away, in pursuit of Mary Terror. Its right front tire went over the speaker and crushed it to bits.
Didi stood up. She saw the mottled pitbull lying on the ground. Laura was on her knees, her right arm free of the tattered coat sleeve, and the brown pitbull faced her six feet away. Didi picked up the two-by-four, her ear stinging, and walked toward the animal.
Before she got there, the pitbull groaned deep in its blasted-open throat and collapsed, its eyes fixed on the woman who'd delivered the bullet.
Tears of pain glistened on Laura's cheeks, but her face was shocked clean of all emotion. She looked at the bluish-red lump of her left hand. There were only three fingers and a thumb on it. The little finger was gone, torn off at the knuckle. Her hand made her think of a fresh steak, tenderized by a butcher's mallet.
'Oh my God,' Didi said. Blood was dripping from her right ear like a chain of rubies. 'Your… hand…'
Laura had gone deathly pale. She blinked, staring at Didi, and then she keeled over onto her side.
Laura's purse was in the car, Didi realized. Her money, credit cards… everything was gone. It was over, and Mary had won.
'Help me! Somebody!' The voice was coming from over near the dogpen. 'I'm dyin' over here!'
Didi left Laura and went back to where the big-bellied man lay against the dogpen. He was a mess, but Didi saw that the blood wasn't spewing out so no arteries had been hit. He looked at her wearily, trying to focus.'Who're you?'
'Nobody,' she said.
'You gonna kill me?'
She shook her head.
'Listen… listen… call an ambulance. Okay? Phone's in the office. Locked up.' He offered her the bloody key ring. 'Call an ambulance. Goddamn Kenny took off early. Oh, I'm hurtin'. Do it, okay?'
Didi accepted the key ring. One of the keys, she saw, was for a General Motors car. 'The Olds is yours?'
'Yeah. Yeah. The Cutlass. Call an ambulance, I'm bleedin' to death.'
She didn't think so. She knew a dying man when she saw one. This guy had a broken collarbone and maybe a punctured lung, but he was breathing all right. Still, she'd have to call the ambulance. 'You just be quiet and don't move.'
'What am I gonna do? A fuckin' polka?'
Didi hurried back to Laura, who was sitting up again. 'Can you walk?'
'I think… I'm going to pass out.'
'I've found us a car,' Didi said.
Laura looked up at her friend, her eyes swollen and her broken hand throbbing almost beyond endurance. She wanted to lie on the ground, curl up, and cry in the cold. But she could not, because Mary Terror still had her baby, and Mary Terror was on her way to California. Laura had something left; she pulled it from a deep, unknown place, the same place where people gritted their teeth and fought uphill against the iron-spiked wheels of life. She had to keep going. There was no quitting, no surrender.
Laura lifted her right hand, and Didi helped her stand. Then Didi picked up the automatic, and she and Laura walked together past the dead dogs.
In the trailer, Didi called 911 and told the operator there'd been a shooting, that an ambulance was needed at the Wentzel Brothers Lumberyard near Geneseo. The operator said an ambulance would be there in eight to ten minutes, and for her to stay on the line. Didi hung up. A small metal box atop the office's desk caught her attention, and she spent forty seconds finding the right key to unlock it. Inside were a few checks clipped to copies of receipts, and a bank deposit envelope that held seventy-one dollars and thirty-five cents. She took the money.
Didi got behind the wheel of the Cutlass, with Laura lying semiconscious amid burger wrappers and crumpled beer cans in the backseat. A pair of large red plastic dice hung from the rearview mirror, and there was a Playboy bunny decal stuck prominently on the rear windshield. The Olds chugged, refusing to start as she turned the key. Didi thought she could hear a siren, getting closer. The Olds chugged again as Didi pumped the accelerator. And then the car shuddered, and with a cannon's boom black smoke blew from the tailpipe. Didi checked the gas gauge, seeing that its needle stood at a quarter of a tank.
The Cutlass creaked and groaned like a frigate in a tempest as Didi backed up, wrestled the grimy wheel, and drove toward the gates. She could feel the tires wanting to slew off to the right, and she decided it was best she hadn't looked to see how much tread they still wore. Then they were through the gates and heading back to the interstate, the Cutlass slowly but steadily gaining speed and making a racket like bricks in a cement mixer. An ambulance appeared ahead of them, approaching across the flat fields. It passed them, its siren yowling, on the way to save a Wentzel.
The two women went on, and only when they were five or six miles farther west along I-80 did Didi give one gasping, terrible sob and wipe her eyes with her dirty sleeve.
4: White Tide
Across the Mississippi River, where I-80 shot straight true toward Iowa City, Earl Van Diver was gaining on the woman who had savaged his life.
The van was going almost eighty, the BMW pushing past eighty-five. Van Diver gripped the wheel with his one good hand, the other hand cold and dead at the end of his torn-open shoulder. Blood was streaked over the seats, spattered across the instrument panel, soaked into the carpet beneath him. He was filling up with winter, his vision turning gray. It was getting more difficult to hold the wheel steady, the wind and his own weakness conspiring against him. Cars veered out of the paths of the two vehicles, a wake of horns echoing behind Van Diver. He glanced at the speedometer, saw the needle vibrating at eighty-seven. Mary had kept the van's speed up over eighty since they'd left the Geneseo exit, swinging back and forth from lane to lane to keep cars between them. Now, though, it was clear from the blue coughs of burning oil coming from the tailpipe that the van's engine was worn out, and she couldn't maintain that speed. Good, he thought as he felt the cold creeping through his cheeks. Good. He wasn't going to let her get away. Oh, no; not this time.
He felt no remorse for leaving Laura and Bedelia. The opportunity to take the car was there. Mary could not be allowed to roam free. She was an animal, and must be put to death like a rabid dog drooling foam. Put to death and death and death.
About the baby he had no emotion. The baby was there. Babies had died before; there were always babies. What was the death of a single baby if an animal like Mary Terror could be ground under? He knew he could never have made Laura Clayborne understand his life's purpose. How could she understand that every time he looked into a mirror he saw the face of Mary Terror? How could she understand the nightmare rages that had driven his wife and daughter away from him? How could she understand that the name Mary drove him crazy with hatred, and that his daughter's name had made him look at her with hatred, too. Laura Clayborne had lost a baby; he had lost himself, down into a dark hole of torment so horrible that it began to – dear God – make him dream of fucking Mary with the barrel of his gun, ah yes ah yes sweet sweet Mary you bitch you soul-sucking bitch, and in the mornings he would wake up wet and sated for a time.
But not for very long.
You're mine. Van Diver thought, his black eyes glazed and shiny.
Two more feet, and the BMW's front fender smashed into the van's rear with a jolt that cracked the stubs of his teeth together. He pushed the van toward the right, trying to force it off the highway, and tires shrieked in a burn of rubber as Mary fought the van back to the left again. A station wagon was in front of her, a Garfield stuck with suction cups to the rear windshield. Mary grazed the station wagon as it careened aside, scraping off a sheet of sparks. Then she was past it, veering around a tractor-trailer truck and back into the left lane. She looked up into the rearview mirror at the BMW's battered snout, and she saw the man's grinning, terrible face above the wheel. Little pig wants to play, she thought, and she stomped on the brake.
The BMW crashed into the back of the van, the hood crumpling and pieces of glass and metal flying up. Van Diver was lifted off his seat, his body thrown forward to strain the limits of his seat belt and his chin slamming against the steering wheel. His entire body tensed for the rest of the wreck, but Mary's foot was planted on the accelerator again and the van was pulling away with a backfire of burning oil, the BMW still traveling seventy miles
