“Shit.”
  By the time that Chyna braked to a full stop, crying out at the flash of pain in her 
bitten foot, Vess was sprawled facedown on the far shoulder of the roadway, three hundred 
feet to the south. He lay perfectly still. Though she didn't believe that the tumble had 
killed him, she was sure that he must be unconscious or at least dazed.
  She wasn't capable of running over him while he lay insensate. But she wasn't going to 
wait around to give him a sporting chance either.
  She buckled into the combination shoulder and lap belt. She suspected that she was 
going to need it.
  As she shifted into drive and started forward, she became aware of a sharp stinging 
along the right side of her head, and when she put a hand to her scalp, she discovered 
that she was bleeding. The passing bumbl*ee buzz had been a grazing bullet, which had 
burned a shallow furrow about three inches long and a sixteenth of an inch deep. Any 
closer, it would have taken off the side of her skull. This also explained the faint 
smell of burning that she'd briefly detected: hot lead, a few singed hairs.
  Ariel was sitting up in a sparkling mantilla and shawl of gummy glass. She gazed out 
through the missing windshield toward Vess, but she was blank-eyed.
  The girl's hands were bleeding. Chyna's heart leaped at the sight of the wet blood, but 
she realized that the wounds were only tiny cuts, nothing serious. The safety glass 
couldn't cause mortal injury, but it was prickly enough to nick the skin.
  When Chyna looked at Vess again, he was on his hands and knees, two hundred feet away. 
Beside him lay a shotgun.
  She tramped on the accelerator. A hard clunk at the back of the motor home. The vehicle 
shook. Another clunk. Then a scraping noise arose, and a hellacious clatterjangle, but 
they gained speed.
  Glancing at the side mirror, she saw showers of sparks as ragged steel scraped across 
blacktop.
  The damaged patrol car was behind her, nunbling along in her wake. She was dragging it.
  Sheriff Vess's right ear is badly abraded, torn, and the smell of his blood is like 
January wind rushing across snowfields high on a mountain slope. A brassy ringing in both 
ears reminds him of the bitter metallic taste of the spider in the Templeton house, and 
he savors it.
  As he gets to his feet, all bones intact, choking down the interestingly sour 
insistence of vomit, he picks up the shotgun. He's happy to see that it seems to have 
come through in fine shape.
  The motor home is angling toward him across the two-lane, about a hundred fifty feet 
away but closing fast, a juggernaut.
  Instead of running off the road into the woods and away from the oncoming vehicle, he 
sprints toward it in a rightward-leading loop that will bring him alongside as it races 
past. He's limping-not because he has injured his leg but simply because he is missing 
the heel on his right boot.
  inle than the lumEven with one boot heel too few, Vess is more ag bering vehicle, and 
the woman sees that she's not going to be able to run him down. She also sees the 
shotgun, no doubt, and she pulls the steering wheel to her right, away from him, ready to 
settle for escape instead of vengeance.
  He has no intention of trying to blast her head off through the already shattered 
windshield or through the side window, partly because he's beginning to be spooked by her 
resilience and doesn't think he'll be able to do enough damage to stop her as she sails 
past like a skeet disk. Also, it's far easier to halt and shoot from the hip than to 
raise the gun and aim, and shooting from the hip means shooting low.
  The recoil from the first three rounds, fired as quickly as he can work the pump 
action, nearly pounds the sheriff off his feet, but he takes out the front tire on the 
driver's side.
  Hardly six feet from him, the motor home starts to slide. Snakes of rubber uncoil into 
the air from the ruined tire. As the behemoth streaks past, Vess uses his last two rounds 
to blow out the rear tire on the driver's side.
  Now Ms. Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive, has big trouble.
  The steering wheel spun back and forth in Chyna's hands, burning her palms as she tried 
determinedly to hold on to it.
  She tapped the brakes, and that seemed to be the absolute wrong thing to do because the 
vehicle yawed dangerously to the left, but when she let up on the brakes, that also 
seemed to be wrong because it yawed even more wildly to the right. The trailing 
black-and-white stuttered against the back bumper, and the motor home shuddered even as 
it swayed more violently side to side, and Chyna knew that they were going to tip over.
  Half drunk on the deliciously complex smell of his own blood and the pure-sex stink of 
the shotgun fire, Sheriff Vess tosses the 2o-gauge aside when the magazine is empty. With 
shining-eyed glee, he watches as the aged motor home rises inevitably off its starboard 
tires, tilting along the night highway on its port-side wheel rims. Virtually all of the 
rubber has shredded away; strips and chunks of it litter both lanes. Jhe steel rims carve 
into the blacktop with a grinding sound that reminds him of the texture of crinoline 
crisp with dried blood, which brings to mind the taste of a certain young lady's mouth in 
the very moment that she died. Then the vehicle crashes onto its side hard enough for 
Vess to feel vibrations in the pavement beneath his feet. The flat boom echoes back and 
forth between the road-flanking trees, like the devil's own shotgun fire.
  Hung up on the back of the motor home, the black-and-white is hauled onto its side by 
the larger vehicle. Then it finally tears loose, flips onto its roof, spins three hundred 
and sixty degrees, and comes to rest in the northbound lane.
  The motor home is far past the car, three hundred feet away from the sheriff and still 
sliding, but it is slowing and will soon stop.
  Everything is screwed up big time: the mess scattered all over the highway, which he 
will be hard-pressed to explain; the ruination of his plan to deal with Ariel in the 
methodical manner that has kept him so excited for the past year; and the incriminating 
bodies in the bedroom of his motor home.
  Yet Sheriff Vess has never felt half as buoyant as he does now. He is so alive, all of 
his senses enhanced by the ferocity of the moment.
  He feels giddy, silly. He wants to caper under the moon and twirl with his arms out 
like a child making himself dizzy with the sight of spinning stars.
  But there are two deaths to be dealt, a lovely young face to be disfigured, and that is 
fun too.
  He reaches to his holster for his revolver. Evidently it fell out when he leaped from 
the car and tumbled across the highway. He looks around for it.
  When the motor home slid to a stop, Chyna wasted no time being astonished to be alive. 
Instantly she disengaged her safety harness and then the girl's.
  The starboard flank of the tipped-over motor home had become its ceiling in this new 
orientation. Ariel clung to the door handle up there to avoid dropping down on top of 
Chyna. The port flank, where Chyna lay, was now essentially the floor. The window in the 
driver's door at her side provided a close-up view only of blacktop.
  She struggled out of her seat, turned around, and perched on the dashboard with her 
back to the windshield and her feet on the console box. She leaned her right side against 
the steering wheel.