In a surrounding grove of evergreens, the boughs of the trees droop as

  if sodden with rain, and they appear charcoal gray instead of green.

  The large pinecones are tumorous and strange.

  A squat block building houses restrooms. He hurries through the cold

  downpour to the men's facilities.

  While the killer is at the first of three urinals, rain drumming loudly

  on the metal roof and the humid air heavy with the limy smell of damp

  concrete, a man in his early sixties enters. At a glance, thick white

  hair, deeply seamed face, bulbous nose patterned with broken

  capillaries. He goes to the third of the urinals.

  "Some storm, huh?" the stranger says.

  "A real rat drowner," the killer answers, having heard that phrase in a

  movie.

  "Hope it blows over soon."

  The killer notices that the older man is about his height and build.

  As he zips up his pants, he says, "Where you headed?"

  "Right now, Las Vegas, but then somewhere else and somewhere else after

  that. Me and the wife, we're retired, we pretty much live in that

  motorhome. Always wanted to see the country, and we sure in blue blazes

  are seeing it now. Nothing like life on the road, new sights every day,

  pure freedom."

  "Sounds great."

  At the sink, washing his hands, the killer stalls, wondering if he dares

  take the jabbering old fool right now, jam the body in a toilet stall.

  But with all the people in the parking lot, somebody might walk in

  unexpectedly.

  Closing his fly, the stranger says, "Only problem is, Frannie that's my

  wife--she hates for me to drive in the rain. Anything more than the

  tiniest drizzle, she wants to pull over and wait it out."

  He sighs. "This won't be a day we make a lot of miles."

  The killer dries his hands under a hot-air machine. "Well, Vegas isn't

  going anywhere."

  "True. Even when the good Lord comes on Judgment Day, there'll be

  blackjack tables open."

  "Hope you break the bank," the killer says, and leaves as the older man

  goes to the sink.

  In the Honda again, wet and shivering, he starts the engine and turns on

  the heater. But he doesn't put the car in gear.

  Three motorhomes are parked in the deep spaces along the curb.

  A minute later, Frannie's husband comes out of the men's room.

  Through the rippling rain on the windshield, the killer watches the

  white-haired man sprint to a large silver-and-blue Road King, which he

  enters through the driver's door at the front. Painted on the door is

  the outline of a heart, and in the heart are two names in fancy script,

  Jack and Frannie.

  Luck is not with Jack, the Vegas-bound retiree. The Road King is only

  four spaces away from the Honda, and this proximity makes it easier for

  the killer to do what must be done.

  The sky is purging itself of an entire ocean. The water falls straight

  down through the windless day, continuously shattering the mirrorlike

  puddles on the blacktop, gushing along the gutters in seemingly endless

  torrents.

  Cars and trucks come in off the highway, park for a while, leave, and

  are replaced by new vehicles that pull in between the Honda and the Road

  King.

  He is patient. Patience is part of his training.

  The engine of the motorhome is idling. Crystallized exhaust plumes rise

  from the twin tail pipes. Warm amber light glows at the curtained

  windows along the side.

  He envies their comfortable home on wheels, which looks cozier than any

  home he can yet hope to have. He also envies their long marriage.

  What would it be like to have a wife? How would it feel to be a beloved

  husband?

  After forty minutes, the rain still isn't easing off, but a flock of

  cars leaves. The Honda is the only vehicle parked on the driver's side

  of the Road King.

  Taking the pistol, he gets out of the car and walks quickly to the

  motorhome, watching the side windows in case Frannie or Jack parts the

  curtains and peers out at this most inopportune moment.

  He glances toward the restrooms. No one in sight.

  Perfect.

  He grips the cold chrome door handle. The lock isn't engaged.

  He scrambles inside, up the steps, and looks over the driver's seat.

  The kitchen is immediately behind the open cab, a dining nook beyond the

  kitchen, then the living room. Frannie and Jack are in the nook,

  eating, the woman with her back toward the killer.

  Jack sees him first, starts simultaneously to rise and slide out of the

  narrow booth, and Frannie looks back over her shoulder, more curious

  than alarmed. The first two rounds take Jack in the chest and throat.

  He collapses over the table. Spattered with blood, Frannie opens her

  mouth to scream, but the third hollow-point round drastically reshapes

  her skull.

  The silencer is attached to the muzzle, but it isn't effective any more.

  The baffles have been compressed. The sound accompanying each shot is

  only slightly quieter than regular gunfire.

  The killer pulls the driver's door shut behind him. He looks out at the

  sidewalk, the rainswept picnic area, the restrooms. No one in sight.

  He climbs over the gear-shift console, into the passenger's seat, and

  peers out the front window on that side. Only four other vehicles share

  the parking lot. The nearest is a Mack truck, and the driver must be in

  the men's room because no one is in the cab.

  It's unlikely that anyone could have heard the shots. The roar of the

  rain provides ideal cover.

  He swivels the command chair around, gets up, and walks back through the

  motorhome. He stops at the dead couple, touches Jack's back . .

  then Frannie's left hand, which lies on the table in a puddle of blood

  beside her lunch plate.

  "Goodbye," he says softly, wishing he could take more time to share this

  special moment with them.

  Having come this far, however, he is nearly frantic to exchange his

  clothes for those of Frannie's husband and get on the road again.

  He has convinced himself that a transmitter is, indeed, concealed in the

  rubber heels of his Rockport shoes, and that its signal is even now

  leading dangerous people to him.

  Beyond the living room is a bathroom, a large closet crammed with

  Frannie's clothes, and a bedroom with a smaller closet filled with

  Jack's wardrobe. In less than three minutes he strips naked and dresses

  in new underwear, white athletic socks, jeans, a red-and brown-checkered

  shirt, a pair of battered sneakers, and a brown leather jacket to

  replace his black one. The inseam of the pants is just right, the waist

  is two inches too big, but he cinches it in with a belt.

  The shoes are slightly loose though wearable, and the shirt and jacket

  fit perfectly.

  He carries the Rockport shoes into the kitchen. To confirm his

  suspicion, he takes a serrated bread knife from a drawer and saws off

  several thin layers of the rubber heel on one shoe until he discovers a

  shallow cavity packed tightly with electronics. A miniaturized

  transmitter is connected to a series of watch bat
teries that seems to

  extend all the way around the heel and perhaps the sole as well.

  Not paranoid after all.

  They're coming.

  Abandoning the shoes in a litter of rubber shavings on the kitchen

  counter, he urgently searches Jack's body and takes the money out of the

  old man's wallet. Sixty-two bucks. He searches for Frannie's purse,

  finds it in the bedroom. Forty-nine dollars.

  When he leaves the motorhome, the mottled gray-black sky is convex, bent

  low with the weight of the thunderheads. Rain by the megaton batters

  the earth.

  Coils of fog serpentine among the trunks of the pine trees and seem to

  be reaching for him as he splashes to the Honda.

  On the interstate again, speeding through the perpetual twilight beneath

  the storm, he turns the car heater to its highest setting and soon

  crosses the state line into Texas, where the flat land becomes

  impossibly flatter. Having shed the last of the meager belongings from

  his old life, he feels liberated. Soaked by the cold rain, he shivers

  uncontrollably, but he is also trembling with anticipation and

  excitement.

  His destiny lies somewhere to the west.

  He peels the plastic wrapper off a Slim Jim and eats while he drives.

  A subtle flavor, threaded through the primary taste of the cured meat,

  reminds him of the metallic odor of blood in the house in Kansas City,

  where he left the nameless dead couple in their enormous Georgian bed.

  The killer pushes the Honda as fast as he dares on the rain-slick

  highway, prepared to kill any cop who pulls him over. Reaching

  Amarillo, Texas, just after dusk on Sunday evening, he discovers that

  the Honda is virtually running on empty. He pulls into a truckstop only

  long enough to tank up, use the bathroom, and buy more food to take with

  him.

  After Amarillo, rocketing westward into the night, he passes Wildorado,

  with the New Mexico border ahead, and suddenly he realizes that he is

  crossing the badlands, in the heart of the Old West, where so many

  wonderful movies have been set. John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red

  Riler, Walter Brennan stealing scenes left and right. Rio Bravo. And

  Shane was set back there in Kansas-wasn't it. --Jack Palance blowing

  away Elisha Cook, Jr. decades before Dorothy took the tornado to Oz.

  Stagecoach, The Gunfighter, True Grit, Destry Rides Again, The

  Unforgi2en, High Plains Drifter, Yellow Sky, so many great movies, not

  all of them set in Texas but at least in the spirit of Texas, with John

  Wayne and Gregory Peck and Jimmy Stewart and Clint Eastwood, legends,

  mythical places now made real and waiting out there beyond the highway,

  obscured by rain and mist and darkness. It was almost possible to

  believe that those stories were being played out right now, in the

  frontier towns he was passing, and that he was Butch Cassidy or the

  Sundance Kid or some other gunman of an earlier century, a killer but

  not really a bad guy, misunderstood by society, forced to kill because

  of what had been done to him, a posse on his trail . . .

  Memories from theater screens and late-night movies on TV-which

  constitute by far the largest portion of the memories he

  possesses--flood lost so completely in those fantasies that he pays too

  little attention to his driving. Gradually he becomes aware that his

  speed has fallen to forty miles an hour. Trucks and cars explode past

  him, the wind of their passage buffeting the Honda, splashing dirty

  water across his windshield, their red taillights swiftly receding into

  the gloom.

  Assuring himself that his mysterious destiny will prove to be as great

  as any that John Wayne pursued in films, he accelerates.

  Empty and half-empty packages of food, crumpled and smeary and full of

  crumbs, are heaped on the passenger seat. They cascade onto the floor,

  under the dashboard, completely filling the leg space on that side of

  the car.

  From the litter, he extracts a new box of doughnuts. To wash them down

  he opens a warmish Pepsi.

  Westward. Steadily westward.

  An identity awaits him. He is going to be someone.

  Later Sunday, at home, after huge bowls of popcorn and two videos, Paige

  tucked the girls into bed, kissed them goodnight, and retreated to the

  open doorway to watch Marty as he settled down for that moment of the

  day he most cherished. Story time.

  He continued with the poem about Santa's evil twin, and the girls were

  instantly enraptured.

  "Reindeer sweep down out of the night.

  See how each is brimming with fright?

  Tossing their heads, rolling their eyes, these gentle animals are so

  very wise they know this Santa isn't their friend, but an imposter and

  far 'round the bend.

  They would stampede for all they're worth, dump this nut off the edge of

  the earth.

  But Santa's bad brother carries a whip, a club, a harpoon, a gun at his

  hip, a blackjack, an Uzi--you better run!-and a terrible, horrible,

  wicked raygun.

  "Raygun?" Charlotte said. "Then he's an alien!"

  "Don't be silly," Emily admonished her. "He's Santa's twin, so if he's

  an alien, Santa is an alien too, which he isn't."

  With the smug condescension of a nine-year-old who had long ago

  discovered Santa Claus wasn't real, Charlotte said, "Em, you have a lot

  to learn. Daddy, what's the raygun do? Turn you to mush?"

  "To stone," Emily said. She withdrew one hand from under the covers and

  revealed the polished stone on which she had painted a pair of eyes.

  "That's what happened to Peepers."

  "They land on the roof, quiet and sneaky.

  Oh, but this Santa is fearfully freaky.

  He whispers a warning to each reindeer, leaning close to make sure they

  hear, You have relatives back at the Pole-antlered, gentle, quite

  innocent souls.

  So if you fly away while I'm inside, back to the Pole on a plane I will

  ride.

  I'll have a picnic in the midnight sun, reindeer pie, pate, reindeer in

  a bun, reindeer salad and hot reindeer soup, oh, all sorts of tasty

  reindeer goop."

  "I hate this guy," Charlotte announced emphatically. She pulled her

  covers up to her nose as she had done the previous evening, but she

  wasn't genuinely frightened, just having a good time pretending to be

  spooked.

  "This guy, he was just born bad," Emily decided. "For sure, he couldn't

  be this way just 'cause his mommy and daddy weren't as nice to him as

  they should've been."

  Paige marveled at Marty's ability to strike the perfect note to elicit

  the kids' total involvement. If he'd given her the poem to review

  before he'd started reading it, Paige would have advised that it was a

  little too strong and dark to appeal to young girls.

  So much for the question of which was superior--the insights of the

  psychologist or the instinct of the storyteller.

  "At the chimney, he looks down the bricks, but that entrance is strictly

  for hicks.

  With all his tools, a way in can be found for a fat bearded burglar out

  on the town.

 
From roof to yard to the kitchen door, he chuckles about what he has in

  store for the lovely family sleeping within.

  He grins one of his most nasty grins.

  oh, what a creeh a scum, and a louse.

  He's breaking into the Stillwater house."

  "Our place!" Charlotte squealed.

  "I knew!" Emily said.

  Charlotte said, "You did not."

  "Yes, I did."

  "Did not."

  "Did too. That's why I'm sleeping with Peepers, so he can protect me

  until after Christmas."

  They insisted that their father read the whole thing from the beginning,

  all verses from both nights. As Marty began to oblige, Paige faded out

  of the doorway and went downstairs to put away the leftover popcorn and

  straighten up the kitchen.

  The day had been perfect as far as the kids were concerned, and it had

  been good for her as well. Marty had not suffered another episode,

  which allowed her to convince herself that the fugue had been a

  singularity--frightening, inexplicable, but not an indication of a

  serious degenerative condition or disease.

  Surely no man could keep pace with two such energetic children,