“Jackie?” came his mother’s voice from the living room as he shuffled in the door. “Is that you?”

“Yes, it’s me,” he said, his voice a harsh, rasping whisper that was nonetheless loud enough to be heard in the next room. “Good morning, Mom.”

“You’re not working today?”

He shut the door against the early morning sun. “No, the ticket I was on ended yesterday, and they didn’t give me a new one today. Do you want some breakfast?”

Once while driving down I-40 through Gallup, New Mexico, Digger had seen a highway numbered 666, extending north into hot, flat nowhere. That, he’d thought, was what AC/DC had meant when they sang “Highway to Hell.” Ever since, whenever anyone told him to go to hell, he’d say, “Okay, but you’ll have to get me to New Mexico, first.” They never got the joke, and by the time he’d explained it, it wasn’t funny anymore.

Then, of course, he’d gone to Hell for real, and the joke had really stopped being funny.

He was reminded of the old joke now, though, because he had decided the real entrance to Hell wasn’t Highway 666. It was Yodaville.

Although Zann usually loved shopping, she didn’t love shopping with her father. The man could spend half an hour looking at ties, comparing colors and prints. A tie is a statement, he said. He was fixated on the ability of the tie to deliver a subliminal message about power and influence or whatever, so every tie had to be compared to every other tie to determine what message it would send and whether that was a message he wanted to send.

As Zann’s eye wandered the rest of the store, looking for something, anything, of interest, she spotted Charlie Peters walking toward a nearby register with a dress shirt in his hand. She headed toward him. “Hey, Charlie,” she called.

Charlie turned toward her with something like panic in his eyes.

The beat-up old Hyundai rattled to a stop in front of the Best Western in Yuma, Arizona. Before Digger could step fully out of the car, Val was rushing out to meet him, looking stunning in a simple denim skirt and pink sleeveless blouse.

“Took you long enough,” she said. “Where’ve you been?”

“Long story,” Digger said.

“Well, I don’t have time to hear it,” Val said. “We need to get going.”