pouring rain. Fortunately, the lightning had passed away to the east.
Standing in the storm-gray twilight gloom beside the disabled car, he
shielded his eyes with one hand and looked into the rain, toward the
west, where distant headlights were approaching.
1-15 was still lightly traveled. A few determined gamblers were
trekking toward their mecca and would probably have been undeterred by
Armageddon, though there were more big trucks than anything else. He
waved his arms, signaling for help, but two cars and three trucks passed
him without slowing. As their tires cut through puddles on the
pavement, they sent sheets of water pluming in their wake, some of which
cascaded over Ben, adding to his misery.
About two minutes later, another eighteen-wheeler came into view. It
was bearing so many lights that it appeared to be decorated for
Christmas. To Ben’s relief, it began to brake far back and came to a
full stop on the berm behind the Merkur.
He ran back to the big rig and peered up at the open window where a
craggy-faced man with a handlebar mustache squinted down at him from the
warm, dry cab. “Broke down!” Ben shouted above the cacophony of wind
and rain.
“Closest mechanic you’re going to find is back in Baker,” the driver
called down to him. “Best cross over to the westbound lanes and try to
catch a ride going that way.
“Don’t have time to find a mechanic and get her fixed!”
Ben shouted. “Got to make Vegas fast as I can.” He had prepared the
lie while waiting for someone to stop. “My wife’s in the hospital
there, him bad, maybe dying.”
“Good Lord,” the driver said, “you better come aboard, then.”
Ben hurried around to the passenger’s door, praying that his benefactor
was a highballer who would keep the pedal to the metal in spite of the
weather and rocket into Vegas in record time.
Driving across the rain-lashed Mojave on the last leg of the trip to Las
Vegas, with the darkness of the storm slowly giving way to the deeper
darkness of night, Rachael felt lonelier than she’d ever felt before-and
she was no stranger to loneliness. The rain had not let up for the past
couple of hours, largely because she was more than keeping pace with the
storm as it moved eastward, driving deeper into the heart of it. The
hollow beating of the windshield wipers and the droning of the tires on
the wet road were like the shuttles of a loom that wove not cloth but
isolation.
Much of her life had been lived in loneliness and in emotional-if not
always physical-isolation. By the time Rachael was born, her mother and
father had discovered that they could not abide each other, but for
religious reasons they had been unwilling to consider divorce.
Therefore, Rachael’s earliest years passed in a loveless house, where
her parents’ resentment toward each other was inadequately concealed.
Worse, each of them seemed to view her as the other’s child-a reason to
resent her, too. Neither was more than dutifully affectionate.
As soon as she was old enough, she was sent to Catholic boarding schools
where, except for holidays, she remained for the next eleven years. In
those institutions, all run by nuns, she made few friends, none close,
partly because she had a very low opinion of herself and could not
believe that anyone would want to be friends with her.
A few days after she graduated from prep school, the summer before she
was to enter college, her parents were killed in a plane crash on their
way home from a business trip. Rachael had been under the impression
that her father had made a small fortune in the garment industry by
investing money that her mother had inherited the year of their wedding.
But when the will was probated and the estate was settled, Rachael
discovered that the family business had been skirting bankruptcy for
years and that their upper-class life-style had eaten up every dollar
earned. Virtually penniless, she had to cancel her plans to attend
Brown University and, instead, went to work as a waitress, living in a
boarding-house and saving what she could toward a more modest education