a swallow of Sierra Nevada, she said, 'So we hole up somewhere around the Petrified Forest and… You said what? You said think?'

'Think,' Dylan confirmed.

'Think about what, besides how to stay alive?'

'Maybe we can figure out how to track down Frankenstein.'

'You forget he's dead?' she asked.

'I mean, track down who he was before they killed him.'

'We don't even have a name, except the one we made up.'

'But he was evidently a scientist. Medical research. Developing psychotropic drugs, psychotropic stuff, psychotropic something, which gives us a key word. Scientists write papers, produce articles for journals, give lectures. They leave a trail.'

'Intellectual breadcrumbs.'

'Yeah. And if I think about it, I might remember more of what the bastard said back there in my motel room, other key words. With enough key words, we can go on the Internet and winnow through the researchers working to enhance brain function, related areas.'

'I'm no tech whiz,' she said. 'Are you?'

'No. But this search doesn't take technical expertise, just patience. Even some of those stuffy science journals run photos of their contributors, and if he was near the top of his field, which it seems he must've been, then he'll have gotten newspaper coverage. As soon as we find a photo, we have a name. Then we can read about him and find out what he's been working on.'

'Unless his research was all top secret, like the Manhattan Project, like the formula for fudge-covered Oreos.'

'There you go again.'

'Even if we get the full skinny on him,' she said, 'how does that help us?'

'Maybe there's a way to undo what he did to us. An antidote or something.'

'Antidote. What – we toss frog tongues, bat wings, and lizard eyes in a big cauldron, stew them up with some broccoli?'

'Here comes Negative Jackson, vortex of pessimism. The folks at DC Comics ought to develop a new superhero around you. They go in for brooding, depressive superheroes these days.'

'And you're a Disney book. All sugar and talking chipmunks.'

In a Wile E. Coyote T-shirt, hunched over his dinner plate, Shep snickered, either because the Disney crack rang his bell or because he found the remaining meat loaf amusing.

Shepherd wasn't always as disconnected as he appeared to be.

'What I'm saying,' Dylan continued, 'is that maybe his work was controversial. And if so, then it's possible some of his colleagues opposed his research. One of them will understand what was done to us – and might be willing to help.'

'Yeah,' she said, 'and if a lot of money is needed to finance the research to find this antidote, we can always get a few billion from your uncle Scrooge McDuck.'

'You have a better idea?'

She stared at him as she drank her beer. One swallow. Two.

'I didn't think so,' he said.

Later, when the waitress brought the check, Jilly insisted on paying for the two beers that she'd ordered.

From her attitude, Dylan deduced that paying her own way was an issue of honor with her. Further, he suspected that she would no more graciously accept a nickel for a parking meter than she would take ten bucks for two beers and a tip.

After putting the tenner on the table, she counted the contents of her wallet. The calculation didn't require much time or higher mathematics. 'I'll need to find an ATM, make a withdrawal.'

'No can do,' he said. 'Those guys who blew up your car – if they have any kind of law-enforcement connections, which they probably do, then they'll be able to follow a plastic trail. And quick.'

'You mean I can't use credit cards, either?'

'Not for a while, anyway.'

'Big trouble,' she muttered, staring glumly into her wallet.

'It's not big trouble. Not considering our other problems.'

'Money trouble,' she said solemnly, 'is never little trouble.'

In that one statement, Dylan could read whole chapters from the autobiography of her childhood.