again, so that everything could be as wonderful as it had been two years
ago.
“They can either go up to Wyoming and catch Interstate 80, or go
southwest on Route 24. What do you think?”
“Whatever you say, George,” the golden girl replied, her voice faint but
pleasant, like a happy memory.
Leland studied the map for several minutes. “Damn . . . They probably
went up and caught I-80 outside of Cheyenne. But even if they did, and
even if we went that way and managed to catch up with them, we wouldn’t
be able to do anything to them. That’s a major highway. Too much
traffic, too many police patrols. All we could do would be follow
them-and that’s not enough.” He was quiet for a while, thinking. “But
if they went the other way, it’s a whole different ballgame. That’s
desolate country. Not as much traffic. Fewer cops. We could really
make up for lost time. Might get a chance at them somewhere along the
way.
She waited, silently.
“We’ll take Route 24,” he said at last. “And if they did go the other
way . . . Well, we can always pick them up again tonight, at their
motel.”
She said nothing.
He smiled at her, folded the map and placed it on top of the tissue box,
where it covered the blue-gray pistol.
He started the van.
He drove away from the Rockies Motor Hotel and then from Denver, going
southwest toward Utah.
During the morning they came out of the mountains and down the piney
valleys of Colorado, from winter’s leftover snow to sun and sand again.
They went through Rifle and Debeque, crossing the Colorado River twice,
then passed Grand junction and, soon after, the border.
In Utah, the mountains fell back into the distance and the land became
sandier, and there was less traffic than there had been. For long
minutes theirs was the only car in sight on the level stretches of open
road.
“What if we had a flat tire now?” Colin asked ‘ indicating the vistas
of unpopulated land.
“We won’t.”
“We might.”
“We have all new tires,” Doyle said.
“But what if?”
“Then we’d change it.”
“And if the spare went flat too?”
“We’d fix it.” “How? ” Alex realized that they were playing one of the
boy’s games, and he smiled. Maybe the kid’s hunch was a good one. Maybe
it was all over now. Perhaps they could yet restore to the trip that
fun which they had known at the beginning of it. “In the emergency kit
in the trunk of this car,” Doyle said in an exaggerated professorial
voice, “there is a large spraycan which you attach to the valve of the
flat tire. It inflates the tire and simultaneously seals the puncture.
You will then be able to drive until you locate a service station which
will attend to your needs.”
“Pretty clever.”
“Isn’t it?”
Colin held an imaginary aerosol dispenser in one hand, pushed on the
unseen button, and made a sputtering noise. “But what if the spraycan
doesn’t work?”
“Oh, it will.”
“Okay . . . But what if we have three flats?”
Doyle laughed.
“It could happen,” Colin said.
“Sure. And we could have four flats.”
“And what would we do?”
As Doyle started to tell him that they would get out of the car and
walk, a horn blared behind them. It was loud and close and
uncomfortably familiar. It was the van.
Sixteen Before Alex could react properly, before the fear could well up
and he could tramp down on the accelerator and rocket away from the
Automover, the van swung into the left-hand lane and started to go
around him, its strident horn still wailing. Far out ahead on the gray,
heat-twisted road-clear to the high, rocky, multi-layered Capitol Reefs
which stood miles away-there was not any eastbound traffic to get in the
van’s path.
“You can’t let him go around us!” Colin said.
“I know.”
If the bastard got out in front of them, he would be able to blockade
the entire roadway. The cracked stone shoulders on both sides were too
narrow and the sand beyond them too dry and soft and loose for the