Dean Koontz - By the Light of the Moon

This time the magnet proved to be not a grandmotherly woman in a candy-striped uniform, but an aging cowboy wearing tan Levi's and a chambray shirt. Arriving just as the guy settled behind the wheel of a Mercury Mountaineer, Dylan prevented him from shutting the door.

From the psychic trace on this door handle, he again encountered the heart-deadening loneliness familiar from the imprint back at the restaurant, a despondency bordering on despair.

A lifetime of outdoor work had given the man in the Mountaineer a cured-leather face, but the decades of sun that crimped and cockled his skin had not left any light in him, and the years of wind had not piped much life into his bones. Burnt out, worn thin, he seemed to be a scraggy gnarl of tumbleweed tenuously rooted to the earth, waiting only for the gust that would break him loose from life.

The old man didn't tip his Stetson as he'd tipped it at Jilly upon leaving the restaurant, but he didn't react with irritation or alarm, either, when Dylan blocked the door. He had the look of a guy who had always been able to take care of himself, regardless of the nature of the threat or tribulation – but there was also about him the aura of a man who didn't much care what happened next.

'You've been searching for something,' Dylan said, although he had no idea what words were coming from him until he'd spoken them and could afterward review their meaning.

'Don't need Jesus, son,' the cowboy replied. 'Already found him twice.' His azurite-blue eyes took in more light than they gave out. 'Don't need trouble, either, nor do you.'

'Not something,' Dylan corrected. 'You're looking for someone.'

'Isn't just about everybody, one way or another?'

'You've been looking a long time,' Dylan said, though he still had no idea where this might be leading.

Through a squint that seemed wise enough to filter truth from illusion, the old man studied him. 'What's your name, son?'

'Dylan O'Conner.'

'Never heard of you. So how'd you hear of me?'

'Didn't hear of you, sir. I don't know who you are. I just…' Words that had come without volition now failed him on command. After a hesitation, he realized that he would have to tell a piece of the truth, reveal part of his secret, if they were to proceed. 'You see, sir, I have these moments of… intuition.'

'Don't count on it at the poker table.'

'Not just intuition. I mean… I know things when there's no way to know. I feel, I know, and… I make connections.'

'Some sort of spiritist, you're sayin'?'

'Sir?'

'You're a diviner, soothsayer, psychic – that sort of thing?'

'Maybe,' Dylan said. 'It's just this weirdness that's happened to me lately. I don't make money at it.'

Those worn features that seemed incapable of a smile might have formed one, although it was drawn lightly, as with a feather on the weathered sandstone of his face, and was so short-lived that it might have been only the tic of a wince. 'If what I'm hearin' is your usual pitch, I'm amazed you don't have to pay folks to listen.'

'You think you've come to the end of whatever road you've been following.' Once more Dylan was unaware of what he would say before he said it. 'You think you've failed. But maybe you haven't.'

'Go on.'

'Maybe she's near right now.'

'She?'

'I don't know, sir. That just came to me. But whoever she is, you know who I mean.'

That analytic squint fixed Dylan once more, this time with a certain merciless quality like the piercing scrutiny of a police detective. 'Step back a piece. Give me room to get out.'

As the old man exited the big Mercury SUV, Dylan surveyed the night for Jilly and Shep. They had ventured a few feet farther from the restaurant since he'd last seen them, but only far enough for Jilly to retrieve the copy of Great Expectations that Dylan had dropped. She stood at Shepherd's side, watchful, in the wound-tight posture of one who wondered if this time, too, there would be knives.

He looked out toward the street, as well. No black Suburbans. Nonetheless, he sensed they had stayed too long in Safford.

'Name's Ben Tanner.'

When Dylan looked away from Shep and Jilly, he discovered the old man offering one worn and callused hand.

He hesitated, concerned that a handshake would expose him to a supercharged version of the bleak loneliness and the despondency that he had sensed in Tanner's psychic imprint, emotion a thousand times more intense by direct contact than what he'd experienced by exposure to the spoor, so powerful that it would knock him to his knees.

He couldn't remember if he had touched Marjorie when he'd found her standing beside the pill-littered kitchen table, but he didn't believe he had. And Kenny? After administering baseball-bat justice, Dylan demanded handcuff and padlock keys from the pants-wetting knife maniac; however, after producing the keys from a shirt pocket, Kenny had given them to Jilly. To the best of Dylan's recollection, he had not touched the vicious little coward.

No strategy to avoid Tanner's hand would leave their fragile rapport undamaged, so Dylan shook it – and discovered that what he had felt so poignantly in the man's latent psychic imprint could not be felt in equal measure, or at all, in the man himself. The mechanism of his sixth sense was no less mysterious than the source of it.

'Come down from Wyoming near a month ago,' Tanner said, 'with some leads, but they had no more substance than gnat piss.'

Dylan reached past Tanner to touch the handle on the driver's door.

'Been rattlin' from one end of Arizona to the other, and now I'm on my way home, where maybe I should've stayed.'

In the psychic trace, Dylan felt again the geography of a burnt-out soul, that continent of ashes, that despondent world of soundless solitude he had encountered when, hand to door, he had left the restaurant.

Although he had not consciously framed the question, Dylan heard himself asking, 'How long has your wife been dead?'

The reappearance of the intimidating squint suggested that the old man still suspected a con, but the pertinence of the question lent Dylan some credibility. 'Emily's been gone eight years,' Tanner said in the matter-of-fact tone with which men of his generation felt obliged to conceal their tenderest emotions, but in spite of the squint, those azurite eyes betrayed the drowning depth of his grief.

To have known by some form of clairvoyance that this stranger's wife was dead, to have known it rather than merely to have suspected it, to know intimately the devastation that this death had wrought in Tanner, made Dylan feel like a brazen intruder exploring the most private spaces of a victim's house, like a sneak who picked the locks on diaries and read the secrets of others. This repugnant aspect of his uncanny talent far outweighed the exhilaration he had felt after the successful confrontation at Marjorie's house, but he couldn't suppress these revelations, which rose into his awareness like water bubbling at a wellhead.

'You and Emily started looking for the girl twelve years ago,' Dylan said, though he didn't know to what girl he referred or yet grasp the nature of their search.

Grief made way for surprise. 'How do you know these things?'

'I said "girl," but she'd have been thirty-eight even then.'

'Fifty now,' Tanner confirmed. For a moment he seemed to be more amazed by the number of lost decades than by the knowledge that Dylan had acquired by divination: 'Fifty. My God, where does a life go?'

Releasing the door handle, Dylan was drawn away from the Mercury by an unknown but more powerful attractant, and once again he was on the move. Almost as an afterthought, he called back to Tanner, 'This way,' as though he had a clue as to where he might be going.

Prudence no doubt counseled the old man to climb in his truck and lock the doors, but his heart was involved now, and prudence had little influence with him. Hurrying at Dylan's side, he said, 'We figured we'd find her sooner than later. Then we learned the system was dead-set against us.'