Michael woke hearing unintelligible words floating on the night wind. He had sprawled over into the passenger seat, the emergency brake handle gouging his thigh.
Sitting up, wide awake, he found he was alone in the car.
His breath had fogged the windows. With a corner of the blanket he tried to wipe a clear spot in the glass, but the smear was worse than the fog. He found a bottle of Windex between the seats and tried to squirt it on the glass, but the liquid had frozen to an icy slush and merely oozed all over his fingers. He dropped the bottle, cursing, and opened his door. Stepping out into the still air, he looked down the row of silent cars. Silent except for the voice, still chanting. Suddenly a woman rushed out from the open area between the rest rooms, glancing back over her shoulder as she hurried toward the cars.
Michael ran toward the brick shelter, hearing Lenore’s nightmare voice echoing louder, hearing car doors slam behind him.
“What’s going on in there?” a man called.
“Some crazy girl!” a woman answered.
The circular cement plaza was lined with vending machines, maps under Plexiglas, informative displays on the Great Plains. Lenore stood in the center of the circle with her arms reaching out to the sky. The moon, nearly full now, was visible through a weathered plastic skylight. She seemed to be pleading with it, screaming and shouting and weeping, tearing her hair and clothes. Her shirt was open, her breasts bared to the sky and the floodlights. But it wasn’t the moon she addressed.
Like a dark balloon bobbing against the plastic skylight, the black mandala hung tethered to her words, a thick black root buried deep in Lenore’s open throat.
Michael glanced back and saw a man moving cautiously forward from the cars, followed by the woman who had run from the plaza. He grabbed Lenore by the elbow and the mandala vanished. He pulled her into the dark behind the brick way-station. She wouldn’t stop raving, but there was no point wasting strength or time trying to shut her up. As soon as he got to the car, he thrust her in and started the engine. Headlights off, he drove down the short ramp toward the highway, leaning out his window for visibility. Glancing back as he gained the highway, he saw several figures gathering under the plaza floodlights.
It was one more scattered bit of havoc strewn in their trail. How long would it take the law to catch up with them if anyone ever managed to piece the loose links into a single chain? As soon as Tucker was discovered, he and Lenore would be wanted for questioning, no doubt of that; presumably the cops would interview Earl and start searching New York. But how could they ever tie that event to the North Carolina cop shot through the head with his own gun?
They couldn’t, that was a fact. At the very least, they should have time to get answers—and help—from Derek Crowe before anyone started looking for them. Tucker and Scarlet were always jaunting off for days at a time; they didn’t have anyone dependent on them, or anyone who’d come looking very hard.
For the time being, they were safe. He felt like a turtle in its shell, his whole world reduced to this tiny compartment that could carry him wherever he wished. His entire existence had sharpened to a single point. He had to stop thinking about his destination. It was waiting somewhere ahead; it would be there when the journey ended. First they had thousands of empty miles to deal with. Miles when he hardly dared sleep and couldn’t use the rest areas for fear of what Lenore would do in a crowd. At least he had this little world of his own, covered with protective symbols inside and out, a pentacle swinging from the rearview mirror, the cryptic Tarot emblem on the steering wheel. It gave him an infantile feeling of security: the roar of the engine was a mother’s heartbeat, a cat’s purr; it felt like a cradle rocking. He had come to resent even the necessity of pulling over to refuel, to eat.
The moon moved steadily ahead of him, downward, westward, followed by all the planets in their course. The car might have been another satellite, pulled by some force beyond his ability to identify—as inexplicable as gravity prior to Newton. Science had not managed to illuminate the universe’s moral nature; there was no road map for Michael’s real journey. But the mandalas knew the way, possessed of some insight that he lacked. Good, bad or neutral, they were, like gravity, irresistible.
25
Nicholas Strete, the reporter from the Bayrometer, was waiting for Derek just outside a North Beach coffee bar in the cold midday fog. At first he thought the kid was loitering, waiting for a bus or spare change; then he came forward grinning, and Derek saw he was carrying a laptop computer. He had expected a serious young man with a pencil behind his ear and a spiral notebook in his hand, ready to take shorthand notes. Strete looked childishly young, with long black hair, a silver nose ring, and clustered loops and gemmed studs in each ear. Bands of symmetrical tribal tattoos ran like chevrons from under the cuffs of his black leather jacket and out over the backs of his hands. But no mandalas, he was glad to see. “Mr. Crowe, I recognize you from your picture!” “Yes, hello.” He peered into the cafe, and Strete opened the door to usher him toward a booth in the corner. There were others at the table already, which caused him to hesitate. Friends of Strete’s? Journalistic parasites, hoping to sit in on the interview? “I hope you don’t mind,” Strete said as they approached the table; the other two rose to let him slide in if he wished, “but for this ‘Mandala Madness’ thing, I thought I’d do sort of a group interview. Originally I planned to just talk to you separately, then it occurred to me, more of a forum thing would be really cool.”
“Cool,” Derek echoed. The couple at the table were not much older than Strete. The male looked Asiatic, but when he extended his hand and greeted Derek, his voice was accented French. Derek’s skin crawled when he realized where he had heard it before.
“Mr. Crowe, at last we meet!” said the young man. “I am Etienne and this is Nina.”
“Club Mandala,” Derek said with undiluted venom.
“I assume you know each other,” said Strete.
“No, no! We have been waiting so long!”
“Too long,” said the woman, Nina. Her hair was black with red highlights, sleek and cut short, curving in toward her jaws like a helmet; she wore horn-rimmed black glasses, lipstick some shade of dark metallic green that reminded him of a tropical insect’s carapace. Her nails were painted to match. As she withdrew the hand Derek refused to take, he saw that her bare shoulder was brightly tattooed with a mandala that might have been taken intact from his book.
“I can’t believe your nerve,” he said in a low voice, glaring from one to the other.
“What’s that?” Strete said, swaying nervously between them. “Did I walk into something?”
“No, everything is fine!” Etienne said. “We relied on you to introduce us, Mr. Strete—this is so much better than a lawyer’s office! But now, I think, you can go.”
Strete bit his lip, looking baffled. “Uh… well, the article…”
“There’s plenty of time for that, don’t you worry,” Nina said, taking Strete by the shoulders and gently walking him away across the restaurant, leaning close to murmur in his ear. Derek watched them go. Etienne’s hand closed on his own shoulder.