Glancing at the side mirror, she saw showers of sparks as ragged steel scraped across blacktop.
The damaged patrol car was behind her, rumbling along in her wake. She was dragging it.
*
Sheriff Vess’s right ear is badly abraded, torn, and the smell of his blood is like January wind rushing across snowfields high on a mountain slope. A brassy ringing in both ears reminds him of the bitter metallic taste of the spider in the Templeton house, and he savors it.
As he gets to his feet, all bones intact, choking down the interestingly sour insistence of vomit, he picks up the shotgun. He’s happy to see that it seems to have come through in fine shape.
The motor home is angling toward him across the two-lane, about a hundred fifty feet away but closing fast, a juggernaut.
Instead of running off the road into the woods and away from the oncoming vehicle, he sprints toward it in a rightward-leading loop that will bring him alongside as it races past. He’s limping—not because he has injured his leg but simply because he is missing the heel on his right boot.
Even with one boot heel too few, Vess is more agile than the lumbering vehicle, and the woman sees that she’s not going to be able to run him down. She also sees the shotgun, no doubt, and she pulls the steering wheel to her right, away from him, ready to settle for escape instead of vengeance.
He has no intention of trying to blast her head off through the already shattered windshield or through the side window, partly because he’s beginning to be spooked by her resilience and doesn’t think he’ll be able to do enough damage to stop her as she sails past like a skeet disk. Also, it’s far easier to halt and shoot from the hip than to raise the gun and aim, and shooting from the hip means shooting low.
The recoil from the first three rounds, fired as quickly as he can work the pump action, nearly pounds the sheriff off his feet, but he takes out the front tire on the driver’s side.
Hardly six feet from him, the motor home starts to slide. Snakes of rubber uncoil into the air from the ruined tire. As the behemoth streaks past, Vess uses his last two rounds to blow out the rear tire on the driver’s side.
Now Ms. Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive, has big trouble.
*
The steering wheel spun back and forth in Chyna’s hands, burning her palms as she tried determinedly to hold on to it.
She tapped the brakes, and that seemed to be the absolute wrong thing to do because the vehicle yawed dangerously to the left, but when she let up on the brakes, that also seemed to be wrong because it yawed even more wildly to the right. The trailing black-and-white stuttered against the back bumper, and the motor home shuddered even as it swayed more violently side to side, and Chyna knew that they were going to tip over.
*
Half drunk on the deliciously complex smell of his own blood and the pure-sex stink of the shotgun fire, Sheriff Vess tosses the 20-gauge aside when the magazine is empty. With shining-eyed glee, he watches as the aged motor home rises inevitably off its starboard tires, tilting along the night highway on its port-side wheel rims. Virtually all of the rubber has shredded away; strips and chunks of it litter both lanes. The steel rims carve into the blacktop with a grinding sound that reminds him of the texture of crinoline crisp with dried blood, which brings to mind the taste of a certain young lady’s mouth in the very moment that she died. Then the vehicle crashes onto its side hard enough for Vess to feel vibrations in the pavement beneath his feet. The flat boom echoes back and forth between the road-flanking trees, like the devil’s own shotgun fire.
Hung up on the back of the motor home, the black-and-white is hauled onto its side by the larger vehicle. Then it finally tears loose, flips onto its roof, spins three hundred and sixty degrees, and comes to rest in the northbound lane.