Less than five minutes after Blockhead and his nameless sidekick arrived at the pearly gates with résumés that made Saint Peter call for the celestial security guards, I topped another rise and looked down another slope at a roadblock formed by two sheriffs-department cars parked nose to nose.

Although frightened, I was not a fraction as terrified as when we were playing let’s-shoot-each-other-in-the-head at the Landulf house. I had been through so much in the past seventy-two hours that I earned my good-scout medal for nerves of steel and was working on my titanium certification.

In fact, I have to admit that I got a cheap thrill from the fact that this police roadblock was in my honor. All my life, I had been a good boy, living by the rules: making my bed each morning, flossing my teeth twice a day, eating my vegetables dutifully…. When I was a lad and then a single young man, all those girls who liked bad boys— which, strangely enough, seemed to be most of them—thought of me as a boring nerd, or thought of me not at all. If they could see me now—head shaved, carrying an unregistered concealed weapon, driving a vehicle stolen from a federal agent—they would swoon, become giddy with desire, and perhaps even throw their panties at me as if I were a rock star.

In truth, of course, I remained a good boy, trying my best to do the right thing. In this inverted world of the twenty-first century, the authorities were the unprincipled thugs, and the armed fugitive in the stolen car was a churchgoing family man who had a dog named Lassie.

As we approached the roadblock, I worried that having a dog beside me would blow my cover, but I didn’t want the sheriff’s deputies to see me stop and put her in the trunk. Then I decided that a psychopathic agent for a psychopathic federal agency might well have a service dog to assist him in chasing down and savaging the innocent.

That scenario would have been more plausible if Lassie were a Doberman or a German shepherd, weighed a hundred pounds more than she did, and were foaming at the mouth with rabies. But she was what she was, and I came slowly to a stop at the barricade with every intention of claiming that beside me sat a canine as highly trained as a circus bear and a thousand times more dangerous.

The four men manning the roadblock were uniformed sheriffs-department deputies. They looked wholesome, earnest, and sane. Two of them were leaning against the back end of a patrol car, drinking coffee and chatting.

Earlier, in the cellar of the Landulf house, Shearman Waxx told Brock that because he needed every man under his command to conduct the search for us, the two roadblocks would be manned solely by sheriffs-department personnel, and for once he was not lying like a snake in Eden. No plainclothes goons were in sight.

I was prepared to flash Rink’s badge and ID, held so that one of my fingers covered his face in the photo, but the deputy at the point position reacted to the triskelion on the windshield and waved me around the barricade without delay.

The shoulder of the road was wide here, with sufficient room on the right to squeeze past the patrol cars, once the two deputies with the coffee cups politely moved out of my way. I almost gave them a thumbs-up sign, but then decided that might get me shot. Instead I remained stone-faced and ignored them, as I imagined an arrogant fed might disdain members of a rural police force, whom he regarded as hicks.

Perhaps eighty feet beyond the roadblock, a man walked in the northbound lane. Although his back was to me, I recognized Shearman Waxx. Ahead of him, past a couple of stone pines, off the road in a rest stop with a graveled area for parking and two picnic tables on a grassy sward, stood the black Hummer.

He must have been recently conferring with the four deputies. If I had arrived at the barricade two minutes sooner, Waxx would have recognized Lassie. Then the dog, Milo, Penny, and I would have been on our way to a torture chamber and thereafter to a wood chipper.

My initial impulse was to run him down and then stand on the accelerator, racing into the misty morning with the hope that, before a sheriffs-department cruiser caught up with us, an alien ship from a faraway star would levitate us into its cargo hold and whisk us away to be studied.

Repressing that urge, I did something riskier than hit-and-run. As Waxx opened the driver’s door and climbed into the Hummer, I drove into the rest area and parked twenty feet behind him, where the stone pines partially screened the sedan from the men at the roadblock.

I could discern his silhouette in the driver’s seat. He was alone in the Hummer, having assigned the three other men at Landulf’s house to the search for us.

On the night Tray Durant murdered my family, when spared from death, I was six years old. Now Milo, six years old, condemned by the order of Shearman Waxx, was mine to save or lose. Driven by intuition, we had come north less on the run than on the hunt for information that might empower us. In the mysterious roundness of all things, Waxx might here be delivered into my hands, as I had been delivered from the hands of Tray.

Lassie curled up on the passenger seat to take a nap, and I got out of the car, wiping my face with one hand as if I were weary from long hours of committing whatever monstrous crimes one of the people-of-the-red-arms committed on an average workday. Turning my back to the Hummer, I raised my arms high, stretched elaborately, and finally sauntered around to the back of the sedan.

When I opened the trunk, Penny said excitedly, incoherently, “Lassie, she was here— The lid closed— Panting in the dark— She was— Then she—”

“Later, later, later,” I insisted, taking her by the arm as she clambered out of the trunk. “Crouch down, use the raised lid as cover, Waxx is sitting in the Hummer like twenty feet away.”

Milo popped out of the trunk as if on a spring and huddled with his mother.

In perhaps twenty seconds or less, I told them what we were going to do.

Milo said, “Cool,” and Penny said, “Oh, my God,” and leaving the trunk lid raised, I walked around the sedan and headed for the Hummer.