We stay at a hotel at that night, some redone Victorian in Mendocino Village. Arabella claims a bed to herself, and Paul and Kelly decide they'd rather just smoke on the balcony. Arthur stays up with them most of the night, which leaves me in an empty double room, making time with the darkness on the ceiling.

No voices come to me in the night; no psychic buzzing tells me someone's scanning my thoughts. I'm guessing Gary's going to disable that little dragnet until he's sure the Inquisition has swept on through the county. I sit and imagine the things happening in his world, the six little dreams marching back out of his life, all the preparation he has to lay at the feet of Anna Doring...And then, of course, what I'm going to be doing to him once we're on the road...

This is the end for Master Gary. He wants to believe he was the first in a franchise, but after Barg gets word up the chain of command he'll be lucky if he can believe in controlling his bowels. No-one on high is going to think what he did is a good idea; and even if they did, how will they implement it? The peacekeepers will know the concept is circulating; the kidnappings will leap face-first into the headlines, and there'll be concerned citizens everywhere ready to call an Amber Alert at a moment's notice. Things will go back to a paranoid, nauseated version of normal, and I'll go back to teaching teenage girls how to be psychic. This'll all be behind us.

I think.

Apparently, Kelly is a stealth bad driver; not so terrible you notice it until someone else drives you down the same road in the same vehicle. Arthur's a smooth, dot-the-Is kind of driver: no sudden jolts, no California stops. We make it all the way from the Tarot house to Fort Bragg proper without my pulse even raising a little; it'd be perfect except for the constant buzz of Arthur wishing we had something to talk about. Trauma'll do that to the chatterboxes, I guess; explains why Kelly never learned to properly speak.

The mechanic's shop is near the south end of town, a rust-pitted garage door and a sign that was outdated in the Eighties. Two guys who should probably be at school saunter out as soon as we park, both of them lit up at the prospect of working the Impala. I'm guessing it smells like money. Their faces fall when I tell them I was the guy with the Cavalier; they mutter and march back into the garage to get the bill, both wondering about my probable income bracket.

"Sucks, doesn't it?"

I turn and look at Arthur, eyebrows pre-raised.

He grins and nods toward the mechanics. "Hearing what they're thinking. Drives you crazy sometimes, right? Especially since you can't tell anybody."

"You mean like by talking about it in a parking lot?"

Arthur scoffs. "Yeah, sure. Because people will believe us these days. We turned the church uptown into a bar, man, give me a break."

I stick my hands in my pockets and give Arthur a slow, measuring glance. "Part of you's wishing I hadn't found you, huh?"

Arthur's laugh is about as sincere as a form letter. "Sorry, man. Not the right person to project onto." But he's a little too cold about it, a little too ready to drive me away.

"Yeah." I snap my fingers (one, two...). "Sorry."

"Mr. Chatham?"

I turn; one of the mechanics is loping toward me, clipboard and triplicate form at the ready.

"Sorry for the delay. Right this way."

I nod myself into synch with him, marching out across the lot and away from Arthur.

"You're lucky," the guy says to me, tapping his pen at the itemized bill. "For a series of gunshots—of all things," he adds with disbelief, "you got off nice and light. Last time we had one of these bullet punctured the radiator; poor guy's insurance premium looked like a lottery ticket."

"Last time?"

He smiles as only a yokel can. "Years ago," he assures me. "Just kind of have a memory for this stuff. Not a lot happens around here."

"Kind of a matter of perspective."

"Yeah, well." He sniffs, the topic clearly shut. "Here we are."

The Cav is in remarkably good shape, a nice squeaky-clean windshield installed, new if mismatched upholstery on the driver's seat. They even seem to have cleaned most of the bird shit off the hood.

"Looks good," I say, in lieu of anything else. "Thanks for getting her together so fast."

The guy doffs his hat. "Just doin' my job. If you'll sign the paperwork..."

"Of course." I take the clipboard, scrawl where indicated. Looks like my insurance is covering the whole thing; sometimes it's nice to have friends with extra senses. "Here you go."

"Thank ya." He looks at the bill, almost forgets to rip off my copy. "Here ya go, and—" He smiles as he hands me the keys. "Treat 'er right, yeah?" I think that's his idea of a joke.

"Like she was my genitalia," I drawl in response.

The guy gives me a blank look, touches the brim of his hat, and walks away. For a second I feel like I should say something nice to the Cav, but the truth is I've barely assigned the bastard a gender.

"He give you too much shit?" Arthur asks, sidling up next me. "Steve's a big classic car nut, really doesn't think much of cars that are, y'know, affordable..."

A give a vague wave of the hand, what I hope looks like dismissal. "It's fine. Really fine." I turn to Arthur, shrug. "Guess we can get out of your hair now, yeah?"

"Guess so. Listen, just to reiterate—"

"No hugging, no learning."

Arthur boggles for a second before he remembers to chuckle. "Right, yeah, none of that. Really though, thank you. I hate that what happened had to be how it went down, but—if you hadn't come along to help gobble up that bait—"

"And if I hadn't floundered trying to figure out what was really going on."

"Floundered, hell. You pieced it together better than I did; I just knew something was up and he was probably going to capture me. You brought the damn thing down around Gary's ears and you did it without turning belief-farms into a nationwide fad."

"Belief-farms." I shake my head. "That is never going to parse nicely in my head, you know?"

"It probably never should."

"Yeah." I look down at my keys, start to circle around to the driver's side. "See you up at the house, yeah?"

"Up at the house," Arthur agrees, taking the hint. "Drive safe."

I pop open the door, smell the half-toxic funk of new upholstery. "Pretty much always do."

I hop in and lock up before he can say anything else. Arthur stares at me for a second, a little too much empathy in his gaze, and slouches off toward the Impala. I let him get out of the lot ahead of me, let him have about five seconds' space. I get some Tarot wedged up in the dashboard before I get going too fast to futz.

Probably never should. "Probably." Nice choice of words, dick.

Paul and Ara have said their goodbyes when I get there; I do the same without much interest or focus. They get what bags we had loaded into the Impala, and there's that awkward little bit of staring and throat-clearing as we all try to encompass this experience.

"Thank you again," Arthur says after a minute.

"Yes. Thanks," mirrors Kelly.

Paul takes the awkward pause as a chance to light up. "I'd say don't mention it," he says around the cigarette, "except I know that we all really want to."

Nervous laughs come from Ara and Arthur.

"Yeah," says the older man. "Sort of the definition of brave, right? Doing the right thing even though it feels really wrong?" basement: about the two fingers I still can't feel, and the way that crucifix moved, and the way the light burnt out of Gary's eyes when I told him I wasn't playing ball.

And how badly, for sixty golden seconds, I really did want to.