"Shit," she whispered, really frightened for the first time since escaping from DuLac's.
Dondi Snayheever waited in his idling car in the parking lot of the abandoned gas station until there were no headlights very close in either direction, and then he switched off his own lights and drove very slowly off the cracked old concrete and up the dirt road.
His father had bought this land sometime in the early fifties, and might still own it. The old man had said that the place had strong vibrations, that it would be a good place for the boy to learn, that the cards would be livelier here.
His father. His father was coming to see him, for the first time in nine years. With his mother!
Snayheever didn't seem to be able to hold on to any one feeling about his father. Over the years since 1981 he had sometimes missed the old man so badly that he had returned to the Baker box, crawled inside, and then just shouted for him until he was hoarse, thinking that he might that way turn back time, so that his father would not have disappeared yet; at other times he wanted to kill him for having left his son to deal with an incomprehensible world all alone.
The little car lurched over the top of the low hill, and he could see his plywood box off to the left among a stand of yucca.
It occurred to him that young Aristarchus here was his brother. Snayheever was treating him a little harshly, for a brother. He'd have to lift the kid up and put a cushion on the chair under him.
Outside town the glow of the Mustang's headlights on the rushing highway ahead of them was the only light besides the faint silvery glow thrown by the half-moon.
I should have got the kids out of town, at least, Diana thought, as soon as I got off the phone with Scott on Friday night. Anything, like Moses' mother putting her baby son in a boat and just letting the river take him, rather than let them stay for this. That's what a good mother would have done. At least Oliver is with his grandfather in the truck a hundred yards back.
"Closed gas station up ahead," said Scott.
"I see it."
She slowed and signaled for a right turn—and then she saw something out of the corner of her eye, and gunned the engine and yanked the wheel around, and the car spun out in the roadside gravel and came to a halt on the shoulder, rocking on the abused shocks, pointing back the way they'd come. The engine was quiet—stalled.
"What is it?" Scott whispered urgently. His hand was under his shirt, on the grip of the revolver.
"A car—" Dust from the spinout swirled outside the windows of the rocking car, but she could see well enough to know that it had been a hallucination. "I must be going crazy. I thought I saw a car leave the road real fast and blow up—right over there." She pointed at a half-demolished cinder-block wall on the south end of the gas station lot.
Crane squinted in the direction she was pointing, and for just an instant he saw a blooming yellow fireball, curdling black at the edges, rising into the sky, in perfect silence—then it was gone, leaving nothing but a dark blur in his vision.
"I saw it too, for a second—" he began. Then he paused, his mouth still open.
He had seen it through his right eye. The plastic eye.
"What's the matter? What was it?"
"I don't know," he said, opening his door and stepping out onto the highway pavement. The broken cinder-block wall at the south end of the lot was weathered and cracked, surrounded by windblown trash, and didn't seem to have been even approached by anyone for decades.
Diana had got out, too, and was standing on the curb. The night wind blew the stirred-up dust away across the desert.
Crane looked at her and shrugged. "Maybe it was something that happened here a long time ago, and the Jack and Queen of Hearts arriving together stirred old images out of the ruins."
"Well, let's get back in the car, the dirt road is—"
The flat, hard pop of an outdoor gunshot interrupted her, and Crane heard the whine of a ricochet off the asphalt a dozen yards to his right.
He hurried around the car, grabbed Diana and pulled her back to the highway side, and forced her down into a crouch behind the fender.
"My father first!" came a call from the crest of a low hill behind the station. "My mother wait in the car, for just a minute. Everything's fine! Everything's fine!"
Well, I guess you got a gun, Crane thought, echoing what Snayheever had told them in Baker two days ago.
"Okay," Crane whispered. "Ozzie and Arky are parked back there; you can just see the car with its headlights out, see it? If you hear another shot, run back and get them. They'll have some ideas."
"But you're not this guy's father! Won't he see that right away?"
"It's dark," Crane said, "and he's crazy. If I can get close to him and he's not actually pointing his gun at your kid, I'll kill him. I imagine he'll have the gun pointed at me."
"So you'll be killed."
"Maybe not. Anyway, I'm dead already, ask Ozzie."
He stood up and limped slowly around the car. Diana had turned off the Mustang's headlights, so the moon was the only light, but its radiance was bright enough to show the dilapidated station and the lot and the dirt road that curled away behind it to the top of the hill.
"Scott."
He looked back. Diana was standing up behind the car, and now she hurried to him and hugged him tightly. "I love you," she said. "Come back safe."
"Two little lovebirds," sang Snayheever up on the hill, "sittin' in a tree, kay-eye-ess-ess-eye-en-gee."
"Christ," Diana whispered, "get my son away from that man."
"I will," Crane told her as he started forward again. "Get back behind the car and stay there."
Crane was sweating as he limped up the dusty, hummocky road, and the breeze not only chilled him but seemed to sting, as if he'd rubbed Ben-Gay all over himself. His bad leg stung and ached. Why hadn't he got a beer from Mavranos as well as the gun?
He wondered how much he might happen to resemble Snayheever's father. Would the crazy young man simply shoot him from a distance when he saw that Crane was the wrong man?
Was Snayheever's finger tightening on the trigger right now?
Crane flinched, but kept limping up the hill.
He tried to imagine being shot, in the frail hope that picturing it would enable him to face it and not stop right where he was and turn around and go hopping and sliding and whimpering back down to the car.
A punch like a hammer, and then you're down, he thought, and the place where you've been hit feels numb and hot and loose.
It didn't help. Each second was a hard choice between going on and running back to the precious penumbra of the car body.
If he kills you, he told himself, you'll just be joining Susan. But the only image of Susan that he could conjure up right now was of the thing that had been convulsing in his closet as he had climbed out of his broken bedroom window on Friday night.
You're going to die anyway, he thought desperately, for having stupidly played in that Assumption game. This way you die trying to save Diana's son's life. Purposeful instead of pointless.
But the death by Assumption won't happen tonight. If you run away, you can have breakfast tomorrow, a good breakfast with a big Bloody Mary in a nice place, with Ozzie. Would the old man hold it against me that I turned back here?
Yes, thought Crane, despairingly and almost angrily, he would.
He began taking longer strides, snarling at the pain in his stabbed thigh.
"Dad!" called Snayheever.
Crane rocked to a halt and looked up through sweat-stung eyes, but couldn't see him. "Yes, son?"