Tap. Tap.
"Lady?"
Tap tap. "Lady, you okay?"
Laura woke up, the effort as tough as swimming through glue. She got her eyes open, and she saw the man in a hooded brown parka beside her window.
"You okay?" he asked again, his face long-jawed and ruddy in the cold.
Laura nodded. The movement made the muscles of her neck and shoulders awaken and rage.
"Got some coffee." The man was holding a thermos. He lifted it in invitation.
Laura rolled her window down. She realized suddenly that the wind had died. A few small snowflakes were still falling. The gray sky was streaked with pearly light, and by its somber glow Laura could see the huge white mountain ranges that marched along I-80. The man poured some coffee into the thermos's cup, gave it to her, and she downed it gratefully. In another life she might have wished for Jamaican Blue Mountain; now any pot-boiled brew was delicious if it got her engine running.
"What're you doin' out here?" he asked. "The road's still closed."
"Took a wrong turn, I guess." Her voice was a froggish croak.
"Lucky you didn't wind up askin' directions from St. Peter. It was a damned mess between here and Rock Springs. Drifts higher'n my head and wide as a house."
Was a mess, he'd said. The noise of machinery came to her. "My wipers are out," she said. "Could you clear my windshield off?"
"Reckon I can." He started raking the snow away with a leather-gloved hand. The powder was almost five inches thick, the last inch iced to the glass. The man dug deep, got his fingers hooked, and wrenched upward, and the plate of ice cracked like a pistol shot and slid away. The windshield on her side was clear, and through it she could see a yellow snowplow at work forty yards ahead, smoke chugging from its exhaust pipe. Another plow was shoving snow aside over on the interstate's eastbound lanes, and a third plow sat without a driver twenty feet from the Cutlass. Laura realized she must've been dead to the world not to have heard that thing approaching. Behind the plows were two large highway department trucks, their crews shoveling cinders onto the patches of ice. Gears clicked and meshed in her brain. "You came from Rock Springs?"
"My men got on at Table Rock, but the drifts are broke up from here on. Hell of a mess, I'm tellin' ya."
The snowplows had come from the west. The way to California was open.
"Thank you." She returned the cup to him. The Cutlass's engine was still idling, the gas tank down almost to the E. She figured by the amount of daylight that she'd been asleep at least four hours. She released the emergency brake.
"Hey, you'd better find a place to pull off!" the plow's driver cautioned. "It's still mighty dangerous. Nobody ever tell you about snow chains?"
"I'll make it. Where's the nearest gas station?"
"Rawlins. That's ten miles or so. I swear, you're about the second luckiest woman in this world!"
"The second luckiest?"
"Yeah. At least you don't have a little baby that could've frozen to death."
Laura stared up at him.
"Woman and her baby caught in the drifts couple of miles ahead," he told her, taking her silence for curiosity. "Worked herself in good and tight. She didn't have no snow chains neither."
"She was in a van?"
"Pardon?"
"A green van? Is that what she was in?"
"Nope. One of them Jeep wagons. Comanche or Geronimo or somethin'."
"What color?"
"Dark blue, I reckon." He frowned. "How come you're askin'?"
"I know her," Laura said. A thought occurred to her. "Did you give her coffee, too?"
"Yup. Drunk it like a horse."
Laura smiled grimly. They had drunk from the same bitter cup. "How long ago was that?"
"Thirty, forty minutes, I reckon. She a friend of yours?"
"No."
"Well, she asked where the nearest gas station was, too. Rawlins, I said. I tell you, travelin' with a little bitty baby in a blizzard without snow chains… that woman must be crazy!"
Laura put the car into drive. "Thanks again. You take care."
"That's my middle name!" he said, and he stepped back from the window.
She started off, guarding her speed. The tires crunched over cinders. Snow chains or not, she was going to make it to Rawlins. She skidded in a couple of places, the highway climbing and then descending across the mountains, but she took it slow and easy and watched the quivering needle of her fuel gauge. Somewhere along the line Mary Terror had ditched her van; that much was clear. Where Mary had gotten the new vehicle, Laura didn't know, but she guessed more blood was on Mary's hands.
The same hands that held the fate of David.
She turned into the gas station at Rawlins, filled the tank, and scraped the rest of the snow off the windshield. She relieved herself in the bathroom, swallowed another Black Cat tablet – its caffeine equivalent to four cups of strong black coffee – and she bought some junk food guaranteed to make her blood sugar soar. The gas station's small grocery also sold gauze bandages, and she bought some to rewrap her hand with. Another bottle of Extra-Strength Excedrin and half a dozen canned Cokes, and she was ready to go. She asked the teenage girl behind the counter about seeing a big woman with a baby, traveling in a dark blue Jeep wagon.
"Yes, ma'am, I seen her," the girl answered. She would be pretty when she got her acne under control, Laura thought. "She was in here 'bout thirty minutes ago. Cute little ol' baby. He was raisin' a ruckus, and she bought him some diapers and a new passy."
"Was she hurt?" Laura asked. The girl stared blankly at her. "Bleeding," Laura said. "Did you see any blood on her?"
"No, ma'am," the girl said in a wary voice. Laura could not know that Mary had awakened, seen the plows coming in the early light, and had removed her bloodstained trousers, blotting up the leakage with the last Pampers and struggling into a fresh pair of jeans from her suitcase.
Laura paid what she owed and went on. She figured she was thirty to forty minutes behind Mary Terror. The snowplows and cinder trucks were out on I-80 like a small army. Except for some flurries, the snowfall had ceased and it was all over but the cleaning up. She began to see more cars on the interstate as she crossed the Continental Divide west of Creston, the mountains looming around her in a rugged white panorama and the sky chalky gray. The highway began its long, slow descent toward Utah. When she passed Rock Springs, she saw state troopers waving tractor-trailer rigs back onto I-80 from a crowded truck stop. The interstate was officially open again, the Rockies stood swathed in the clouds behind her, and she gradually increased her speed to fifty-five, then to sixty, then to sixty-five.
She crossed the Utah state line and immediately saw a sign that said Salt Lake City was fifty-eight miles ahead. She looked for a dark blue Jeep wagon, spotted a vehicle that fit the description, but when she got up beside it she saw a Utah tag and a white-haired man at the wheel. The interstate took her into Salt Lake City, where she made a gas stop, then curved along the gray shore of the Great Salt Lake, straightened out, and shot her toward the sandy desert wastes. As Laura ate her lunch of two Snickers bars and a Coke, the clouds opened and the sun glared through. Patches of blue appeared in the sky, and little whirlwinds kicked up puffs of dust from the winter desert.
She passed Wendover, Utah, at two o'clock, and a big green sign with a roulette wheel on it welcomed her to Nevada. Desert land, jagged peaks, and scrub brush bordered I-80 all the way to the horizon. The carcasses of road kill were being plucked at by vultures with wingspans like Stealth bombers. Laura passed signs advertising "giant flea" markets, chicken ranches, Harrah's Auto Museum in Reno, and a rodeo in Winnemucca. Several times she looked to her right, expecting to see Didi sitting on the seat beside her. If Didi was there, she was a quiet ghost. The tires hummed and the engine racketed, dark blooms of burning oil drifting out behind. Laura kept watching for Mary's Jeep wagon; she saw a number of them, but none were the right color. On the long straight highway, cars were passing her doing eighty and ninety miles an hour. She got into the windbreak of a tractor-trailer truck and let the speed wind up to seventy-five. Nevada became a progression of signs, the names of desert towns blowing past: Oasis… Wells… Metropolis… Deeth, the second of which someone had altered with spray paint to spell Death.