INTENSITY

The redheaded cashier is reading a paperback. He looks up at Vess, and his eyes are as gray as ashes but clear and piercing. “What can I do for you, sir?”

“I’m at pump seven,” Vess says.

The radio is tuned to a country station. Alan Jackson sings about midnight in Montgomery, the wind, a whippoorwill, a lonesome chill, and the ghost of Hank Williams.

“How you want to pay?” asks the cashier.

“If I put any more on the credit cards, the Bank of America’s going to send someone around to break my legs,” says Vess, and he slaps down a hundred-dollar bill. “Figure I’ll need about sixty bucks’ worth.”

The combination of the song, the birthmark, and the cashier’s haunting gray eyes generates in Vess an eerie sense of expectancy. Something exceptional is about to happen.

“Paying off Christmas like the rest of us, huh?” says the cashier as he rings up the sale. “Hell, I’ll still be payin’ off Christmas next Christmas.”

The second clerk sits on a stool farther along the counter. He’s not at a cash register but is laboring on the bookkeeping or checking inventory sheets—anyway, doing some kind of paperwork.

Vess has not previously looked directly at the second man, and now he discovers that this is the exceptional thing he felt looming.

“Storm coming,” he says to the second clerk.

The man looks up from the papers spread on the counter. He is in his twenties, at least half Asian, and strikingly handsome. No. More than handsome. Jet-black hair, golden complexion, eyes as liquid as oil and as deep as wells. There is a gentle quality to his good looks that almost gives him an effeminate aspect—but not quite.

Ariel would love him. He is just her type.

“Might be cold enough for snow in some of the mountain passes,” says the Asian, “if you’re going that way.”

He has a pleasant—almost musical—voice that would charm Ariel. He is really quite breathtaking.

To the cashier who is counting out change, Vess says, “Just hold on to that. I need a supply of munchies too. I’ll be back as soon as I fill up the tank.”

He leaves quickly, afraid that they might sense his excitement and become alarmed.

Although he’s been in the store no more than a minute, the night seems markedly colder than it was when he went inside. Invigorating. He catches the fragrance of pine trees and spruce—even fir from far to the north—inhales the sweet greenness of the heavily timbered hills behind him, detects the crisp scent of oncoming rain, smells the ozone of lightning bolts not yet hurled, breathes in the pungent fear of small animals that already quake in the fields and forests in anticipation of the storm.

*

After she was certain that he had left the motor home, Chyna crept forward through the vehicle, holding the butcher knife in front of her.

The windows in the dining area and the lounge were curtained, so she was not able to see what lay outside. At the front, however, the windshield revealed that they had stopped at a service station.

She had no idea where the killer was. He had left no more than a minute earlier. He might be outside, within a few feet of the door.

She hadn’t heard him removing the gas cap or jacking the pump nozzle into the tank. But from the way they were parked, fuel was evidently taken on board from the starboard side, so that was most likely where he would be.

Afraid to proceed without knowing his exact whereabouts, but even more afraid to remain in the motor home, she slipped into the driver’s seat. The headlights were off, and the instrument panel was dark, but there was enough backglow from the dining-nook lamp to make her supremely visible from outside.

At the next island, a Pontiac pulled away from the pumps. Its red taillights swiftly dwindled.

As far as she could see, the motor home was now the only vehicle at the station.

The keys weren’t in the ignition. She wouldn’t have tried to drive off anyway. That had been an option back in the vineyard, when there had been no help nearby. Here, there must be employees—and whoever pulled off the highway next.

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