The Thunderbird was not where it had been the night before. That space was empty.
He refused to panic. Nothing was lost. They had not escaped. He knew exactly where they were going.
He parked where the Thunderbird had been, shut off the engine. There was a map on top of the same tissue box which held the .32-caliber pistol. Leland unfolded it on the seat and turned sideways to study it, traced the meager system of highways that crossed Colorado and Utah.
“They don't have many choices,” he told the golden girl in the seat next to him. “Either they stay on the planned route—or they take one of these other two.”
She said nothing.
“After last night, they'll change their plans.”
When his headache was gone, Leland had also lost his selective amnesia. He could now recall everything: arriving at the motel an hour before they did, watching the lobby until they arrived, cautiously following them to their room, coming back in the middle of the night and trying to pick the lock on their door, the silent chase, and the ax . . . If that damned headache had only held off for a few minutes, if it had not come on him when it did, he would have finished off Alex Doyle.
Leland was not disturbed by the realization that he had tried to kill a man. After suffering so much at the hands of others ' he had finally come to understand that there was only one thing that would destroy this far-reaching conspiracy that was working against him: force, violence, counterattack. He must smash this entire evil association which had been formed solely to drive him to complete despair. And since Alex Doyle—and the boy, as well—formed the keystone of this conspiracy, murder was quite justified. He had acted in self-defense.
On Monday, when he had caught sight of his own eyes in the mirror, he had been confused, shocked by what he saw. Now, when he looked in the mirror, he saw nothing but a reflection, a flat image. After all, he was only doing what Courtney wanted, so that they could be together 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 Thunderbird to leave the pavement and regain the lead once that was lost.
Doyle put his foot down.
The big car surged ahead.
But the stranger in the van, though mad, was not stupid. He had been expecting that maneuver. He put speed on too, and at least for the moment, he was able to stay even with Doyle.
Wind roared between the two parallel vehicles as they hurtled westward.
“We'll outpace him,” Alex said.
Colin did not respond.
The slim speedometer needle climbed smoothly to eighty and then on up to eighty-five. Doyle glanced at it once. Tense and frightened, Colin watched it with real dread.
The flat land whipped past them in a shimmering white blur of sand and heat and free-lying salt.
And the Automover hung in beside them.
“He can't keep up,” Alex said.
Ninety. Ninety-five . . .
Then, as they were rushing toward a hundred-miles-an-hour, with the wind whooping between them, the madman pulled his wheel to the right. Not much. Just a little bit. And only for an instant. The whole side of the Automover made light, brief contact with the full length of the Thunderbird.
Sparks showered up and skittered like a fall of bright stars across the windshield in front of Doyle. Tortured sheet metal screamed and coughed and crumpled up on itself.
The steering wheel was nearly torn out of Doyle's hand. He grappled with it, held on as the car lurched onto the stone shoulder, kicking up gravel that rattled noisily in the undercarriage. Their speed fell, and they began a slow sideways turn. Alex was certain that they were going to plow into the van, which was still alongside of them. But then the car began to right itself . . . He took them back onto the highway, touching the gas pedal when he would have preferred to go with the brakes.
“You all right?” he asked Colin.
The boy swallowed hard. “Yes.”
“Better hold on, then. We're going to g
et the hell out of here,” he said as the Thunderbird gradually picked up the speed which it had lost, casting its pale shadow on the side of the Chevrolet.
Doyle risked one quick glance away from the road, looked up at the van's side window, which was no more than three or four feet away. Despite the short distance between them, he could not see the other driver, not even his silhouette. The man was sitting up higher than Doyle, on the far side of the cab, and he was very well hidden by the yellow-white desert sunlight that played upon the window glass.
Eighty miles an hour again, making up for lost time and for lost ground. And now on up to eighty-five, with the speedometer needle quivering slightly. it hesitated on the eighty-five, in fact; for a moment it looked as if it would stick there, and then it jerked and rose slowly.
Alex watched the Chevrolet out of the corner of his eyes. When he first sensed it moving in to brush against them a second time, he would take the car into the stony burm and try to avoid another collision. They could not tolerate much more of that banging around. Though it was half again as expensive as the Automover van, the big luxury car would come apart much sooner and more completely than the Chevrolet. It would dissolve around them like a flimsy paper construction, roll over and over like a weightless model, and burn faster than a cardboard carton.
At ninety miles an hour, the car began to shake badly, making a noise like stones rolling in the bottom of a washtub. The steering wheel vibrated furiously in Doyle's hands. And then, worse, it started to spin uselessly back and forth.
Doyle eased up on the accelerator, although that was the last thing he wanted to do.
The needle fell. At eighty-five, the ride was smooth and the car was under control.
“Something's broken!” Colin shouted over the roar of the wind and the two competing engines.
“No. it must have been a section of bad road.”
Though he knew that their luck was not running that way, Alex hoped to God that what he had told the boy was true. Let it be true. Let it be nothing more serious than a piece of bad road, a section of rain-tunneled pavement. Don't let anything happen to the Thunderbird. It must not break down. They must not be stranded out here in the sand and the salt flats, not alone, not so far from help, and not with the madman as their only company.
He tried the accelerator.
The car picked up, hit ninety . . .
And the violent shudder returned, as if the frame and body were no longer firmly joined and were slamming into each other, parting, slamming together again. This time, as he lost control of the wheel, he felt the horrible quaking in the gas pedal as well. Their top speed was going to be eighty-five. Otherwise, the car would fall apart. Therefore, they were not going to outpace the Chevrolet.
The driver of the van seemed to realize this the same moment that Doyle did. He tooted his horn, then pulled away from them, out in front where he had command of the highway.
“What are we going to do?” Colin asked.
“Wait and see what he does.”
When the Automover was approximately a thousand yards out ahead of them, wrapped up in the deceptively undulating streams of hot air that were rising off the superheated pavement, it slowed down to a steady eighty-five and maintained a consistent half-mile lead.
A mile passed.
On both sides of the road, the land became even whiter, as if it had been bleached by the raw sun. It was punctuated only by rare, ugly clumps of struggling scrub and by occasional dark rock teeth that were all stained and rotted by the desert wind and heat.
Two miles.
The van was still out there, taunting them.
The dashboard vents spewed crisp, cold air, and still the interior of the Thunderbird was too warm and close. Alex felt perspiration bead on his forehead. His shirt was sticking to him.
Three miles.
“Maybe we should stop,” Colin said.
“And turn back?”
“Maybe.”
“He would see us,” Doyle said. “He would turn right around and follow - and before long, he'd be out in front of us again.”
“Well . . .”
“Let's wait and see what he does,” Doyle said again, trying to keep the fear out of his voice. He was aware that the boy needed an example of strength. “You want to get the map and see how far it is to the next town?
Colin understood the significance of the question. He grabbed the map and opened it on his knees. It covered him like a quilt. Squinting through his Coke-bottle glasses, he found their last known position, estimated the distance they had come since then, and marked the spot with one finger. He located the nearest town, checked the key at the bottom of the map, then did some figuring in his head.
“Well?” Doyle asked.
“Sixty miles.”
“You sure?
“Positive.”
“I see.”
It was too damned far.
Colin folded the map and put it away. He sat like a stone sculpture, staring at the back of the Chevrolet van.
The highway crested a gentle slope, dropped away into a broad alkali basin. It looked like an ink line drawn across a clean sheet of typewriter paper. For miles and miles to the west, the road was empty. Nothing moved out there.
This complete isolation was precisely what the driver of the van wanted. He braked hard, pulled the Chevrolet toward the right burm, then swung it around to the left in a broad loop. The van stopped, sideways in the road, blocking most of both lanes.
Doyle tapped the brakes, then realized that there was no percentage in slowing down or stopping altogether. He put his foot on the accelerator again. “Here we go!”
Holding at a steady eighty-five, the Thunderbird bore down on the van, aimed straight at the center of the green-and-blue advertisement painted on its flank. Seven hundred yards lay between them. Now only six hundred-five, four, three hundred . . .
“He isn't going to move!” Colin said.
“Doesn't matter.”
“We'll hit!”
“No.”
“Alex—”
Fifty yards from the truck, Doyle wheeled to the right. Tires squealed. The car rushed across the graveled burm, bounced as wildly as if the springs had turned to rubber, and kept on going.
Doyle realized that he was attempting to pull off a stunt which only a short while ago he had thought impossible. Now, whether it was impossible or not, it was their only hope. He was terrified.
The car plowed into the grainy white soil that edged the highway, and alkali dust plumed up behind them like a vapor trail. Their speed was cut by a third in the first few seconds, and the Thunderbird lurched sickeningly in the sandy earth.
It'll stop us, Doyle thought. We'll be stranded here.
He stomped the accelerator to the floor.
Although they were still doing better than fifty, the wide tires protested the loss of traction, spun furiously. The car slewed sideways, fishtailed back before picking up the speed demanded of it.
They passed the Automover.
Doyle angled back toward the highway. He kept the accelerator pressed all the way down. Through the partially unresponsive steering wheel, he felt the treacherous land shifting beneath them. However, before the sand could capture one or more of the wheels, they reached the shoulder of the road and kicked up hundreds of small stones as they plunged back onto the pavement.
In seconds, they were doing eighty-five again, heading west, the van behind them.
“You did it!” Colin said.
“Not yet.”
“But you did!” He was still frightened, but he also sounded pleasantly excited.
Doyle looked in the mirror.
Far back there, the van was starting after them, a white speck against the whiter land.
“He's coming?” Colin asked.
“Yes.”
“See if it'll go past ninety now.”
Doyle tried, but the car began to shake and rattle. “No good. Something was damaged when he slammed into u
s.”
“Well, at least we know you can drive us around any roadblock he throws up,” the boy said.
Doyle looked at him. “You've got more faith in my driving than I do. That was pretty hairy back there.”
“You can do it,” Colin said. Desert sunlight, coming through the window, made his wire-framed glasses look like tiny tubes of light.
Three minutes later the van was on their tail.
But when it tried to come around them, Doyle swung the Thunderbird into the left hand lane, blocking the van and forcing it to fall back. When the Chevy attempted to move in on their right, Doyle weaved in front of it and blew his own horn to counter the other's savage blaring.
For several minutes and miles they played that game with an unsportsmanlike disregard for rules, cruising from one side of the road to the other. Then, inevitably, the van found an opening and took advantage of it, drawing even with them.
“Here we go again,” Doyle said.
As if he had cued it, the Automover closed the space between them and brushed the car. Sparks showered up and sputtered out in an instant, and metal whined, though not as loudly or as gratingly as it had the first time that they had collided.
Alex fought the-wheel. They plummeted along the gravel shoulder for a thousand yards before he could get them back onto the highway.
The van hit them again, harder than before.
This time Alex lost control. He could not hold onto the sweat-slicked steering wheel which spun through his hands. It was slippery as a stick of butter. Only when they were off the road, grinding crazily through the ridged sand, was he able to get a good grip on the wet plastic and regain command of their fates.
They were doing forty-five when they came back onto the road, and they were a few yards ahead of the van. But it caught up with them a moment later and hung beside them until they were doing eighty-five again. The whole right side of the Automover was scraped and dented. Doyle knew, as he looked anxiously at the other vehicle, that the left side of the Thunderbird was in much worse condition.