in the car at the time and had not witnessed the purchase.
Alex did not want the boy to know about the tablets. Colin was already
too tense for his own good. it would not be good for him to find out
that Doyle, despite all his assurances, was getting sleepy at the wheel.
He looked at his reflection in the cracked mirror above the dirty
washbasin, grimaced. “You look terrible.”
The reflection remained mute.
They by-passed the exit to Reno and stayed on Route 50 until they found
a motel just east of Carson City. It was a shabby place, decaying at
the edges. But neither of them had the energy to look any farther. The
dashboard clock read eight-thirty-more than twenty-two hours since they
had left Denver.
in their room, Colin went straight for his bed and flopped down. “Wake
me in six months, ” he said.
Alex went into the bath and closed the door. He used his electric razor
to touch up the shave he had taken six hours before, brushed his teeth,
took a hot shower. When he came back into the main room, Colin was
asleep; the boy had not even bothered to undress. Doyle put on clean
clothes, then woke him.
“What’s the matter?” the boy asked, nearly leaping off the bed when
Doyle touched his shoulder.
“You can’t sleep yet.”
,Why not?” Colin rubbed at his face. “I’m going out. I won’t leave
you alone, so I guess you’ll have to come with me.”
“Out? Where? ” Alex hesitated a moment. “To . . . To buy a gun.”
Now Colin was wide awake. He stood up and straightened his Phantom of
the Opera shirt. “Do you really think we need a gun?
Do you think that man in the Automover-”
“He probably won’t show up again.”
“Then-”
“I only said he probably won’t. But I just don’t know any more . . .
I’ve thought about it all night, all the way across Nevada, and I can’t
be sure of anything.” He wiped at his own face, pulling off his
weariness. “And then ‘ when I’m pretty sure that we’ve lost him-well, I
think about some of the people we’ve run into. That service station
attendant near Harrisburg. The woman at the Lazy Time Motel. I think
about Captain Ackridge . . .
I don’t know. It’s not that I think those people are dangerous. It’s
just that they represent something that’s happening . . . Well, it
seems to me we ought to have a gun, more to keep it in the house in San
Francisco than to protect us for the last few hours of this trip.”
“Then why not buy it in San Francisco?”
“I think I’ll sleep better if we get it now,” Alex said.
“But I thought you were a pacifist.”
“I am.” Colin shook his head. “A pacifist who carries a gun?”
“Stranger things happen every day,” Doyle said.
A few minutes past eleven o’clock, an hour and a half after they had
gone out, Doyle and the boy returned to the motel room. Alex closed the
door, shutting out the insufferable desert heat. He twisted the dead
lock and put the guard chain in place. He tried the knob, but it would
not turn.
Colin took the small, heavy pasteboard box to the bed and sat down
with it. He lifted the lid and looked inside at the .32-caliber pistol
and the box of ammunition. He had stayed in the car when Doyle went to
buy it, and he had not been allowed to open the box on the short ride
back. This was his first look at the weapon. He made a sour face. “You
said the man in the sporting goods store called it a lady’s gun.”
“That’s right,” Doyle said, sitting down on the edge of his bed and
taking off his boots. He knew he was not going to be able to stay awake
more than another minute or two.
“Why did he say that?”
“Compared to a .45, it has less punch, less kick, and makes a great deal
less noise. It’s the kind of pistol a woman usually buys.”