Silence returned to the hot day.
On the far side of the road, the two killers looked after the Peterbilt for a moment, then continued their search for Jim.
Furious and scared, he eased back from the shoulder of the highway, flattened out again, and belly-crawled eastward toward the motor home, dragging the shotgun with him. The elevated roadbed was between him and them; they could not possibly see him, yet he more than half expected them to sprint across the blacktop and pump half a dozen rounds into him.
When he dared look up again, he was directly opposite the parked Roadking, which blocked the two men from his view. If he couldn't see them, they couldn't see him. He scrambled to his feet and crossed the pavement to the passenger side of the motor home.
The door on that flank was a third of the way from the front bumper to the rear, not opposite the driver's door. It was ajar.
He took hold of the handle. Then he realized that a third man might have stayed inside with the woman and girl. He couldn't risk going in there until he had dealt with the two outside, for he might be trapped between gunmen.
He moved to the front of the Roadking, and just as he reached the corner, he heard voices approaching. He froze, waiting for the guy with the weird haircut to come around the front bumper. But they stopped on the other side.
“—who gives a shit—”
“—but he mighta seen our license number—”
“—chances are, he's bad hurt—”
“—wasn't no blood in the car—”
Jim sank to one knee by the tire, looked under the vehicle. They were standing on the other side, near the driver's door.
“—we just take the next southbound—”
“—with cops on our tail—”
“—by the time he gets to any cops, we'll be in Arizona—”
“—you hope—”
“—I know—”
Rising, moving cautiously, Jim slipped around the front corner of the Roadking. He eased past the first pair of headlights and the engine hatch.
“—cut across Arizona into New Mexico—”
“—they got cops, too—”
“—into Texas, put a few states between us, drive all night if we have to—”
Jim was grateful that the shoulder of the highway was dirt rather than loose gravel. He crept silently across it to the driver's-side headlights, staying low.
“—you know what piss-poor cooperation they got across state lines—”
“—he's out there somewhere, damn it—”
“—so're a million scorpions and rattlesnakes—”
Jim stepped around to their side of the motor home, covering them with the shotgun. “Don't move!”
For an instant they gaped at him the way he might have stared at a three-eyed Martian with a mouth in its forehead. They were only about eight feet away, close enough to spit on, which they looked like they deserved. At a distance they had appeared as dangerous as snakes with legs, and they still looked deadlier than anything that slithered in the desert.
They were holding their handguns, pointed at the ground. Jim thrust the shotgun at them and shouted, “Drop 'em, damn it!”
Either they were the hardest of hard cases or they were nuts — probably both — because they didn't freeze at the sight of the shotgun. The guy with the redoubled ponytail flung himself to the ground and rolled. Simultaneously, the refugee from Road Warrior brought up his pistol, and Jim pumped a round into the guy's chest at point-blank range, blowing him backward and down and all the way to hell.
The survivor's feet vanished as he wriggled under the Roadking.
To avoid being shot in the foot and ankle, Jim grabbed the open door and jumped onto the step beside the driver's seat. Even as his feet left the ground, two shots boomed from under the motor home, and one of them punctured the tire beside which he'd been standing.
Instead of retreating into the Roadking, he dropped back to the ground, fell flat, and shoved the shotgun under the vehicle, figuring to take his adversary by surprise. But the guy was already out from under on the other side. Jim could see only the black cowboy boots hurrying toward the rear of the motor home. The guy turned the corner — and vanished.
The ladder. At the right rear corner. Next to the racked motorcycle.
The bastard was going onto the roof.
Jim hustled all the way under the Roadking before the killer could look over the edge of the roof, spot him, and fire down. It was no cooler beneath the vehicle, because the sun-scorched earthen shoulder radiated the heat it had been storing up since dawn.
Two cars roared by on the highway, one close after the other. He hadn't heard them coming, maybe because his heart was beating so hard that he felt as if he were inside a kettle drum. He cursed the motorists under his breath, then realized they couldn't be expected to stop when they saw a guy like Dork Knob prowling the top of the motor home with a handgun.
He had a better chance of winning if he continued to do the unexpected, so he immediately crawled on his belly, fast as a marine under fire, to the rear of the Roadking. He twisted onto his back, eased his head out past the rear bumper, and peered up across the Harley, at the ascending rungs that appeared to dwindle into blazing white sun.
The ladder was empty. The killer was already on the roof. He might think that he had temporarily mystified his pursuer with his vanishing act, and in any case he wouldn't expect to be followed with utter recklessness.
Jim slid all the way into the open and went up the ladder. He gripped the hot siderail with one hand, holding the compact shotgun with the other, trying to ascend as soundlessly as possible. His adversary was surprisingly quiet on the aluminum surface above, making barely enough noises of his own to cover an occasional pop and squeak from the aged rungs under Jim's feet.
At the top, Jim cautiously raised his head and squinted across the roof. The killer was two-thirds of the way toward the front of the Roadking, at the right side, looking down. He was moving along on hands and knees, which must have hurt; although the time-stained white paint reflected a lot of the sun, it had stored sufficient heat to sting even well-callused hands and to penetrate blue denim. But if the guy was in pain, he didn't show it; he was evidently as suicidally macho as his dead buddy had been.
Jim eased up another rung.
The killer actually lowered himself onto his belly, though the roof must have scorched instantly through his thin T-shirt. He was trying to maintain as low a profile as possible, waiting for Jim to appear below.
Jim eased up one more rung. The roof now met him at mid-torso. He turned sideways on the ladder and jammed one knee behind the outer upright, wedging himself in place so he would have both hands for the shotgun and so the recoil would not knock him backward to the ground.
If the guy on the roof didn't have a sixth sense, then he was just damned lucky. Jim had not made a sound, but the creep suddenly glanced back over his shoulder and spotted him.
Cursing, Jim swung the shotgun around.
The killer flung himself sideways, off the roof.
Without getting in a shot, Jim pulled his knee from behind the upright and jumped from the ladder. He hit the ground hard but kept his balance, stepped around the corner of the motor home, and squeezed off one round.
But the creep was already bolting through the side door. At worst, he caught a few pellets in one leg. Probably not even that.
He was going after the woman and child.
Hostages.
Of maybe he just wanted to slaughter them before he was cut down himself. The past couple of decades had seen the rise of the vagabond sociopath, roaming the country, looking for easy prey, racking up long lists of victims, attaining sexual release as much from brutal murder as from rape.