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been wrong.
    It took the better part of two hours to get the car out of the ditch. Tammy whined, Ziggy was no real help at all, but Griff and Bronwyn both put some muscle into pushing, and when they finally got back on the road—with the sun going down a bit to the far western hills—the car made some funny rattling noises that Josh guessed originated somewhere in the rear axle.
    Josh turned the Lincoln around and headed back toward what they hoped was the highway.
    Instead, he found a confluence of ribbon roads, a narrow crossroads with what looked like pyramid-shaped hills in the distance and that strange cast of sulfurous light and purple shadow in the sagebrush, which meant night would seep across the desert roads within a few hours.
    Without asking the others for their suggestions on which way to go, he took the road that seemed to be headed west, and soon it went from a narrow two lanes, to a wide two lanes, and he felt pretty good about his choice of roads until he heard the back left tire blow out.
    But he didn’t even know about Dave Olshaker.

Chapter Six
    1
    Now, back up a few days.
    Back to the Saturday night when the rest of them all took off in the Pimpmobile for the West Coast. Picture a big strapping guy of twenty, in the back of a pickup truck, with eyes that just popped open like he’d come back from the dead. He’d had a dream, and it involved a couple of things he didn’t like to think about, one of them being his friend Billy Dunne, and it freaked him out to think about it. Dave Olshaker snarfled awake, farting as he woke, and he was royally pissed. He’d been up ’til at least six or seven a.m., and after leaving Tammy in the frat house, he’d gotten in the pickup with his buddy Billy Dunne and gone to do 360s in the mud of the cow pasture out by McCrory’s lake. Sometime, in a haze of beer and piss, he passed out. Woke up, looking at the back of Billy’s head, too. What a shocker that had been.
    It was like the dream! Just like the dream!
    He didn’t like to think about what happened the night before. Even if he could remember, which he wasn’t so sure about, given the Mother of Hangovers that held him in its warm embrace. He had a taste of what he had come to think of as sour ass in his mouth, and a hammering in the head that so distracted him that he barely realized he’d woken up in the backseat of his Ford pickup truck.
    He got on the road once he found out from one of Bronwyn Shapiro’s friends exactly what route they were taking. He told her Bronwyn’s dad had called, and he needed to call him back to let him know. “For safety.”
    And that’s when a girl named Kathy Emmons stepped forward and told him how to track them down.
    2
    His head hurt so much, Olshaker ended up having to pull over at a place he liked to call Motel 69. Billy got the room, and Olshaker barely got his sorry ass to the bed before passing out again. Before he turned off the bedside light, he told Billy he had to sleep on the far side of the bed.
    “Why?” Billy’s eyes were all bloodshot and his face was pockmarked from too many Milky Way bars and Mr. Pibbs and Pabst Blue Ribbon in between to wash it all down. He looked like an old man with a mop of bright yellow hair thrown on his scalp.
    “ ’Cause you stink,” Olshaker said, but it wasn’t completely true. He was a little afraid that he’d start dreaming about Tammy and in the dream wrap his legs around her; only when he woke up, it might be Billy’s thighs rubbing against him.
    Out of this general fear, Olshaker kept his clothes on that night.
    They’d lost a day, but they got back on the road and ended up pretty much following the route that the Pimpmobile had taken.
    And he was there in Arizona when the Pimpmobile took the wrong turn off the main highway.
    He drove his truck up to a plateau and got out binoculars to watch what Tammy was up to with her friends.
    And when they got the flat tire, he turned to Billy Dunne and said, “Holy shit.