The van and the BMW, both dented and battered from their first encounter, headed west on the quiet interstate. Mary Terror checked her gas gauge and kept glancing back at Laura's car, marking its position. As Drummer's crying dwindled, Mary began to sing "Light My Fire" in a low, wandering voice.
Follow me, she was thinking. Her gaze ticked to the BMW's headlights again. That's right. Follow me so I can kill you.
The van and the car passed on. Back at the entrance ramp about thirty minutes later, Earl Van Diver tightened the last lug nut and released the air from the inflatable jack. He was wearing a black woolen cap and a jump suit in camouflage green and brown, his pallid, bony face scratched by foliage. He returned his tools to their proper niches in his trunk, where the sniper's rifle and boxes of ammunition were stored along with his SuperSnooper listening dish and tape recorder. He removed a palm-size black box from the trunk, which he mounted with adhesive pads on the underside of the dashboard. Then he plugged a connection into the cigarette lighter, started the engine, and turned a switch on the black box. A little blue light pulsed, but no numerals showed up yet on the display. On his rear windshield was an antenna that resembled that of a cellular phone, but was for a different purpose. Van Diver made another connection, the antenna's jack into the black box. Still no numerals. That was all right. The magnetic homing device he'd planted in the right front wheel well of Mary Terror's van wouldn't pick up on the display until he was within about four miles. It had been a precaution, for such a case as this.
Beneath his seat was a hiding place where his Browning automatic pistol could slide in and out. It would be used well before he was finished with Mary Terror.
And if the other two women got in the way, they were dead meat, too.
Earl Van Diver backed the Buick up the embankment to the road and then drove onto the interstate's ramp. West to California, he thought. Looking for Jack Gardiner. It was all on the tape, their voices caught by the SuperSnooper dish and the wireless amplification bug he'd planted inside a pottery vase in Bedelia Morse's front room. Going to California, the land of nuts and fruits.
It was a good place to kill a nightmare.
The Buick's speed hung between seventy and seventy-five, the pavement singing beneath the new tire. Van Diver, an executioner on a mission long awaited, hurtled toward his target.
Part VI – On the Storm
1: Happy Herman's
The sun was coming up, into a pewter sky. The warning light on the BMW's gas gauge had begun blinking. Laura tried not to pay any attention to it – tried to will it begone – but the light kept snagging her eye.
"Low on gas," Didi said over the wind's scream.
The heater was purring merrily, warming their feet and legs while they froze from the waist up. The positive side of this, though, was that neither Laura nor Didi could be lulled to sleep with the cold and the wind singing them a banshee symphony. Didi kept her hands in her pockets, but every so often Laura had to unclench one hand from the steering wheel, flex the blood back into it, put it back where it was and do the same to the other. Ahead of them, between fifty and sixty yards away, was the olive-green van, its left side scraped to the bare metal and the rear looking like a sledgehammer had been taken to it. Traffic had picked up on the interstate: more trucks, zooming past in defiance of the legal limit. Twenty minutes or so before, Laura had seen a patrol car speed past on the other side of the median, blue lights flashing. She wondered if the sight had given Mary Terror as much of a start as it had herself. Beyond Mary's van, the sky was still dark and ominous, as if night refused to recede from the shore of dawn.
"Gas is almost gone," Didi said. "Hear me?"
"I hear you."
"Well, what're you going to do? Wait until we have to push the damned thing?"
Laura didn't answer. She really didn't know what she was going to do; this was a wing-it-by-the-seat situation. If she pulled into a gas station first, then Mary Terror might turn off I-94 at the nearest exit. If she waited much longer, the gas would give out and they'd be coasting. There was something darkly comedic about this, like a twisted Lucy and Ethel on the trail of a celebrity when Ricky went to Hollywood. Don Juan, she thought. Wasn't that the movie Ricky visited Hollywood to film? Or was it Casanova? No, Don Juan. She was almost sure of it. That was the first sign of old age: forgetting details. Who was it that Lucy had gotten a booth next to at the Brown Derby? William Holden? Hadn't she spilled soup on his head? Or was it a salad instead of's –
The blare of an air horn behind her almost lifted Laura out of her seat and caused Didi to yelp like a dog. She jerked the wheel to the right, back into the lane she'd drifted out of, and the huge truck that was looming on her tail roared past like a snorting dinosaur.
"Screw you!" Didi shouted, and shot the truck's driver a bird.
Laura's heart began to pound.
Mary Terror was cutting her speed, and easing over toward an exit ramp that was about a quarter mile ahead.
Laura blinked, wasn't sure if she was walking on the paths of La-La Land again or not.
In the sky was an apparition. A symbol of high karma, as Mark Treggs might have said. Up on stilts on the roadside was a gigantic yellow Smiley Face, and a sign that said HAPPY HERMAN'S! GAS! FOOD! GROCERIES! NEXT EXIT!
Oh yes, Laura thought. That was where Mary Terror was going. Maybe she needed gas. Maybe she needed something to keep her awake. In any case, Happy Herman's Smiley Face was a beacon, drawing Mary Terror off the interstate like a hippie to a be-in.
"Where's she going?" Didi said excitedly. "She's getting off!"
"I know." Laura moved into the right lane. The exit ramp was coming up. Mary Terror took it, committing the van to a long curve to the right, and Laura cut the BMW's speed as she followed.
Happy Herman's was on the left. It was a yellow cinder-block combination grocery store, burger joint, and gas station, with full-serve and self-serve pumps. Big yellow Smiley Faces were painted on the windows. A couple of trucks were at the diesel pumps, and a station wagon with an Ohio tag was being fueled with self-serve premium unleaded. Mary Terror slid the van under a yellow plastic awning. As her front tires went over a rubber hose across the concrete, a shrill bell rang. She stopped at the full-serve pumps, her gas port lined up with the regular leaded hose. Then she sat there and watched in the sideview mirror as the BMW came in and went to the self-serve pumps thirty feet away. Laura Clayborne got out, the injured side of her face bruised and swollen and her hair windblown. Was there a gun in her hand? Mary saw the woman start to walk toward the van, and then a man's wrinkled face appeared at the window. He tapped on the glass, and Mary quickly glanced in the rearview mirror at her own face to make sure she'd gotten all of Edward's blood off with her saliva and fingernails. Some blood remained at her hairline, but it would have to do. She cranked the window down. "Fill 'er up?" the man asked. He wore a yellow, grease-stained Happy Herman cap and he was chewing vigorously on a toothpick.
Mary nodded. The man moved away from the window, and Mary stared at Laura, who stood less than ten feet away. Her hands were empty; no gun. Behind her, Didi was fueling up the BMW. Laura took two steps closer, and stopped when Mary rested her arm on the window frame, the baby's blood-spattered white blanket over her hand and about three inches of the Colt's barrel showing.
The sight of the bloody white blanket transfixed Laura. She couldn't take her eyes off it, and she felt a hot surge of sickness rising in her throat. And then Mary's other arm came into view and there was David, alive and sucking on a pacifier. The Colt's barrel moved a few inches, taking aim in the direction of the baby's skull.