dead roach on its back. The two men were standing near it, together
now.
Evidently, they had just checked the car and knew he was not in it.
They were talking animatedly, but they were too far away for Jim to hear
what they were saying. A couple of words carried to him, but they were
faded by distance and distorted by the furnace-dry air.
Sweat kept trickling into his eyes, blurring his vision. He blotted his
face with his sleeve and squinted at the men again.
They were moving slowly away from the Camaro now, deeper into the
desert. One of them was wary, swiveling his head from side to side, and
the other studied the ground as they moved, no doubt searching for signs
of Jim’s passage. Just his luck, one of them would turn out to have
been raised by Indian scouts, and they’d be all over him faster than an
iguana on a sand beetle.
From the west came the sound of an engine, low at first but growing
rapidly louder even as Jim turned his head to look in that direction.
Out of a waterfall mirage came a Peterbilt. From Jim’s low vantage
point, the truck looked so huge that it didn’t even seem like a truck
but like some futuristic war machine that had traveled backward in time
from the twenty-second century.
The driver of the Peterbilt would see the overturned Camaro. In the
traditional Samaritan spirit that most truckers showed on the road, he
would stop to offer assistance. His arrival would rattle the two
killers, and while they were distracted, Jim would get the drop on them.
He had it all figured out-except it didn’t work that way. The Peterbilt
didn’t slow as it approached, and Jim realized he was going to have to
flag it down. But before he could even rise up, the big truck swept
past with n dragon roar and a blast of hot wind, breaking the speed
limit by a Guinness margin, as if it were a judgment wagon driven by a
demon and loaded with souls that the devil wanted in hell right now Jim
fought the urge to leap up and yell after it: Where’s your tradition
Samaritan spirit, you shithead?
Silence returned to the hot day.
On the far side of the road, the two killers looked after the Peterbilt
for moment, then continued their search for Jim.
Furious and scared, he eased back from the shoulder of the highway;
flattened out again, and belly-crawled eastward toward the motor home,
dragging the shotgun with him. The elevated roadbed was between him and
them; they could not possibly see him, yet he more than half expected
them to sprint across the blacktop and pump half a dozen rounds into him
When he dared look up again, he was directly opposite the parked Road
king, which blocked the two men from his view. If he couldn’t see them,
they couldn’t see him. He scrambled to his feet and crossed the
pavement to the passenger side of the motor home.
The door on that flank was a third of the way from the front bumper at
the rear, not opposite the driver’s door. It was ajar.
He took hold of the handle. Then he realized that a third man might
have stayed inside with the woman and girl. He couldn’t risk going in
there until he had dealt with the two outside, for he might be trapped
between gunmen.
He moved to the front of the Road king, and just as he reached the
corner, he heard voices approaching. He froze, waiting for the guy with
the weird haircut to come around the front bumper. But they stopped on
the other side.
“-who gives a shit?”
“-but he mighta seen our license number-”
“-chances are, he’s bad hurt-”
“-wasn’t no blood in the car” Jim sank to one knee by the tire, looked
under the vehicle. They were standing on the other side, near the
driver’s door.
“-we just take the next southbound-”
“-with cops on our tail”
“-by the time he gets to any cops, we’ll be in Arizona”
“-you hope-”
“-I know-” Rising, moving cautiously, Jim slipped around the front