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rolled the kinks out of her shoulders. “Why WaWa?”
    Celluci shrugged, eyes appreciatively following her movements. “Why not WaWa? I thought you might want to see the goose.”
    â€œThe goose?” Slowly, she turned and peered up at the nine-meter-high steel sculpture silhouetted against a gray sky streaked with orange. “Okay. I’ve seen it. I hope we’re not sharing the high point of your day.”
    â€œClose,” he admitted. “How’re you feeling?”
    â€œLike my body spent the day bouncing around inside a padded box. Other than that, fine.”
    â€œAre you, uh . . .” He broke off in embarrassment as a car pulled into the small parking lot and a pair of children exploded out of the back and raced up the path toward the bathrooms.
    â€œHungry?” Stepping into the circle of his body heat, she grinned. “Mike, you can say
hungry
in front of kids—they’ll assume I’ll be having a Big Mac, not Ronald MacDonald.”
    â€œThat’s disgusting.”
    â€œActually, it’s given me an appetite.”
    He grabbed her upper arms, halting her advance. “Forget it, Vicki, I’m too old for a quickie in the back of a van.” But his protest had little force, and after the kids and the car disappeared, he allowed himself to be convinced.
    It didn’t take much.
    Twenty minutes later, as they climbed up into the front seats, Vicki reached out and caught a mosquito about to land on his back. “Forget it, sister,” she muttered, squashing the bug between thumb and forefinger. “He gave at the office.”
    â€œWe’re just past Portage la Prairie?” Celluci looked up from the map of Manitoba with a scowl. He hadn’t slept well, and the thermos of coffee Vicki’d handed him when he’d staggered out of the van could peel the residue off a garbage truck. He drank it anyway—after fifteen years drinking police coffee, he could drink anything—but he wasn’t happy. The last thing he needed to be told was that they’d gone considerably past the point where he’d expected to take over. “You must’ve been doing between a hundred and twenty-five and a hundred and thirty kilometers an hour!”
    â€œWhat’s your point?”
    â€œLet’s start with the speed limit being a hundred kilometers an hour and take it from there. It’s not just a good idea,” he added sarcastically, fighting to refold the map. “It’s the law.”
    Vicki clamped her teeth down on a complaint that a hundred K to someone with her reaction time was ridiculously slow, and merely shrugged. Her opinions didn’t make the speed limit any less the law. If he’d suggested she’d been driving unsafely, then she could’ve given him an argument.
    Leaning back against the van, she stared out at the farmland surrounding the gas station parking lot. With the station closed and the only illumination coming from the stars and Celluci’s flashlight, it seemed as though they were the last people alive in the world. She hated that feeling and she’d felt it for most of the night as she’d sped away from Lake Superior toward Kenora and the Ontario/Manitoba border. At 3 A.M. even Winnipeg was a little short of people up and about—except for a sleepy clerk at the 24-hour gas station/donut shop where she’d filled the van and two transients spotted sleeping in the shelter of an overpass. She’d cut through the middle of Portage la Prairie rather than take the Trans-Canada Highway loop around, but it was still too early for anyone to be up and about.
    Used to living, and hunting among three million people, at least one million of whom never seemed to sleep, the isolation made her feel vulnerable and exposed.
    â€œGive me that.” She reached down and snatched the partially folded map out of Mike’s hands. “All you have to do is follow the