He tries to shift the black-and-white into reverse, figuring that he can back away from the motor home even as it’s pushing at him, but the stick first stutters stubbornly in his hand, clunks into neutral, and then freezes. The transmission is shot.
As bad: He suspects that the smashed front end of the car is hung up on the back of the motor home.
She’s going to push him off the highway. In some places the drop-off from the shoulder is eight or ten feet and steep enough virtually to ensure that the patrol car will tumble ass-over-teakettle if it goes over the edge. Worse, if they are hung up on each other, and if the woman doesn’t have full control of the motor home, she’ll most likely roll it off the road on top of the black-and-white, crushing him.
Hell, maybe that’s what she’s trying to do.
She’s a damn singularity, all right, in her own way just like him. He admires her for it.
He smells gasoline. This is not a good place to be.
To the right of the center console and the police radio (which he switched off when he first saw the motor home and realized that it was his own), a pump-action 20-gauge shotgun is mounted barrel-up in spring clips attached to the dashboard. It has a five-shell magazine, which Sheriff Vess always keeps loaded.
He grabs the shotgun, wrenches it out of the clips, holds it in both hands, and slides left from behind the steering wheel. He bails out through the missing door.
They’re reversing at twenty or twenty-five miles an hour, rapidly gaining speed because the car is in neutral and no longer resisting the backward rush. The pavement comes up to meet him as though he’s a parachutist with huge holes in his silks. He hits and rolls, keeping his arms tucked in against his body in the hope that he won’t break any bones, fiercely clutching the shotgun, tumbling diagonally across the blacktop to the shoulder beyond the northbound lane. He tries to keep his head up, but he takes a bad knock, and another. He welcomes the pain, shouting with delight, reveling in the incredible intensity of this adventure.
*
Chyna was watching the side mirror when Edgler Vess sprang out of the patrol car, slammed into the blacktop, and rolled across the highway.
“Shit.”
By the time that Chyna braked to a full stop, crying out at the flash of pain in her bitten foot, Vess was sprawled facedown on the far shoulder of the roadway, three hundred feet to the south. He lay perfectly still. Though she didn’t believe that the tumble had killed him, she was sure that he must be unconscious or at least dazed.
She wasn’t capable of running over him while he lay insensate. But she wasn’t going to wait around to give him a sporting chance either.
She buckled into the combination shoulder and lap belt. She suspected that she was going to need it.
As she shifted into drive and started forward, she became aware of a sharp stinging along the right side of her head, and when she put a hand to her scalp, she discovered that she was bleeding. The passing bumblebee buzz had been a grazing bullet, which had burned a shallow furrow about three inches long and a sixteenth of an inch deep. Any closer, it would have taken off the side of her skull. This also explained the faint smell of burning that she’d briefly detected: hot lead, a few singed hairs.
Ariel was sitting up in a sparkling mantilla and shawl of gummy glass. She gazed out through the missing windshield toward Vess, but she was blank-eyed.
The girl’s hands were bleeding. Chyna’s heart leaped at the sight of the wet blood, but she realized that the wounds were only tiny cuts, nothing serious. The safety glass couldn’t cause mortal injury, but it was prickly enough to nick the skin.
When Chyna looked at Vess again, he was on his hands and knees, two hundred feet away. Beside him lay a shotgun.
She tramped on the accelerator.
A hard clunk at the back of the motor home. The vehicle shook. Another clunk. Then a scraping noise arose, and a hellacious clatter-jangle, but they gained speed.