Immediately she shifted the Honda into reverse and backed away from the tree, which stood inviolate. The ground was carpeted with wet redwood needles on which the tires spun before gripping, but not enough rain had fallen to churn the earth into mud. Rattling and clinking, the car bounced across the shallow drainage swale, which ran with only an inch or two of muddy water, and backed onto the pavement again.
Chyna glanced toward the top of the gently ascending slope down which she had just driven. As yet there was not even a faint glow of approaching headlights from beyond the curve.
He was coming. No doubt about that.
Soon.
She didn’t have time to reverse even part of the way up the slope. But she needed to build a little speed.
With her left foot, she tramped the brake pedal as far toward the floorboards as it would go, and with her right foot she eased down on the accelerator. The engine whined, then shrieked. The car strained like a spurred horse pressing against the gate of a rodeo chute. She could feel it wanting to surge forward, as if it were a living thing, and she wondered how much acceleration would be too much, enough to kill her or trap her in wreckage. Then she gave it a little more juice, smelled something burning, and raised her left foot from the brake pedal.
The tires spun furiously on the glistering blacktop, and then with a shudder the Honda shot forward, rattled and splashed across the ditch, and slammed into the trunk of the redwood. The right headlight burst, metal squealed, the hood crumpled and tweaked and popped open with a sound oddly like a hard strum on a banjo, but the windshield didn’t shatter.
The engine stuttered. Either the fuel had been exhausted at last or the crash had done severe mechanical damage.
Gasping for breath after the cinching punishment of the shoulder harness, praying that the engine wouldn’t fail just yet, Chyna popped the car into reverse again.
Ideally, the Honda would be blocking the road when the killer came around the bend. She had to force him to stop—and to get out of his motor home.
The battered car wheezed, almost stalled, then unexpectedly revved, and Chyna said gratefully, “Jesus,” as it rolled backward onto the pavement.
She pulled across both lanes but swung around a little, angling the car uphill so the killer would be able to see the damaged front end as soon as he negotiated the curve.
The engine clunked twice and died, but that was all right. She was in position.
Without the engine noise for competition, the rain seemed to be falling more forcefully than before, rattling on the roof and snapping against the glass.
At the upper curve, darkness still held.
She put the Honda in park, so it would not coast backward when she took her foot off the brake.
The headlights were both broken out, but the windshield wipers continued to thump back and forth, operating on battery power. She didn’t switch them off.
She opened the driver’s door and, feeling horribly exposed in the dome light, started to get out. She needed to be away from the car and in hiding by the time the motor home appeared—which would be in maybe twenty seconds, maybe ten, hard to say because she had lost track of how much time had passed since she herself had driven around the bend.
The gun.
Before she fully escaped the car, Chyna remembered the revolver. She swung back inside, reached for the weapon—but it was no longer on the seat.
In the first or second crash, the gun must have been thrown onto the floor. Leaning across the console between the front seats, she felt frantically in the darkness, found cold steel, the barrel, her finger actually slipping into the smooth muzzle. With a wordless murmur of relief, she fished the gun from the foot space and reversed her grip on it.
With the weapon firmly in hand, she scrambled out of the Honda. She left the driver’s door standing open.
Rain chilled her, and wind.
In the direction from which she had come, the night brightened faintly, and the redwood trunks near the shoulder of the curve began to glow as if in the radiance of a sudden moon.