Then she stood up, aimed into the darkness where the sniper was, and pulled the trigger. The gun almost jumped out of her hand, its report cracking her eardrums. She kept shooting, a second bullet and a third, ripping the fabric of night. The other gun was silent. Over the buzz of pistol noise, Laura heard the roar of Mary Terror's van starting. "She's getting away!" Didi shouted. Car keys! Laura thought. She grasped her purse from the ground, and she began running toward the house.
Mary Terror threw the van into reverse and backed down the driveway, Drummer wailing in his bassinet on the floorboard. She saw it in her sideview mirror a BMW parked on the road, blocking the driveway. She pressed her foot to the accelerator, and the van's rear end slammed against the BMW's passenger door, crumpling it in with a crash of metal and glass. The BMW trembled and groaned, but would not give way. Sweat was on her face, the taste of Edward's blood on her lips. She fought the gearshift into first, roared back up the driveway to try to knock the car aside again. The headlights caught Laura coming, gun in hand, followed by Bedelia Morse. No time to waste. Mary gritted her teeth, put the van into reverse again, and wheeled it off the driveway, knocking down thin pines and smashing one of Didi's abstract sculptures to rubble. The van scraped past the BMW's front fender, and Mary twisted the wheel to straighten the van out, hit the accelerator once more, and the van shot forward with a scream of rubber. She sped away, heading west.
Laura reached her car, saw the van's taillights in the distance – both the red lenses broken – before the vehicle took a curve and disappeared. She heard Didi breathing hard behind her, and she turned around and aimed the pistol into Didi's face. "Get in the car."
"What?"
"Get in the car!" She tried to open the rear door on the passenger side but the hinges were jammed. Laura grabbed Didi's arm and shoved her around to the other side, where she opened the driver's door. Didi balked, tried to fight free, but Laura put the gun's barrel up under Didi's jaw and all her resistance faded. When Didi was in, Laura slid under the wheel, fished her keys from her blood-spattered purse, and started the engine. Something rattled and shrieked under the hood, but the gauges showed no warning lights. Laura mashed down on the accelerator, and the battered car laid strips of rubber to match the van's.
The window on Didi's side was broken out, freezing wind shrieking into the car as the speedometer's needle passed sixty. Laura took the curve at sixty-five, skidding over into the left-hand lane. No taillights ahead, but another sharp curve lay in wait. Laura's foot didn't move toward the brake. She battled the car around the curve, went off onto the shoulder and almost into the woods before she got the car back up onto the road again. Laura glanced at the speedometer the needle was moving past seventy. Didi was jammed back into her seat, her red hair flying in the wind, her face strained with terror in the dashboard's green glow.
A third curve almost threw the BMW into the trees, but Laura held tight to the shuddering steering wheel. Then there was a long straightaway ahead, and two white lights on it. Laura wiped her bleeding nose with her forearm and let the car wind up, the engine roaring and the speedometer showing eighty. But the van was going fast, too, black smoke billowing from its crumpled exhaust pipe. On both sides of the road the barren trees swept past in a dark blur. Laura got up close enough to read the numbers on the Georgia tag, and then the taillights flashed; Mary was cutting her speed, going into another wicked right-hand curve. Laura had to hit the brakes, too, and she faded back as the tires bit into the curve, wrenched them right, left, and then led them into another straightaway. Now Mary was standing on the accelerator, the van shooting forward with a fishtailing slipslide that made the breath freeze in Laura's lungs. If the van went off the road, David could be killed. She realized she couldn't ram the van, force it off onto the shoulder, or fire a bullet at a tire. Any of those things might cause Mary Terror to lose control of the wheel. A bullet aimed at a tire might go through the van's body, or hit the gas tank. David would die in the flaming wreckage as surely as by one of Mary Terror's bullets. Laura cut her speed, began to let the van pull away. The speedometer's needle dropped: through seventy-five… seventy… sixty-five… sixty. Mary kept the speed up at seventy and the van was moving away, dark smoke billowing behind. Laura saw a sign on the right: I-94, 6 MI.
The highway west, she thought.
The automatic's barrel pressed against Laura's right temple.
Didi had picked the gun up from beside her. "Stop the car," Didi said.
Laura kept driving, the speed now at a constant sixty.
"Stop the car!" Didi repeated. "I'm getting out!"
Laura didn't answer, her attention focused on the road and the van ahead. Mary Terror would take the interstate because it was the fastest route to California.
"I SAID STOP THE CAR!" Didi shouted over the wind's racket.
"No," Laura said.
Didi sat there, stunned and helpless with the gun in her hand.
Laura's nostrils were jamming up with blood. She blew her nose into her hand, enduring a savage pain that shot through her cheekbones, and then she wiped the scarlet mess onto her jeans. "I'm not going to lose Mary."
Didi's emotions ripped like a ragged flag. "I'LL KILL YOU IF YOU DON'T STOP THE CAR!" she screamed. "I'LL BLOW YOUR DAMNED BRAINS OUT!"
Laura didn't let up on the pedal. "You're not a killer anymore," she said without even glancing in Didi's direction. "That's all over. Besides, do you want to go back to your house and try to explain to the police why Edward Fordyce is lying dead in the woods?"
"Stop the car, I said." Didi's voice was weaker.
"Where are you going to go if I do?"
"I'll find somewhere! Don't you worry about me!"
Laura's head was pounding fiercely, the blood beginning to thicken in her nostrils. She had to breathe through her mouth to get any air. Bitch knocked the shit out of me, she thought. "I need you," she said.
"I've already ruined my life for you!"
"Then you don't have anything else to lose. I need you to help me get my baby back. I'm going to keep following Mary Terror all the way to California. All the way to hell if I have to."
"You're crazy! She'll kill the kid before she'll let you take him!"
"We'll see about that," Laura said.
Didi was about to demand to be let out again when a pair of headlights blazed in the rearview mirror. Didi looked back, saw a car gaining fast on them. "Christ!" she said. "I think it's the cops!" She lowered the gun from Laura's temple.
Laura watched the car coming. The damned thing was absolutely flying, doing over eighty. No siren or blue lights yet, but Laura's heart had jammed in her throat. She didn't know what to do: hit the accelerator or the brakes? And then the car was upon them, its headlights glowing like white suns in the rearview mirror. Laura jerked the BMW to the right as the car veered alongside them and screamed past. It was a big, dark blue or black Buick, maybe six or seven years old but immaculate, and the winds of its passage almost whirled the BMW off the road. The Buick tore on, swerved into the lane ahead of Laura, and kept going. It had a Michigan tag and a sticker that said WHEN GUNS ARE OUTLAWED, ONLY OUTLAWS WILL HAVE GUNS on the rear bumper.
In the van, Mary Terror saw the new arrival coming. Drummer was still crying, his bassinet having overturned on one of the curves. Pigs, she thought. Here come the fucking pigs. Edward's blood was sticky on her face, bits of his skull and brains spattered on her clothes. She cocked her Colt and rolled down her window, and she eased up on the accelerator as the big car left its lane and started to pull around her.