Intensity

10

Less than twenty-two hours since the first cry in the Templeton house in Napa. A lifetime. And now toward another midnight and into whatever lay beyond.

Two lamps were aglow in the living room. Chyna no longer cared about keeping the house dark. As soon as she went out the front door and confronted the dogs, there would be no hope of lulling Vess into a false sense of security if he came home early.

According to the mantel clock, it was ten-thirty.

Ariel sat in one of the armchairs. She was hugging herself and rocking slowly back and forth, as if suffering from a stomachache, although she made no sound and remained expressionless.

Protective gear designed for Vess was huge on Chyna, and she vacillated between feeling ridiculous and worrying that she would be dangerously impeded by the bulky garb. She had rolled up the bottoms of the chaps and fixed them in place with large safety pins that she’d found in a sewing kit in the laundry room. The belts of the chaps featured loops and long Velcro closures, so she was able to cinch them tight enough to keep them from sliding down over her hips. The cuffs of the padded sleeves were folded back and pinned too, and the Kevlar vest helped to bulk her up, so she wasn’t quite swimming in the jacket. She wore a segmented plastic-armor collar that encircled her neck and prevented the dogs from tearing out her throat. She couldn’t have been more cumbersomely dressed if she’d been cleaning up nuclear waste in a post-meltdown reactor.

Nevertheless, she was vulnerable in places, especially at her feet and ankles. Vess’s training togs included a pair of leather combat boots with steel toes, but they were much too big for her. As protection against attack dogs, her soft Rockports were hardly more effective than bedroom slippers. In order to get to the motor home without being severely bitten, she would have to be quick and aggressive.

She had considered carrying a club of some kind. But with her agility impaired by the layers of protective gear, she couldn’t use it effectively enough to hurt any of the Dobermans or even dissuade them from attacking.

Instead, Chyna was equipped with two lever-action spray bottles that she’d found in a laundry-room cabinet. One had been filled with a liquid glass cleaner and the other with a spot remover for use on carpets and upholstery. She had emptied both bottles into the kitchen sink, rinsed them out, considered filling them with bleach, but chose pure ammonia, of which the fastidious Vess, the keeper of a spotless house, possessed two one-quart containers. Now the plastic spray bottles stood beside the front door. The nozzle on each could be adjusted to produce a spray or a stream, and both were set at STREAM.

In the armchair, Ariel continued to hug herself and to rock back and forth in silence, gazing down at the carpet.

Although it was unlikely that the catatonic girl would get up from the chair and go anywhere on her own, Chyna said, “Now, you stay right where you are, honey. Don’t move, okay? I’ll be back for you soon.”

Ariel didn’t reply.

“Don’t move.”

Chyna’s layers of protective clothing were beginning to weigh painfully on her bruised muscles and sore joints. Minute by minute, the discomfort was going to make her slower mentally and physically. She had to act while she was still reasonably sharp.

She put on the visored helmet. She had lined the interior with a folded towel so it wouldn’t sit loosely on her head, and the chin strap helped to keep it secure. The curved shield of Plexiglas came two inches below her chin, but the underside was open to allow air to flow in freely — and there were six small holes across the center of the pane for additional ventilation.

She stepped to one front window and then to the other, looking onto the porch, which was visible in the light that spilled out from the living-room lamps. There were no Dobermans in sight.

The yard beyond the porch was dark, and the meadow beyond the yard seemed as black as the far side of the moon. The dogs might be standing out there, watching her silhouette in the lighted windows. In fact, they might be waiting just beyond the porch balustrade, crouched and ready to spring.

She glanced at the clock.

Ten thirty-eight.

“Oh, God, I don’t want to do this,” she murmured.

Curiously, she remembered a cocoon that she’d found when she and her mother had been staying with some people in Pennsylvania fourteen or fifteen years before. The chrysalis had been hanging from a twig on a birch tree, semitransparent and backlit by a beam of sunlight, so she had been able to see the insect within. It was a butterfly that had passed all the way through the pupa stage, a fully mature imago. Its metamorphosis complete, it had been quivering frantically within the cocoon, its wirelike legs twitching ceaselessly, as if it was eager to be free but frightened of the hostile world into which it would be born. Now, in her padding and hard-plastic armor, Chyna quivered like that butterfly, although she was not eager to burst free into the night world that awaited her but wanted to withdraw even deeper into her chrysalis.

She went to the front door.

She pulled on the stained leather gloves, which were heavy but surprisingly flexible. They were too large but had adjustable Velcro bands at the wrists to hold them in place.

She had sewn a brass key to the thumb of the right-hand glove, running the thread through the hole in the key bow. The entire blade, with all its tumbler-activating serrations, extended beyond the tip of the thumb, so it could be inserted easily into the keyway on the door of the motor home. She didn’t want to have to fumble the key from a pocket with the dogs attacking from all sides — and she sure as hell didn’t want to risk dropping it.

Of course, the vehicle might not be locked. But she wasn’t taking any chances.

From the floor, she picked up the spray bottles. One in each hand. Again, she checked to be sure that they were set on STREAM.

She quietly disengaged the deadbolt lock, listened for the hollow thump of paws on the board floor, and finally cracked the door.

The porch looked clear.

Chyna crossed the threshold and quickly pulled the door shut behind her, fumbling at the knob because she was hampered by the plastic bottles in her hands.

She hooked her fingers around the levers on the bottles. The effectiveness of these weapons would depend on how fast the dogs came at her and whether she could aim well in the brief window of opportunity that they would give her.

In a night as windless as it was deep, the seashell mobile hung motionless. Not even a single leaf stirred on the tree at the north end of the porch.

The night seemed to be soundless. With her ears under the padded helmet, however, she wasn’t able to hear small noises.

She had the weird feeling that the entire world was but a highly detailed diorama sealed inside a glass paperweight.

Without even the faintest breeze to carry her scent to the dogs, maybe they would not be aware that she had come outside.

Yeah, and maybe pigs can fly but just don’t want us to know.

The fieldstone steps were at the south end of the porch. The motor home stood in the driveway, twenty feet from the bottom of the steps.

Keeping her back to the wall of the house, she edged to her right. As she moved, she glanced repeatedly to her left at the railed north side of the porch, and out past the balustrade into the front yard directly ahead of her. No dogs.

The night was so chilly that her breath formed a faint fog on the inside of her visor. Each flare of condensation faded quickly — but each seemed to fan out across the Plexiglas farther than the one before it. In spite of the ventilation from under her chin and through the six penny-size holes across the center of the pane, she began to worry that her own hot exhalations were gradually going to leave her effectively blind. She was breathing hard and fast, and she was hardly more able to slow her rate of respiration than quiet the rapid pounding of her heart.

If she blew each breath out, angling it toward the open bottom of the face shield, she would be able to minimize the problem. This resulted in a faint, hollow whistling characterized by a vibrato that revealed the depth of her fear.

Two small sliding steps, three, four: She eased sideways past the living-room window. She was uncomfortably aware of the light at her back. Silhouetted again.

She should have turned all the lights out, but she hadn’t wanted Ariel to be alone in the dark. In her current condition, perhaps the girl would not have known if the lights were on or off, but it had felt wrong to leave her in blackness.

Having crossed half the distance from the door to the south end of the porch without incident, Chyna grew bolder. Instead of edging sideways, she turned directly toward the steps and shuffled forward as fast as the hampering gear would allow.

As black as the night out of which it came, as silent as the high patchy clouds sailing slowly across fields of stars, the first Doberman sprinted toward her from the front of the motor home. It didn’t bark or growl.

She almost failed to see it in time. Because she forgot to exhale with calculation, a wave of condensation spread across the inside of the visor. At once, the pale film of moisture retreated like an ebbing surf, but the dog was already there, leaping toward the steps, ears flattened against its tapered skull, lips skinned back from its teeth.

She squeezed the lever of the spray bottle that she clutched in her right hand. Ammonia shot six or seven feet in the still air.

The dog wasn’t within range when the first stream spattered onto the porch floor, but it was closing fast.

She felt stupid, like a kid with a water pistol. This wasn’t going to work. Wasn’t going to work. But oh, Jesus, it had to work or she was dog chow.

Immediately she pumped the lever again, and the dog was on the steps, where the stream fell short of it, and she wished that she had a sprayer with more pressure, one with at least a twenty-foot range, so she could stop the beast before it got near her, but she squeezed the trigger again even as the previous stream was still falling, and this one got the dog as it came up onto the porch. She was aiming for its eyes, but the ammonia splashed its muzzle, spattering its nose and its bared teeth.

The effect was instantaneous. The Doberman lost its footing and tumbled toward Chyna, squealing, and would have crashed into her if she hadn’t jumped aside.

With caustic ammonia slathering its tongue and fumes filling its lungs, unable to draw a breath of clean air, the dog rolled onto its back, pawing frantically at its snout. It wheezed and hacked and made shrill sounds of distress.

Chyna turned from it. She kept moving.

She was surprised to hear herself speaking aloud: “Shit, shit, shit…”

Onward, then, to the head of the porch steps, where she glanced back warily and saw that the big dog was on its feet, wobbling in circles, shaking its head. Between sharp squeals of pain, it was sneezing violently.

The second dog virtually flew out of the darkness, attacking as Chyna descended the bottom step. From the corner of her eye, she detected movement to her left, turned her head, and saw an airborne Doberman — oh, God — like an incoming mortar round. Though she raised her left arm and started to swing toward the dog, she wasn’t quick enough, and before she could loose a stream of ammonia, she was hit so hard that she was nearly bowled off her feet. She stumbled sideways but somehow maintained her balance.

The Doberman’s teeth were sunk into the thick sleeve on her left arm. It wasn’t merely holding her as a police dog would have done but was working at the padding as if chewing on meat, trying to rip off a chunk and severely disable her, tear open an artery so she would bleed to death, but fortunately its teeth hadn’t penetrated to her flesh.

After coming at her in disciplined silence, the dog still wasn’t snarling. But from low in its throat issued a sound halfway between a growl and a hungry keening, an eerie and needful cry that Chyna heard too clearly in spite of her padded helmet.

Point-blank, reaching across her body with her right hand, she squirted a stream of ammonia into the Doberman’s fierce black eyes.

The dog’s jaws flew open as if they were part of a mechanical device that had popped a tension spring, and it spun away from her, silvery strings of saliva trailing from its black lips, howling in agony.

She remembered the words of warning on the ammonia label: Causes substantial but temporary eye injury.

Squealing like an injured child, the dog rolled in the grass, pawing at its eyes as the first animal had pawed at its snout, but with even greater urgency.

The manufacturer recommended rinsing contaminated eyes with plenty of water for fifteen minutes. The dog had no water, unless it instinctively made its way to a stream or pond, so it would not be a problem to her for at least a quarter of an hour, most likely far longer.

The Doberman sprang to its feet and chased its tail, snapping its teeth. It stumbled and fell again, scrambled erect, and streaked away into the night, temporarily blinded, in considerable pain.

Incredibly, listening to the poor thing’s screams as she hurried toward the motor home, Chyna winced with remorse. It would have torn her apart without hesitation if it could have gotten at her, but it was a mindless killer only by training, not by nature. In a way, the dogs were just other victims of Edgler Vess, their lives bent to his purpose. She would have spared them suffering if she had been able to rely solely on the protective clothing.

How many more dogs?

Vess had implied there was a pack. Hadn’t he said four? Of course, he might be lying. There might be only two.

Move, move, move.

At the passenger-side cockpit door of the motor home, she tried the handle. Locked.

No more dogs, just five seconds without dogs, please.

She dropped the spray bottle from her right hand, so she could pinch the bow of the key between her thumb and finger. She was barely able to feel it through the thick gloves.

Her hand was shaking. The key missed the keyhole and chattered against the chrome face of the lock cylinder. She would have dropped it if it hadn’t been sewn to the glove.

From behind this time, just as she was about to slip the key into the door on her second try, a Doberman hit her, leaping onto her back, biting at the nape of her neck.

She was slammed forward against the vehicle. The face shield on her helmet smacked hard against the door.

The dog’s teeth were sunk into the thick rolled collar of the trainer’s jacket, no doubt also into the padding on the segmented plastic collar that she wore under the jacket to protect her neck. It was holding on to her by its teeth, tearing at her ineffectively with its claws, like a demon lover in a nightmare.

As the dog’s impact had pitched her forward against the motor home, now the weight of it and its furious squirming dragged her away from the vehicle. She almost toppled backward, but she knew that the advantage would go to the dog if it managed to drag her to the ground.

Stay up. Stay tall.

Lurching around a hundred eighty degrees as she struggled to keep her balance, she saw that the first Doberman was no longer on the porch. Astonishingly, the creature hanging from her neck must be the small one that she had squirted on the muzzle. Now it was able to get its breath again, back in service, undaunted by her chemical arsenal, giving its all for Edgler Vess.

On the plus side, maybe there were only two dogs.

She still had the spray bottle in her left hand. She squeezed the trigger, aiming several squirts over her shoulder. But the heavy padding in the jacket sleeves didn’t allow her to bend her arms much, and she wasn’t able to fire at an angle that could splash the ammonia in the dog’s eyes.

She threw herself backward against the side of the motor home, much as she had hurtled into the fireplace earlier. The Doberman was trapped between her and the vehicle as the chair had been between her and the river-rock wall, and it took the brunt of the impact.

Letting go of her, falling away, the dog squealed, a pitiful sound that sickened her, but also a good sound — oh, yes — a good sound as sweet as any music.

Buckles jangling, padded chaps slapping together, Chyna scuttled sideways, trying to get out of the animal’s reach, worried about her ankles, her vulnerable ankles.

But suddenly the Doberman no longer seemed to be in a fighting mood. It slunk away from her, tail tucked between its legs, rolling its eyes to keep a watch on her peripherally, shaking and wheezing as though it had damaged a lung, and favoring its hind leg on the right side.

She squeezed the trigger on the spray bottle. The creature was out of range, and the stream of ammonia arced into the grass.

Two dogs down.

Move, move.

Chyna turned to the motor home again — and cried out as a third dog, weighing more than she did, leaped at her throat, bit through the jacket, and staggered her backward.

Going down. Shit. And as she went, the dog was on top of her, chewing frenziedly at the collar of the jacket.

When Chyna hit the ground, her breath was knocked from her in spite of all the padding, and the spray bottle popped out of her left hand, spun into the air. She grabbed at it as it tumbled away, but she missed.

The dog ripped loose a strip of padding from around the jacket collar and shook its head, casting the scrap aside, spraying her face shield with gobs of foamy saliva. It bore in at her again, tearing more fiercely at the same spot, burrowing deeper, seeking meat, blood, triumph.

She pounded its sleek head with both fists, trying to smash its ears, hoping that they would be sensitive, vulnerable. “Get off, damn it, off! Off!”

The Doberman snapped at her right hand, missed, teeth clashing audibly, snapped again, and connected. Its incisors didn’t instantly penetrate the tough leather glove, but it shook her hand viciously, as though it had hold of a rat and meant to snap its spine. Though her skin hadn’t been broken, the grinding pressure of the bite was so painful that Chyna screamed.

In an instant, the dog released her hand and was at her throat again. Past the torn jacket. Teeth slashing at the Kevlar vest.

Howling in pain, Chyna stretched her throbbing right hand toward the spray bottle lying in the grass. The weapon was a foot beyond her reach.

When turning her head to look at the bottle, she inadvertently caused the bottom of her face shield to lift, giving the Doberman better access to her throat, and it thrust its muzzle under the curve of Plexiglas, above the Kevlar vest, biting into the thick padding on the exterior of the segmented hard-plastic collar, which was her last defense. Intent on tearing this band of body armor away, the dog jerked back so hard that Chyna’s head was lifted off the ground, and pain flared across the nape of her neck.

She tried to heave the Doberman off her. It was heavy, bearing down stubbornly, paws digging frantically at her.

As the dog wrenched at Chyna’s protective collar, she could feel its hot breath against the underside of her chin. If it could get its snout under the shield at a slightly better angle, it might be able to bite her chin, would be able to bite her chin, and at any moment it was going to realize this.

She heaved with all her strength, and the dog clung, but she was able to hitch a few inches closer to the spray bottle. She heaved again, and now the bottle was just six inches beyond her grasping fingertips.

She saw the other Doberman limping toward her, ready to rejoin the fray. She hadn’t damaged its lungs, after all, when she slammed it between her and the motor home.

Two of them. She couldn’t handle two of them at once, both on top of her.

She heaved, desperately hitching sideways on her back, dragging the clinging Doberman with her.

Its hot tongue licked the underside of her chin, licked, tasting her sweat. It was making that horrible, needful sound deep in its throat.

Heave.

Spotting her point of greatest vulnerability, the limping dog scuttled toward her right foot. She kicked at it, and the dog dodged back, but then it darted in again. She kicked, and the Doberman bit the heel of her Rockport.

Her frantic breathing fogged the inside of the visor. In fact, the breath of the clinging Doberman fogged it too, because its muzzle was under the Plexiglas. She was effectively blind.

Kicking with both feet to ward off the limping dog. Kicking, heaving sideways.

The other’s hot tongue slathered her chin. Its sour breath. Teeth gnashing an inch short of her flesh. The tongue again.

Chyna touched the spray bottle. Closed her fingers around it.

Though the bite hadn’t penetrated the glove, her hand was still throbbing with such crippling pain that she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to hold on to the bottle or find the right grip, wouldn’t be able to work the lever-action trigger, but then she blindly squeezed off a stream of ammonia. Unthinking, she had used her swollen trigger finger, and the flash of pain made her dizzy. She shifted her middle finger onto the lever and squeezed off another blast.

In spite of her kicking, the injured dog bit through her shoe. Teeth pierced her right foot.

Chyna triggered another thick stream of ammonia toward her feet, yet another, and abruptly that Doberman let go of her. Both she and the dog were shrieking, blind and shaking and living now in the same commonwealth of pain.

Snapping teeth. The remaining dog. Pressing toward her chin, under the visor. Snap-snap-snap. And the eager hungry whine.

She jammed the bottle in its face, pulled the trigger, pulled, and the dog scrambled off her, screaming.

A few drops of ammonia penetrated the visor through the series of small holes across the center of the pane. She wasn’t able to see through the fogged Plexiglas, and the acrid fumes made breathing difficult.

Gasping, eyes watering, she dropped the spray bottle and crawled on her hands and knees toward where she thought the motor home stood. She bumped into the side of it and pulled herself to her feet. Her bitten foot felt hot, perhaps because it was soaking in the bath of blood contained in her shoe, but she could put her weight on it.

Three dogs so far.

If three, then surely four.

The fourth would be coming.

As the ammonia evaporated from the face shield and less rapidly from the front of her torn jacket, the quantity of fumes decreased but not quickly enough. She was eager to remove the helmet and draw an unobstructed breath. She didn’t dare take it off, however, not until she was inside the motor home.

Choking on ammonia fumes, trying to remember to exhale downward under the Plexiglas visor but half blinded because her eyes wouldn’t stop watering, Chyna felt along the side of the motor home until she found the cockpit door again. She was surprised that she could walk on her bitten foot with only tolerable twinges of pain.

The key was still sewn securely to her right glove. She pinched it between her thumb and forefinger.

A dog was wailing in the distance, probably the first one that she had squirted in the eyes. Nearby, another was crying pitifully and howling. A third whimpered, sneezed, gagged on fumes.

But where was the fourth?

Fumbling at the lock cylinder, she found the keyhole by trial and error. She opened the door. She hauled herself up into the copilot’s seat.

As she pulled the door shut, something slammed into the outside of it. The fourth dog.

She took off the helmet, the gloves. She stripped out of the padded jacket.

Teeth bared, the fourth Doberman leaped at the side window. Its claws rattled briefly against the glass, and then it dropped back to the lawn, glaring at her.

Revealed by the light from the narrow hallway, Laura Templeton’s body still lay on the bed in a tangle of manacles and chains, wrapped in a sheet.

Chyna’s chest tightened with emotion, and her throat swelled so that she had trouble swallowing. She told herself that the corpse on the bed was not really Laura. The essence of Laura was gone, and this was only the husk, merely flesh and bone on a long journey to dust. Laura’s spirit had traveled in the night to a brighter and warmer home, and there was no point shedding tears for her, because she had transcended.

The closet door was closed. Chyna was sure that the dead man still hung in there.

In the fourteen hours or longer since she had been in the motor-home bedroom, the stuffy air had acquired a faint but repulsive scent of corruption. She had expected worse. Nevertheless, she breathed through her mouth, trying to avoid the smell.

She switched on the reading lamp and opened the top drawer of the nightstand. The items that she had discovered the previous night were still there, rattling softly against one another as the engine vibrations translated through the floor.

She was nervous about leaving the engine running, because the sound of it would mask the approach of another vehicle in case Vess came home earlier. But she needed lights, and she didn’t want to risk depleting the battery.

From the drawer, she withdrew the package of gauze pads, the roll of cloth tape, and the scissors.

In the lounge area behind the cockpit, she sat in one of the armchairs. Earlier, she had stripped out of all the protective gear. Now she removed her right shoe. Her sock was sodden with blood, and she peeled it off.

From two punctures in the top of her foot, blood welled dark and thick. It was seeping, however, not spurting, and she wasn’t going to die from the wound itself anytime soon.

She quickly pressed a double thickness of gauze pads over the seeping holes and fixed them in place with a length of cloth tape. By tightening the tape to apply a little pressure, she might be able to make the bleeding slow or stop.

She would have preferred to saturate the punctures with Bactine or iodine, but she didn’t have anything like that. Anyway, infection wouldn’t set in for a few hours, and by then she would have gotten away from here and obtained medical attention. Or she’d be dead of other causes.

The chance of rabies seemed small to nil. Edgler Vess would be solicitous of the health of his dogs. They would have received all their vaccinations.

Her sock was cold and slimy with blood, and she didn’t even try to pull it on again. She slipped her bandaged foot into her shoe and tied the lace slightly looser than usual.

A folding metal stepstool was stored in a narrow slot between the kitchen cabinetry and the refrigerator. She carried it into the short hallway at the end of the vehicle and opened it under the skylight, which was a flat panel of frosted plastic about three feet long and perhaps twenty inches wide.

She climbed onto the stool to inspect the skylight, hoping that it either tilted open to admit fresh air or was attached to the roof from the interior. Unfortunately, the panel was fixed, with no louver function, and the mounting flange was on the exterior, so she could not get at any screws or rivets from the inside.

Under her padded clothing, she had worn a tool belt that she’d found in one of the drawers of Vess’s workbench. She had taken it off with the rest of the gear. Now it was on the table in the dining nook.

Unable to be certain what tools she would need, she’d brought a pair of standard pliers, a pair of needle-nose pliers, both flat and rat-tail files, and several sizes of screwdrivers with standard blades and Phillips heads. There was also a hammer, which was the only thing that she could use.

When she stood on the first step of the two-step stool, the top of her head was only ten inches from the skylight. Averting her face, she swung the hammer with her left hand, and the flat steel head met the plastic with a horrendous bang and clatter.

The skylight was undamaged.

Chyna swung the hammer relentlessly. Each blow reverberated in the plastic overhead but also through all of her strained and weary muscles, through her aching bones.

The motor home was at least fifteen years old, and this appeared to be the original factory-installed skylight. It wasn’t Plexiglas but some less formidable material; over many years of sunshine and bad weather, the plastic had grown brittle. Finally the rectangular panel cracked along one edge of the frame. Chyna hammered at the leading point of the fissure, making it grow all the way to the corner, then along the narrow end, and then along the other three-foot length.

She had to pause several times to catch her breath and to change the hammer from hand to hand. At last the panel rattled loosely in its frame; it now seemed to be secured only by splinters of material along the fissures and by the uncracked fourth edge.

Chyna dropped the hammer, slowly flexed her hands a few times to work some of the stiffness out of them, and then put both palms flat against the plastic. Grunting with the effort, she pushed upward as she climbed onto the second step of the stool.

With a brittle splintering of plastic, the panel lifted an inch, jagged edges squeaking against each other. Then it bent backward at its fourth side, creaking, resisting her…resisting…until she cried out wordlessly in frustration and, finding new strength, pushed even harder. Abruptly the fourth side cracked all the way through, with a bang! as loud as a gunshot.

She pushed the panel out through the ceiling. It rattled across the roof and dropped to the driveway.

Through the hole above her head, Chyna saw clouds suddenly slide away from the moon. Cold light bathed her upturned face, and in the bottomless sky was the clean white fire of stars.

Chyna backed the motor home off the driveway and alongside the front of the house, parallel to the porch and as close to it as she could get. She let the big vehicle roll slowly, anxious not to tear up the thick grass, because under it the ground might be muddy even half a day after the rain had stopped. She didn’t dare bog down.

When she was in position, she put the vehicle in park and set the emergency brake. She left the engine running.

In the short hall at the back of the motor home, the stepstool had fallen over. She put it upright, climbed the two steps, and stood with her head in the night air, above the open frame of the broken-out skylight.

She wished the stool had a third step. She needed to muscle herself out of the hallway, and she was at a less advantageous angle than she would have liked.

She placed her hands flat on the roof on opposite sides of the twenty-inch-wide rectangular opening and struggled to lever her body out of the motor home. She strained so hard that she could feel the tendons flaring between her neck and shoulders, her pulse pounding like doomsday drums in her temples and carotid arteries, every muscle in her arms and across her back quivering with the effort.

Pain and exhaustion seemed certain to thwart her. But then she thought of Ariel in the living-room armchair: rocking back and forth, hugging herself, a faraway look in her eyes, her lips parted in what might have been a silent scream. That image of the girl empowered Chyna, put her in touch with hitherto unknown resources. Her shaking arms slowly straightened, pulling her body out of the hallway, and inch by inch she kicked her feet as if she were a swimmer ascending from the depths. At last her elbows locked with her arms at full extension, and she heaved forward, out through the skylight, onto the roof.

On the way, her sweater caught on small fragments of plastic that bristled from the skylight frame. A few jagged points pierced the knit material and stung her belly, but she broke loose of them.

She crawled forward, rolled onto her back, hiked her sweater, and felt her stomach to see how badly she had been cut. Blood wept from a couple of shallow punctures, but she wasn’t hurt seriously.

From far off in the night came the howls of at least two injured dogs. Their pathetic cries were so filled with fear, vulnerability, misery, and loneliness that Chyna could hardly bear to listen.

She eased to the edge of the roof and looked down at the yard to the east of the house.

The uninjured Doberman trotted around the front of the motor home and spotted her at once. It stood directly under her, gazing up, teeth bared. It seemed unfazed by the suffering of its three comrades.

Chyna moved away from the edge and got to her feet. The metal surface was somewhat slippery with dew, and she was thankful for the rubber tread on her Rockports. If she lost her footing and fell off into the yard, with no weapons and no protective clothing, the one remaining Doberman would overwhelm her and tear out her throat in ten seconds flat.

The motor home was only a few inches below the edge of the porch roof. She had parked so close that the distance between the vehicle and the house was less than a foot.

She stepped up and across that gap, onto the sloped roof of the porch. The asphalt shingles had a sandy texture and weren’t nearly as treacherous as the top of the motor home.

The slope wasn’t steep either, and she climbed easily to the front wall of the house. The recent rain had liberated a tarry scent from the numerous coats of creosote with which the logs had been treated over the years.

The double-hung window of Vess’s second-story bedroom was open three inches, as she had left it before departing the house. She slipped her aching hands through the opening and, groaning, shoved up on the bottom panel. In this wet weather, the wood had swollen, but although it stuck a couple of times, she got it all the way open.

She climbed through the window into Vess’s bedroom, where she had left a lamp burning.

In the upstairs hall, she glanced at the open door across from the bedroom. The dark study lay beyond, and she was still troubled by the feeling that there was something in it that she had missed, something vital she should know about Edgler Vess.

But she had no time for additional detective work. She hurried downstairs to the living room.

Ariel was huddled in the armchair where she had been left. She was still hugging herself and rocking, lost.

According to the mantel clock, the time was four minutes past eleven.

“You stay right there,” Chyna instructed. “Just a minute more, honey.”

She went through the kitchen to the laundry room, in search of a broom. She found both a broom and a sponge mop. The mop had the longer handle of the two, so she took it instead of the broom.

As she entered the living room again, she heard a familiar and dreaded sound. Squeak-squeak. Squeak-squeak-squeak.

She glanced at the nearest window and saw the uninjured Doberman clawing the glass. Its pointy ears were pricked, but they flattened against its skull when Chyna made eye contact with the creature. The Doberman issued the now-familiar needful keening that caused the fine hairs to stiffen on the nape of Chyna’s neck.

Squeak-squeak-squeak.

Turning away from the dog, Chyna started toward Ariel — and then had her attention drawn to the other living-room window. A Doberman stood with its forepaws at the base of that pane too.

This had to be the first one she had encountered when she’d gone out of the house, the same animal that she had sprayed in the muzzle. It had recovered quickly and had bitten her foot when she’d been pinned on the ground by the third dog.

She was sure that she’d blinded the second dog, which had shot at her like a mortar round from out of the darkness, and the third as well. Until now she had assumed that her second chance at this animal had also resulted in a disabling eye shot.

She’d been wrong.

At the time, of course, she herself had been all but blinded by her fogged visor — and frantic, because the third dog had been holding her down and chewing through the padding at her throat, licking at her chin. All she had known was that this animal had shrieked when she’d squirted it and that it had stopped biting her foot.

The stream of ammonia must have splashed the dog’s muzzle the second time, just as it had during their first encounter.

“Lucky bastard,” she whispered.

The twice-injured Doberman didn’t scratch at the window glass. It just watched her. Intently. Ears standing straight up. Missing nothing.

Or perhaps it wasn’t the same dog at all. Perhaps there were five of them. Or six.

At the other window: Squeak-squeak. Squeak-squeak.

Crouching in front of Ariel, Chyna said, “Honey, we’re ready to go.”

The girl rocked.

Chyna took hold of one of Ariel’s hands. This time, she didn’t have to pry the fingers out of a marble-hard fist, and at her urging, the girl got up from the chair.

Carrying the sponge mop in one hand, leading the girl with the other, Chyna crossed the living room, past the two big front windows. She moved slowly and didn’t look directly at the Dobermans, because she was afraid that either haste or another moment of confrontational eye contact might spur them to smash through the glass.

She and Ariel stepped through a doorless opening to the stairs.

Behind them, one of the dogs began to bark.

Chyna didn’t like that. Didn’t like that at all. None of them had barked before. Their disciplined stealth had been chilling — but now the barking was worse than their silence.

Climbing the stairs, pulling the girl after her, Chyna felt a hundred years old, weak and depleted. She wanted to sit and catch her breath and let her aching legs rest. To keep moving, Ariel needed constant tension on her arm; without it, she stopped and stood murmuring soundlessly. Each riser seemed higher than the one below it, as though Chyna were the storybook Alice in the wake of the white rabbit, her stomach full of exotic mushrooms, ascending an enchanted staircase in some dark wonderland.

Then, as they turned at the landing and started up the second flight, glass shattered into the living room below. In an instant, that sound made Chyna young again, able to bound like a gazelle up stairs made for giants.

“Hurry!” she urged Ariel, pulling her along.

The girl picked up her pace but still seemed to be plodding.

Leaping, desperate, to the top of the second flight, Chyna said, “Hurry!”

Vicious barking rose in the stairwell below.

Chyna entered the upstairs hall, holding tightly to the girl’s hand. She could hear the galloping thunder of ascending dogs louder even than her own heart.

To the door on the left. Into Vess’s bedroom.

She dragged Ariel after her, across the threshold, and slammed the door. There was no lock, just the spring latch activated by the knob.

They’re dogs, for God’s sake, just dogs, mean as hell, but they can’t operate a doorknob.

A dog threw itself against the door, which rattled in its frame but seemed secure.

Chyna led Ariel to the open window, where she propped the mop against the wall.

Barking, barking, the dogs clawed at the door.

With both hands, Chyna clasped the girl’s face, leaned close, and peered hopefully into her beautiful blue but vacant eyes. “Honey, please, I need you again, like I needed you with the power drill and the handcuffs. I need you a lot worse now, Ariel, because we don’t have much time, not much time at all, and we’re so close, we really are, so damn close.”

Though their eyes were at most three inches apart, Ariel seemed not to see Chyna.

“Listen to me, listen, honey, wherever you are, wherever you’re hiding out there in the Wild Wood or beyond the wardrobe door there in Narnia — is that where you are, baby? — or maybe Oz, but wherever you are, please listen to me and do what I tell you. We’ve got to go out on the porch roof. It’s not steep, you can do it, but you have to be careful. I want you to go out the window and then take a couple of steps to the left. Not to the right. There’s not much roof to the right, you’ll fall off. Take a couple steps to the left and stop and just wait there for me. I’ll be right behind you, just wait, and I’ll take you on from there.”

She let go of the girl’s face and hugged her fiercely, loving her as she would have loved a sister if she’d had one, as she wished she had been able to love her mother, loving her for what she had been through, for having suffered and survived.

“I am your guardian, honey. I’m your guardian. Vess is never going to touch you again, the freak, the hateful bastard. He’s never going to touch you again. I’m going to get you out of this stinking place, and away from him forever, but you have to work with me, you have to help and listen and be careful, so careful.”

She let go of the girl and met her eyes again.

Ariel was still Elsewhere. There was no flicker of recognition as there had been for a split second in the cellar, after the girl had used the drill.

The barking had stopped.

From the far side of the room came a new and disturbing sound. Not the clatter of the door shaking in its frame. A harder rattling noise. Metallic.

The knob was jiggling back and forth. One of the dogs must be pawing industriously at it.

The door wasn’t well fitted. Chyna could see a half-inch gap between the edge of it and the jamb. In the gap was a gleam of shiny brass: the tongue of the simple latch. If the latch was not seated deeply in the jamb, even the dog’s fumbling might, by purest chance, spring it open.

“Wait,” she told Ariel.

She crossed the room and tried to pull the dresser in front of the door.

The dogs must have sensed that she’d drawn nearer, because they began barking again. The old black iron knob rattled more furiously than before.

The dresser was heavy. But there was no straight-backed chair that she could wedge under the knob, and the nightstand didn’t seem bulky enough to prevent the dogs from shoving the door open if, in fact, the spring latch popped out of the jamb.

Heavy as it was, she nevertheless dragged the dresser halfway across the bedroom door. That seemed good enough.

The Dobermans were going crazy, barking more ferociously than ever, as if they knew that she had foiled them.

When Chyna turned to Ariel again, the girl was gone.

“No.”

Panicked, she ran to the window and looked outside.

Radiant in moonlight, hair silver now instead of blond, Ariel waited on the porch roof exactly two short steps to the left of the window, where she’d been told to go. Her back was pressed to the log wall of the house, and she was staring at the sky, though she was probably still focused on something infinitely farther away than mere stars.

Chyna pushed the sponge mop onto the roof and then went out through the window while the infuriated Dobermans raged in the house behind her.

Outside, blinded dogs were no longer wailing miserably in the distance.

Chyna reached for the girl. Ariel’s hand was not stiff and clawlike as it had been before. It was still cold but now limp.

“That was good, honey, that was good. You did just what I said. But always wait for me, okay? Stay with me.”

She picked up the mop with her free hand and led Ariel to the edge of the porch roof. The gap between them and the motor home was less than a foot wide, but it was potentially dangerous for someone in Ariel’s condition.

“Let’s step across together. Okay, honey?”

Ariel was still gazing at the sky. In her eyes were cataracts of moonlight that made her look like a milky-eyed corpse.

Chilled as if the dead moonlight eyes were an omen, Chyna let go of her companion’s hand and gently forced her to tilt her head down until she was looking at the gap between the porch roof and the motor home.

“Together. Here, give me your hand. Be careful to step across. It’s not wide, you don’t even have to jump it, no strain. But if you step into it, you might fall through to the ground, where the dogs could get you. And even if you don’t fall through, you’re sure to be hurt.”

Chyna stepped across, but Ariel didn’t follow.

Turning to the girl, still holding her slack hand, Chyna tugged gently. “Come on, baby, let’s go, let’s get out of here. We’ll turn him in to the cops, and he’ll never be able to hurt anybody again, not ever, not you or me or anyone.”

After a hesitation, Ariel stepped across the gap onto the roof of the motor home — and slipped on the dew-wet metal. Chyna dropped the mop, grabbed the girl, and kept her from falling.

“Almost there, baby.”

She picked up the mop again and led Ariel to the open skylight, where she encouraged her to kneel.

“That’s good. Now wait. Almost there.”

Chyna stretched out on her stomach, leaned into the skylight, and used the mop to push the stepstool toward the back of the hall and out of the way. Dropping down onto it, one of them might have broken a leg.

They were so close to escape. They couldn’t take any chances.

Chyna got to her feet and threw the mop into the yard.

Bending down, putting one hand on the girl’s shoulder, she said, “Okay, now slide along here and put your legs through the skylight. Come on, honey. Sit on the edge, watch the sharp pieces of plastic, yeah, that’s it, let your legs dangle. Okay, now just drop to the floor inside, and then go forward. Okay? Do you understand? Go forward toward the cockpit, honey, so I won’t fall on you when I come through.”

Chyna gave the girl a gentle push, which was all she required. Ariel dropped into the motor home, landed on her feet, stumbled on the hammer that Chyna had discarded earlier, and put one hand against the wall to steady herself.

“Go forward,” Chyna urged.

Behind her, a second-story window shattered onto the porch roof. One of the two study windows. The door to Vess’s office had not been closed, and the dogs had gotten into it from the upstairs hall after the bedroom door had frustrated them.

She turned and saw a Doberman coming straight at her across the roof, leaping toward her with such velocity that, when it hit her, it would carry her off the top of the motor home and into the yard.

She twisted aside, but the dog was a lot quicker than she was, correcting its trajectory even as it bounded onto the vehicle. When it landed, however, it slipped on the dewy surface, skidded, claws screeching on the metal, and to Chyna’s astonishment, it tumbled past her, slid off the roof, and left her untouched.

Howling, the dog fell into the yard, squealed when it hit the ground, and tried to scramble to its feet. Something was wrong with its hindquarters. It couldn’t stand up. Perhaps it had broken its pelvis. It was in pain but still so furious that it remained focused on Chyna rather than itself. The dog sat barking up at her, its hind legs twisted to one side at an unnatural angle.

Not barking, wary and watchful, the other Doberman also had come through the broken study window onto the porch roof. This was the one that she’d squirted twice with ammonia, hitting the muzzle both times, for even now it shook its head and snorted as if plagued by lingering fumes. It had learned to respect her, and it wasn’t going to rush at her as rashly as the other dog had done.

Sooner or later, of course, it would realize that she no longer had the spray bottle, that she was holding nothing that might be used as a weapon. Then it would regain its courage.

What to do?

She wished that she hadn’t thrown the sponge mop into the yard. She could have jabbed at the Doberman with the wooden handle when it attacked. She might even have been able to hurt it if she poked hard enough. But the mop was beyond reach.

Think.

Instead of approaching her across the porch roof, the Doberman slunk along the front wall of the house, its shoulders hunched and its head low, away from her but glancing back. It reached the open window of Vess’s bedroom, and then it slowly returned, alternately looking down at the shards of moonlight-silvered glass among which it carefully placed its feet and glaring at her from under its brow.

Chyna tried to think of something in the motor home that could be used as a weapon. The girl could pass it up to her.

She said softly, “Ariel.”

The dog halted at the sound of her voice.

“Ariel.”

But the girl didn’t reply.

Hopeless. Ariel could not be coaxed into action fast enough to be of any help.

When finally the Doberman attacked, Chyna wouldn’t be lucky again, either. This one would not hurtle across the porch roof and slide off the motor home without getting its teeth in her. When it leaped at her, she would have nothing to fight with except her bare hands.

The dog stopped pacing. It raised its tapered black head and stared at her, ears pricked, panting.

Chyna’s mind raced. She had never before been able to think quite this clearly and quickly.

Although loath to take her eyes off the Doberman, she glanced down through the skylight.

Ariel was not in the short hallway below. She’d gone forward as she’d been instructed. Good girl.

The dog was no longer panting. It stood rigid and vigilant. As Chyna watched, its ears twitched and then flattened against its skull.

Chyna said, “Screw it,” and she jumped through the broken-out skylight into the motor home. Pain exploded through her bitten foot.

The stepstool, which she had pushed aside with the sponge mop, was against the closed bedroom door. She grabbed it and dragged it forward, out from under the skylight.

Paws thumped on the metal roof.

Chyna snatched the hammer from the floor and slipped the handle under the waistband of her blue jeans. Even through her red cotton sweater, the steel head was cold against her belly.

The dog appeared in the opening above, a predatory silhouette in the moonlight.

Chyna picked up the stepstool, which had a tubular metal handle that served as a backrail when the top step was used as a chair. She eased backward to the bathroom door, realizing just how narrow the hall was. She didn’t have enough room to swing the stool like a club, but it was still useful. She held it in front of her in the manner of a lion tamer with a chair.

“Come on, you bastard,” she said to the looming dog, dismayed to hear how shaky her voice was. “Come on.”

The animal hesitated warily at the brink of the opening above.

She didn’t dare turn away. The moment she turned, it would come in after her.

She raised her voice, shouting angrily at the Doberman, taunting it: “Come on! What’re you waiting for? What the hell are you scared of, you chickenshit?”

The dog growled.

“Come on, come on, damn you, come down here and get it! Come and get it!”

Snarling, the Doberman jumped. The instant that it landed in the hallway, it seemed to ricochet off the floor and straight toward Chyna without any hesitation.

She didn’t take a defensive position. That would be death. She had one chance. One slim chance. Aggressive action. Go for it. She immediately rushed the dog, meeting its attack head-on, jamming the legs of the stool at it as though they were four swords.

The impact of the dog rocked her, almost knocked her down, but then the animal rebounded from her, yelping in pain, perhaps having taken one of the stool legs in an eye or hard against the tip of its snout. It tumbled toward the back of the short hall.

As the Doberman sprang to its feet, it seemed a little wobbly. Chyna was on top of it, jabbing mercilessly with the metal legs of the stool, pressing the dog backward, keeping it off balance so it couldn’t get around the stool and at her side, or under the stool and at her ankles, or over the stool and at her face. In spite of its injuries, the dog was quick, strong, dear God, hugely strong, and as lithe as a cat. The muscles in her arms burned with the effort, and her heart hammered so hard that her vision brightened then dimmed with each hard pulse, but she dared not relent even for a second. When the stool began to fold shut, pinching two of her fingers, she popped it open at once, jabbed the legs into the dog, jabbed, jabbed, until she drove the animal against the bedroom door, where she caged it between that panel of Masonite and the legs of the stool. The Doberman squirmed, snarled, snapped at the stool, clawed at the floor, clawed at the door, kicked, frantic to escape its trap. It was Chyna’s weight and all muscle, not containable for long. She leaned her body against the stool, pressing it into the dog, then let go of the stool with one hand so she could extract the hammer from her waistband. She couldn’t control the stool as well with one hand as with two, and the dog eeled up the bedroom door and came over the top of its cage, straining its head forward, snapping savagely at her, its teeth huge, slobber flying from its chops, eyes black and bloody and protuberant with rage. Still leaning against the stool, Chyna swung the big hammer. It struck with a pock on bone, and the dog screamed. Chyna swung the hammer again, landing a second blow on the skull, and the dog stopped screaming, slumped.

She stepped back.

The stool clattered to the floor.

The dog was still breathing. It made a pitiful sound. Then it tried to get up.

She swung the hammer a third time. That was the end of it.

Breathing raggedly, dripping cold sweat, Chyna dropped the hammer and stumbled into the bathroom. She threw up in the toilet, purging herself of Vess’s coffeecake.

She did not feel triumphant.

In her entire life, she had never killed anything larger than a palmetto beetle — until now. Self-defense justified the killing but didn’t make it easier.

Acutely aware of how little time they had left, she nevertheless paused at the sink to splash handfuls of cold water in her face and to rinse out her mouth.

Her reflection in the mirror scared her. Such a face. Bruised and bloodied. Eyes sunken, encircled by dark rings. Hair dirty and tangled. She looked crazed.

In a way, she was crazy. Crazy with a love of freedom, with an urgent thirst for it. Finally, finally. Freedom from Vess and from her mother. From the past. From the need to understand. She was crazy with the hope that she could save Ariel and at last do more than merely survive.

The girl was on a sofa in the lounge, hugging herself, rocking back and forth. She was making her first sound since Chyna had seen her through the view port in the padded door the previous morning: a wretched, rhythmic moaning.

“It’s okay, honey. Hush now. Everything’s going to be all right. You’ll see.”

The girl continued moaning and would not be soothed.

Chyna led her forward, settled her into the copilot’s seat, and engaged her safety harness. “We’re getting out of here, baby. It’s all over now.”

She swung into the driver’s seat. The engine was running and not overheated. According to the fuel gauge, they had plenty of gasoline. Good oil pressure. No warning lights were aglow.

The instrument panel included a clock. Maybe it didn’t keep time well. The motor home was old, after all. The clock read ten minutes till midnight.

Chyna switched on the headlights, disengaged the emergency brake, and put the motor home in gear.

She remembered that she must not risk spinning the wheels and digging tire-clutching holes in the lawn. Instead of accelerating, she allowed the vehicle to drift slowly forward, off the grass, and then she turned left onto the driveway, heading east.

She wasn’t accustomed to driving anything as large as the motor home, but she handled it well enough. After what she’d been through in the past twenty-four hours, there wasn’t a vehicle in the world that would be too much for her to handle. If the only thing available had been an army tank, she would have figured out how to work the controls and how to wrestle with the steering, and she would have driven it out of here.

Glancing at the side mirror, she watched the log house dwindling into the moonlit night behind them. The place was full of light and appeared as welcoming as any home that she had ever seen.

Ariel had fallen silent. She was bent forward in her harness. Her hands were buried in her hair, and she was clutching her head as if she felt it would explode.

“We’re on our way,” Chyna assured her. “Not far now, not far.”

The girl’s face was no longer placid, as it had been since Chyna first glimpsed her in the lamplight in the doll-crowded room, and it was not lovely either. Her features were contorted in an expression of wrenching anguish, and she appeared to be sobbing, although she produced no sound and no tears.

It was impossible to know what torments the girl was suffering. Perhaps she was terrified that they would encounter Edgler Vess and be stopped only a few feet short of escape. Or perhaps she wasn’t reacting to anything here, now, but was lost in a terrible moment of the past, or was responding to imaginary events in the fantasy Elsewhere into which Vess had driven her.

They topped the bald rise and started down a long gradual slope where trees crowded close to the driveway. Chyna was sure that Vess had paused on both sides of a gate the previous morning, when he had driven onto the property, and she figured it couldn’t be much farther ahead.

Vess hadn’t gotten out of the motor home to deal with the gate. It must be electrically operated.

Gripping the steering wheel with one hand, Chyna slid open the tambour top on the console box between the seats. She fumbled through the contents and found a remote-control device just as the gate appeared in the headlights.

The barrier was formidable. Steel posts. Tubular steel rails and crossbars. Barbed wire. She hoped to God that she wouldn’t have to ram it, because even the big motor home might not be able to break it down.

She pointed the remote control at the windshield, pressed the button, and jubilantly said, “Yes,” when the gate began to swing inward.

She let up on the accelerator and tapped the brake pedal, giving the heavy barrier time to come all the way open before she got close enough to obstruct it. The gate moved ponderously.

Fear beat through her, like the frantic wings of a dark bird, and she was suddenly sure that Vess was going to pull his car into the end of the driveway, blocking them, just as the gate finished opening.

But she drove between the posts to a two-lane blacktop highway that led left and right. No car was visible in either direction.

To the north, left, the highway climbed into a forested night, toward ragged moon-frosted clouds and stars, as if it were a ramp that would carry them right off the planet and up into deepest space.

To the south, the lanes descended, curving out of sight through fields and woods. In the distance, perhaps five or six miles away, a faint golden radiance lay against the night, like a Japanese fan on black velvet, as if a small town waited in that direction.

Chyna turned south, leaving Edgler Vess’s gate wide open. She accelerated. Twenty miles an hour. Thirty. She held the motor home at forty miles an hour, but she found it easy to imagine that she was going faster than any jet plane. Flying, free.

Although she was suffering uncounted pains and was plagued by a degree of bone-deep exhaustion that she’d never before experienced, her spirit soared.

“Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive,” she said, not as a prayer but as a report to God.

They were in a rural stretch of countryside, with no houses or businesses to either the east or the west of the road, no lights except the glow in the distance, but Chyna felt bathed in light.

Ariel continued to clutch her head, and her sweet face remained tormented.

“Ariel, untouched and alive,” Chyna told her. “Untouched and alive. Alive. It’s okay, honey. Everything’s going to be okay.” She checked the odometer. “It’s three miles behind us and getting farther behind every minute, every second.”

They crested a low hill, and Chyna squinted in the sudden flare of oncoming headlights. A single car was approaching uphill in the northbound lane.

She tensed, because it might be Vess.

The clock showed three minutes to midnight.

Even if it was Vess, and though he would be certain to recognize his own vehicle, Chyna felt secure. The motor home was a lot bigger than his car, so he wouldn’t be able to run her off the highway. In fact, she’d be able to smash the hell out of him, if it came to that, and she wouldn’t hesitate to use the motor home as a battering ram if she couldn’t outrun him.

But it wasn’t Vess. As the car drew nearer, she saw something on the roof, first thought that it was a ski rack, but then realized that it was an array of unlit emergency beacons and a siren-bullhorn. Last night, as she had followed Vess north on Highway 101 toward redwood country, she had hoped to encounter a police car — and now she had found one.

She pounded the horn, flashed the headlights, and braked the motor home.

“Cops!” she told Ariel. “Honey, see, everything’s going to be all right. We found ourselves some cops!”

The girl huddled forward, snared in her harness.

In response to her horn and the flashing lights, the police officer switched on his emergency beacons, although he didn’t use his siren.

Chyna pulled to the side of the road and stopped. “They can get Vess before he discovers we’re gone and tries to run.”

The cruiser had already passed her. She had glimpsed the words SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT in the crest on the driver’s door, and they were the two most glorious words in the English language.

In the sideview mirror, she watched the car as it hung a wide U-turn in the middle of the road. It came past her in the southbound lane now, and it coasted to a stop thirty feet ahead, on the graveled shoulder.

Relieved and exhilarated, Chyna opened her door and jumped down from the driver’s seat. She headed toward the cruiser.

She could see that only one officer was in the car. He was wearing a trooper’s hat with a wide brim. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry to get out.

The revolving emergency beacons cast off gouts of red light that streamed across the moonlit pavement, and splashes of blue light as in a turbulent dream, while the tall trees by the side of the road appeared to leap close and then away, close and then away. A wind came out of nowhere to harry dead leaves and clouds of grit across the blacktop as though the strobing beacons themselves had disturbed the stillness.

Almost halfway to the car, where the policeman still sat behind the steering wheel, Chyna remembered the files in Vess’s study, and suddenly they meant something far different from what they had meant before, as did the handcuffs.

She stopped.

“Oh, Jesus.”

She knew.

Chyna spun away from the black-and-white and sprinted back to the motor home. In the flashing blue and red light, weighed down by the fat moon, she felt as if she were running slow motion in a dream, through air as thick as custard.

When she reached the open door she glanced toward the patrol car. The cop was getting out.

Gasping, Chyna climbed up into the driver’s seat, pulling the door shut behind her.

The officer had gotten out of the cruiser. Edgler Vess.

Chyna released the emergency brake.

Vess opened fire.