cry himself out. She glanced into the rearview mirror, saw the BMW about fifty yards behind, cutting its speed. She cut hers, too, down to about sixty. Whoever was in the Buick would have to change the tire, and by that time she'd be long gone.
But Laura Clayborne was in the car behind her. Maybe Bedelia was with her. Traitor, she thought. A bullet wasn't enough for her, she should be slit open and gutted for the crows, like the lowest kind of roadkill.
The BMW kept its distance. Mary returned the Magnum to her shoulder bag. She was trembling, but she'd shake it off soon enough. At this time of the morning the interstate was almost empty, just a few trucks hauling freight. Mary began to relax, but her gaze kept ticking to the BM Ws headlights. Should've blown out the tires when I had the chance, she thought. Why didn't the bitch bring the pigs with her? Why had she come alone? Stupid, that's why. Stupid and weak.
'What are you going to do?' she asked the headlights. 'Follow me to California?' She laughed: a harsh, nervous bark.
'Earl Van Diver is his name,' Didi was saying to Laura. 'An FBI agent. Mary shot him in the throat in 1972, at the Shootout in Linden. I think he found out who I am, but he doesn't want me.' She nodded toward the van. 'He wants Mary.'
Laura had turned the heat up to high, but the BMW's interior was still uncomfortably cold, the wind shrieking in around them. There was nothing else left to do. Nothing except to keep that van with the broken taillights in sight. Sooner or later Mary would have to stop to get gas. She would get sleepy, hungry, and thirsty. She would have to pull off, sooner or later. And when that happened… what then?
Laura checked her own gas gauge. A little less than half a tank. If she had to stop first, Mary would pull on out of sight. She might turn off the interstate, try to hide until she was sure Laura couldn't find her again. But Mary was interested in only one direction, and one destination. Between here and there was over two thousand miles, and who knew what might happen in that terrible distance?
'I want out,' Didi said. 'I'm not going with you.'
Laura was silent, her nose clogged with dried blood and her injured cheek turning blue-black.
'I swear to God!' Didi told her. 'I'm not going with you!'
Laura didn't answer. She had watched a human being be murdered this morning. His blood was all over her purse, and the smell of death was in the car. She felt the horror of what she'd seen start to consume her mind, take her away from the task she had set for herself, and she did the only thing she could: she just stopped thinking about Edward Fordyce, and thrust the memory of his writhing body back to a place from where it couldn't easily be summoned. She had to think about one thing and one thing only: David, in the van fifty or sixty yards ahead. Mary Terror at the wheel. Armed and dangerous. Two thousand miles between her and a man who might or might not be Jack Gardiner.
'I want out! First gas station!'
They passed one in a few minutes. It was all lit up.
The van kept going, its speed constant at sixty-five.
Didi was quiet. She put her hands to her ears, to shut out the wind's scream.
You'll stop somewhere, Laura thought. Maybe ten miles. Maybe fifty. But you'll stop, and when you do I'll be right there behind you.
She glanced at the automatic lying on the seat where Didi had put it down. The grip had a dried smear of scarlet on it. Then she returned her attention to the broken taillights, and she brushed aside the nagging question of how she could possibly get David away from Mary Terror without the woman putting a bullet through his head.
Laura almost cried, but she held back the tears. Her face felt like leather stretched over hot iron. Tears wouldn't help the pain, and they wouldn't help get David back alive. She didn't need her eyes swollen up, that was for sure.
'You're crazy,' Didi said. A last shot: 'Going to get us both killed and the baby, too.'
There was no reply from Laura, but the comment had worked itself in like a thorn. Laura concentrated on keeping a steady fifty yards or so behind the van. No need to spook Mary. Just make her feel nice and comfortable up there in her van with her two guns and the child she called Drummer.
He was going to grow up as David. Laura vowed it, over her dead body.
The van and the BMW, both dented and battered from their first encounter, headed west on the quiet interstate. Mary Terror checked her gas gauge and kept glancing back at Laura's car, marking its position. As Drummer's crying dwindled, Mary began to sing 'Light My Fire' in a low, wandering voice.
Follow me, she was thinking. Her gaze ticked to the BMW's headlights again. That's right. Follow me so I can kill you.
The van and the car passed on. Back at the entrance ramp about thirty minutes later, Earl Van Diver tightened the last lug nut and released the air from the inflatable jack. He was wearing a black woolen cap and a jump suit in camouflage green and brown, his pallid, bony face scratched by foliage. He returned his tools to their proper niches in his trunk, where the sniper's rifle and boxes of ammunition were stored along with his SuperSnooper listening dish and tape recorder. He removed a palm-size black box from the trunk, which he mounted with adhesive pads on the underside of the dashboard. Then he plugged a connection into the cigarette lighter, started the engine, and turned a switch on the black box. A little blue light pulsed, but no numerals showed up yet on the display. On his rear windshield was an antenna that resembled that of a cellular phone, but was for a different purpose. Van Diver made another connection, the antenna's jack into the black box. Still no numerals. That was all right. The magnetic homing device he'd planted in the right front wheel well of Mary Terror's van wouldn't pick up on the display until he was within about four miles. It had been a precaution, for such a case as this.
Beneath his seat was a hiding place where his Browning automatic pistol could slide in and out. It would be used well before he was finished with Mary Terror.
And if the other two women got in the way, they were dead meat, too.
Earl Van Diver backed the Buick up the embankment to the road and then drove onto the interstate's ramp. West to California, he thought. Looking for Jack Gardiner. It was all on the tape, their voices caught by the SuperSnooper dish and the wireless amplification bug he'd planted inside a pottery vase in Bedelia Morse's front room. Going to California, the land of nuts and fruits.
It was a good place to kill a nightmare.
The Buick's speed hung between seventy and seventy-five, the pavement singing beneath the new tire. Van Diver, an executioner on a mission long awaited, hurtled toward his target.
Part VI – On the Storm
1: Happy Herman's
The sun was coming up, into a pewter sky. The warning light on the BMW's gas gauge had begun blinking. Laura tried not to pay any attention to it – tried to will it begone – but the light kept snagging her eye.
'Low on gas,' Didi said over the wind's scream.
The heater was purring merrily, warming their feet and legs while they froze from the waist up. The positive side of this, though, was that neither Laura nor Didi could be lulled to sleep with the cold and the wind singing them a banshee symphony. Didi kept her hands in her pockets, but every so often Laura had to unclench one hand from the steering wheel, flex the blood back into it, put it back where it was and do the same to the other. Ahead of them, between fifty and sixty yards away, was the olive-green van, its left side scraped to the bare metal and the rear looking like a sledgehammer had been taken to it. Traffic had picked up on the interstate: more trucks, zooming past in defiance of the legal limit. Twenty minutes or so before, Laura had seen a patrol car speed past on the other side of the median, blue lights flashing. She wondered if the sight had given Mary Terror as much of a start as it had herself. Beyond Mary's van, the sky was still dark and ominous, as if night refused to recede from the shore of dawn.
'Gas is almost gone,' Didi said. 'Hear me?'
'I hear you.'
'Well, what're you going to do? Wait until we have to push the damned thing?'
Laura didn't answer. She really didn't know what she was going to do; this was a wing-it-by-the-seat situation. If she pulled into a gas station first, then Mary Terror might turn off I-94 at the nearest exit. If she waited
