The motor home is far past the car, three hundred feet away from the sheriff and still sliding, but it is slowing and will soon stop.
Everything is screwed up big time: the mess scattered all over the highway, which he will be hard-pressed to explain; the ruination of his plan to deal with Ariel in the methodical manner that has kept him so excited for the past year; and the incriminating bodies in the bedroom of his motor home.
Yet Sheriff Vess has never felt half as buoyant as he does now. He is so alive, all of his senses enhanced by the ferocity of the moment. He feels giddy, silly. He wants to caper under the moon and twirl with his arms out like a child making himself dizzy with the sight of spinning stars.
But there are two deaths to be dealt, a lovely young face to be disfigured, and that is fun too.
He reaches to his holster for his revolver. Evidently it fell out when he leaped from the car and tumbled across the highway. He looks around for it.
*
When the motor home slid to a stop, Chyna wasted no time being astonished to be alive. Instantly she disengaged her safety harness and then the girl’s.
The starboard flank of the tipped-over motor home had become its ceiling in this new orientation. Ariel clung to the door handle up there to avoid dropping down on top of Chyna. The port flank, where Chyna lay, was now essentially the floor. The window in the driver’s door at her side provided a close-up view only of blacktop.
She struggled out of her seat, turned around, and perched on the dashboard with her back to the windshield and her feet on the console box. She leaned her right side against the steering wheel.
The air was thick with gasoline fumes. Breathing was difficult.
She reached to Ariel and said, “Come on, baby, out through the windshield, quickly now.”
When the girl failed to look at her but clung to the door and stared out the side window at the night sky, Chyna took her by the shoulder and pulled.
“Come on, honey, come on, come on, come on,” she urged. “It’s damn stupid if we die now, after getting this far. If you die now, won’t the dolls laugh? Won’t they laugh and laugh?”
*
Here, now, comes Sheriff Edgler Vess, battered and bleeding but sprightly in his step, past the roof of the motor home, which is now essentially the vehicle’s port flank as it lies half capsized on this sea of blacktop and spilled gasoline. He glances curiously at the broken-out skylight but proceeds without hesitation to the front of the vehicle where he discovers Chyna and Ariel, naughty girls, who have just come out through the windshield.
Their backs are to him, and they are moving away, heading toward the west side of the highway, where a sheltering grove of pines stands not far beyond the pavement, surely hoping to scuttle out of sight before he finds them. The woman is hobbling, urging the girl along with a hand in the small of her back.
Though the sheriff was unable to find his revolver, he has the 20-gauge, which he holds in both hands by the barrel. He comes in fast behind them. The woman hears the odd squish that he makes limping on one bad boot heel across the reeking wet pavement, but she doesn’t have a chance to turn fully and confront him. Vess swings the shotgun like a club, putting everything he has into it, smashing the flat of the stock across her shoulder blades.
The woman is knocked off her feet, the breath hammered from her, unable to cry out. She pitches forward and sprawls facedown on the pavement, perhaps unconscious but certainly stunned immobile.
Ariel totters forward in the direction that she was headed, as though she knows nothing of what happened to Chyna, and perhaps she doesn’t. Maybe she is desperate for freedom, but more likely she is stumbling across the blacktop with no more awareness than a wind-up doll.
The woman rolls onto her back, looking up at him, not dazed but white and wild-eyed with rage.