eyes tightly shut and shouting at the girl to close hers too.
  Gunshots cracked, one right after the other, as fast as Vess could squeeze them off, 
and the windshield imploded. Sheets of gummy safety glass crashed into the front seats, 
spilling over Chyna and the girl, and things split and shattered farther back in the 
motor home as the slugs found stopping points.
  She tried to count the shots. She thought she heard six. Maybe only five. She wasn't 
sure. Damn. Then she realized that it didn't matter how many rounds he'd fired, because 
she hadn't gotten a good look at the weapon. She didn't know for sure that it was a 
revolver. A pistol wouldn't have just six rounds; it could have ten or more, a lot 
more if it had an expanded magazine.
  Risking a bullet in the face, Chyna sat up, shaking off cascades of gummy-prickly 
glass, and looked out through the empty windshield” frame. She saw Edgler Vess by the 
patrol car, thirty feet away. He was tipping the expended cartridges out of his piece, so 
it had to be a revolver.
  Already she had released the emergency brake. Now she shifted the motor home out of 
park.
  Standing tall, appearing cool and unhurried but nevertheless nimble-fingered, Vess 
plucked a speedloader from the dump pouch on his gun belt.
  Thanks to her mother's criminal friends, Chyna knew all about speedloaders. Before Vess 
could reload, she took her foot off the brake pedal and stomped the accelerator.
  Move, move, move.
  Slipping the speedloader into the revolver and twisting it, Vess looked up almost 
casually when he heard the roar of the motor-home engine.
  Chyna drove onto the pavement as though she intended to sweep past the patrol car and 
away, but she was going to run the freak into the ground.
  Vess dropped the speedloader, snapped the cylinder shut. Afraid that Ariel might look 
up, Chyna shouted, “Stay down, stay down!” She ducked her own head just as a slug smacked 
off the window frame and ricocheted back through the vehicle.
  She raised her head at once, because the motor home was on the move, and she needed to 
see what she was doing. She swung the wheel to the right, heading for Vess at the open 
door of the patrol car.
  He fired again, and she seemed to be looking straight down the bore of the barrel when 
the quick flame flared. She heard a strange hissing-throbbing-buzzing, not unlike the 
lightning-quick passage of a fat bumblebee on a summer afternoon, and she smelled 
something hot,like singed hair.
  Vess dived into the car to get out of her way. The motor home smashed into the open 
door, ripping it away, maybe taking off one or both of the hateful bastard's legs as well.
  The fragrance of gunfire always reminds Sheriff Vess of the stink of sex, maybe because 
it smells hot or maybe because there's a trace of the same ammonia odor in gunpowder that 
is stronger in semen, but no matter what the reason, gunfire excites him and gives him an 
instant erection, and when he leaps into the car, he lets out an exuberant whoop. The 
roar of the motor home is all around him, bearing down on him, the headlights blazing, as 
much tumult as if he were in the middle of a close encounter of the third kind. As he 
dives for safety, he yanks his legs in after himself, knowing that this is going to be 
close, damn close, which is what makes itfun. Something raps hard against his right foot, 
cold wind rushes in around him, the driver's door tears off and clatters end over end 
along the blacktop as the motor home shrieks past.
  The sheriffs right foot is numb, and although he feels no pain yet, he believes that 
i4might have been crushed or even torn off. When he sits up in the driver's seat, 
holsters his revolver, and reaches down with one hand to feel for the expected stump and 
the warm gush of blood, he discovers that he is intact. The heel was torn off his boot. 
just that. No worse. The rubber heel.
  His foot is numb, and his calf tingles all the way to the knee, but the sheriff laughs.
  “You'll pay for the shoe repair, you bitch.”
  The motor home is two hundred feet from him, heading south. Because he never switched 
off the engine when he pulled onto the shoulder of the highway, he needs only to release 
the hand brake and shift into drive. The tires kick up a storm of gravel that thunders 
against the undercarriage. The black-and-white lurches forward. Hot rubber shrieks like 
babies in pain, bites into the blacktop, and Vess rockets after the motor home.
  Too late, distracted by his numb foot and recklessly eager to get his hands on the 
woman, he realizes that the big vehicle is no longer heading south. It's reversing toward 
him at maybe thirty iles an hour, even faster.
  He slams his foot down on the brake pedal, but before he can pull the wheel to the left 
to get out of the way, the motor home crashes into him with a horrendous sound, and it's 
like hitting a rock wall. His head snaps back, and then he pitches forward against the 
steering wheel so hard that all the breath is knocked out of him, while a dizzying 
darkness swirls at the edges of his vision.
  The hood buckles and pops open, and he can't see a damn thing through the windshield. 
But he hears his tires spinning and smells burning rubber. The patrol car is being pushed 
backward, and though the collision dramatically slowed the motor home for a moment, it's 
picking up speed again.
  He tries to shift the black-and-white into reverse, figuring that he can back away from 
the motor home even as it's pushing at him, but the stick first stutters stubbornly in 
his hand, clunks into neutral, and then freezes. The transmission is shot.
  As bad: He suspects that the smashed front end of the car is hung up on the back of the 
motor home.
  She's going to push him off the highway. In some places the drop-off from the shoulder 
is eight or ten feet and steep enough virtually to ensure that the patrol car will tumble 
ass-over-teakettle if it goes over the edge. Worse, if they are hung up on each other, 
and if the woman doesn't have full control of the motor home, she'll most likely roll it 
off the road on top of the black-and-white, crushing him.
  Hell, maybe that's what she's trying to do. She's a damn singularity, all right, in her 
own way just like him. He admires her for it.
  He smells gasoline. This is not a good place to be. To the right of the center console 
and the police radio (which he switched off when he first saw the motor home and realized 
that it was his own), a pump-action 2o-gauge shotgun is mounted barrel-up in spring clips 
attached to the dashboard. It has a five-shell magazine, which Sheriff Vess always keeps 
loaded.
  He grabs the shotgun, wrenches it out of the clips, holds it in both hands, and slides 
left from behind the steering wheel. He bails out through the missing door.
  They're reversing at twenty or twenty-five miles an hour, rapidly gaining speed because 
the car is in neutral and no longer resisting the backward rush. The pavement comes up to 
meet him as though he's a parachutist with huge holes in his silks. He hits and rolls, 
keeping his arms tucked in against his body in the hope that he won't break any bones, 
fiercely clutching the shotgun, tumbling diagonally across the blacktop to the shoulder 
beyond the northbound lane. He tries to keep his head up, but he takes a bad knock, and 
another. He welcomes the pain, shouting with delight, reveling in the incredible 
intensity of this adventure.
  Chyna was watching the side mirror when Edgler Vess sprang out of the patrol car, 
slammed into the blacktop, and rolled across the highway.