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he
yelled. He ran over and kicked the handset across the pavement. “Fuck fuck fuck
fuck fuck!”
    Jenna ran over
and put a hand on his shoulder. “Dom,
hush
. There are people
watching!”
    Dom pushed her
hand away and marched back to the car, Jenna in pursuit. “I don’t give a rat’s
ass. Let’s get the hell out of this state; I need to be on the open road and
well away from that freak.” Before climbing in he leaned over the back and gave
the numbers on the license plate a quick swipe, glaring at the strangers
watching as he did so. Everyone turned their gazes elsewhere when he was done.
    “How did she
find us?” asked Jenna, once they were back on the highway headed north.
    “She didn’t,”
answered Billy. “She must have gotten the scent of you and figured out where
you lived, but the best she could do was introduce a formula to dial back;
there’s no way it could have told her where we were, though. Not that fast.” He
sounded like he was trying to convince himself.
    Dom laughed, a
short, bitter sound. “So we can hope. In the meantime, we worry about just how
strong this person is.”
    “But you told
her back there,” said Jenna, glancing over at him. “The only reason she almost
caught you was because you didn’t have anything with you.”
    Eyes closed, Dom
leaned his head back against the seat. “It’s looking like this person is
capable of shit I can only dream of, Jenna. I’d say we were lucky to get out.
Lucky you showed up and had a car.”
    “We were hunting
the same thing she was,” continued Billy, “Dom by himself and me with my
earlier host, and she was faster off the mark, seems to have found what we were
all after.” He cocked open his left eye and looked over at her. “And now she’s
hunting us.”
    “You wanted to
learn.” Dom forced the eye closed again. “You’re in now, like it or not, and
school it ain’t. This is going to be a trial by fire.”
    Jenna tapped the
steering wheel in a familiar pattern. “Since I’m learning, maybe it’s time for
another lesson. What was that you were doing with the phone’s keypad?”
    Dom nodded. She
was tapping the same beat that he had kept when he’d faked up the Mingus tune.
“Time was,” he said, “you could play musical notes on a phone’s buttons. Not
anymore, but there’s still a residual numeracy there. I was playing a rough
estimation of a piece by Charlie Mingus.”
    “Why him?”
    “The same day
that Mingus died in Mexico at age 56, 56 sperm whales beached themselves nearby.”
    Jenna blinked,
then glanced at Dom with her right eyebrow raised. “So?”
    “So there are
some hints in numerate literature that whenever whales beach themselves it’s
because they’ve come to collect the shadow of a person who has died,” said
Billy. “Of course, we can’t talk to whales, so we can’t say for sure, but they
are numerate creatures. Whether or not you need to die by the sea, well, nobody
knows.” Billy shrugged. “But it does seem that it’s always the same number of
whales as it is years the person, or even persons, has lived.”
    “What’s also
interesting is that sometimes they seem to take shadows that want to go, and
sometimes they take them against their will. Mingus, I think he was voluntary.”
Dom leaned his seat back, turned his head to the right, feeling exhausted from
the heat and all the action. “Wake me up when you want me to spell you for
driving.”
    Jenna turned on
the radio. A distant classic rock station was tuned in, ELO’s “Telephone Line”
playing, accompanied by the hiss and static of interference, and, Dom could
swear, harmony by the man from the phone call. But before he could say
anything, Jenna slipped a CD into the stereo, and he drifted off to the sounds
of Coltrane.

5
     
    Jenna woke Dom a
few hours later and he drove on until he came to a town with a store big enough
to outfit the both of them. Again, he decided to bankroll her, and an hour
later they walked out with a