The headlights half blinded him, but he saw the silhouettes of two men at the front of the Suburban. A third stood just forward of the driver’s door.

Tom didn’t try to sprint off the highway and into the dark land because even gentle terrain could be treacherous to a blind runner.

Besides, he didn’t run from anything, neither from violence junkies cruising in search of kicks nor from a tsunami. If someone or something killed him, he would only be getting the death that he wanted but that he had no courage to embrace by suicide.

He walked toward them, keeping his head high.

When they got a good look at his face, with the grisly details no doubt exaggerated by the extreme light and shadows, one of them said, “Holy hell, Jackie, look at this,” and the one named Jackie said to Tom, “Hey, where you goin’, Frankenstein?”

“Leave me alone,” he warned, and kept moving toward them as he raised the pistol from his side and transferred it to his right hand.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” shouted the guy by the driver’s door. “Stop right there, Karloff. I got you covered.”

To prove his claim, he fired a round over Tom’s head. The report sounded like a rifle.

Through the years, each time that he committed an armed robbery with an unloaded gun, Tom expected his victim to be carrying heat and to do him the favor of shooting him dead.

Here seemed to be the men who would set him free at last. He was surprised, therefore, when he didn’t continue toward them.

“Drop the gun,” the shooter commanded.

Jackie’s pal said, “Blow his brains out, George, do it.”

George warned Tom, “I’ll do it. Drop the gun or I’ll do it.”

Instead of casting the pistol aside, Tom tucked it under his belt, against his abdomen.

Less than twenty feet separated him from the two men in front of the Suburban. Wary, they moved toward him, careful to remain out of their armed companion’s line of fire.

“I’m not alone,” Tom said.

Jackie laughed, and the guy beside him said, “Problem is—that’s an imaginary friend you been talking to, rummy. What’ve you got in the backpack? Take it off and give us a look.”

Out of the night to Tom’s left, from the long slope that led down to the sea, came a low and sinister form, its eyes radiant with the reflected beams of the headlights. A lean coyote with its sharp teeth bared.

The beast didn’t even glance at Tom Bigger. With boldness not characteristic of the species, it moved menacingly toward those who were threatening him.

“Is that a dog?” Jackie asked, and his pal said, “Shit, no.”

As if conjured with invocations and pentagrams, another coyote slunk out of the darkness, close behind the first. And then a third.

Backing away, Jackie said, “Scare them off, George.”

The shooter fired a round in the air, but the animals weren’t frightened.

From the deep dark and the tall grass, a fourth coyote, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh materialized.

The rifleman, who was the driver, got behind the wheel of the Suburban, and the slam of his door triggered the retreat of the other men to the safety of the vehicle.

Now that he was the only prey remaining, Tom Bigger expected the pack to turn on him, but their attention remained fixed on the three occupants of the SUV.

For a minute or two, the driver waited, surely expecting the coyotes to roam away into the night. But the seven maintained their vigil, eerily still.

Through the windshield, Tom could see the two men in the front seat, the third leaning forward from behind them. They appeared to be arguing.

The driver released the emergency brake, put the Suburban in gear, and pulled onto the highway. He drove south, back the way he had come.

Tom watched until the taillights dwindled from view.

He took the unloaded pistol from under his waistband, held it at his side, and walked north.

The coyotes accompanied him through the moonlight, three ahead of him, one on each side, and two behind.

So high that the sound of its engines didn’t reach the earth, a jet transited the sky from west to east, and for Tom its lights signified that his journey, too, would continue, must continue.

After a quarter of a mile, the coyotes moved away from him in single file, diagonally across the blacktop.

He stopped to watch them leave.

One by one, the seven leaped across a drainage swale beyond the farther shoulder of the highway, eastbound as silently as the jet, and vanished into a moonlit meadow.

He did not know what to think of them.

After they were gone, he walked north again for about a mile, until he came to a small stone bridge over a currently dry creek. He took off his backpack and placed it on the waist-high wall of the bridge.

He put away the pistol. From the upper compartment of the pack, he took one of the six bottles of tequila, each of which was wrapped in its own stuffsack.

Two cars appeared in the south, but the thugs were not returning with reinforcements. A sedan and a pickup swept past without slowing.

Tom twisted the cap, broke the tax stamp, opened the pint. He brought it to his nose and inhaled.

The aroma made his mouth water and his stomach flutter with anticipation. The shakes took him, so he held the tequila with both hands.

After he stood there for a while, perhaps for five minutes, he screwed the cap back on the bottle. He took no satisfaction in his self-control. He knew his willpower would not long endure.

Cursing himself for his sudden temperance, he threw the bottle off the bridge. He heard it shatter on the stones in the waterless waterway.

He zipped shut the storm flap, shouldered the backpack once more, and adjusted the hip belt.

Soon twelve hours would have passed since the sobering incident in the bluff-top rest area, above his cave home. He’d been awake for twenty hours, and he’d walked a long way in the past four. He should have been asleep on his feet, but he was awake, alert, and grimly focused.

He knew where he must go. A long, long walk remained ahead of him.

He knew what he must do. The task would not be easy. He might not have the courage to complete it.

As Tom Bigger walked north into the last few hours of the night, he was overcome again by the feeling that he was not alone, that he was followed step by step, and not merely by coyotes. And he was afraid.

Thirty-nine