the highway, he needs only to release the hand brake and shift into drive. The tires kick up a storm of gravel that thunders against the undercarriage. The black-and-white lurches forward. Hot rubber shrieks like babies in pain, bites into the blacktop, and Vess rockets after the motor home.
Too late, distracted by his numb foot and recklessly eager to get his hands on the woman, he realizes that the big vehicle is no longer heading south. It’s reversing toward him at maybe thirty miles an hour, even faster.
He slams his foot down on the brake pedal, but before he can pull the wheel to the left to get out of the way, the motor home crashes into him with a horrendous sound, and it’s like hitting a rock wall. His head snaps back, and then he pitches forward against the steering wheel so hard that all the breath is knocked out of him, while a dizzying darkness swirls at the edges of his vision.
The hood buckles and pops open, and he can’t see a damn thing through the windshield. But he hears his tires spinning and smells burning rubber. The patrol car is being pushed backward, and though the collision dramatically slowed the motor home for a moment, it’s picking up speed again.
He tries to shift the black-and-white into reverse, figuring that he can back away from the motor home even as it’s pushing at him, but the stick first stutters stubbornly in his hand, clunks into neutral, and then freezes. The transmission is shot.
As bad: He suspects that the smashed front end of the car is hung up on the back of the motor home.
She’s going to push him off the highway. In some places the drop-off from the shoulder is eight or ten feet and steep enough virtually to ensure that the patrol car will tumble ass-over-teakettle if it goes over the edge. Worse, if they are hung up on each other, and if the woman doesn’t have full control of the motor home, she’ll most likely roll it off the road on top of the black-and-white, crushing him.
Hell, maybe that’s what she’s trying to do.
She’s a damn singularity, all right, in her own way just like him. He admires her for it.
He smells gasoline. This is not a good place to be.
To the right of the center console and the police radio (which he switched off when he first saw the motor home and realized that it was his own), a pump-action 20-gauge shotgun is mounted barrel-up in spring clips attached to the dashboard. It has a five-shell magazine, which Sheriff Vess always keeps loaded.
He grabs the shotgun, wrenches it out of the clips, holds it in both hands, and slides left from behind the steering wheel. He bails out through the missing door.
They’re reversing at twenty or twenty-five miles an hour, rapidly gaining speed because the car is in neutral and no longer resisting the backward rush. The pavement comes up to meet him as though he’s a parachutist with huge holes in his silks. He hits and rolls, keeping his arms tucked in against his body in the hope that he won’t break any bones, fiercely clutching the shotgun, tumbling diagonally across the blacktop to the shoulder beyond the northbound lane. He tries to keep his head up, but he takes a bad knock, and another. He welcomes the pain, shouting with delight, reveling in the incredible intensity of this adventure.
Chyna was watching the side mirror when Edgler Vess sprang out of the patrol car, slammed into the blac