Accelerating the pace of resolution, Shep worked the jigsaw ambidextrously, keeping two pieces in play at all times. His right hand and his left swooped over and under each other, fluttered across the pile of loose pieces in the box, flew sparrow-quick to blue sky or cherry trees, or to unfinished corners of the temple roof, and back again to the box, as if in a frenzy of nest-building.

'Doodle-deedle-doodle,' Shep said.

Dylan groaned.

'Doodle-deedle-doodle.'

If past experience was a reliable guide, Shep would repeat this bit of nonsense hundreds or even thousands of times, for at least the next half-hour and perhaps until he fell asleep nearer to dawn than to midnight.

'Doodle-deedle-doodle.'

In less dangerous times – which fortunately included virtually all of his life to date, until he'd encountered the lunatic with the syringe – Dylan had occasionally endured these fits of repetition by playing a rhyming game with whatever concatenation of meaningless syllables currently obsessed his brother.

'Doodle-deedle-doodle.'

I'd like to eat a noodle, Dylan thought.

'Doodle-deedle-doodle.'

And not just one lonely noodle-

'Doodle-deedle-doodle.'

But the whole kit and caboodle.

Bound to a chair, full of stuff, sought by assassins: This was not the time for rhyme. This was a time for clear thinking. This was a time for an ingenious plan and effective action. The moment had come to seize the pocketknife somehow, some way, and to do amazing, wonderfully clever, knock-your-socks-off things with it.

'Doodle-deedle-doodle.'

Let's bake a noodle strudel.

In his inimitable green and silent way, Fred thanked Jillian for the plant food that she gave him and for the carefully measured drink with which she slaked his thirsty roots.

Secure in his handsome pot, the little guy spread his branches in the soft glow of the desk lamp. He brought a measure of grace to a motel room furnished in violently clashing colors that might have been interpreted as a furious interior designer's loud statement of rebellion against nature's harmonious palette. In the morning, she would move him into the bathroom while she showered; he reveled in the steam.

'I'm thinking of using a lot more of you in the act,' Jilly informed him. 'I've cooked up some new bits we can do together.'

During her performance, she usually brought Fred onstage for her final eight minutes, set him on a tall stool, and introduced him to the audience as her latest beau and as the only one she had ever dated who neither embarrassed her in public nor tried to make her feel inadequate about one aspect or another of her anatomy. Perching on a stool beside him, she discussed modern romance, and Fred made the perfect straight man. He gave new meaning to the term deadpan reaction, and the audience loved him.

'Don't worry,' Jilly said. 'I won't put you in goofy-looking pots or insult your dignity in any way.'

Whether cactus or sedum, no other succulent plant could have radiated trust more powerfully than did Fred.

With her significant other having been fed and watered and made to feel appreciated, Jilly slung her purse over her shoulder, grabbed the empty plastic ice bucket, and left the room to get ice and to feed quarters to the nearest soda-vending machine. Lately, she'd been in the grip of a root-beer jones. Although she preferred diet soda, she would drink regular when that was the only form of root beer that she could find: two bottles, sometimes three a night. If she had no choice but the fully sugared variety, then she would eat nothing but dry toast for breakfast, to compensate for the indulgence.

Fat asses plagued the women in her family, by which she wasn't referring to the men they married. Her mother, her mother's sisters, and her cousins all had fetchingly tight buns when they were in their teens, or even in their twenties, but sooner rather than later, each of them looked as if she had shoved a pair of pumpkins down the back of her pants. They rarely gained weight in the thighs or the stomach, only in the gluteus maximus, medius, and minimus, resulting in what her mother jokingly referred to as the gluteus muchomega. This curse was not passed down from generation to generation on the Jackson side of the family, but on the Armstrong side – the maternal side – along with male-pattern baldness and a sense of humor.

Only Aunt Gloria, now forty-eight, had escaped being afflicted with the Armstrong ass past thirty. Sometimes Gloria attributed her enduringly lean posterior to the fact that she had made a novena to the Blessed Virgin three times each year since the age of nine, when she'd first become aware that sudden colossal butt expansion might lie in her future; at other times, she thought that maybe a periodic flirtation with bulimia had something to do with the fact that she could still sit on a bicycle seat without requiring the services of a proctologist to dismount.

Jilly, too, was a believer, but she'd never made a novena in the hope of petitioning for a merciful exemption from gluteus muchomega. Her reticence in this matter arose not because she doubted that such a petition would be effective, but only because she was incapable of raising the issue of her butt in a spiritual conversation with the Holy Mother.

She had practiced bulimia for two miserable days, when she was thirteen, before deciding that daily volitional vomiting was worse than living two thirds of your life in stretchable ski pants, with a quiet fear of narrow doorways. Now she pinned all her hopes on dry toast for breakfast and wizardly advances in plastic surgery.

The ice and vending machines were in an alcove off the covered walkway that served her room, no more than fifty feet from her door. A faint breeze, coming off the desert, was too hot to cool the night and so dry that she half expected her lips to parch and split with an audible crackle; hissing faintly, this current of air seemed to serpentine along the covered passage as if it, too, were searching for something with which to wet its scaly lips.

En route, Jilly encountered a rumpled, kindly-looking man who, apparently returning from the automated oasis, had just purchased a can of Coke and three bags of peanuts. His eyes were the faded blue of a Sonoran or a Mojave sky in August, when even Heaven can't hold its color against the intense bleaching light, but he wasn't native to the region, for his round face was pink, not cancerously tan, seamed by excess weight and by time rather than by the merciless Southwest sun.

Although his eyes didn't focus on Jilly, and though he wore the distracted half-smile of someone lost in a jungle of complex but pleasant thoughts, the man spoke as he approached her: 'If I'm dead an hour from now, I'd sure regret not having eaten a lot of peanuts before the lights went out. I love peanuts.'

This statement was peculiar at best, and Jilly was a young woman of sufficient experience to know that in contemporary America you should not reply to strangers who, unbidden, revealed their fears of mortality and their preferred deathbed snacks. Maybe you were dealing with a blighted soul who had been made eccentric by the stresses of modern life. More likely, however, you were being confronted by a drug-blasted psychopath who wanted to carve a crack pipe from your femur and use your skin as the cloth for a decorative cozy to cover his favorite beheading ax. Nevertheless, perhaps because the guy appeared so harmless, or maybe because Jilly herself was a tad wiggy after too long a period during which all her conversation had been conducted with a jade plant, she replied: 'For me, it's root beer. When my time is up, I want to cross a River Styx of pure root beer.'