Intensity

4

Intensity.

He believes in living with intensity.

Sitting at the steering wheel, he closes his eyes and massages the back of his neck.

He isn’t trying to get rid of the pain. It came on its own, and it will leave him naturally in time. He never takes Tylenol and other crap like that.

What he’s trying to do is enjoy the pain as fully as possible. With his fingertips he finds an especially sore spot just to the left of the third cervical vertebra, and he presses on it until the pain causes faint sprays of twinkly white and gray lights in the blackness behind his eyelids, like distant fireworks in a world without color.

Very nice.

Pain is merely a part of life. By embracing it, one can find surprising satisfaction in suffering. More important, getting in touch with his own pain makes it easier for him to take pleasure in the pain of others.

Two vertebrae farther down, he locates an even more sensitive point of inflamed tendon or muscle, a wonderful little button buried in the flesh which, when pressed, causes pain to shoot all the way across his shoulder and down his trapezius. At first he works the spot with a lover’s tender touch, groaning softly, then he attacks it vigorously until the sweet agony makes him suck air between his clenched teeth.

Intensity.

He does not expect to live forever. His time in this body is finite and precious — and therefore must not be wasted.

He does not believe in reincarnation or in any of the standard promises of an afterlife that are sold by the world’s great religions — although at times he senses that he is approaching a revelation of tremendous importance. He is willing to contemplate the possibility that the immortal soul exists, and that his own spirit may one day be exalted. But if he is to undergo an apotheosis, it will be brought about by his own bold actions, not by divine grace; if he, in fact, becomes a god, the transformation will occur because he has already chosen to live like a god — without fear, without remorse, without limits, with all his senses fiercely sharpened.

Anyone can smell a rose and enjoy the scent. But he has long been training himself to feel the destruction of its beauty when he crushes the flower in his fist. If he were to have a rose now, and if he were to chew the petals, he would be able to taste not merely the rose itself but the redness of it; likewise, he could taste the yellowness of buttercups, the blue of hyacinths. He could taste the bee that had crawled across the blossom on its eternal buzzing task of pollination, the soil out of which the flower had grown, and the wind that had caressed it through the summer of its growing.

He has never met anyone who can understand the intensity with which he experiences the world or the greater intensity for which he strives. With his help, perhaps Ariel will understand one day. Now, of course, she is too immature to achieve the insight.

One last squeeze of his neck. The pain. He sighs.

From the copilot’s seat, he picks up a folded raincoat. No rain is yet falling, but he needs to cover his blood-spattered clothing before going inside.

He could have changed into clean clothes prior to leaving the Templeton house, but he enjoys wearing these. The patina excites him.

He gets out of the driver’s seat, stands behind it, and pulls on the coat.

He washed his hands in the kitchen sink at the Templeton house, though he would have preferred to leave them stained too. While he can conceal his clothes under a raincoat, hiding his hands is not as easy.

He never wears gloves. To do so would be to concede that he fears apprehension, which he does not.

Although his fingerprints are on file with federal and state agencies, the prints he leaves at the scene will never match those that bear his name in the records. Like the rest of the world, police organizations are hell-bent on computerization; by now most fingerprint-image reference banks are in the form of digitized data, to facilitate high-speed scanning and processing. Even more easily than hard files, electronic files can be manipulated, because the work can be done at a great distance; there is no need to burglarize highly secure facilities, when instead he can be a ghost haunting their machines from across a continent. Because of his intelligence, talents, and connections, he has been able to meddle with the data.

Wearing gloves, even thin surgical latex gloves, would be an intolerable barrier to sensation. He likes to let his hand glide lightly over the fine golden hairs on a woman’s thigh, take time to appreciate the texture of pebbled gooseflesh against his palm, to relish the fierce heat of skin and then, after, the warmth all fading, fading. When he kills, he finds it absolutely essential to feel the wetness.

The prints under his name in the various files are, in fact, those of a young marine named Bernard Petain, who died tragically during training maneuvers at Camp Pendleton many years ago. And the prints that he leaves at the scene, often etched in blood, cannot be matched to any on file with the military, the FBI, the Department of Motor Vehicles, or anywhere else.

He finishes buttoning the raincoat, turns up the collar, and looks at his hands. Stains under three fingernails. It might be grease or soil. No one will be suspicious of it.

He himself can smell the blood on his clothes even through the black nylon raincoat and insulated liner, but others are not sufficiently sensitive to detect it.

Staring at the residue under his nails, however, he can hear the screams again, that lovely music in the night, the Templeton house as reverberant as a concert hall, and no one to hear except him and the deaf vineyards.

If he is ever caught in the act, the authorities will print him again, discover his deception with the computers, and eventually link him to a long list of unsolved murders. But he isn’t concerned about that. He’ll never be taken alive, never be put on trial. Whatever they learn about his activities after his death will only add to the glory of his name.

He is Edgler Foreman Vess. From the letters of his name, one can extract a long list of power words: GOD, FEAR, DEMON, SAVE, RAGE, ANGER, DRAGON, FORGE, SEED, SEMEN, FREE, and others. Also words with a mystical quality: DREAM, VESSEL, LORE, FOREVER, MARVEL. Sometimes the last thing that he whispers to a victim is a sentence composed from this list of words. One that he especially likes and uses often is GOD FEARS ME.

Anyway, all questions of fingerprints and other evidence are moot, because he will never be caught. He is thirty-three years old. He has been enjoying himself in this fashion for a long time, and he has never had a close call.

Now he takes the pistol out of the open console between the pilot’s and copilot’s chairs. A Heckler & Koch P7.

Earlier, he had reloaded the thirteen-round magazine. Now he unscrews the sound suppressor, because he has no plans to visit other houses this night. Besides, the baffles are probably damaged from the shots that he has fired, diminishing both the effect of the silencer and the accuracy of the weapon.

Occasionally he daydreams about what it would be like if the impossible happened, if he were interrupted at play and surrounded by a SWAT team. With his experience and knowledge, the ensuing showdown would be thrillingly intense.

If there is a single secret behind the success of Edgler Vess, it is his belief that no twist of fate is either good or bad, that no experience is qualitatively better than another. Winning twenty million dollars in the lottery is no more to be desired than being trapped by a SWAT team, and a shootout with the authorities is no more to be dreaded than winning all that money. The value of any experience isn’t in its positive or negative effect on his life but in the sheer luminous power of it, the vividness, the ferocity, the amount and degree of pure sensation that it provides. Intensity.

Vess puts the sound suppressor in the console between the seats.

He drops the pistol into the right-hand pocket of his raincoat.

He is not expecting trouble. Nevertheless, he goes nowhere unarmed. One can never be too careful. Besides, opportunities often arise unexpectedly.

In the driver’s seat again, he takes the keys from the ignition and checks that the brake is firmly set. He opens the door and gets out of the motor home.

All eight gasoline pumps are self-service. He is parked at the outer of the two service islands. He needs to go to the cashier in the associated convenience store to pay in advance and to identify the pump that he’ll be using so it can be turned on.

The night breathes. At higher altitudes, a strong gale drives masses of clouds out of the northwest toward the southeast. Here at ground level, a lesser exhalation of cold wind huffs between the pumps, whistles alongside the motor home, and flaps the raincoat against Vess’s legs. The convenience store — buff brick below, white aluminum siding above, big windows full of merchandise — stands in front of rising hills that are covered with huge evergreens; the wind soughs through their branches with a hollow, ancient, lonely voice.

Out on Highway 101, there is little traffic at this hour. When a truck passes, it cleaves the wind with a cry that seems strangely Jurassic.

A Pontiac with Washington State license plates is parked at the inner service island, under the yellow sodium-vapor lamps. Other than the motor home, it is the only vehicle in sight. A bumper sticker on the back announces that ELECTRICIANS KNOW HOW TO PLUG IT IN.

On the roof of the building, positioned for maximum visibility from 101, is a red neon sign that announces OPEN 24 HOURS. Red is the quality of the sound each passing truck makes out there on the highway. In the glow, his hands look as if he never washed them.

As Vess approaches the entrance, the glass door swings open, and a man comes out carrying a family-size bag of potato chips and a six-pack of Coke in cans. He is a chubby guy with long sideburns and a walrus mustache.

Gesturing at the sky, he says, “Storm’s coming,” as he hurries past Vess.

“Good,” Vess says. He likes storms. He enjoys driving in them. The more torrential the rain, the better. With lightning flashing and trees cracking in the wind and pavement as slick as ice.

The guy with the walrus mustache goes to the Pontiac.

Vess enters the convenience store, wondering what an electrician from Washington is doing on the road in northern California at this ungodly hour of the night.

He’s fascinated by the way in which lives connect briefly, with a potential for drama that is sometimes fulfilled and sometimes not. A man stops for gasoline, lingers to buy potato chips and Coke, makes a comment on the weather to a stranger — and continues on his journey. The stranger could as easily follow the man to the car and blow his brains out. There would be risks for the shooter, but not serious risks; it could be managed with surprising discretion. The man’s survival is either full of mysterious meaning or utterly meaningless; Vess is unable to decide which.

If fate doesn’t actually exist, it ought to.

The small store is warm, clean, and brightly lighted. Three narrow aisles extend to the left of the door, offering the usual roadside merchandise: every imaginable snack food, the basic patent medicines, magazines, paperback books, postcards, novelty items designed to hang from rearview mirrors, and selected canned goods that sell to campers and to people, like Vess, who travel in homes on wheels. Along the back wall are tall coolers full of beer and soft drinks, as well as a couple of freezers containing ice cream treats. To the right of the door is the service counter that separates the two cashiers’ stations and the clerical area from the public part of the store.

Two employees are on duty, both men. These days, no one works alone in such places at night — and with good reason.

The guy at the cash register is a redhead in his thirties with freckles and a two-inch-diameter birthmark, as pink as uncooked salmon, on his pale forehead. The mark is uncannily like the image of a fetus curled in a womb, as if a gestating twin had died early in the mother’s pregnancy and left its fossilized image on the surviving brother’s brow.

The redheaded cashier is reading a paperback. He looks up at Vess, and his eyes are as gray as ashes but clear and piercing. “What can I do for you, sir?”

“I’m at pump seven,” Vess says.

The radio is tuned to a country station. Alan Jackson sings about midnight in Montgomery, the wind, a whippoorwill, a lonesome chill, and the ghost of Hank Williams.

“How you want to pay?” asks the cashier.

“If I put any more on the credit cards, the Bank of America’s going to send someone around to break my legs,” says Vess, and he slaps down a hundred-dollar bill. “Figure I’ll need about sixty bucks’ worth.”

The combination of the song, the birthmark, and the cashier’s haunting gray eyes generates in Vess an eerie sense of expectancy. Something exceptional is about to happen.

“Paying off Christmas like the rest of us, huh?” says the cashier as he rings up the sale.

“Hell, I’ll still be payin’ off Christmas next Christmas.”

The second clerk sits on a stool farther along the counter. He’s not at a cash register but is laboring on the bookkeeping or checking inventory sheets — anyway, doing some kind of paperwork.

Vess has not previously looked directly at the second man, and now he discovers that this is the exceptional thing he felt looming.

“Storm coming,” he says to the second clerk.

The man looks up from the papers spread on the counter. He is in his twenties, at least half Asian, and strikingly handsome. No. More than handsome. Jet-black hair, golden complexion, eyes as liquid as oil and as deep as wells. There is a gentle quality to his good looks that almost gives him an effeminate aspect — but not quite.

Ariel would love him. He is just her type.

“Might be cold enough for snow in some of the mountain passes,” says the Asian, “if you’re going that way.”

He has a pleasant — almost musical — voice that would charm Ariel. He is really quite breathtaking.

To the cashier who is counting out change, Vess says, “Just hold on to that. I need a supply of munchies too. I’ll be back as soon as I fill up the tank.”

He leaves quickly, afraid that they might sense his excitement and become alarmed.

Although he’s been in the store no more than a minute, the night seems markedly colder than it was when he went inside. Invigorating. He catches the fragrance of pine trees and spruce — even fir from far to the north — inhales the sweet greenness of the heavily timbered hills behind him, detects the crisp scent of oncoming rain, smells the ozone of lightning bolts not yet hurled, breathes in the pungent fear of small animals that already quake in the fields and forests in anticipation of the storm.

After she was certain that he had left the motor home, Chyna crept forward through the vehicle, holding the butcher knife in front of her.

The windows in the dining area and the lounge were curtained, so she was not able to see what lay outside. At the front, however, the windshield revealed that they had stopped at a service station.

She had no idea where the killer was. He had left no more than a minute earlier. He might be outside, within a few feet of the door.

She hadn’t heard him removing the gas cap or jacking the pump nozzle into the tank. But from the way they were parked, fuel was evidently taken on board from the starboard side, so that was most likely where he would be.

Afraid to proceed without knowing his exact whereabouts, but even more afraid to remain in the motor home, she slipped into the driver’s seat. The headlights were off, and the instrument panel was dark, but there was enough backglow from the dining-nook lamp to make her supremely visible from outside.

At the next island, a Pontiac pulled away from the pumps. Its red taillights swiftly dwindled.

As far as she could see, the motor home was now the only vehicle at the station.

The keys weren’t in the ignition. She wouldn’t have tried to drive off anyway. That had been an option back in the vineyard, when there had been no help nearby. Here, there must be employees — and whoever pulled off the highway next.

She cracked the door, wincing at the hard sound, jumped out, and stumbled when she hit the ground. The butcher knife popped from her hand as if greased, clattered against the pavement, and spun away.

Certain that she had drawn the killer’s attention and that he was already bearing down on her, Chyna scrambled to her feet. She spun left, then right, with her hands out in front of her in pathetic defense. But the eater of spiders was nowhere to be seen on the brightly lighted blacktop.

She pressed the door shut, searched the surrounding pavement for the knife, couldn’t immediately spot it — and froze when a man came out of the station about fifty or sixty feet away. He was wearing a long coat, so at first Chyna was sure that he couldn’t be the killer, but then immediately she recalled the inexplicable rustling of fabric to which she had listened before he had left the motor home, and she knew.

The only place to hide was behind one of the pumps at the next service island, but that was thirty feet away, between her and the store, with a lot of bright exposed pavement to cross. Besides, he was approaching the same island from the other side, and he would reach it first, catching her in the open.

If she tried to get around the motor home, he would spot her and wonder where she had come from. His psychosis probably included a measure of paranoia, and he would assume that she had been in his vehicle. He would pursue her. Relentlessly.

Instead, even as she saw him leaving the store, Chyna dropped flat to the pavement. Counting on the obstructing pumps at the first island to mask any movement close to the ground, she crawled on her belly under the motor home.

The killer didn’t cry out, didn’t pick up his pace. He hadn’t seen her.

From her hiding place, she watched him approach. As he drew close, the sulfurous light was so bright that she could recognize his black leather boots as the same pair that she had studied from beneath the guest-room bed a couple of hours before.

She turned her head to follow him as he went around the back of the motor home to the starboard side, where he stopped at one of the pumps.

The blacktop was cold against her thighs, belly, and breasts. It leached the body heat out of her through her jeans and cotton sweater, and she began to shiver.

She listened as the killer disengaged the hose spout from the nozzle boot, opened the fuel port on the side of the motor home, and removed the tank cap. She figured it would take a few minutes to fill the behemoth, so she began to ease out of her hiding place even as she heard the spout thunk into the tank.

Still flat at ground level, she suddenly saw the butcher knife. Out on the blacktop. Ten feet from the front bumper. The yellow light glimmered along the cutting edge.

Even as she was sliding into the open, however, before she could push to her feet, she heard boot heels on blacktop. She glanced back under the motor home and saw that the killer evidently had fixed the nozzle trigger in place with the regulator clip, because he was on the move again.

Frantically and as silently as possible, she retreated beneath the vehicle once more. She could hear gasoline sloshing into the fuel tank.

The killer walked forward along the starboard side, around the front, to the driver’s door. But he didn’t open the door. He paused. Very still. Then he walked to the butcher knife, stooped, and picked it up.

Chyna held her breath, though it seemed impossible that the killer could intuit the meaning of the knife. He’d never seen it before. He couldn’t know that it had come from the Templeton house. Although it was indisputably odd to find a butcher knife lying on a service-station approach lane, it might have fallen out of any vehicle that had passed through.

With the knife, he returned to the motor home and climbed inside, leaving the driver’s door open behind him.

Over Chyna’s head, the footsteps on the steel floor were as hollow as voodoo drums. As best she could tell, he stopped in the dining area.

Vess isn’t prone to see omens and portents everywhere he looks. A single hawk flying across the face of the full moon, glimpsed at midnight, will not fill him with expectations of either disaster or good fortune. A black cat crossing his path, a mirror shattering while his reflection is captured in it, a news story about the birth of a two-headed calf — none of these things will rattle him. He is convinced that he makes his own fate and that spiritual transcendence — if such a thing can happen — ensues merely from one’s acting boldly and living with intensity.

Nevertheless, the large butcher knife makes him wonder. It has a totemic quality, an almost magical aura. He carefully places it on the counter in the kitchen, where the light lays a wet sheen along the weapon’s cutting edge.

When he picked it off the blacktop, the blade had been cold but the handle had been vaguely warm, as if with the anticipatory heat of his grip.

Eventually he will experiment with this strangely discarded blade to determine if anything special happens when he cuts someone with it. At the moment, however, it doesn’t provide him with the advantage that he needs for the work at hand.

He has the Heckler & Koch P7 snug in the right-hand pocket of his raincoat, but he doesn’t feel that even it is adequate to the situation.

The two lads behind the cashiers’ counter are not in the war zone of a big-city 7-Eleven market, but they are smart enough to take precautions. Not even Beverly Hills and Bel Air, peopled by wealthy actors and retired football stars, are any longer safe at night either for or from their citizens. These fellows will have a firearm for self-protection and will know how to use it. Dealing with them will require an intimidating weapon with formidable stopping power.

He opens a cabinet to the left of the oven. A Mossberg short-barreled, pistol-grip, pump-action, 12-gauge shotgun is mounted in a pair of spring clamps on the shelf. He pops it loose of the clamps and lays it on the countertop.

The magazine tube of the 12-gauge is already loaded. Although he doesn’t belong to the American Automobile Association, Edgler Vess is otherwise always prepared for any eventuality when he travels.

In the cabinet is a box of shotgun shells, open for easy access. He takes a few and puts them on the counter next to the Mossberg, though he is not likely to need them.

He quickly unbuttons the raincoat but doesn’t take it off. He transfers the pistol from his right-hand exterior pocket to an interior, right-hand breast pocket in the lining. This is also where he places the spare shells.

From a kitchen drawer, he withdraws a compact Polaroid camera. He tucks it into the pocket from which he just removed the Heckler & Koch P7. From his wallet, he removes a trimmed Polaroid snapshot of his special girl, Ariel, and he slips it into the same pocket that contains the camera.

With his seven-inch switchblade, which is tacky from all the work for which it was used at the Templeton house, he slashes the lining of the left coat pocket. Then he rips away these tattered fragments of fabric. Now, if he were to drop coins into this pocket, they would fall straight to the floor.

He puts the shotgun under his open coat and holds it with his left hand, through the ruined pocket. The concealment is effective. He does not believe that he looks at all suspicious.

He quickly paces back to the bedroom, then forward, practicing his walk. He is able to move freely without banging the shotgun against his legs.

After all, he can draw upon the nimbleness and the grace of the spider from the Templeton house.

Although he doesn’t care what damage he does to the birthmarked cashier with the ashen eyes, he’ll have to be careful not to destroy the face of the young Asian gentleman. He must have good photographs for Ariel.

Overhead, the killer seemed to be occupied in the dining area. The floor creaked under him as he shifted his weight.

Unless he had drawn open the curtains, he couldn’t see outside from where he was. With luck, Chyna could make a break for freedom.

She considered remaining under the vehicle, letting him tank up and drive away, and only then going inside to call the police.

But he had found the butcher knife; he would be thinking about it. Though she could see no way that he could grasp the significance of the knife, by now she had an almost superstitious dread of him and was irrationally convinced that he would find her if she remained where she was.

She crawled out from under the motor home, rose into a crouch, glanced at the open door, and then looked back and up at the windows along the side. The curtains were closed.

Emboldened, she got to her feet, crossed to the inner service island, and stepped between the pumps. She glanced back, but the killer remained inside the vehicle.

She went out of the night into bright fluorescent light and the twang of country music. Two employees were behind the counter on the right, and she intended to say Call the police, but then she glanced through the glass door that had just closed behind her, and she saw the killer getting out of the motor home and coming toward the store, even though he hadn’t finished filling the fuel tank.

He was looking down. He hadn’t seen her.

She moved away from the door.

The two men stared at her expectantly.

If she told them to call the police, they would want to know why, and there was no time for a discussion, not even enough time for the telephone call. Instead, she said, “Please don’t let him know I’m here,” and before they could reply, she walked away from them, along an aisle with goods shelved six feet high on both sides, to the far end of the store.

As she stepped out of the aisle to hide at the end of a row of display cases, Chyna heard the door open and the killer enter. A growl of wind came with him, and then the door swung shut.

The redheaded cashier and the young Asian gentleman with the liquid-night eyes are staring at him strangely, as if they know something they shouldn’t, and he almost pulls the shotgun from under his coat the moment that he walks through the door, almost blows them away without preamble. But he tells himself that he is misreading them, that they are merely intrigued by him, because he is, after all, a striking figure. Often people sense his exceptional power and are aware that he lives a larger life than they do. He is a popular man at parties, and women are frequently attracted to him. These men are merely drawn to him as are so many others. Besides, if he whacks them immediately, without a word, he will be denying himself the pleasure of foreplay.

Alan Jackson is no longer singing on the radio, and cocking one ear appreciatively, Vess says, “Man, I like that Emmylou Harris, don’t you? Was there ever anyone could sing this stuff so it got to you that way?”

“She’s good,” says the redhead. Previously he was outgoing. Now he seems reserved.

The Asian says nothing, inscrutable in this Zen temple of Twinkies, Hershey bars, beer nuts, snack crackers, and Doritos.

“I love a song about home fires and family,” Vess says.

“You on vacation?” asks the redhead.

“Hell, friend, I’m always on vacation.”

“Too young to be retired.”

“I mean,” says Vess, “life itself is a vacation if you look at it the right way. Been doing some hunting.”

“Around these parts? What game’s in season?” the redhead asks.

The Asian remains silent but attentive. He takes a Slim Jim sausage off a display rack and skins open the plastic wrapper without letting his gaze flicker from Vess.

They don’t suspect for a second that they’re both going to be dead in a minute, and their cow-stupid lack of awareness delights Vess. It is quite funny, really. How dramatically their eyes will widen in the instant that the shotgun roars.

Instead of answering the cashier’s question, Vess says, “Are you a hunter?”

“Fishing’s my sport,” the redhead says.

“Never cared for it,” says Vess.

“Great way to get in touch with nature — little boat on the lake, peaceful water.”

Vess shakes his head. “You can’t see anything in their eyes.”

The redhead blinks, confused. “In whose eyes?”

“I mean, they’re just fish. They just have these flat, glassy eyes. Jesus.”

“Well, I never said they’re pretty. But nothing tastes better than your own-caught salmon or a mess of trout.”

Edgler Vess listens to the music for a moment, letting the two men watch him. The song genuinely affects him. He feels the piercing loneliness of the road, the longing of a lover far from home. He is a sensitive man.

The Asian bites off a piece of the Slim Jim. He chews daintily, his jaw muscles hardly moving.

Vess decides that he will take the unfinished sausage back to Ariel. She can put her mouth where the Asian had his. This intimacy with the beautiful young man will be Vess’s gift to the girl.

He says, “Sure will be glad to get home to my Ariel. Isn’t that a pretty name?”

“Sure is,” says the redhead.

“Fits her too.”

“She the missus?” asks the redhead. His friendliness is not as natural as when Vess spoke with him about turning on pump number seven. He is definitely uncomfortable and trying not to show it.

Time to startle them, see how they react. Will either of them begin to realize just how much trouble is coming?

“Nope,” Vess says. “No ball and chain for me. Maybe one day. Anyway, Ariel’s only sixteen, not ready yet.”

They are not sure what to say. Sixteen is half his age. Sixteen is still a child. Jailbait.

The risk he’s taking is enormous and titillating. Another customer might pull off the highway at any moment, raising the stakes.

“Prettiest thing you’ll ever see this side of paradise,” says Vess, and he licks his lips. “Ariel, I mean.”

He takes the Polaroid snapshot from his coat pocket and drops it onto the counter. The clerks stare at it.

“She’s pure angel,” says Vess. “Porcelain skin. Breathtaking. Makes your scrotum twang like a bass fiddle.”

With barely disguised distaste, the cashier looks at the pump-monitor board to the left of the cash register and says, “Your sixty bucks just finished going in the tank.”

Vess says, “Don’t get me wrong. I never touched her — that way. She’s been locked in the basement the past year, where I can look at her anytime I want to. Waiting for my little doll to ripen, get just a little sweeter.”

As glassy-eyed as fish, they gaze at him. He relishes their expressions.

Then he smiles, laughs, and says, “Hey, had you going there, didn’t I?”

Neither man smiles back at him, and the redhead says tightly, “You still going to make some other purchases, or do you just want your change?”

Vess puts on his most sincere face. He can almost manage a blush. “Listen, sorry if I offended. I’m a joker. Can’t help puttin’ people on.”

“Well,” says the redhead, “I have a sixteen-year-old daughter, so I don’t see what’s funny.”

Speaking to the Asian, Vess says, “When I go hunting, I take trophies. You know — like a matador gets the bull’s tail and ears? Sometimes it’s just a picture. Gifts for Ariel. She’ll really like you.”

As he speaks, he raises the Mossberg, draped with the raincoat as if with black funeral bunting, seizes it in both hands, blows the redheaded cashier off his stool, and pumps another shell into the breech.

The Asian. Oh, how his eyes widen. The expression in them is like nothing ever to be seen in the eyes of fish.

Even as the redhead crashes to the floor, this young Asian gentleman with the fabulous eyes has one hand under the counter, going for a weapon.

Vess says, “Don’t, or I’ll shove the bullets up your ass.”

But the Asian brings up the revolver anyway, a Smith & Wesson.38 Chiefs Special, so Vess thrusts the shotgun across the counter and fires point-blank at his chest, loath to mess up that perfect face. The young man is airborne off the stool, the revolver spinning from his hand even before he has a chance to squeeze off one round.

The redhead is screaming.

Vess walks to the gate in the counter and passes through to the work area.

The redheaded cashier with the sixteen-year-old daughter waiting at home is curled as if imitating the fetus-like pink birthmark on his forehead, hugging himself, holding himself together. On the radio, Garth Brooks sings “Thunder Rolls.” Now the cashier is screaming and crying at the same time. The screams reverberate in the plate-glass windows, and the echo of the shotgun still roars in Vess’s ears, and a new customer could walk into the store at any second. The moment is achingly intense.

One more round finishes the cashier.

The Asian is unconscious and going fast. Happily, his face is unmarked.

Like a pilgrim genuflecting before a shrine, Vess drops onto one knee as a final gasp rattles from the dying young man. A sound like the brittle flutter of insect wings. He leans close to inhale the other’s exhalation, breathes deeply. Now small measures of the Asian’s grace and beauty are a part of him, conveyed on the scent of the Slim Jim.

The Brooks song is followed by that old Johnny Cash number “A Boy Named Sue,” which is silly enough to spoil the mood. Vess turns off the radio.

As he reloads, he surveys the area behind the counter and spots a row of wall switches. They are labeled with the locations of the lights that they control. He shuts down all the exterior lighting, including the OPEN 24 HOURS of red neon on the roof.

When he also switches off the fluorescent ceiling panels, the store is not plunged into total darkness. The display lights in the long row of coolers glow eerily behind the insulated glass doors. A lighted clock advertising Coors beer hangs on one wall, and at the counter, a gooseneck lamp illuminates the papers on which the Asian gentleman was working.

Nevertheless, the shadows are deep, and the place appears to be closed. It’s unlikely that a customer will pull in from the highway.

Of course a county sheriff’s deputy or highway patrol officer, curious about why this establishment that never closes is, in fact, suddenly closed, might investigate. Consequently, Vess doesn’t dawdle over the tasks that remain.

Huddled with her back against the end panel of the shelves, as far as she could get from the cashiers’ counter, Chyna felt exposed by the display-case light to her right and threatened by the shadows to her left. In the silence following the gunfire and the cessation of the music, she became convinced that the killer could hear her ragged, shuddery breathing. But she couldn’t quiet herself, and she couldn’t stop shaking any more than a rabbit could cease shivering in the shadow of a wolf.

Maybe the rumble of the compressors for the coolers and freezers would provide enough covering sound to save her. She wanted to lean out to one side and then the other to check the flanking aisles, but she could not summon the courage to look. She was crazily certain that, leaning out, she’d come face-to-face with the eater of spiders.

She had thought that nothing could be more devastating than finding the bodies of Paul and Sarah — and later Laura — but this had been worse. This time she had been in the same room when murder happened, close enough not merely to hear the screams but to feel them like punches in the chest.

She supposed the killer was robbing the place, but he didn’t need to kill the clerks just to get the money. Necessity, of course, was not a deciding factor with him. He had killed them simply because he enjoyed doing so. He was on a roll. He was hot.

She seemed trapped in an endless night. A breakdown in the cosmic machinery, gears jammed. Stars locked in place. No sunrise ever rising. And coming down through the frozen sky, a terrible coldness.

A light flashed, and Chyna brought her hands up defensively in front of her face. Then she realized that the flash had come from the other end of the store. And again.

Edgler Vess is not a hunter, as he had told the redheaded cashier, but a connoisseur who collects exquisite images, recording most of them with the camera of his mind’s eye but once in a while with the Polaroid camera. Memories of great beauty enliven his thoughts every day and form the basis of his gratifying dreams.

Each camera flash seems to linger in the huge eyes of the Asian clerk, glimmering as if it were his spirit trapped behind his corneas and seeking egress from the cooling mortal coil.

Once, in Nevada, Vess had killed an incomparable twenty-year-old brunette, whose face had made Claudia Schiffer and Kate Moss look like hags. Before meticulously destroying her, he had taken six photographs. With threats, he had even managed to make her smile in three of the shots; she had a radiant smile. Once every thirty days during the three months following that memorable episode, he had cut up and eaten one of the photos in which she’d been smiling, and with the consumption of each, he had been fiercely aroused by the destruction of her beauty. He had felt her smile in his belly, a warming radiance, and knew that he himself was more beautiful because he contained it.

He can’t remember the brunette’s name. Names are never of any importance to him.

Knowing the name of the young Asian gentleman, however, will be helpful when he describes this episode to Ariel. He puts aside the Polaroid, rolls the dead man over, and takes his wallet from his hip pocket.

Holding the driver’s license in the light from the gooseneck lamp, he sees that the name is Thomas Fujimoto.

Vess decides to call him Fuji. Like the mountain.

He returns the license to the wallet and tucks the wallet in the pocket. He takes none of the dead man’s money. He won’t touch the cash in the register either — except to extract the forty dollars in change that is due him. He isn’t a thief.

With three photographs taken, he needs only to keep his promise to Fuji and prove that he is a man of his word. It is an awkward bit of business, but he finds it amusing.

Now he must deal with the security system, which has recorded everything that he’s done. A video camera is mounted over the front door and focused on the cashiers’ counter.

Edgler Foreman Vess has no desire to see himself on television news. Living with intensity is virtually impossible when one is in prison.

Chyna was in control of her breathing again, but her heart knocked so hard that her vision pulsed, and the carotid arteries thumped in her throat as though jolts of electricity were slamming through them.

Again convinced that safety lay in movement, she leaned into the light and looked around the corner into the aisle in front of the coolers. The killer was not in sight, although she could hear him moving at the other end of the store: crisp furtive rustlings like a rat in a drift of autumn leaves.

On her hands and knees, stomach clenched in terror, she crawled into the spill of cooler light far enough to look along the narrow aisle, seeking something on the shelves to the right that might serve as a weapon. Without the butcher knife, she felt helpless.

No knives were conveniently for sale. Nearest to her were hanging displays of novelty key chains, fingernail clippers, pocket combs, styptic pencils, packets of moistened towelettes, eyeglass-cleaning papers, decks of playing cards, and disposable cigarette lighters.

She reached up and took one of the lighters off the rack. She wasn’t sure how she could use it to defend herself, but in the absence of a satisfyingly sharp length of steel, fire was the only weapon available to her.

The overhead fluorescent panels blinked on. The brightness froze her.

She looked toward the far end of the store. The killer wasn’t in sight, but across one wall his slouched shadow swelled huge and then shrank and then glided away like that of a moth swooping past a floodlamp.

Vess switches the lights on only to look at the video camera mounted above the front door.

Of course the incriminating tape is not contained in the camera. If access were that easy, even some of the dimwit thugs who make a living sticking up service stations and convenience stores would be smart enough to climb on a stool and eject the cassette to take it with them or otherwise destroy the evidence. The camera is sending the image to a video recorder elsewhere in the building.

The system is an add-on, so the transmission cable isn’t buried in the wall. This is fortunate for Vess, because if the cable were hidden, the search would be more time-consuming. The line isn’t even tucked up above the suspended acoustic-tile ceiling. Bracketed to the Sheetrock, it leads openly to the back partition behind the cashiers’ counter and through a half-inch-diameter hole in that wall to another room.

There’s a door to that room as well. He finds an office with one desk, gray metal filing cabinets, a small safe with a combination lock, and wood-pattern Formica storage cabinets.

Fortunately, the recorder isn’t in the safe. The transmission cable comes through the wall from the store, continues through two more brackets for a distance of about seven feet, then drops down through the top of one of the storage cabinets. No attempt at concealment whatsoever.

He opens the upper doors to the cabinet, doesn’t find what he seeks, and checks below. Three machines are stacked atop one another.

Tape whispers through the bottom machine, and the indicator light shines above the word RECORD. He presses the STOP button, then EJECT, and he drops the cassette into his raincoat pocket.

He might play it for Ariel. The quality will not be first-rate, because this is an old system, outdated technology. But the precious girl will be impressed by his bold performance even in too brightly lit scenes on black-and-white tape that has been re-recorded too often.

A telephone stands on the desk. He uncouples it from the cord that leads to the wall jack and uses the butt of the shotgun to smash the keypad.

A new shift of clerks will come on duty, probably at eight or nine o’clock, in four or five hours. By then Vess will be long gone. But there’s no point in making it easy for them to call the police. Something might go wrong with his plans, delaying him here or on the highway, and then he will be glad that he bought himself an extra half hour by destroying the telephones.

Beside the door is a pegboard on which hang eight keys, each with its own tag. With the exception of the current regrettable interruption in service, this establishment is open twenty-four hours a day — yet there’s a key to lock the front door. He slips it off its peg.

In the work area behind the cashiers’ counter once more, after closing the office door behind him, Vess snaps down a switch, and the overhead fluorescents wink out.

He stands in the dim light that remains, breathing through his mouth, licking his lips, rolling his tongue over his gums, tasting the lingering acrid scent of gunfire. The gloom feels good against his face and the backs of his hands; the shadows are as erotic as slender, trembling hands.

Stepping around the bodies, he goes to the counter and takes only his forty dollars from the cash register drawer.

The young Asian’s Smith & Wesson.38 Chief’s Special lies on the counter, in the cone of light from the gooseneck lamp, where Vess carefully placed it minutes ago. He is no more capable of stealing the gun than he is of taking money that doesn’t belong to him.

The Slim Jim, from which the Asian took a large bite, is also on the counter. Unfortunately, the wrapper was peeled off; therefore, it is useless.

Vess plucks another sausage from the display rack, neatly chews off the end of the plastic wrapper, and slides the tube of meat out of the package. He inserts the shorter sausage (missing the Asian’s bite) into the wrapper and twists the end shut. He puts this in his pocket with the videotape — for Ariel.

He pays for the sausage that he threw away, making change from the open register drawer.

On the counter is a telephone. He unplugs it from the jack and smashes the keypad with the butt of the shotgun.

Now he goes shopping.

Chyna was relieved when the lights went off, frightened by the hammering, and then alert in the subsequent silence.

She had crept out of the cooler-lighted aisle and returned to her shelter at the end of the shelf row, where she had quietly peeled open the cardboard-and-plastic package that contained the disposable cigarette lighter. While the overhead fluorescents had been on and the flickering flame couldn’t betray her, she had tested the lighter, and it had worked.

Now she clutched this pathetic weapon and prayed that the killer would finish whatever he was doing — maybe looting the cash register — and just, for God’s sake, get out of here. She didn’t want to have to go up against him with a Bic butane. If he stumbled onto her, she might be able to take advantage of his surprise, thrust the lighter in his face, and give him a nasty little burn — or even set his hair on fire — before he recoiled. More likely, his reflexes would be uncannily quick; he’d knock the lighter out of her hand before she could do any damage.

Even if she burned him, she would gain only precious seconds to turn and flee. Hurting, he would come after her, and with his long legs, he would be swift. Then the outcome of the race would depend on whether her terror or his insane rage was the greater motivating force.

She heard movement, the creak of the counter gate, footsteps. Half nauseated from protracted fear, she was gloriously heartened when it seemed that he was leaving.

Then she realized that the footsteps were not crossing toward the door at the front of the store. They were approaching her.

She was squatting on her haunches, back pressed to the end panel of the shelf row, not immediately sure where he was. In the first of the three aisles, toward the front of the store? In the center aisle immediately to her left?

No.

The third aisle.

To her right.

He was coming past the coolers. Not fast. Not as if he knew that she was here and intended to whack her.

Rising into a crouch but staying low, Chyna eased to the left, into the middle of the three passages. Here the glow from the coolers, one row removed, bounced off the acoustic-tile ceiling but provided little illumination. All the merchandise was shelved with shadows.

She started forward toward the cashiers’ counter, thankful for her soft-soled shoes — and then she remembered the packaging from which she had extracted the Bic lighter. She’d left it on the floor where she’d been squatting at the end of the shelf row.

He would see it, probably even step on it. Maybe he would think that earlier in the night some shoplifter had slipped the lighter out of the packaging to conceal it more easily in a pocket. Or maybe he would know.

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 life, 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.

She placed the revolver on the passenger seat, within easy reach, reluctant to let it out of her hand. As an adult, she had always relied on prudence and caution to stay out of harm’s way. She hadn’t held a gun since she’d walked out on her mother at the age of sixteen. Now she could not imagine living without a weapon at her side, and she doubted that she ever would do so again — which was a development that dismayed her.

The engine turned over at once. The tires shrieked, and she peeled rubber getting started. Smoke bloomed from the spinning wheels, but then she shot out from behind the building and rocketed past the service islands.

The connecting road to the freeway was deserted. The motor home was out of sight.

At this point, 101 was a four-lane divided highway, so the motor home couldn’t have gotten across the median to turn south. The killer had to have gone north, and he couldn’t have traveled far in the little lead time that he had.

Chyna went after him.