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elfin features, she looked a little bit like Courtney. Not much, but some. Therefore she had precipitated his spell. He knew ' now, that he did not want to put his knife into her, had never wanted to put his knife into her. He did not want to make love to her, either. Indeed, he had no interest in that girl at all. He was strictly a one-woman man. He cared only for his lovely Courtney.
        As quickly as his thoughts passed from the waitress to Courtney, they flicked from Courtney to Doyle and the boy. Leland was shocked at the suddenly perceived possibility that the Thunderbird had passed while he was putting the dead trooper into the squad car. Perhaps they had gone by twenty minutes ago. They could be miles and miles out in front of him…
        What if Doyle changed his intended route? What if he did not follow the road that was marked on his map?
        Leland felt a hard lump of fear rise in his throat.
        If he lost Doyle and the kid, wouldn't he be losing Courtney? If he lost Courtney, lost his way to Courtney, hadn't he then lost everything?
        Droplets of sweat standing out on his broad forehead despite the air conditioning, he slipped the van in gear and backed out of there. The front wheels arced through the bloodied gravel. He shifted into drive and took the Chevrolet out of the rest area. The dome light on the squad car still went around and around, but Leland was not aware of that. There was no reality for him except the road ahead and the Thunderbird which must be even now escaping from him.
        

    Three
        
        When they had been back on the road for fifteen minutes after their lunch break and still the rented Chevrolet van had not appeared in the rear-view mirror, Doyle stopped watching for it. He had been shaken when the van pulled behind them again after their breakfast stop near Harrisburg, but of course that had been merely coincidence. It had trailed them across all of Pennsylvania and through a sliver of West Virginia, then into Ohio-but that was because it happened to be going west on the same Interstate they were using. The driver of the van, whoever he was, had chosen his route from a map, just as Doyle had; there was nothing sinister in the other man's mind when he outlined his trip. Belatedly Alex realized that he could have relieved his own mind at any time during the morning just by pulling to the side of the road and letting the van go past. He could have waited for it to build up a fifteen-minute lead and could have dispensed immediately with the whole crazy idea that they were being pursued. Well, it did not matter much now. The van was gone, way out ahead of them somewhere.
        “He back there?” Colin asked.
        “No.”
        “Shucks.”
        “Shucks?
        “I'd really like to know what he was up to,” Colin said. “Now I guess we'll never find out.”
        Alex smiled. “I guess we never will.”
        Compared to Pennsylvania, Ohio was almost a plains state. Vistas of open green land stretched out on both sides of the highway, marred only by an occasional shabby town, neat farm, or oddly isolated and routinely filthy factory. The sameness of it, stretching away into the distance under an equally bland blue sky, bored and depressed them. The car seemed to crawl at a quarter of its real speed.
        When they had been on the road only twenty minutes, Colin began to twist and squirm uncomfortably. “This seatbelt isn't made right,” he told Doyle.
        “Oh?”
        “I think they made it too tight.”
        “It can't be too tight. It's adjustable.”
        “I don't know…” Colin tested it with both hands.
        “You aren't getting out of it with excuses as contrived as that one.”
        Colin looked at the open fields, at a herd of fat cows grazing on a hill above a white-and-red barn. “I didn't know there were so many cows in the world. Ever since we left home I've seen cows everywhere I look. If I see