discretion. The man's survival is either full of mysterious meaning or utterly meaningless; Vess is unable to decide which.
If fate doesn't actually exist, it ought to.
The small store is warm, clean, and brightly lighted. Three narrow aisles extend to the left of the door, offering the usual roadside merchandise: every imaginable snack food, the basic patent medicines, magazines, paperback books, postcards, novelty items designed to hang from rearview mirrors, and selected canned goods that sell to campers and to people, like Vess, who travel in homes on wheels. Along the back wall are tall coolers full of beer and soft drinks, as well as a couple of freezers containing ice cream treats. To the right of the door is the service counter that separates the two cashiers' stations and the clerical area from the public part of the store.
Two employees are on duty, both men. These days, no one works alone in such places at night-and with good reason.
The guy at the cash register is a redhead in his thirties with freckles and a two-inch-diameter birthmark, as pink as uncooked salmon, on his pale forehead. The mark is uncannily like the image of a fetus curled in a womb, as if a gestating twin had died early in the mother's pregnancy and left its fossilized image on the surviving brother's brow.
The redheaded cashier is reading a paperback. He looks up at Vess, and his eyes are as gray as ashes but clear and piercing. 'What can I do for you, sir?'
'I'm at pump seven,' Vess says.
The radio is tuned to a country station. Alan Jackson sings about midnight in Montgomery, the wind, a whippoorwill, a lonesome chill, and the ghost of Hank Williams.
'How you want to pay?' asks the cashier.
'If I put any more on the credit cards, the Bank of America's going to send someone around to break my legs,' says Vess, and he slaps down a hundred-dollar bill. 'Figure I'll need about sixty bucks' worth.'
The combination of the song, the birthmark, and the cashier's haunting gray eyes generates in Vess an eerie sense of expectancy. Something exceptional is about to happen.
'Paying off Christmas like the rest of us, huh?' says the cashier as he rings up the sale. 'Hell, I'll still be payin' off Christmas
The second clerk sits on a stool farther along the counter. He's not at a cash register but is laboring on the bookkeeping or checking inventory sheets-anyway, doing some kind of paperwork.
Vess has not previously looked directly at the second man, and now he discovers that this is the exceptional thing he felt looming.
'Storm coming,' he says to the second clerk.
The man looks up from the papers spread on the counter. He is in his twenties, at least half Asian, and strikingly handsome. No. More than handsome. Jet-black hair, golden complexion, eyes as liquid as oil and as deep as wells. There is a gentle quality to his good looks that almost gives him an effeminate aspect-but not quite.
Ariel would love him. He is just her type.
'Might be cold enough for snow in some of the mountain passes,' says the Asian, 'if you're going that way.'
He has a pleasant-almost musical-voice that would charm Ariel. He is really quite breathtaking.
To the cashier who is counting out change, Vess says, 'Just hold on to that. I need a supply of munchies too. I'll be back as soon as I fill up the tank.'
He leaves quickly, afraid that they might sense his excitement and become alarmed.
Although he's been in the store no more than a minute, the night seems markedly colder than it was when he went inside. Invigorating. He catches the fragrance of pine trees and spruce-even fir from far to the north-inhales the sweet
After she was certain that he had left the motor home, Chyna crept forward through the vehicle, holding the butcher knife in front of her.
The windows in the dining area and the lounge were curtained, so she was not able to see what lay outside. At the front, however, the windshield revealed that they had stopped at a service station.
She had no idea where the killer was. He had left no more than a minute earlier. He might be outside, within a few feet of the door.
She hadn't heard him removing the gas cap or jacking the pump nozzle into the tank. But from the way they were parked, fuel was evidently taken on board from the starboard side, so that was most likely where he would be.
Afraid to proceed without knowing his exact whereabouts, but even more afraid to remain in the motor home, she slipped into the driver's seat. The headlights were off, and the instrument panel was dark, but there was enough backglow from the dining-nook lamp to make her supremely visible from outside.
At the next island, a Pontiac pulled away from the pumps. Its red taillights swiftly dwindled.
As far as she could see, the motor home was now the only vehicle at the station.
The keys weren't in the ignition. She wouldn't have tried to drive off anyway. That had been an option back in the vineyard, when there had been no help nearby. Here, there must be employees-and whoever pulled off the highway next.
She cracked the door, wincing at the hard sound, jumped out, and stumbled when she hit the ground. The butcher knife popped from her hand as if greased, clattered against the pavement, and spun away.
Certain that she had drawn the killer's attention and that he was already bearing down on her, Chyna scrambled to her feet. She spun left, then right, with her hands out in front of her in pathetic defense. But the eater of spiders was nowhere to be seen on the brightly lighted blacktop.
She pressed the door shut, searched the surrounding pavement for the knife, couldn't immediately spot it-and froze when a man came out of the station about fifty or sixty feet away. He was wearing a long coat, so at first Chyna was sure that he couldn't be the killer, but then immediately she recalled the inexplicable rustling of fabric to which she had listened before he had left the motor home, and she
The only place to hide was behind one of the pumps at the next service island, but that was thirty feet away, between her and the store, with a lot of bright exposed pavement to cross. Besides, he was approaching the same island from the other side, and he would reach it first, catching her in the open.
If she tried to get around the motor home, he would spot her and wonder where she had come from. His psychosis probably included a measure of paranoia, and he would assume that she had been in his vehicle. He would pursue her. Relentlessly.
Instead, even as she saw him leaving the store, Chyna dropped flat to the pavement. Counting on the obstructing pumps at the first island to mask any movement close to the ground, she crawled on her belly under the motor home.
The killer didn't cry out, didn't pick up his pace. He hadn't seen her.
From her hiding place, she watched him approach. As he drew close, the sulfurous light was so bright that she could recognize his black leather boots as the same pair that she had studied from beneath the guest-room bed a couple of hours before.
She turned her head to follow him as he went around the back of the motor home to the starboard side, where he stopped at one of the pumps.
The blacktop was cold against her thighs, belly, and breasts. It leached the body heat out of her through her jeans and cotton sweater, and she began to shiver.
She listened as the killer disengaged the hose spout from the nozzle boot, opened the fuel port on the side of the motor home, and removed the tank cap. She figured it would take a few minutes to fill the behemoth, so she began to ease out of her hiding place even as she heard the spout thunk into the tank.
Still flat at ground level, she suddenly saw the butcher knife. Out on the blacktop. Ten feet from the front bumper. The yellow light glimmered along the cutting edge.
Even as she was sliding into the open, however, before she could push to her feet, she heard boot heels on blacktop. She glanced back under the motor home and saw that the killer evidently had fixed the nozzle trigger in
