behind the wheel while he moved into the passenger’s seat, keeping the muzzle of
the revolver on her the whole time.
“Drive,” he said.
“Where?”
“Back to your place.”
“But—”
“Keep your mouth shut and drive.”
Now she was at the opposite side of the cab from the glove box. To get to it,
she would have to reach in front of him. He would never be that lax.
Determined to keep a rein on her galloping fear, she now found that she had to
rein in despair as well.
She started the truck, drove out of the parking lot, and turned right in the
street.
The windshield wipers thumped nearly as loud as her heart. She wasn’t sure how
much of the oppressive sound was made by the impacting rain and how much of it
was the roar of her own blood in her ears.
Block by block, Nora searched for a cop—although she had no idea what she should
do if she saw one. She never had to figure it out because no cops were anywhere
to be seen.
Until they were out of Carmel and on the Pacific Coast Highway, the blustering
wind not only drove rain against the windshield but also flung bristling bits of
cypress and pine needles from the huge old trees that sheltered the town’s
streets. South along the coast, as they headed into steadily less populated
areas, no trees overhung the road, but the wind off the ocean hit the pickup
full force. Nora frequently felt it pulling at the wheel. And the rain, slashing
straight at them from the sea, seemed to pummel the truck hard enough to leave
dents in the sheet metal.
After at least five minutes of silence, which seemed like an hour, she could no
longer obey his order to keep her mouth shut. “How did you find us?”
“Been watching your place for more than a day,” he said in that cool, quiet
voice that matched his placid face. “When you left this morning, I followed you,
hoping you’d give me an opening.”
“No, I mean, how did you know where we lived?”
He smiled. “Van Dyne.”
“That double-crossing creep.”
“Special circumstances,” he assured her. “The Big Man in San Francisco Owed me a
favor, so he put pressure on Van Dyne.”
“Big man?”
“Tetragna.”
“Who’s he?”
“You don’t know anything, do you?” he said. “Except how to make babies, huh? You
know about that, huh?”
The hard taunting note in his voice was not merely sexually suggestive: it Was
darker, stranger, and more terrifying than that. She was so frightened
of the fierce tension that she sensed in him each time he approached the subject
of sex that she did not dare reply to him.
She turned on the headlights as they encountered thin fog. She kept her
attention on the rain-washed highway, squinting through the smeary windshield.
He said, “You’re very pretty. If I was going to stick it into anyone, I’d stick
it into you.”
Nora bit her lip.
“But even as pretty as you are,” he said, “you’re like all the others, I’ll bet.
If I stuck it into you, then it’d rot and fall off because you’re diseased like
all the others—aren’t you? Yeah. You are. Sex is death. I’m one of the few who
seem to know it, even though proof is everywhere. Sex is death. But you’re very
pretty . .
As she listened to him, her throat got tight. She was having difficulty drawing
a deep breath.
Suddenly his taciturnity was gone. He talked fast, still soft-voiced and
unnervingly calm, considering the crazy things he was saying, but very fast:
“I’m going to be bigger than Tetragna, more important. I’ve got scores of lives
in me. I’ve absorbed energies from more than you’d believe, experienced The
Moment, felt The Snap. It’s my Gift. When Tetragna’s dead and gone, I’ll be
here. When everyone now alive is dead, I’ll be here because I’m immortal.”
She didn’t know what to say. He had come out of nowhere, somehow knowing about
Einstein, and he was a lunatic, and there seemed to be nothing she could do. She
was as angry about the unfairness of it as she was afraid. They had made careful