Her unblemished driving record resulted from her preference for moderation in all things, including the pace at which she ordinarily drove. Judging by the catastrophes that she had seen befall others, survival was closely related to moderation, and her whole life was about survival, as any nun’s life might be defined by the word faith or any politician’s by power. She seldom drank more than one glass of wine, never used drugs, engaged in no dangerous sports, ate a diet low in fat and salt and sugar, stayed out of neighborhoods reputed to be dangerous, never expressed strong opinions, and in general was safely inconspicuous—all in the interest of getting by, hanging on, surviving.
Against the odds, she had already survived the events of the past few hours. The killer didn’t even know that she existed. She had made it. She was free. It was over. The smart thing, the wise thing, the sane thing—the Chyna thing—to do was to let him go, just let him get away, pull off to the side of the road, stop, surrender to the shakes that she was strenuously repressing, and thank God that she was untouched and alive.
As she drove, Chyna argued against her previous conviction, insisting that the teenage girl in the cellar, Ariel of the angelic face, wasn’t real. The photo might be of a girl whom he had already killed. The story of her incarceration might be only a sick fantasy, a psychotic’s version of a Brothers Grimm tale, Rapunzel underground, merely a mind game that he’d been playing with the two clerks.
“Liar,” she called herself.
The girl in the photo was alive somewhere, imprisoned. Ariel was no fantasy. Indeed, she was Chyna; they were one and the same, because all lost girls are the same girl, united by their suffering.
She kept her foot pressed firmly on the accelerator, and the Honda crested a hill, and the aged motor home was on the long gradual downslope ahead, five hundred feet away. Her breath caught in her throat, and then she exhaled with a whispered, “Oh, Jesus.”
She was approaching him at too great a speed. She eased off the accelerator.
By the time she was two hundred feet from the motor home, she had matched speeds with it. She fell back farther, hoping that he hadn’t noticed her initial haste.
He was driving between fifty and fifty-five miles per hour, a prudent pace on that highway, especially as they were now traveling on a stretch without a median strip and with somewhat narrower lanes than previously. He wouldn’t necessarily expect her to pass him, and he shouldn’t be suspicious when she remained behind; after all, at this sleepy hour, not every driver in California was in a blistering hurry or suicidally reckless.
At this more reasonable speed, she didn’t have to concentrate as intently as before on the road ahead, and she quickly searched the immediate interior of the car in hopes of finding a cellular telephone. She was pessimistic about the chances that a night clerk at a service station would have a portable phone, but on the other hand, half the world seemed to have them now, not just salesmen and Realtors and lawyers. She checked the console box. Then the glove box. Under the driver’s seat. Unfortunately, her pessimism proved well founded.
Southbound traffic passed in the oncoming lanes: a big rig with a lead-footed driver, a Mercedes close in its wake—then, following a long gap, a Ford. Chyna paid special attention to the cars, hoping that one of them would be a police cruiser.
If she spotted a cop, she intended to get his attention with the car horn and by making a weaving spectacle of herself in his rearview mirror. If she was too late with the horn and if the cop didn’t look back and catch a glimpse of her reckless slalom, she would turn and pursue him, reluctantly letting the motor home out of her sight.
She wasn’t hopeful about finding a cop anytime soon.
All the luck seemed to be with the killer. He conducted himself with a confidence that unnerved Chyna. Perhaps that confidence was the only guarantor of his good luck—although even for one as rooted in reality as Chyna, it was easy to let superstition overwhelm her, attributing to him powers dark and supernatural.