Cold Fire

They were talking animatedly, but they were too far away for Jim to hear what they were saying. A couple of words carried to him, but they were faded by distance and distorted by the furnace-dry air.

Sweat kept trickling into his eyes, blurring his vision. He blotted his face with his sleeve and squinted at the men again.

They were moving slowly away from the Camaro now, deeper into the desert. One of them was wary, swiveling his head from side to side, and the other studied the ground as they moved, no doubt searching for signs of Jim's passage. Just his luck, one of them would turn out to have been raised by Indian scouts, and they'd be all over him faster than an iguana on a sand beetle.

From the west came the sound of an engine, low at first but growing rapidly louder even as Jim turned his head to look in that direction.

Out of a waterfall mirage came a Peterbilt. From Jim's low vantage point, the truck looked so huge that it didn't even seem like a truck but like some futuristic war machine that had traveled backward in time from the twenty-second century.

The driver of the Peterbilt would see the overturned Camaro. In the traditional Samaritan spirit that most truckers showed on the road, he would stop to offer assistance. His arrival would rattle the two killers, and while they were distracted, Jim would get the drop on them.

He had it all figured out-except it didn't work that way. The Peterbilt didn't slow as it approached, and Jim realized he was going to have to flag it down. But before he could even rise up, the big truck swept past with n dragon roar and a blast of hot wind, breaking the speed limit by a Guinness margin, as if it were a judgment wagon driven by a demon and loaded with souls that the devil wanted in hell right now Jim fought the urge to leap up and yell after it: Where's your tradition Samaritan spirit, you shithead? Silence returned to the hot day.

On the far side of the road, the two killers looked after the Peterbilt for moment, then continued their search for Jim.

Furious and scared, he eased back from the shoulder of the highway; flattened out again, and belly-crawled eastward toward the motor home, dragging the shotgun with him. The elevated roadbed was between him and them; they could not possibly see him, yet he more than half expected them to sprint across the blacktop and pump half a dozen rounds into him When he dared look up again, he was directly opposite the parked Road king, which blocked the two men from his view. If he couldn't see them, they couldn't see him. He scrambled to his feet and crossed the pavement to the passenger side of the motor home.

The door on that flank was a third of the way from the front bumper at the rear, not opposite the driver's door. It was ajar.

He took hold of the handle. Then he realized that a third man might have stayed inside with the woman and girl. He couldn't risk going in there until he had dealt with the two outside, for he might be trapped between gunmen.

He moved to the front of the Road king, and just as he reached the corner, he heard voices approaching. He froze, waiting for the guy with the weird haircut to come around the front bumper. But they stopped on the other side.

"— who gives a shit?" "-but he mighta seen our license number-" "-chances are, he's bad hurt-" "-wasn't no blood in the car" Jim sank to one knee by the tire, looked under the vehicle. They were standing on the other side, near the driver's door.

"— we just take the next southbound-" "-with cops on our tail" "-by the time he gets to any cops, we'll be in Arizona" "-you hope-" "-I know-" Rising, moving cautiously, Jim slipped around the front corner of the Road king. He eased past the first pair of headlights and the engine hatch "-cut across Arizona into New Mexico-" "-they got cops, too-" "-into Texas, put a few states between us, drive all night if we have to." Jim was grateful that the shoulder of the highway was dirt rather than loose gravel. He crept silently across it to the driver's-side headlights, staying low.

"— you know what piss-poor cooperation they got across state lines " "-he's out there somewhere, damn it" "-so're a million scorpions and rattlesnakes-" Jim stepped around to their side of the motor home, covering them with the shotgun. "Don't move!" For an instant they gaped at him the way he might have stared at a three-eyed Martian with a mouth in its forehead. They were only about eight feet away, close enough to spit on, which they looked like they deserved. At a distance they had appeared as dangerous as snakes with legs, and they still looked deadlier than anything that slithered in the desert.

They were holding their handguns, pointed at the ground. Jim thrust the shotgun at them and shouted, "Drop 'em, damn it!" Either they were the hardest of hard cases or they were nuts-probably both-because they didn't freeze at the sight of the shotgun. The guy with the redoubled ponytail flung himself to the ground and rolled.