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His eyes glittered There was so pushed into a corner I didn’t doubt he’d kill He was right The body in the trunk was proof enough of that

I didn’t answer hih to pros, most of them violent, and then I opened the front driver’s-side door, got in, and started the engine I considered gunning it and leaving him there in the dust, but all he had to do was make a phone call, and I was a wanted felon with a body in the trunk

Play along Find an opportunity Wait for Venna

It was risky, but it was the only card in my hand at the moment

Chapter Nine

NINE

We buried Mr Hunter, whatever his narave six miles from Ares, in a stretch of desert that probably hadn’t had huain for ten more Eamon and I buried him, that is; Sarah slept on in the backseat, the sleep of the OxyContin-coddled innocent By the tiritty with sweat and sand I wanted to kill Eaurative if not literal sense He had, apparently, saved ain, the sticky gray center with him I wanted to be able to hate him with a whole heart

Well, of course, there was the threat againststupid

We didn’t talk, except that he directed hway 95 to 160, where we turned west He wasn’t telling me the final destination

I hated the car about aswas loose, and it shiood on the outside, rotten on the inside, just like Eamon himself

I didn’t draw Eamon’s attention to it, but somewhere outside of Pahruhways by definition had a lot of people traveling the same direction, especially in the boonies-but I did so with speed, and the white panel van stayed right with ed lanes, or slowed down He was hanging back, and he was covering up with other traffic, but he was a fixture in my rearview mirror

He hadn’t been there e’d duh That had been a clear road for h-flying eagle So if he was hoping to catch us red-handed, literally, he was out of luck No doubt the trunk would sink us with forensics, if it ca, wasn’t I? And Eaerprints had stayed on the wallet, which was safely in his coat pocket Insurance

The weather was shifting I felt it rather than saw it, a sensation like pressure in my head I tried to focus on it as I drove, and before I knehat I was doing, I was looking at the world through the lenses that David had shown ht, he and Lewis had called it And the world was different when you kne to interpret the clues

The car I was driving, in Oversight, was a rust bucket, tainted by indifference Past the hood, the road gliht-tiny creatures,in their own little drae landscape of grays and blues and orange streaks More like fluid than air The orange was pushing its way through I had no idea if orange indicated heat; if so, that was so all kinds of swirls and eddies and y Those showed as black streaks, like oil dropped in water

I’d gotten so engrossed in the strange view that I’d backed off on speed Ea tour, pet, or do you actually want to get there?" he snapped I jammed the accelerator down and checked the rearview ht-headed to look at the world this way, but it eirdly coon Whoever was driving that thing had an intis I couldn’t get limpse of the interior

Sarah sat up and yawned, and I nearly yelped In Oversight she looked horribly distorted-puffy, sick, surrounded by a flickering black cloud edged in red

I didn’t dare look at Eas I just didn’t want to know

I blinked, and the visions were gone It was just a road, and those were just cars, and in the rumpy, tired, and ill "I need a bathroom," she said

"You’ll have to hold it," Eas that sting"

He wasn’t wrong We’d taken 372 out of Pahruh there was some traffic, there were no towns A few clusters of sun-rotted buildings, but nothing that deserved the na slowly in the opposite direction, but I’d held our speed to just under the legal li fate, when fate included jail time and possibly even a death sentence

Clouds boiled up in the west by the time we’d crossed the border into California Sarah had whined periodically about a need for bathroom, water, and food; I felt the sae her We raided the polyunsaturated goodness of the snack aisle of a Quik Stop on the outskirts of Tecopa, which was as, and restrooht closed in early, and with it ca in the car’s headlights like a downpour of dia I’ve done this before, I thought I could sense that, although I couldn’t really touch the y up there in the sky, feel it rippling through in to understand or explain It was soothing

Ea

And the white van stayed in the rearview h a rainstor

I stopped the car about dawn, or ould have been dawn if the sun had been able to pierce the cloud cover, and switched places with Eamon We ate convenience store food, drank stale coffee, and after a while I dropped off to sleep, or at least an uneasy approximation of it, lulled by the steady drum of raindrops on the roof of the car

I drea atthat looked likewith my smile and eyes as black and erinned with razor-edged teeth You can’t run You don’t belong here I woke up feeling sick and afraid and lost, and it didn’t get any better when reality set in I was sick and afraid and lost I couldn’t trust Eamon I couldn’t trust ht have had ot to save yourself, I told myself It didn’t nificant improvement in my ability to keep a stiff upper lip about it

"Where are we?" I asked We were in the burbs of a major ed from flat desert to hilly desert The rain had stopped, but the weather was still cloudy and-by the feel of , looked tired and annoyed Sarah was asleep again I felt in the pocket of my jeans to be sure I still had possession of her Oxy She hi quietly to herself-bad dreams or withdrawal, I couldn’t be sure

"Doesn’t ," Ea Well, I hadn’t thought he’d lanced at me with hard, shiny eyes like wet pebbles "You knew"

I shrugged and stretched "Didn’tthe problem with a bullet"