Mine

Mine Page 43

In the warmth of the Cherokee, Mary's bladder let go.

The wet heat soaked into the seat beneath her hips and thighs. all she could think of was another song from the memory vault: "Macarthur Park," and all that sweet green icing flowing down. She was backing the Cherokee down the mountain road, the tires skidding left and right. The feeling was returning to her hands now, the prickling of a thousand hot needles. Her face felt as if several layers of flesh had been flayed off, and the blood on her jeans had frozen into a shine. Her right hand was streaked with crimson, the angers twitching their nerve-damage dance. Drummer was still crying, but she let him sing; he was alive, and he was hers.

The Cherokee's rear end bashed into one of the abandoned cars on the roadside. She got the vehicle straightened out again, and in another moment metal shrieked as the Cherokee skidded over to the right and grazed a station wagon. Then she had reached the bottom of the road, and she turned the Cherokee toward I-80, the heater buzzing but the cold still latched deep in her lungs. She found a sign that pointed to I-80 West, and she turned onto the entrance ramp, the snow swirling like underwater silt before her lights. Blocking her way was another big flashing sign: STOP ROaD CLOSED. But there was no pig car this time, and Mary plowed the Cherokee through the snow on the right shoulder and got back on the ramp.

It made a long, snow-slick curve onto I-80 that Mary took at a crawl. and then she was on the interstate, the pig car at the McFadden exit a quarter mile behind her. She slowly let the speed wind up to forty miles an hour, the highway ascending under her wheels. Snow was still coming down hard, the wind a fierce beast. She was on her way across the Rockies.

Less than ten minutes after Mary had turned onto I-80, a rust-eaten Cutlass with one eye made the ramp's curve and came after her.

The icy tears were thawing on Laura's face. She was wired, her pulse racing. One hand was clenched firmly on the wheel, the elbow of her other arm helping steer. The single working wiper was making a shrill whining noise as it pushed the snow away, and Laura feared the wiper motor might be about to burn out. The Cutlass was climbing, the highway ahead waxy with ice. She kept her speed between thirty and thirty-five, and she prayed to God that Mary was still alert enough not to go off the road. Mary was badly hurt and half frozen, just like her. Under the bandages, Laura's mangled hand was a swollen blaze. Her body had reached and passed its threshold of pain, and now she was going on sheer willpower and Black Cats. She was still going because tears wouldn't get David back, and neither would she get her son by crawling into a corner and surrendering. She had come too far now to give up. She'd left her friend behind, in the snow. Mary Terror had another sin to pay for.

The wind thrashed at the Cutlass, and the car's frame moaned like a human voice. Laura stared straight ahead, unblinking, into the storm. She was looking for red tail-lights, but there was nothing but snow and darkness beyond. The highway was curving to the right, still ascending. The tires slid over a sheet of ice and Laura's heart stuttered, but then the tires gripped pavement again. The wiper motor's whine had gotten louder, and that frightened Laura more than the ice. If the wiper failed, she was finished until the storm ended. Now the road began to descend and curve to the left, and Laura had to ease on the brake. The tires slipped once more, the Cutlass sliding over almost to the median's ice-crusted guardrail before she regained control. Sheets of snow that looked solid were flailing at the windshield, and again the highway climbed. a gust of wind hit the Cutlass like a punch from the left, the wheel shivering in her grip.

She had to go on even if she was making only ten miles an hour. She had to go on until the wiper motor burned out and the snow closed in. The only thing in her life that mattered worth a damn anymore was holding her son in her arms, and she would fight the furies every mile of the way if that's what had to be done.

ahead, Mary had slowed the Cherokee. The road had leveled off, and snowdrifts four and five feet high stood on this section of I-80. The winds were beating at the Cherokee from both sides, their noise like banshee wails. Mary threaded a path between the drifts, her tires spinning on ice and then catching again. The Cherokee suddenly got away from her and fishtailed, and she fought the wheel, but there was nothing she could do. The entire vehicle made a slow spin and crunched into a snowdrift. She powered the Cherokee through it, the engine straining. Thirty more yards, and the drifts were all around her, some of them sculpted to eight feet high. She kept going, trying to find a path through them, but she had to stop again be-because the snowdrifts were up to the hood and would not be bullied.

She looked in the rearview mirror. Darkness upon darkness. Where was the bitchi Still back at the Silver Cloud Inni Or on the highwayi The bitch was a fighter, but she wasn't crazy enough to try to cross the Rockies in a blizzard. No, that kind of insanity was Mary's domain.

She wasn't going anywhere for a while. There was plenty of gas in the tank. The heater was all right. In a couple of hours dawn would break. Maybe in the light she could find a way out of this.

Mary pulled up the emergency brake, then switched off the headlights and the wipers. Within seconds the windshield was covered over. She let the engine idle, and she picked up Drummer. He was through crying, but now he was making mewling hungry noises. She reached for her bag and the baby's formula. The acidic smell of urine drifted to hen Drummer had joined her in wetting himself. Hell of a place to change a diaper, she thought, but she was a mother now, and such things had to be done. She glanced in the rearview mirror again. Still nothing. The bitch had stayed at the Silver Cloud with Benedict Bedelia. The shots would've hit Laura Clayhead if Didi hadn't gotten in the way. They'd been good shots, the both of them. She didn't know exactly where Didi had been hit, but she didn't think Didi was going to be chasing anybody for a while.

Two miles behind the Cherokee, Laura heard a grinding noise. It went on for ten seconds, and then the wiper stopped. Snow blanked the windshield. "Damn it!" Laura shouted as she eased pressure on the brake. The car began to skid, first to the left and then back to the right, turning and sliding sideways along I-80. Laura's nerves were screaming, but all she could do was brace herself for a collision. at last the Cutlass straightened out, began to respond to the brake, and rolled to a slippery halt.

Her traveling was over until the snow stopped. There was nothing to do but pull up the emergency brake and turn off the headlight. The heater was rattling, but it was pumping out warm air. There was a little more than a half tank of gas. She could survive for a few hours.

In the darkness Laura forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply, trying to calm down. Mary might get away from her, but she knew Mary's destination. Mary wasn't going to be driving very fast or far in this storm. She might even pull off I-80 and try to sleep. The important thing was to get to Freestone before Mary and find Jack Gardiner, if indeed he was one of the three men on Didi's list.

The wind shrieked like discordant violin notes around the Cutlass. Laura leaned her head back and closed her eyes. The image of Didi's face came to her: not the face of the woman who lay dying in the snow, but her face as she worked carefully on the splints for Laura's hand. She saw Didi in the pottery workshop, showing the items that had been created from a tormented mind. and then she saw Didi's face as the woman might have looked when she was much younger, a teenager in a black-and-white high school yearbook picture, something from the late sixties. Didi was smiling, her hair sprayed and flipped up on the ends and her face freckled and healthy-looking with a little farmgirl chub in her cheeks. Her eyes were clear, and they gazed toward the future from a place where murder and terror did not live.

The picture began to fade.

Laura let it go, and she slept in the arms of the storm.

The tasks of a mother done, Mary put Drummer on the passenger seat and zipped up the parka around him again. For a few minutes she brooded on the distance she had yet to go  -  two hundred miles across Utah, then into Nevada for more than three hundred miles, passing through Reno into California, down to Sacramento, and then through the Napa Valley toward Oakland and San Francisco. Have to buy more diapers and formula for Drummer. Have to get some pain pills and something to keep me awake. She still had plenty of money from her mother's ring and forty-seven dollars and some change she'd taken from Rocky Road's house. She would have to change her jeans before she went into a store, and getting her swollen thigh into fresh denim was going to be a job. She had another pair of gloves somewhere in her belongings, so she could hide her bloodied hand. How long would it be before the pigs got on her casei Not very long, she figured. Have to haul ass when she got over the mountains, maybe find a place to lay low until the heat passed.

She couldn't deal with these things right now. Her fever had returned, her body a raw pulse, and she realized she was fading fast. She found the baby's face in the dark, kissed his forehead, and then reclined the driver's seat back. She closed her eyes and listened to the wind. God's voice was in it, singing "Love Her Madly" to her.

Mary heard only the first verse, and then she was asleep.