the Merkur down even more than the reliably maneuverable Mercedes,
widening the gap between him and Rachael. So he swung off the lightly
traveled Interstate, into the heart of Barstow, and used a telephone
booth at a Union 76 Station to call Whitney Gavis in Las Vegas.
He would tell Whitney about Eric Leben hiding in the Inink of Rachael’s
car. With any luck at alJ, Rachael ould not stop on the road, would not
give Eric an easy flUnity to go after her, so the dead man would wait i
hidey-hole until they were all the way into Vegas.
forewarn, Whit Gavis could fire about six rounds of heavy buckshot into
the trunk as Eric opened it from the inside, and Rachael, never having
realized she was in danger, would be safe.
Everything was going to be all right.
Whit would take care of everything.
Ben finished tapping in the number, using his AT&T card for the call,
and in a moment Whit’s phone began to ring a hundred and sixty miles
away.
The storm was still having trouble breaking. Only a few big drops of
rain spattered against the glass walls of the booth.
The phone rang, rang.
The previously milky clouds had curdled into immense gray-black
thunderheads, which in turn had formed stilldarker, knotted, more
malignant masses that were moving at great speed toward the southeast.
The phone rang again and again and again.
Be there, damn it, Ben thought.
But Whit was not there, and wishing him home would not make it true.
On the twentieth ring, Ben hung up.
For a moment he stood in the telephone booth, despairing, not sure what
to do.
Once, he’d been a man of action, with never a doubt in a crisis. But in
reaction to various unsettling discoveries about the world he lived in,
he had tried to remake himself into a different man-student of the past,
train fancier.
He had failed in that remake, a failure that recent events had made
eminently clear, He could not just stop being the man he had once been.
He accepted that now. And he had thought that he had lost none of his
edge. But he realized that all those years of pretending to be someone
else had dulled him. His failure to look in the Mercedes’s trunk before
sending Rachael away, his current despair, his confusion, his sudden
lack of direction were all proof that too much pretending had its deadly
effect.
Lightning sizzled across the swollen black heavens, but even that
scalpel of light did not split open the belly of the storm.
He decided there was nothing to be done but hit the road, head for
Vegas, hope for the best, though hope seemed futile now. He could stop
in Baker, sixty miles ahead, and try Whit’s number again.
Maybe his luck would change.
It had to change.
He opened the door of the booth and ran to the stolen Merkur.
Again, lightning blasted the charred sky.
A cannonade of thunder volleyed back and forth between the sky and the
waiting earth.
The air stank of ozone.
He got in the car, slammed the door, started the engine, and the storm
finally broke, throwing a million tons of water down upon the desert in
a sudden deluge.
Rachael had been following the bottom of the wide arroyo for what seemed
miles but was probably only a few hundred yards. The illusion of
greater distance resulted partly from the hot pain in her twisted ankle,
which was subsiding but only slowly.
She felt trapped in a maze through which she might forever search
futilely for a nonexistent exit. Narrower arroyos branched off the
primary channel, all on the right-hand side. She considered pursuing
another gulch, but each intersected the main run at an angle, so she
couldn’t see how far they extended. She was afraid of deviating into
one, only to encounter a dead end within a short distance.
To her left, three stories above, Eric hurried along the brink of the
arroyo, following her limping progress as if he were the mutant master
of the maze in a Dungeons and Dragons game. If and when he started down