Colin asked, gripping his knees in his delicate hands and leaning
forward as if bent by the tension.
“I don’t know.”
“Are you going to stop?”
“No.”
Colin nodded. “Good. I don’t think we should stop. I think we should
keep going no matter what.”
Doyle expected that any second now the stranger would stop blowing his
horn and let the van fall back to its customary quarter of a mile.
Instead, it just hung in there, only three feet away from their back end
now, cruising at seventy miles an hour, horn blaring.
Whether or not the man in the Chevy was as dangerous as a Charles Manson
or Richard Speck, he was most certainly unbalanced. He was getting some
sort of kick out of terrorizing complete strangers, and that was far
from normal. More than ever before, Doyle knew he did not want to
confront this man face-to-face and test the limits of his madness.
Beep, beep, beeeeeep “What can we do?” the boy asked.
Doyle glanced at him. “Seatbelt on?”
“Of course.”
“We’ll outrun him again.”
“And go to Denver on the back roads?”
“Yeah.”
“He’ll pick us up again tomorrow morning when we leave Denver on the way
to Salt Lake City.”
“No, he won’t,” Doyle said.
“How can you be sure?”
“He’s not clairvoyant,” Doyle said. “He’s just been lucky, that’s all.
By chance, he’s stayed in the approximate area where we’ve stayed each
night-and equally by chance, he’s started out around the same hour each
morning that we started out. It’s purely coincidental, the way he keeps
catching up to us.” He knew that this was the only rational
explanation, as weak as it was, the only thing that made any sense. Yet
he did not believe a word of it. “You read about dozens of wilder
coincidences in the newspapers. All the time.” He was talking, now,
only to calm the boy. That old, familiar, dreaded fear of his had
returned, and he knew that he would not be calm again, himself, until
they were safely in San Francisco.
He pressed down on the accelerator.
The Thunderbird surged forward, opening a gap between them and the
Chevrolet. The gap rapidly widened, even though the Automover put on
its own burst of speed.
“You’ll have a lot more driving to do if we go the back way,” the boy
said, a vague apprehension in his voice.
“Not necessarily. We can go north and pick up Route 36 again,” Doyle
said, watching the van dwindle in the rearview mirror. “That’s a pretty
good road up there.”
“It’ll still mean an extra couple of hours. Yesterday you were really
tired when we got to the motel.”
,I’ll be all right,” Doyle said. “Don’t you worry about me.”
They took Connecting Route 77 north to Route 36 and went west across the
top of the state.
Colin no longer found the fields, grain elevators, oil derricks, and
dust storms especially interesting. He hardly looked at the scenery. He
tucked in his Frankenstein T-shirt and smoothed it down, played tunes on
his bony knees, cleaned his thick glasses, and smoothed his shirt some
more. The minutes passed like snails.
Leland let the van slow down to seventy, quieting the furniture and
household goods which rattled noisily in the cargo hold when he drove
any faster. He looked at the golden, transparent girl beside him. “They
must have turned off somewhere along the way. We won’t catch up with
them until we get into Denver this evening.”
She said nothing.
“I should have stayed back a ways until I saw a chance to run them off
the road. I shouldn’t have pressured him like that right away.”
She only smiled.
“Well,” he said, “I guess you’re right. The highway’s too public a
place to take care of them. Tonight, at the motel, will be better.
I might be able to do it with the knife, if I can sneak up on them. No
noise that way. And they won’t be expecting anything there. ” The
fields flashed past. The leaden sky grew lower, and rain spattered
across the windshield. The wipers thumped hypnotically, like a club
slammed again and again into something soft and warm.