Shouting for Milo, Penny and I flew from the Explorer as if we had been ejected by a device installed by James Bond’s favorite car customizer.

If the boy was in the garage, he apparently was in no condition to answer our calls. Penny hurried to search in, under, and around the sedan in the second parking stall, while I returned to the house.

I thought of John Clitherow. He had been Waxx’s primary target, but the critic had first taken John’s family.

The greatest punishment is not your own death but instead the loss of those you love. How much worse that loss must be if you have to live with the bitter knowledge that those who trusted and relied on you had been dealt early deaths as surrogates for you, punished for your offenses.

Waxx was not merely a homicidal sociopath but also, in the fullest sense, a terrorist.

In the doomed house, in the sparkling laundry room that would soon be filthy rubble, in the kitchen that momentarily would itself be cooked, in response to my ever more frantic shouts, Milo finally called out—“Yo, Dad!”—and entered at a run from the downstairs hall.

He carried Lassie’s favorite toy, which we had inadvertently left behind: a plush purple bunny with huge startled eyes and floppy ears and a white puffball tail. It was cute, and it had a squeaker in its tummy, and the dog adored it, but it wasn’t a toy worth dying for.

With more athletic grace than I had ever before exhibited, I scooped Milo off the kitchen floor and into my arms, swiveled toward the laundry room, and ran.

Giggling and exuberantly squeaking the bunny, Milo said, “What’s happening?”

“The place is gonna blow,” I said.

The squeaking alerted Penny. By the time we reached the garage, she stood by the open driver’s door of the Explorer.

Her eyes were even wider than those of the startled rabbit. “No time to belt him in, Cubby, hold him in your lap!”

Even though the door had rolled all the way up and offered no obstacle, I felt relieved that she would be driving. Two facts—that the SUV had a reverse gear, that the back wall of the garage remained intact—seemed to tempt Fate too much for me to drive.

Milo had wanted to ride shotgun, and now he shared that position with me. He sat in my lap, and I wrapped both arms around him.

Folding his arms around the bunny and holding it against his chest, the boy said to the toy, “Don’t worry. Dad won’t let anything happen to us.”

Geniuses, even six-year-old prodigies, don’t believe that toys live any kind of life. Milo talked not to the rabbit, but reassured himself.

I had left the key in the ignition. When Penny tried to start the engine, she got from it a cough, a cough, a groan.

She glanced at me as I glanced at her, and we didn’t need to be telepathic to know we shared the same thought: Waxx had sabotaged the vehicle.