Ralph Carver was somewhere deep in the black and didn't want to come up. He sensed physical pain waiting - a hangover, perhaps, and a really spectacular one if he could feel his head aching even in his sleep - but not just that. Something else. Something to do with

(Kirsten)

this morning. Something to do with

(Kirsten)

their vacation. He had gotten drunk, he supposed pulled a real horror show, Ellie was undoubtedly pissed at him, but even that didn't seem enough to account for how horrible he felt. . .

Screaming. Someone was screaming. But distant.

Ralph tried to burrow even deeper into the black, but now hands seized his shoulder and began shaking him Every shake sent a monstrous bolt of pain through his poor hungover head.

"Ralph! Ralph, wake up! You have to wake up!"

Ellie shaking him. Was he late for work? How could he be late for work? They were on vacation.

Then, shockingly loud, penetrating the blackness like the beam of a powerful light, gunshots. Three of them then a pause, then a fourth.

His eyes flew open and he bolted into a sitting position no idea for a moment where he was or what was hap-pening, only knowing that his head hurt horribly and felt the size of a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Something sticky that fell like jam or maple syrup all down the side of his face. Ellen looking at him, one eye wide and frantic, the other nearly lost in a puffy com-plication of blue-black flesh.

Screaming. Somewhere. A woman. From below them. Maybe - He tried to get on his feet but his knees wouldn't lock.

He fell forward off the bed he was sitting on (except it wasn't a bed, it was a cot) and landed on his hands and knees. A fresh bolt of pain passed through his head, and for a moment he thought his skull would split open like an eggshell. Then he was looking down at his hands through clotted clumps of hair. Both hands were streaked with blood, the left considerably redder than the right. As he looked at them, sudden memory

(Kirsten oh Jesus Ellie catch her)

burst in his head like a poison firework and he screamed himself, screamed down at his bloodstained hands, screamed as what he had been trying to burrow away from dropped into his mind like a stone into a pond. Kirsten had fallen down the stairs - No. Pushed.

The crazy bastard who had brought them here had pushed his seven-year-old daughter down the stairs. Ellie had reached for her and the crazy bastard had punched his wife in the eye and knocked her down. But Ellie had fallen on the stairs and Kirsten had plunged down them, her eyes wide open, full of shocked surprise, Ralph didn't think she'd known what was happening, and if he could hold onto anything he would hold onto that, that it had all happened too fast for her to have any real idea, and then she had hit, she had cartwheeled, feet flying first upward and then backward, and there had been this sound, this awful sound like a branch breaking under a weight of ice, and suddenly everything about her had changed, he had seen the change even before she came to a stop at the foot of the stairs, as if that were no little girl down there but a stuffed dummy, headpiece full of straw.

Don't think it, don 't think it, don't you dare think it. Except he had to. The way she had landed . . . the way she had lain at the foot of the stairs with her head on one side . . .

Fresh blood was pattering down on his left hand, he saw. Apparently something was wrong with that side of his head. What had happened? Had the cop hit him, too, maybe with the butt of the monster sidearm he had been wearing? Maybe, but that part was mostly gone. He could remember the gruesome somersault she had done, and the way she had slid down the rest of the stairs, and how she had come to rest with her head cocked that way, and that was all. Christ, wasn't it enough?

"Ralph?" Ellie was tugging at him and panting harshly "Ralph, get up! Please get up!"

"Dad! Daddy, come on!" That was David, from farther away. "He okay, Mom? He's bleeding again, isn't he?'

"No. . . no, he - "

"Yes he is, I can see it from here. Daddy, are you okay?"

"Yes," he said. He got one foot planted beneath him groped for the bunk, and tottered upright. His left eye was bleary with blood. The lid felt as if it had been dipped in plaster of Paris. He wiped it with the heel of his hand wincing as fresh pain stung him - the area above his left eye felt like freshly tenderized meat. He tried to turn around, toward the sound of his son's voice, and stag gered. It was like being on a boat. His balance was shot, and even when he stopped turning it felt to something in his head like he was still doing it, reeling and rocking going round and round. Ellie grabbed him, supported him, helped him forward.

"She's dead, isn't she?" Ralph asked. His choked voice came out of a throat plated with dead blood. He couldn believe what he heard that voice saying, but he supposed that in time he would. That was the worst of it. In time he would. "Kirsten's dead."

"I think so, yes." Ellie staggered this time. "Grab the bars, Ralph, can you? You're going to knock me over."

They were in a jail cell. In front of him, just out of reach, was the barred door. The bars were painted white and in some places the paint had dried and hardened in thick runnels. Ralph lunged forward a step and grabbed them. He was looking out at a desk, sitting in the middle of a square of floor like the single bit of stage dressing in a minimalist play. There were papers on it, and a double barrelled shotgun, and a strew of fat green shotgun shells The old-fashioned wooden desk chair in the kneehole was on casters, and there was a faded blue pillow on the seat. Overhead was a light fixture encased in a mesh bowl. The dead flies inside the fixture made huge, gro-tesque shadows.

There were jail cells on three sides of this room. The one in the middle, probably the drunk-tank, was large and empty. Ralph and Ellie Carver were in a smaller one. A second small cell to their right was empty. Across from them were two other closet-sized cells. In one of them was their eleven-year-old son, David, and a man with white hair. Ralph could see nothing else of this man, because he was sitting on the bunk with his head lowered onto his hands. When the woman screamed from below them again, David turned in that direction, where an open door gave on a flight of stairs

(Kirsten, Kirsten falling, the snapping sound of her neck breaking)

going down to street level, but the white-haired man did not shift his position in the slightest.

Ellie came to stand beside him and slipped an arm around his waist. Ralph risked letting go of the bars with one of his hands so he could take one of hers.

Now there were thuds on the stairs, coming closer, and scuffling sounds. Someone was being brought up to join them, but she wasn't coming easily.

"We have to help him!" she was screaming. "We have to help Peter! We - "

Her words broke off as she was thrown into the room. She crossed it with weird, balletic grace, stuttering on her toes, white sneakers like ballet slippers, hands held out, hair streaming behind her, jeans, a faded blue shirt. She collided with the desk, upper thighs smacking the edge hard enough to move it backward toward the chair, and then, from the other side of the room, David was shriek-ing at her like a bird, standing at the bars, jumping up and down on the balls of his feet, shrieking in a savage, panicky voice Ralph had never heard before, never even suspected.

"The shotgun, lady!" David screamed. "Get the shot-gun, shoot him, shoot him, lady, shoot him!"

The white-haired man finally looked up. His face was old and dark with desert tan; the deep bags beneath his watery ginhead eyes gave him a bloodhound look.

"Get it!" the old man rasped. "For Christ's sake, woman!"

The woman in the jeans and the workshirt looked toward the sound of the boy's voice, then back over her shoulder toward the stairs and the clump of heavy approaching footfalls.

"Do it!" Ellie chimed in from beside Ralph. "He killed our daughter, he'll kill all of us, do it!"

The woman in the jeans and workshirt grabbed for the gun.

2

UntiL Nevada, things had been fine.

They had started out as four happy wanderers from Ohio, destination Lake Tahoe. There Ellie Carver and the kids would swim and hike and sightsee for ten days and Ralph Carver would gamble - slowly, pleasurably, and with tremendous concentration. This would be their fourth visit to Nevada, their second to Tahoe, and Ralph would continue to follow his ironclad gambling rule: he would quit when he had either (a) lost a thousand dollars, or (b) won ten thousand. In their three previous trips, he had reached neither of these markers. Once he had gone back to Columbus with five hundred dollars of his stake intact, once with two hundred, and last year he had driven them back with over three thousand dollars in the inner lefthand pocket of his lucky safari jacket. On that trip they had stayed at Hiltons and Sheratons instead of in the RV at camping areas, and the elder Carvers had gotten themselves laid every damned night. Ralph considered that pretty phenomenal for people pushing forty.

"You're probably tired of casinos," he'd said in February, when they started talking about this vacation. "Maybe California this time? Mexico?"

"Sure, we can all get dysentery," Ellie had replied. "Look at the Pacific between sprints to the casa de poo-p00, or whatever they call it down there."

"What about Texas? We could take the kids to see the Alamo."

"Too hot, too historic. Tahoe will be cool, even in July.

The kids love it. I do, too. And as long as you don't come asking for any of my money when yours is gone - "

"You know I'd never do that," he had said, sounding shocked. Feeling a little shocked, actually. The two of them sitting in the kitchen of their suburban home in Wentworth, not far from Columbus, sitting next to the bronze Frigidaire with the magnetic stick-on daisies scat-tered across it, travel-folders on the counter in front of them, neither aware that the gambling had already started and the first loss would be their daughter. "You know what I told you - "

" 'Once the addict-behavior starts, the gambling stops,'" she had repeated. "I know, I remember, I believe. You like Tahoe, I like Tahoe, the kids like Tahoe, Tahoe is fine."

So he had made the reservations, and today - if it still was today - they had been on U.s. 50, the so-called loneliest highway in America, headed west across Nevada toward the High Sierra. Kirsten had been playing with Melissa Sweetheart, her favorite doll, Ellie had been nap-ping, and David had been sitting beside Ralph, looking out the window with his chin propped on his hand. Earlier he had been reading the Bible his new pal the Rev had given him (Ralph hoped to God that Martin wasn't queer - the man was married, which was good, but still, you could never damn tell), but now he'd marked his place and tucked the Bible away in the console storage bin. Ralph thought again of asking the kid what he was thinking about, what all the Bible stuff was about, but you might as well ask a post what it was thinking. David (he could abide Davey but hated to be called Dave) was a strange kid that way, not like either parent. Not much like his sister, either, for that matter. This sudden interest in religion - what Ellen called "David's God-trip" - was only one of his oddities. It would probably pass, and in the meantime, David did not quote verses at him on the subject of gambling, cursing, or avoiding the razor on weekends, and that was good enough for Ralph. He loved the kid, after all, and love stretched to cover a multitude of oddities. He had an idea that was one of the things love was for.

Ralph had been opening his mouth to ask David if he wanted to play Twenty Questions - there had been nothing much to look at since leaving Ely that morning and he was bored out of his mind - when he felt the Wayfarer's steering suddenly go mushy in his hands and heard the highway-drone of the tires suddenly become a flapping sound.

"Dad?" David asked. He sounded concerned but not panicked. That was good. "Everything okay?"

"Hold on," he had said, and began pumping the brakes. "This could be a little rough."

Now, standing at the bars and watching the dazed woman who might be their only hope of surviving this nightmare, he thought: "I really had no idea of what rough was, did I?"

It hurt his head to scream, but he screamed anyway, unaware of how much he sounded like his own son:

"Shoot him, lady, shoot him!"

3

What Mary Jackson recalled, what caused her to reach for the shotgun even though she had never actually held a gun - rifle or pistol - in her entire life, was the memory of the big cop mixing the words I'm going to kill you into the Miranda warning.

And he meant it. Oh God yes.

She swung around with the gun. The big blond CO~ was standing in the doorway, looking at her with his bright gray empty eyes.

"Shoot him, lady, shoot him!" a man screamed. He was in the cell to Mary's right, standing next to a woman with an eye so black that the bruise had sent tendrils down her cheek, like ink injected beneath the skin. The man looked even worse; the left side of his face appeared to be covered with caked, half-dried blood.

The cop ran at her, his boots rattling on the hardwood floor. Mary stepped back, away from him and toward the big empty cell at the rear of the room, pulling back both of the shotgun's hammers with the side of her thumb as she retreated. Then she raised it to her shoulder. She had no intention of warning him. He had just killed her husband in cold blood, and she had no intention of warning him.

4

Ralph had pumped the brakes and held the wheel with his elbows locked, letting it work back and forth a little in his hands but not too much. He could feel the RV trying to yaw. The secret to handling a high-speed blow-out in an RV, he'd been told, was to let it yaw - a little, anyway. Although - bad news, folks - this didn't feel like just one blowout.

He glanced up into the rearview at Kirsten, who had stopped playing with Melissa Sweetheart and was now holding the doll against her chest. Kirstie knew something was going on, just not what.

"Kirsten, sit down!" he called. "Belt in!"

Except by then it was over. He wrestled the Wayfarer off the road, killed the engine, and wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. All in all he didn't think he'd done badly. Hadn't even toppled the vase of desert flowers standing on the table in back. Ellie and Kirstie had picked them behind the motel in Ely this morning, while he and David were first loading up and then checking out.

"Good driving, Dad," David said in a matter-of-fact voice.

Ellie was sitting up now, looking around blearily. "Bathroom break?" she asked. "Why're we tilted this way, Ralph?"

"We had a - "

He broke off, looking into the outside mirror. A police-car was rushing toward them from behind, blue lights flashing. It came to a screaming stop about a hundred yards back, and the biggest cop Ralph had ever seen in his life almost hounded out. Ralph saw that the cop had his gun drawn, and felt adrenaline light up his nerves.

The cop stared right and left, his gun held up to shoulder height with the muzzle pointing at the cloudless morn-ing sky. Then he actually turned in a circle. When he was facing the RV again, he looked directly into the outside rearview, seeming to meet Ralph's eyes. The cop raised both hands over his head, brought them down violently, then raised and brought them down again. The pantomime was impossible to misinterpret - Stay inside, stay where you are.

"Ellie, lock the back doors." Ralph banged down the button beside him as he spoke. David, who was watching him, did the same thing on his side of the car without having to be asked.

"What?" She looked at him uncertainly. "What's going on?"

"I don't know, but there's a cop back there and he looks excited." Back where I had the flat, he thought, then amended that. The flats.

The cop bent and picked something up off the surface of the road. It was a meshy strip with little twinkles of light bouncing off it the way light bounces off the sequins on a woman's evening dress. He carried it back to his car, dragging one end along the shoulder, his gun still in his other hand, still held up at a kind of port arms. He seemed to be trying to look in all directions at once.

Ellie locked the aft door and the main cabin door, then came forward again. "What in the samhill is going on?"

"I told you, I don't know. But that doesn't look, you know, real encouraging." He pointed into the mirror out-side the driver's window.

Ellie bent, planting her hands just above her knees and watching with Ralph as the cop dumped the meshy thing into the passenger seat, then backed around to the driver's side with his gun now held up in both hands. Later it would occur to Ralph just how carefully crafted this little silent movie had been.

Kirstie came up behind 'her mother and began to bop Melissa Sweetheart softly against her mother's stuck-out bottom. "Butt, butt, butt, butt," she sang. "We love a great big motherbutt."

"Don't, Kirstie."

Ordinarily Kirstie would have needed two or three requests to cease and desist, but something in her mother's voice this time caused her to stop at once. She looked at her brother, who was staring as intently into his mirror as the grownups were into Daddy's. She went over to him and tried to get in his lap. David set her back on her feet gently but firmly. "Not now, Pie."

"But what is it? What's the big deal?"

"Nothing, no big deal," David said, never taking his eyes off the mirror.

The cop got into his cruiser and drove up the road to the Wayfarer. He got out again, his gun still out but now held along his leg with the muzzle pointed at the road. He looked right and left again, then walked over to Ralph's window. The driver's position in the Wayfarer was much higher than a car's seat would have been, but the cop was so tall - six-seven, at least - that he was still able to look down on Ralph as he sat behind the wheel in his captain's chair.

The cop made a cranking gesture with his empty hand. Ralph rolled his window halfway down. "What's the trouble, Officer?"

"How many are you?" the cop asked.

"What's wr - "

"Sir, how many are you?"

"Four," Ralph said, beginning to feel really frightened now. "My wife, my two kids, me. We have a couple of flats - "

"No, sir, all your tires are flat. You ran over a piece of highway carpet."

"I don't - "

"It's a strip of mesh embedded with hundreds of short nails," the cop said. "We use it to stop speeders whenever we can - it beats the hell out of hot pursuit."

"What was a thing like that doing in the road?" Ellie asked indignantly.

The cop said, "I'm going to open the rear door of my car, the one closest to your RV. When you see that, I want you to exit your vehicle and get into the back of mine. And quickly."

He craned his neck, saw Kirsten - she was now holding onto her mother's leg and peering cautiously around it - and gave her a smile. "Hi, girly-o."

Kirstie smiled back at him.

The cop shifted his eyes briefly to David. He nodded, and David nodded back noncommittally. "Who's out there, sir?" David asked.

"A bad guy," the cop said. "That's all you need to know for now, son. A very bad guy. Takr'

"Officer - " Ralph began.

"Sir, with all due respect, I feel like a clay pigeon in a shooting gallery. There's a dangerous man out here he's good with a rifle, and that piece of highway carpet suggests he's nearby. Further discussion of the situation must wait until our position has been improved, do you understand?"

Tak? Ralph wondered. Was that the bad guy's name9 "Yes, but - "

"You first, sir. Carry your little girl. The boy next Your wife last. You'll have to cram, but you can all fit into the car."

Ralph unbelted and stood up. "Where are we going" he asked.

"Desperation. Mining town. Eight miles or so from here."

Ralph nodded, rolled up his window, then picked up Kirsten. She looked at him with troubled eyes that were not far from tears.

"Daddy, is it Mr. Big Boogeyman?" she asked. Mr. Big Boogeyman was a monster she had brought home from school one day. Ralph didn't know which of the kids had described this shadowy closet-dweller to his gentle seven-year-old daughter, but he thought if he could have found him (he simply assumed it was a boy, it seemed to him that the care and feeding of the monsters in the school-yards of America always fell to the boys), he would have cheerfully strangled the bugger. It had taken two months to get Kirstie more or less soothed down about Mr. Big Boogeyman. Now this.

"No, not Mr. Big Boogeyman," Ralph said. "Probably just a postal worker having a bad day."

"Daddy, you work for the post office," she said as he carried her back toward the door in the middle of the Wayfarer's cabin.

"Yup," he said, aware that Ellie had put David in front of her and was walking with her hands on his shoulders. "It's sort of ajoke, see?"

"Like a knock-knock without the knocking?"

"Yup," he said again. He looked out the window in the RV's cabin door and saw the cop had opened the back door of the police cruiser. He also saw that when he opened the Wayfarer's door, it would overlap the car door, making a protective wall. That was good.

Sure. Unless the desert rat this guy's looking for is in back of us. Christ Almighty, why couldn't we have gone to Atlantic City?

"Dad?" That was David, his intelligent but slightly peculiar son who had started going to church last fall, after the thing that had happened to his friend Brian. Not Sunday school, not Thursday Night Youth Group, just church. And Sunday afternoons at the parsonage, talking with his new friend, the Rev. Who, by the way, was going to die slowly if he had been sharing anything with David but his thoughts. According to David it was all talk, and after the thing with Brian, Ralph supposed the kid needed someone to talk to. He only wished David had felt able to bring his questions to his mother and father instead of to some holy joe outsider who was married but still might - "Dad? Is it all right?"

"Yes. Fine." He didn't know if it was or not, didn't really know what they were dealing with here, but that was what you said to your kids, wasn't it? Yes, fine, all right. He thought that if he were on a plane with David and the engines quit, he'd put his arm around the boy and tell him everything was fine all the way down.

He opened the door, and it banged against the inside of the cruiser door.

"Quick, come on, let's see some hustle," the cop said, looking nervously around.

Ralph went down the steps with Kirstie sitting in the crook of his left arm. As he stepped down, she dropped her doll.

"Melissa!" she cried. "I dropped Melissa Sweetheart, get her, Daddy!"

"No, get in the car, get in the car!" the cop shouted. "I'll get the doll!"

Ralph slid in, putting his hand on the top of Kirstie's head and helping her duck. David followed him, then Ellie. The back seat of the car was filled with papers, and the front seat had been warped into a bell-shape by the oversized cop's weight. The moment Ellie pulled her right leg in, the cop slammed the door shut and went racing around the back of the cruiser.

'Lissa!" Kirstie cried in tones of real agony. "He forgot 'Lissa!"

Ellie reached for the doorhandle. meaning to lean out and get Melissa Sweetheart - surely no psycho with a rifle could pick her off in the time it would take to grab up a little girl's doll - then looked back at Ralph. "Where're the handles?" she asked.

The driver's side door of the cruiser opened, and the cop dropped into it like a bomb. The seat crunched back against Ralph's knees and he winced, glad that Kirstie's legs were hanging down between his. Not that Kirstie was still. She wriggled and twisted on his lap, hands held out to her mother.

"My doll, Mummy, my doll! Melissa!"

"Officer - " Ellie began.

"No time," the cop said. "Can't. Tak!" He U-turned across the road and headed east in a spew of dust. The rear end of the car fishtailed briefly. As it steadied again, it occurred to Ralph how fast this had happened - not ten minutes ago they'd been in their RV, headed down the road. He'd been about to ask David to play Twenty Ques-tions, not because he really wanted to but because he had been bored.

He sure wasn't bored now.

"Melissa Sweeeeeeetheart!" Kirstie screamed, and then began to weep.

"Take it easy, Pie," David said. It was his pet name for his baby sister. Like so many other things about David, neither of his parents knew what it meant or where it had come from. Ellie thought it was short for sweetie pie, but when she had asked him one night, David had just - shrugged and grinned his appealing, slanted little grin

"Nah, she's just a pie," he had said. "Just a pie. that's all

"But 'Lissa's in the dirty old dirt," Kirstie said, looking at her brother with swimming eyes.

"We'll come back and get her and clean her all up," David said.

"Promise?"

"Uh-huh. I'll even help you wash her hair."

"With Prell?"

"Uh-huh." He put a quick kiss on her cheek.

"What if the bad man comes?" Kirstie asked. "The bad man like Mr. Big Boogeyman? What if he dollnaps Melissa Sweetheart?"

David covered his mouth with his hand to hide the ghost of a grin. "He won't." The boy glanced up into the rearview mirror, trying to make eye contact with the cop. "Will he?"

"No," the cop said. "The man we're looking for is not a dollnapper." There was no facetiousness Ralph could detect in his voice; he sounded like Joe Friday. Just the facts, ma'am.

He slowed briefly as they passed a sign which read DES-PERATION, then accelerated as he turned right. Ralph hung on, praying that the guy knew what he was doing, that he wouldn't roll them. The car seemed to lift slightly, then settled back. They were now heading south. On the hori-zon, a huge bulwark of earth, its tan side cut with cracks and zigzag trenches like black scars, loomed against the sky.

"What is he, then?" Ellie asked. "What is this guy? And how did he get hold of the stuff you use to stop speeders? The watchamacallit?"

"Highway carpet, Mom," David said. He ran a finger up and down the metal mesh between the front and back seats, his face intent and thoughtful and troubled. Not even a ghost of a smile there now.

"Same way he got the guns he's toting and the car he's driving," the man behind the wheel said. Now they were passing the Rattlesnake Trailer Park, now the head-quarters of the Desperation Mining Corporation. Up ahead was a huddle of business buildings. A blinker-light flashed yellow under a hundred thousand miles of blue-denim sky. "He's a cop. And I'll tell you one thing,

Carvers: when you've got a nutty cop on your hands, I. you ye got a situation."

"How do you know our name?" David asked. "You didn't ask to see my dad's driver's license, so how do you know our name?"

"Saw it when your dad opened the door," the cop said, looking up into the rearview mirror. "Little plaque over the table: GOD BLESS OUR ROAMING HOME. THE CARVERS. Cute."

Something about this bothered Ralph, but for now he paid no attention. His fright had grown into a sense of foreboding so strong and yet so diffuse that he felt a little as if he'd eaten something laced with poison. He thought that if he held his hand up it would be steady, but that didn't change the fact that he had become more scared not less, since the cop had sped them away from their disabled roaming home with such spooky ease. It apparently wasn't the kind of fear that made your bands shake (it's a dry fright, he thought with a tiny and not very char acteristic twinkle of humor), but it was real enough, for all that.

"A cop," Ralph mused, thinking of a movie he'd rented from the video store down the street one Saturday night not too long ago. Maniac Cop, it had been called. The line of ad-copy above the title had read: YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT. PERMANENTLY. Funny how stupid stuff like that sometimes stuck with you. Except it didn't seem very funny right now.

"A cop, right," their cop replied. He sounded as if he '~ might be smiling.

Oh, really? Ralph asked himself. And just how does a smile sound?

He was aware that Ellie was looking at him with a kind of strained curiosity, but this didn't seem like a good time to return her glance. He didn't know what they might read in each other's eyes, and wasn't sure he wanted to find out.

The cop had been smiling, though. He was somehow sure of it.

Why would he he? What's funny about a maniac cop on the loose, or six flat tires, or a family of four crammed into a hot police-car with no handles on the back doors, or my daughter's favorite doll lying face-down in the dirt eight miles back? What could possibly be funny about any of those things?

He didn't know. But the cop had sounded as if he were smiling.

"A state trooper, did you say?" Ralph asked as they drove beneath the blinker.

"Look, Mummy!" Kirsten said brightly, Melissa Sweet heart at least temporarily forgotten. "Bikes! Bikes in the street, and standing on their heads! See down there? Isn't that funny?"

"Yes, honey, I see them," Ellie said. She didn't sound as if she found the upside-down bikes in the street any-where near as hilarious as her daughter did.

"Trooper? No, I didn't say that." The big man behind the wheel still sounded as if he were smiling. "Not a state trooper, a town cop."

"Really," Ralph said. "Wow. How many cops do you have in a little place like this, Officer?"

"Well, there were two others," the cop said, the smile in his voice more obvious than ever, "but I killed them."

He turned his head to look back through the mesh, and he wasn't smiling after all. He was grinning. His teeth were so big they looked more like tools than bones. They showed all the way to the back of his mouth. Above and below them were what seemed like acres of pink gum.

"Now I'm the only law west of the Pecos."

Ralph stared at him, mouth gaping. The cop grinned back, driving with his head turned, pulling up neatly in front of the Desperation Municipal Building without ever looking once at where he was going.

"Carvers," he said, speaking solemnly through his grin, "welcome to Desperation."

5

An hour Later the cop ran at the woman in the jeans and the workshirt, his cowboy boots rattling on the hard-wood floor, his hands outstretched, but his grin was gone and Ralph felt savage triumph leap up his throat, like something ugly on a spring. The cop was coming hard, but the woman in the jeans had managed - probably due more to luck than to any conscious decision on her part - to keep the desk between them, and that was going to make the difference. Ralph saw her pull back the ham-mers of the shotgun which had been lying on the desk, saw her raise it to her shoulder as her back struck the bars of the room's largest cell, saw her curl her finger around the double triggers.

The big cop was going like hell, but it wasn't going to do him any good.

Shoot him, lady. Ralph thought. Not to save us but because he killed my daughter. BLow his motherfucking head off

The instant before Mary pulled the triggers, the cop fell to his knees on the other side of the desk, his head drop-ping like the head of a man who has knelt to pray. The double roar of the shotgun was terrific in the closed holding area. Flame licked out of the barrels. Ralph heard his wife scream - in triumph, he thought. If so, it was premature. The cop's Smokey Bear hat flew off his head, but the loads went high. Shot hit the back wall of the room and thudded into the plastered stairwell outside the open door with a sound like wind-driven sleet hitting a windowpane. There was a bulletin-board to the right of the doorway, and Ralph saw round black holes spatter across the papers tacked up there. The cop's hat was a shredded ruin held together only by a thin leather hat-band. It had been buckshot in the gun, not bird. If it had hit the cop in the midsection, it would have torn him apart. Knowing that made Ralph feel even worse.

The big cop threw his weight against the desk and shoved it across the room toward the cell Ralph had decided was the drunk-tank - toward the cell and the woman pressed against the cell's bars. The chair was penned in the kneehole. It swivelled back and forth, casters squall-ing. The woman tried to get the gun down between her and the chair before the chair could hit her, but she didn't move fast enough. The chairback crashed into her hips and pelvis and stomach, driving her backward into the bars. She howled in pain and surprise.

The big cop spread his arms like Samson preparing to pull down the temple and grasped the sides of the desk. Although his ears were still ringing from the shotgun blast, Ralph heard the seams under the arms of the maniac cop's khaki uniform shirt give way. The cop pulled the desk back. "Drop it!" he yelled. "Drop the gun, Mary!"

The woman shoved the chair away from her, raised the shotgun, and pulled back the double hammers again. She was sobbing with pain and effort. Out of the corner of his eye, Ralph saw Ellie put her hands over her ears as the dark-haired woman curled her finger around the triggers, but this time there was only a dry click when the hammers fell. Ralph felt disappointment as bitter as gall crowd his throat. He had known just looking at it that the shotgun wasn't a pump or an auto, and still he had somehow. thought it would fire, had absolutely expected it to fire, as if God himself would reload the chambers and perform a Winchester miracle.

The cop shoved the desk forward a second time. If not for the chair, Ralph saw, she would have been safe in the kneehole. But the chair was there, and it slammed into her midsection again, doubling her forward and drawing a harsh retching noise from her.

"Drop it Mary, drop it!" the cop yelled.

But she wouldn't. As the cop pulled the desk back again (Why doesn't he just charge her? Ralph thought. I)oesn't he know the, damned gun is empty?), shells spilling off the top and rolling everywhere, she reversed it so she could grip the twin barrels. Then she leaned for-ward and brought the stock down over the top of the desk like a club. The cop tried to drop his right shoulder, but the burled walnut stock of the gun caught him on the collarbone just the same. He grunted. Ralph had no idea if it was a grunt of surprise, pain, or simple exasperation, but the sound drew a scream of approval from across the room, where David was still standing with his hands wrapped around the bars of the cell he was in. His face was pale and sweaty, his eyes blazing. The old man with the white hair had joined him.

The cop pulled the desk back once more - the blow to his shoulder did not noticeably impair his ability to do this - and slammed it forward again, hitting the woman with the chair and driving her into the bars. She uttered another harsh cry.

"Put it down!" the cop yelled. It was a funny kind of yell, and for a moment Ralph found himself hoping that the bastard was hurt after all. Then he realized the cop was laughing. "Put it down or I'll beat you to a pulp, I really will

The dark-haired woman - Mary - raised the gun again, but this time with no conviction. One side of her shirt had pulled out of her jeans, and Ralph could see bright red marks on the white skin of her waist and belly. He knew that, were she to take the shirt off, he would see the chairback's silhouette tattooed all the way up to the cups of her bra.

She held the gun in the air for a moment, the inlaid stock wavering, then threw it aside. It clattered across to the cell where David and the white-haired man were. David looked down at it.

"Don't touch it, son," the white-haired man said. "it's empty, just leave it alone."

The cop glanced at David and the white-haired man. Then, smiling brilliantly, he looked at the woman with her back to the drunk-tank bars. He pulled the desk away from her, went around it, and kicked at the chair. It voy-aged across the hardwood on its squeaky casters and thumped to a stop against the empty cell next to Ralph and Ellie. The cop put an arm around the dark-haired woman's shoulders. He looked at her almost tenderly. She responded with the blackest glance Ralph had ever seen in his life.

"Can you walk?" the cop asked her. "Is anything broken'?"

"What difference does it make?" She spat at him. "Kill me if you're going to, get it over with."

"Kill you? Kill you?" He looked stunned, the expres-sion of a man who has never killed anything bigger than a wasp in his whole life. "I'm not going to kill you. Mare!" He hugged her to him briefly, then looked around at Ralph and Ellie, David and the white-haired man. "Gosh, no!" he said. "Not when things are just getting interesting."