Chyna had wanted to learn about firearms not to use them in one noble cause or another but to protect herself from those people in her mother’s strange circles who succumbed to drug-enhanced rages—or who stared at her with a sick desire. She had been too young to want their attention, too self-respecting to encourage them—but thanks to her mother, she had not been too innocent to understand what some of them wanted to do with her.
Now, with the dead clerk’s revolver in hand, she turned and saw the shattered telephone.
“Shit.”
She hurried back through the gate, into the public part of the store, directly to the front door.
The motor home was still parked on this side of the farther of the two service islands. The headlights were off.
The killer was not in sight at first—but then he walked into view around the back of the motor home, his unbuttoned coat flaring like a cape in the wind.
Although the man was about sixty feet away, surely he couldn’t see her at the door. He wasn’t even looking in her direction, but Chyna took a step backward.
Apparently he had been racking the hose at the gasoline pump and capping the fuel tank. He walked alongside the vehicle toward the driver’s door.
She had planned to telephone the police and tell them that the killer was headed north on Highway 101. Now, by the time she got to a phone, called the cops, and made them understand the situation, he might have as much as an hour’s lead. Within an hour, he would have several choices of other routes that branched off 101. He might continue north toward Oregon, turn east toward Nevada—or even angle west to the coast, thereafter turning south again along the Pacific and into San Francisco, vanishing in the urban maze. The more miles he traveled before an all-points bulletin went out for him, the harder he would be to find. He would soon be in another police agency’s jurisdiction, first a different county and perhaps eventually a different state, complicating the search for him.
And now that she thought about it, Chyna realized that she had precious little information that would be helpful to the cops. The motor home might be blue or green; she wasn’t sure which—or even if it was either—because she’d seen it only in the darkness and then in the color-distorting yellow glow of the service station’s sodium-vapor lights. She didn’t know the make of it either, and she hadn’t seen the license plate.
He was getting away.
Unhurried, clearly confident that he was in no imminent danger of discovery, he climbed into the motor home and pulled shut the driver’s door.
He’s going to get away. Jesus. No, intolerable, unthinkable. He can’t be allowed to get away, never pay for what he did to Laura, to all of them—even worse, have a chance to do it again. No, God, please, let me drop the hateful rotten fucking bastard with a shot in the head.
She stepped close to the door again. It could be unlocked only with a key. She didn’t have a key.
She heard the motor-home engine turn over.
If she shot out the glass, he would hear. Even over the roar of the engine and from a distance, he would hear.
Once through the door, she would be too far away to shoot him. Fifty or sixty feet, at night, with a handgun, the gasoline pumps intervening. No way. She had to get close, right up against the motor home, put the muzzle to the window.
But if he heard her shoot her way through the locked door and saw her coming out of the store, she wouldn’t have a chance to get close to him, not in a million years, and then he would be stalking her again, across the service-station property, wherever she went, and his shotgun was better armament than her revolver.
Out at the motor home, he switched on the headlights.
“No.”
She ran to the gate in the counter, shoved through it, stepped around the dead men, and went to the door in the back wall.
There had to be a rear entrance. Both practical function and fire codes would require it.