t five o'clock on a gray Sunday afternoon as the Lady Meerkats were cutting down basketball nets in a not-too-distant part of the state Wesley Smith and Robbie Henderson were sitting in Wesley's modest Chevy Malibu, watching the door of a roadhouse in Eddyville, twenty miles north of Cadiz. The parking lot was oiled dirt and mostly empty. There was almost certainly a TV inside The Broken Windmill, but Wesley guessed discriminating tipplers would rather do their drinking and NFL-watching at home. You didn't have to go inside the joint to know it was a hole. Candy Rymer's first stop had been bad, but this second one was worse.

Parked slightly crooked (and blocking what appeared to be the fire exit) was a filthy, dinged-up Ford Explorer with two bumper stickers on the back. MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT THE STATE CORRECTIONAL FACILITY, one read. The other was even more succinct: I BRAKE FOR JACK DANIELS.

"Maybe we oughtta do it right here," Robbie said. "While she's inside slopping it up and watching the Titans."

It was a tempting idea, but Wesley shook his head. "We'll wait. She's got one more stop to make. Hopson, remember?"

"That's miles from here."

"Right," Wesley said. "But we've got time to kill, and we're going to kill it."

"Why?"

"Because what we're up to is changing the future. Or trying to, at least. We have no idea how tough that is. Waiting as long as possible improves our chances."

"Wesley, that is one drunk chick. She was drunk when she got out of that first juke-joint in Central City, and she's going to be a lot drunker when she comes out of yonder shack. I can't see her getting her car repaired in time to rendezvous with the girls' bus forty miles from here. And what if we break down while we're trying to follow her to her last stop?"

Wesley hadn't considered this. Now he did. "My instincts say wait, but if you have a strong feeling that we should do it now, we will."

"The only strong feeling I have is a scared-to-freakin'-death feeling," Robbie said. He sat up. "Too late to do anything else, anyway. Here she comes, Miss America."

Candy Rymer emerged from The Broken Windmill in a moderate weave. She dropped her purse, bent down to get it, almost fell over, cursed, picked it up, laughed, and then continued to where her Explorer was parked, digging her keys out as she went. Her face was puffy, not quite hiding the remains of what must once have been very good looks. Her hair, blond on top and black at the roots, hung around her cheeks in lank curls. Her belly pooched out the front of elastic-waist jeans just below the hem of what had to be a Kmart smock top.

She got in her beat-to-shit SUV, kicked the engine into life (it sounded in desperate need of a tune-up) and drove forward into the roadhouse's fire door. There was a crunch. Then her backup lights came on and she reversed so fast that for one sickening moment Wesley thought she was going to hit his Malibu, crippling it and leaving them on foot as she drove off toward her appointment in Samarra. But she stopped in time and peeled onto the highway without pausing to look for traffic. A moment later Wesley was following as she headed east toward Hopson. And the intersection where the Lady Meerkats' bus would arrive in four hours.

In spite of the terrible thing she was going to do, Wesley couldn't help feeling a little sorry for her, and he had an idea Robbie felt the same. The follow-up story they'd read about her in the Echo told a tale as familiar as it was sordid.

Candace "Candy" Rymer, age forty-one, divorced. Three children, now in the custody of their father. For the last twelve years of her life she'd been in and out of spin-dry facilities. According to an acquaintance (she seemed to have no friends), she had tried AA and decided it wasn't for her. Too much holy-rolling. She had been arrested for DUI half a dozen times. She had lost her license after each of the last two, but in both cases it had been restored, the second time by special petition. She needed her license to get to her job at the fertilizer factory in Bainbridge, she told Judge Wallenby. What she didn't tell him was that she had lost the job six months previous and nobody checked. Candy Rymer was a booze-bomb waiting to go off, and the explosion was now very close.

The story hadn't mentioned her home address in Montgomery, but it didn't need to. In what Wesley considered a rather brilliant piece of investigative journalism (especially for the Echo), the reporter had retraced Candy's final binge, from The Pot O' Gold in Central City to The Broken Windmill in Eddyville to Banty's Bar in Hopson. There the bartender was going to try to take her keys. Unsuccessfully. Candy was going to give him the finger and leave, shouting "I'm done giving my business to this dive!" back over her shoulder. That was at seven o'clock. The reporter theorized that Candy must have pulled over somewhere for a short nap, possibly on Route 124, before cutting across to Route 80. A little further down 80, she would make her final stop. A fiery one.

Once Robbie put the thought in his head, Wesley kept expecting his always-trustworthy Chevrolet to die and coast to a stop at the side of the two-lane blacktop, a victim of either a bad battery or the Paradox Laws. Candy Rymer's taillights would disappear from view and they would spend the following hours making frantic but useless calls (always assuming their phones would even work out here in the williwags) and cursing themselves for not disabling her vehicle back in Eddyville, while they still had a chance.

But the Malibu cruised as effortlessly as always, without a single gurgle or glitch. He stayed about half a mile behind Candy's Explorer.

"Man, she's all over the road," Robbie said. "Maybe she'll ditch the damn thing before she gets to the next bar. Save us the trouble of slashing her tires."

"According to the Echo, that doesn't happen."

"Yeah, but we know the future's not cast in stone, don't we? Maybe this is another Ur, or something."

Wesley didn't think it worked that way with UR LOCAL, but he kept his mouth shut. Either way, it was too late now.

Candy Rymer made it to Banty's without going in the ditch or hitting any oncoming traffic, although she could have done either; God knew she had enough close calls. When one of the cars that swerved out of her way passed Wesley's Malibu, Robbie said: "That's a family. Mom, Pop, three little kids goofin' around in the back."

That was when Wesley stopped feeling sorry for Rymer and started feeling angry at her. It was a clean, hot emotion that made his pique at Ellen feel paltry by comparison.

"That bitch," he said. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel. "That drunken who-gives-a-shit bitch. I'll kill her if that's the only way I can stop her."

"I'll help," Robbie said, then clamped his mouth so tightly shut his lips nearly disappeared.

They didn't have to kill her, and the Paradox Laws stopped them no more than the laws against drinking and driving had stopped Candy Rymer on her tour of southern Kentucky's more desperate watering holes.

The parking lot of Banty's Bar was paved, but the buckling concrete looked like something left over from an Israeli bombing raid in Gaza. Overhead, a fizzing neon rooster flashed on and off. Hooked in one set of its talons was a moonshine jug with XXX printed on the side.

The Rymer woman's Explorer was parked almost directly beneath this fabulous bird, and by its stuttering orange-red glow, Wesley slashed open the elderly SUV's front tires with the butcher knife they had brought for that express purpose. As the whoosh of escaping air hit him, he was struck by a wave of relief so great that at first he couldn't get up but only hunker on his knees like a man praying.

"My turn," Robbie said, and a moment later the Explorer settled further as the kid punctured the rear tires. Then came another hiss. He had put a hole in the spare for good measure. By then Wesley had gotten to his feet.

"Let's park around to the side," Robbie said. "I think we better keep an eye on her."

"I'm going to do a lot more than that," Wesley said.

"Easy, big fella. What are you planning on?"

"I'm not planning. I'm beyond that." But the rage shaking through his body suggested something different.

According to the Echo, she had called Banty's a dive in her parting shot, but apparently that had been cleaned up for family consumption. What she actually threw back over her shoulder was, "I'm done doing business with this shitpit!" Only by this point she was so drunk the vulgarity came out in a slippery slur: shippih.

Robbie, fascinated at seeing the news story played out before his eyes right down to the upraised middle finger (which the Echo had primly referred to as "an obscene gesture"), made no effort to grab Wesley as he strode toward her. He did call "Wait!" but Wesley didn't. He seized the woman and commenced shaking her.

Candy Rymer's mouth dropped open; the keys she'd been holding in the hand not occupied with bird-flipping dropped to the cracked concrete tarmac.

"Leggo me, you bassard!"

Wesley didn't. He slapped her face hard enough to split her lower lip, then went back on her the other way. "Sober up!" he screamed into her frightened face. "Sober up, you useless bitch! Get a life and stop fucking up other peoples'! You're going to kill people! Do you understand that? You are going to fucking KILL people!"

He slapped her a third time, the sound as loud as a pistol-shot. She staggered back against the side of the building, weeping and holding her hands up to protect her face. Blood trickled down her chin. Their shadows, turned into elongated gantries by the neon bird, winked off and on.

He raised his hand to slap a fourth time better to slap than to choke, which was what he really wanted to do but Robbie grabbed him from behind and wrestled him away. "Stop it! That's enough!"

The bartender and a couple of goofy-looking patrons were now standing in the doorway, gawking. Candy Rymer had slid down to a sitting position. She was weeping hysterically, her hands pressed to her swelling face. "Why does everyone hate me?" she sobbed. "Why is everyone so goddam mean?"

Wesley looked at her dully, the anger out of him. What replaced it was a kind of hopelessness. You would say that a drunk driver who caused the deaths of at least eleven people had to be evil, but there was no evil here. Only a sobbing alkie sitting on the cracked, weedy concrete of a country roadhouse parking lot. A woman who, if the off-and-on light of the stuttering rooster did not lie, had wet her pants.

"You can get the person but you can't get the evil," Wesley said. "The evil always survives. Isn't that a bitch. Just a total bitch."

"Yeah, I'm sure, but come on. Before they get a really good look at you."

Robbie was leading him back to the Malibu. Wesley went as docilely as a child. He was trembling. "The evil always survives, Robbie. In all the Urs. Remember that."

"You bet, absolutely. Give me the keys. I'll drive."

"Hey!" someone shouted from behind them. "Why in the hell did you beat up that woman? She wasn't doing nothing to you! Come back here!"

Robbie pushed Wesley into the car, ran around the hood, threw himself behind the wheel, and drove away fast. He kept the pedal down until the stuttering rooster disappeared, then eased up. "What now?"

Wesley ran a hand over his eyes. "I'm sorry I did that," he said. "And yet I'm not. Do you understand?"

"Yeah," Robbie said. "You bet. It was for Coach Silverman. And Josie too." He smiled. "My little mousie."

Wesley nodded.

"So where do we go? Home?"

"Not yet," Wesley said.

They parked on the edge of a cornfield near the intersection of Route 139 and Highway 80, two miles west of Cadiz. They were early, and Wesley used the time to fire up the pink Kindle. When he tried to access UR LOCAL, he was greeted by a somehow unsurprising message: THIS SERVICE NO LONGER AVAILABLE.

"Probably for the best," he said.

Robbie turned toward him. "Say what?"

"Nothing. It doesn't matter." He put the Kindle back in his briefcase.

"Wes?"

"What, Robbie?"

"Did we break the Paradox Laws?"

"Undoubtedly," Wes said. And with some satisfaction.

At five to nine, they heard honking and saw lights. They got out of the Malibu and stood in front of it, waiting. Wesley observed that Robbie's hands were clenched, and was glad he himself wasn't the only one still afraid that Candy Rymer might still somehow appear.

Headlights breasted the nearest hill. It was the bus, followed by a dozen cars filled with Lady Meerkat supporters, all honking deliriously and flashing their high beams off and on. As the bus passed, Wesley heard young female voices singing "We Are the Champions" and felt a chill race up his back and lift the hair on his neck.

He raised his hand and waved.

Beside him, Robbie did the same. Then he turned to Wesley, smiling. "What do you say, Prof? Want to join the parade?"

Wesley clapped him on the shoulder. "That sounds like a damn fine idea."

When the last of the cars had passed, Robbie got in line. Like the others, he honked and flashed his lights all the way back to Moore.

Wesley didn't mind.