Luke wiped his brow and shut off the ignition. The clock in the dash moved from 10:28 to 10:34. He got out of the car to stretch his legs. His knees popped disagreeably. He wasn’t old—Jesus, forty-two wasn’t old, was it?—but sometimes he felt it.

Vehicles ripped by, making the ground shake. Every speeding semi was a minor earthquake. Luke waited. He saw a roadrunner with a rattlesnake in its beak, and watched a hawk swoop to the ground and come up empty.

“You okay, Kitty?”

“Yeah, sorry,” Kitty replied, her voice wet and cracked. “Be there soon.”

For a brief time there were no vehicles in either direction. The Mojave silence was vast, disturbed only by large birds cawing and the distinctly heartbreaking sound of Kitty in tears.

They got moving again, the road quieter as they approached the Dead Mountains. Kitty sat crisscross-applesauce in her seat, her hair hanging over her face. She let out a deep sigh every other mile.

“How long was I asleep?” she asked.

“Not long,” Luke replied. “Ten minutes, maybe.”

“That’s all it took.” She shook her head, the sunlight winking off the lenses of her shades. “It’s like he’s waiting just inside my mind. Like a serial killer behind a door. A monster in the closet.”

“It’ll get easier,” Luke said.

“I hope so.”

“It will. You may need to talk to someone when you get back to Kentucky. A professional.” He nodded encouragingly and tapped his fingers on the wheel. “It’ll take time, but the right help, the right meds . . .”

Encouraging words, but he and Kitty were probably thinking the same thing: that only four months had passed since he’d tried to kill himself in this very car.

They took U.S. 95 north, getting closer to Nueva Vida. The possibility of seeing the bat-faced man became enticingly real, and Luke’s anxiety ripened accordingly. He was suddenly sure that if he turned on the radio, he would hear one of Lisa’s songs—the universe’s way of urging him along.

“This heat,” Kitty said, and sighed.

“I know.”

They entered Nueva Vida fifteen minutes later. The first thing they saw was an elderly cop perched on a stepladder, cutting down a dead coyote that had been strung by its hind legs to the welcome sign.

Population 880. It was as if the more affluent homes and businesses had stolen away in the night, leaving only the loose and struggling pieces: a gas station with two pumps and a caged mountain lion, a motel called Lazies with a sign that promised only beds and tv, a couple of restaurants, a convenience store, a trailer park with a green-water swimming pool and a thousand yapping dogs. Norteño blared from a closet-sized amp set up in the bed of an old pickup truck. Hispanic grandmothers danced around it, their bare feet stirring puffs of dust. Kids threw stones at cans and bottles.