Intuition might serve him as well as it sometimes served Chyna. If intuition was the whisper of God, then perhaps another and less benevolent god spoke with equal subtleness to a man like this.
She turned back, leaned around the corner, and snatched up the empty package. The stiff plastic crinkled in her shaky grip, but the sound was faint and, luckily, masked by his footsteps.
He was at least halfway down the third aisle by the time she started forward along the second. But he was taking his time while she was scuttling as fast as she could, and she reached the head of her aisle before he arrived at the end of his.
At the terminus of the shelf row, instead of a flat panel like the one at the far end, there was a freestanding wire carousel rack holding paperback books, and Chyna nearly collided with it when she turned the corner. She caught herself just in time, slipped around the rack, and sheltered against it, between aisles once more.
On the floor lay a Polaroid photograph: a close-up of a strikingly beautiful girl of about sixteen, with long platinum-blond hair. The teenager’s features were composed but not relaxed, frozen in a studied blandness, as though her true feelings were so explosive that she would self-destruct if she acknowledged them. Her eyes subtly belied her calm demeanor; they were slightly wide, watchful, achingly expressive, windows on a soul in torment, full of anger and fear and desperation.
This must be the photograph that he had shown to the clerks. Ariel. The girl in the cellar.
Although she and Ariel bore no resemblance to each other, Chyna felt as though she were staring into a mirror rather than looking at a picture. In Ariel, she recognized a terror akin to the fear that had suffused her own childhood, a familiar desperation, loneliness as deep as a cold polar ocean.
The killer’s footsteps brought her back to the moment. Judging by the sound of them, he was no longer in the third aisle. He had turned the corner at the back of the store and was now in the middle passage.
He was coming forward, leisurely covering the same territory over which Chyna had just scuttled.
What the hell is he doing?
She wanted to take the photograph but didn’t dare. She put it on the floor where she had found it.
She went around the paperback carousel into the third aisle, which the killer had just left, and she headed toward the end of the shelf row again. She stayed close to the merchandise on the left, away from the glass doors of the lighted coolers on the right, to avoid throwing a shadow on the ceiling tiles, which he might see.
When she was moving, she could still hear his heavy footsteps, but unless she stopped to listen, she couldn’t tell in which direction he was headed. Yet she didn’t dare stop to take a bearing on him, lest he circle again into this aisle and catch her in the open. When she reached the end of the row and turned the corner, she half expected to discover that he had changed directions, to collide with him, and to be caught.
But he wasn’t there.
Sitting on her haunches, Chyna leaned back against the end panel of the shelf row, the very spot from which she’d started. Gingerly she put the empty Bic lighter package on the floor between her feet, in the same place from which she had retrieved it less than a minute before.
She listened. No footsteps. Other than the noise made by the coolers, only silence.
Thumb poised, she clutched the lighter in her fist, prepared to strike the flame.
Vess stuffs two snack packages of cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers, one Planters peanut bar, and two Hershey bars with almonds into his raincoat pockets, in which he’s already carrying the pistol, the Polaroid, and the videotape.
He totals the cost in his head. Because he doesn’t want to waste time going behind the register to make change, he rounds the figure to the nearest dollar and leaves the payment on the counter.
After picking up the fallen photograph of Ariel, he hesitates, soaking up the atmosphere of aftermath. There is a special quality to a room in which people have recently perished: like the hush in a theater during that instant between when the final curtain falls on a perfect performance and when the wild applause begins; a sense of triumph but also a solemn awareness of eternity suspended like a cold droplet at the point of a melting icicle. With the screaming done and the blood pooled in stillness, Edgler Vess is better able to appreciate the effects of his bold actions and to relish the quiet intensity of death.
Finally he leaves the store. Using the tagged key that he took from the pegboard, he locks the door.
At the corner of the building is one public telephone. With its armored cord, the handset isn’t easily torn loose, so he hammers it against the phone box five, ten, twenty times, until the plastic cracks, revealing the microphone. He tears the mike out of the broken mouthpiece, drops it on the pavement, and methodically crushes it under his boot heel. Then he hangs the useless handset on the switch hook again.
His work here is done. Although satisfying, this interlude was unexpected; it has put him behind schedule.
He has much driving to do. He is not tired. He had slept all the previous afternoon and well into the evening, before visiting the Templetons. Nevertheless, he is loath to waste more time. He longs to be home.
Far to the north, sheets of lightning flutter softly between dense layers of clouds, pulses rather than bolts. Vess is pleased by the prospect of a big storm. Here at ground level, where life is lived, tumult and turmoil are fundamental elements of the human climate, and for reasons that he cannot understand, he is unfailingly reassured by the sight of violence in higher realms as well. Though he fears nothing, he is sometimes inexplicably disturbed by the sight of serene skies—whether blue or overcast—and often on a clear night when the sky is deep with stars, he prefers not to gaze into that immensity.
Now no stars are visible. Above lie only sullen masses of clouds harried by a cold wind, briefly veined with lightning, pregnant with a deluge.
Vess hurries across the blacktop toward the motor home, eager to resume his journey northward, to meet the promised storm, to find that best place in the night where the lightning will come in great shattering bolts, where a harder wind will crack trees, where rain will fall in destructive floods.
Crouching at the end of the shelf row, Chyna had listened to the door open and close, not daring to believe that the killer had left at last and that her ordeal might be over. Breath held, she’d waited for the sound of the door opening again and for his footsteps as he reentered.
When she had heard, instead, the key scraping-clicking in the lock and the deadbolt snapping into place, she had gone forward along the middle of the three aisles, staying low, cat-quiet because she expected, superstitiously, that he might hear the slightest sound even from outside.
A violent hammering, reverberating through the building walls, had brought her to a sudden halt at the head of the aisle. He was pounding furiously on something, but she couldn’t imagine what it might be.
When the hammering stopped, Chyna hesitated, then rose from her crouch and leaned around the end of the shelves. She looked to the right, past the first aisle, toward the glass door and the windows at the front of the store.
With the outside lights off, the service islands lay in murk as deep as that on any river bottom.
She could not at first see the killer, who was at one with the night in his black raincoat. But then he moved, wading through the darkness toward the motor home.
Even if he glanced back, he wouldn’t be able to see her in the dimly lighted store. Her heart thundered anyway as she stepped into the open area between the heads of the three aisles and the cashiers’ counter.
The photograph of Ariel was no longer on the floor. She wished that she could believe it had never existed.
At the moment, the two employees who had kept the secret of her presence were more important than Ariel or the killer. The roar of the shotgun and the sudden cessation of the soul-shriveling screams had convinced her that they were dead. But she must be sure. If one of them clung miraculously to lif
e, and if she could get help for him—police and paramedics—she would partially redeem herself.
She had been unable to do anything to stop the blood-loving bastard; she had only cowered out of his sight, praying frantically for invisibility. Now nausea rolled like a slop of chilled oysters in her stomach—and at the same time she was lifted by a sickening exhilaration that she had lived when so many others had died. Understandable though it was, the exhilaration shamed her, and for herself as well as for the two clerks, she hoped that she could still save them.
She pushed through the gate in the counter, and the piercing creak of a hinge scraped the hollows of her bones.
A gooseneck lamp provided some light.
The two men were on the floor.
“Ah,” she said. And then: “God.”
They were beyond her help, and immediately she turned away from them, her vision blurring.
On the counter, directly under the lamp, lay a revolver. She stared at it in disbelief, blinking back tears.
Evidently it had belonged to one of the clerks. She’d overheard the conversation between the killer and the two men; and she vaguely recalled a harsh admonition that might have been a warning to drop a gun. This gun.
She grabbed it, held it in both hands—a weight that buoyed her.
If the killer returned, she was ready, no longer helpless, for she knew how to use guns. Some of her mother’s craziest friends had been expert with weaponry, hate-filled people with a queer brightness in the eyes that was a sign of drug use in some cases but that was visible in others only when they spoke passionately about their deep commitment to truth and justice. On an isolated farm in Montana, when Chyna was only twelve, a woman named Doreen and a man named Kirk had instructed her in the use of a pistol, although her slender arms had jumped wildly with the recoil. Patiently teaching her control, they had said that someday she would be a true soldier and a credit to the movement.
Chyna had wanted to learn about firearms not to use them in one noble cause or another but to protect herself from those people in her mother’s strange circles who succumbed to drug-enhanced rages—or who stared at her with a sick desire. She had been too young to want their attention, too self-respecting to encourage them—but thanks to her mother, she had not been too innocent to understand what some of them wanted to do with her.
Now, with the dead clerk’s revolver in hand, she turned and saw the shattered telephone.
“Shit.”
She hurried back through the gate, into the public part of the store, directly to the front door.
The motor home was still parked on this side of the farther of the two service islands. The headlights were off.
The killer was not in sight at first—but then he walked into view around the back of the motor home, his unbuttoned coat flaring like a cape in the wind.
Although the man was about sixty feet away, surely he couldn’t see her at the door. He wasn’t even looking in her direction, but Chyna took a step backward.
Apparently he had been racking the hose at the gasoline pump and capping the fuel tank. He walked alongside the vehicle toward the driver’s door.
She had planned to telephone the police and tell them that the killer was headed north on Highway 101. Now, by the time she got to a phone, called the cops, and made them understand the situation, he might have as much as an hour’s lead. Within an hour, he would have several choices of other routes that branched off 101. He might continue north toward Oregon, turn east toward Nevada—or even angle west to the coast, thereafter turning south again along the Pacific and into San Francisco, vanishing in the urban maze. The more miles he traveled before an all-points bulletin went out for him, the harder he would be to find. He would soon be in another police agency’s jurisdiction, first a different county and perhaps eventually a different state, complicating the search for him.
And now that she thought about it, Chyna realized that she had precious little information that would be helpful to the cops. The motor home might be blue or green; she wasn’t sure which—or even if it was either—because she’d seen it only in the darkness and then in the color-distorting yellow glow of the service station’s sodium-vapor lights. She didn’t know the make of it either, and she hadn’t seen the license plate.
He was getting away.
Unhurried, clearly confident that he was in no imminent danger of discovery, he climbed into the motor home and pulled shut the driver’s door.
He’s going to get away. Jesus. No, intolerable, unthinkable. He can’t be allowed to get away, never pay for what he did to Laura, to all of them—even worse, have a chance to do it again. No, God, please, let me drop the hateful rotten fucking bastard with a shot in the head.
She stepped close to the door again. It could be unlocked only with a key. She didn’t have a key.
She heard the motor-home engine turn over.
If she shot out the glass, he would hear. Even over the roar of the engine and from a distance, he would hear.
Once through the door, she would be too far away to shoot him. Fifty or sixty feet, at night, with a handgun, the gasoline pumps intervening. No way. She had to get close, right up against the motor home, put the muzzle to the window.
But if he heard her shoot her way through the locked door and saw her coming out of the store, she wouldn’t have a chance to get close to him, not in a million years, and then he would be stalking her again, across the service-station property, wherever she went, and his shotgun was better armament than her revolver.
Out at the motor home, he switched on the headlights.
“No.”
She ran to the gate in the counter, shoved through it, stepped around the dead men, and went to the door in the back wall.
There had to be a rear entrance. Both practical function and fire codes would require it.
The door opened onto blackness. As far as she could tell, there were no windows ahead of her. Maybe it was only a supply closet or a bathroom. She stepped across the threshold, closed the door behind her to prevent light from leaking into the store, felt along the wall to her left, found a switch, and risked turning on the lights.
She was in a cramped office. On the desk was another shattered telephone.
Directly across the room from the door that she had just used was another door. No obvious lock. That would be a bathroom.
To her left, in the back wall of the building, a metal door featured a pair of over-and-under deadbolts with thumb-turns. She disengaged the locks and opened the door, and a flood tide of cold wind washed into the office.
Behind the store spread a twenty-foot-wide paved area, and then a steep hillside rose with serried trees that were black in the night and restless in the wind. A security light in a wire cage revealed two parked cars, which probably belonged to the clerks.
Cursing the killer, Chyna turned to the right and sprinted along the shorter length of the building, around the corner, past public rest rooms. She had never caused anyone physical harm, not once in her life, but she was ready to kill now, and she knew that she could do it without hesitation, with no thought of mercy, with a vengeance, because he had empowered her to do it. This was what he had reduced her to—this blind, animal fury—and the worst thing was that it felt good, this rage, so good in comparison to the fear and helplessness she had endured, a sweet singing of rushing blood in the veins and an exhilarating sense of savage strength. She should have been appalled at the lust for blood that seized her, but she liked it, and she knew that she would like it even more when she caught up with the motor home and shot him through the driver’s-side window, pulled open the door and shot him again where he sat bleeding, dragged him out and let him sprawl on the pavement and emptied the revolver into him until he could never again go hunting.
She rounded the second corner and reached the front of the building.
The motor home was pulling away from the pumps.
She raced after it, faster than she had ever run in her life, cleaving a
resistant wind that stung new tears from her eyes, shoes pounding noisily on the blacktop.
Now it was Dear Lord, let me catch him instead of Dear Lord, let me get away from him, and now it was Dear Lord, let me kill him instead of Dear Lord, don’t let him kill me.
The motor home picked up speed. It was already out of the service area, entering the eighth-of-a-mile lane that would take it back onto the highway.
She would never be able to catch it.
He was getting away.
She halted and planted her feet wide apart. The revolver was in her right hand. She raised it, gripped it with both hands, arms extended, elbows locked. Shooter’s stance. Every good girl should know it, come the revolution.
Her heart didn’t merely beat, it crashed, and every explosive pump shook her arms, so she couldn’t hold the revolver on target. The motor home was too distant anyway. She’d miss it by yards. And even if she got lucky and put one round in the back wall, it would be nowhere near the driver. He was out of her reach, beyond harm, cruising away.
It was over. She could go for help, find the nearest working phone, call the local police, and try to cut his lead time as short as possible—but for now and here, it was over.
Except that it wasn’t over, and she knew it wasn’t, no matter how much she wanted to be finished with it, because she said aloud, “Ariel.”
Sixteen. Prettiest thing this side of paradise. Pure angel. Porcelain skin. Breathtaking. Locked in the basement for a year. Never touched her—that way. Waiting for her to ripen, get just a little sweeter.
In Chyna’s mind’s eye, the Polaroid photograph of Ariel was as clear and detailed as it had been when she’d held it in her hand. That bland expression, maintained with obvious effort. Those eyes, brimming with anguish.
Earlier, listening to the conversation between the killer and the two clerks, Chyna had known that he was not merely playing games with them, that he was telling the truth. The creep was letting them in on his secrets, admitting his perverse crimes, getting a kick out of revealing his guilt because he knew that they were going to die and that they would never have a chance to repeat his admissions to anyone. Even if she’d never seen the photograph, she would have known.
Ariel. Those eyes. The anguish.
While she had been concentrating on her own survival, Chyna had blocked all thoughts of the captive girl from her mind. And when she had found the revolver, she had at once convinced herself that all she wanted was to kill this son of a bitch, blow his brains out, because the truth was something that she hadn’t quite been able to face.
The truth had been that she didn’t dare kill him, because when he was dead, they might never find Ariel—or find her days too late, after she had died of starvation or thirst in her basement cell. He might have the girl locked under his house, which they would probably be able to locate from whatever identification he was carrying, but he might have stashed her elsewhere, in a place remote, to which he and only he could lead them. Chyna had pursued the killer to disable him, so the cops would be able to wrench from him the location at which Ariel was being held. If she could have caught up with the motor home, she would have tried to yank open the driver’s door, shoot the vicious bastard in the leg as she ran alongside, wound him badly enough that he would have to stop the vehicle. But she’d had to hide that truth from herself because trying to wound him was a lot riskier than going for a head shot through the window, and she might not have had the courage to run so fast and try so hard if she had admitted to herself what, in fact, had needed to be done.
With its burden of corpses, with its driver whose name might well be Legion, the big motor home dwindled down the service road toward Highway 101, quite literally Hell on wheels.
Somewhere he had a house, and under the house was a basement, and in the basement was a sixteen-year-old girl named Ariel, held prisoner for a year, untouched but soon to be violated, alive but not for long.
“She’s real,” Chyna whispered to the wind.
The taillights receded into the night.
She frantically surveyed the lonely stretch of countryside. She was unable to see help in any direction. No house lights in the immediate vicinity. Just trees and darkness. Something glowed faintly to the north, beyond a hill or two, but she didn’t know the source, and anyway she couldn’t get that far quickly on foot.
On the highway, a truck appeared from the south behind a blaze of headlights, but it didn’t pull off to tank up at the shuttered service station. It shrieked past, the driver oblivious of Chyna.
The lumbering motor home was almost to the far end of the connecting road.
Sobbing with frustration, with anger, with fear for the girl whom she had never met, and with despair for her own culpability if that girl died, Chyna turned away from the motor home. Hurried past the gasoline pumps. Around the building, back the way she had come.
Throughout her own childhood, no one had ever held out a hand to her. No one had ever cared that she was trapped, frightened, and helpless.
Now, when she thought of the Polaroid snapshot, the image was like one of those holograms that changed depending on the angle at which it was viewed. Sometimes it was Ariel’s face, but sometimes it was Chyna’s own.
As she ran, she prayed that she wouldn’t have to go inside again. And search the bodies.
Distant lightning flickered, and faraway thunder clattered like boot heels on hollow basement stairs. On the steep hills behind the building, black trees thrashed in the escalating wind.
The first car was a white Chevrolet. Ten years old. Unlocked.
When she scrambled in behind the steering wheel, the worn-out seat springs creaked, and a candy-bar wrapper or something crackled underfoot. The interior stank of stale cigarette smoke.
The keys were not in the ignition. She checked behind the sun visor. Under the driver’s seat. Nothing.
The second car was a Honda, newer than the Chevy. It smelled of a lemon-scented air freshener, and the keys were in a coin tray on the console.