This zooming along at seventy-five miles an hour was another reason he was glad Melissa and Jess weren’t here. He only had two hands.

They shot along the highway, the lights of central Bixby glowing before them, a great mass of darkness all around.

“Can you see anything?”

She leaned forward, squinting through the windshield at the dark road ahead. “Barely. I think that little cluster of taillights is them.”

“So what are we supposed to do now?” Jonathan said. “Try to catch up and help Rex? Or stick to the plan when we hit the county line and head out to pick up Melissa and Jess?”

“Crap, I don’t know. I hate all this plan stuff.”

“Me too,” Jonathan said.

“Maybe we should keep following Rex. We can swoop in and pick him up after he runs out of gas.”

Jonathan swallowed. “You do realize that’ll be trickier than it sounds, right, Dess? Remember what you said about them maybe having guns?”

“Absolutely. But we can’t just leave him out here with real Grayfoots chasing him. Who knows what they’ll do to him?”

Jonathan couldn’t argue with that. Melissa’s car couldn’t outrun those two Mercedes even if it wasn’t about to conk out. “I guess I could fly over and get Jessica after midnight falls.”

“What about Melissa?” Dess said. “We’ll need her if we’re going to get into Angie’s mind. You actually going to hold her hand?”

Cold fingers stroked Jonathan’s spine at the thought. He’d touched Melissa exactly once before, for an emergency jump across a hundred yards of angry tarantulas. In those few seconds her tortured mind had flooded into him like a wave of nausea; it was something he never wanted to repeat.

He sighed. “I guess I’ll have to. But what about you and Rex being alone in Saddleback? It’ll take me ten minutes to get Jessica there, and that’s the deep desert—darkling country.”

“Don’t worry about me.” Dess kicked the duffel bag on the floor in front of her, which let out a clank. “I think our big problem right now is Rex staying alive until midnight.”

“Yeah, you got that right. Those guys in the Mercs looked pretty pissed.” Jonathan took a deep breath. “Okay, we go after Rex and save his sorry ass from the Grayfoots.”

He accelerated still more, squeezing every drop of speed out of his father’s car.

Dess scrunched down into her seat. “Sounds like a plan to me.”

15

11:34 P.M.

OUT OF GAS

As they crossed the county line, Rex kept his eyes locked on the road ahead. “Are they giving up?”

Angie turned to stare through the back window, then let out a string of curses. “No, still with us. And if they’re risking Bixby at this hour to catch us, that means they’re in a really bad mood.”

Rex gripped the steering wheel, trying not to scream with frustration. In all his detailed planning, it had never once occurred to him that the real Grayfoots would show up. “How did they know we were meeting?”

“No one followed me, Rex, I’m positive.”

“What about your phone?”

“They couldn’t have tapped it. That number I gave you was a disposable cell phone I bought last week at the Tulsa Mall. Never used it before you called, so they couldn’t have…” Her voice turned cold. “You didn’t call me from your house, did you?”

Rex didn’t answer for a few critical seconds, and by the time he found the right words, it was too late to lie.

“Was I not supposed to?” he finally managed.

She let out a groan.

“You mean, my phone is tapped?” he cried.

“Only for the last two years. Pinhead.”

Rex drove on, waiting for the burning sensation of a knife slipping between his ribs, but all he heard was Angie muttering beneath her breath. “Jesus. Maybe you really are just a bunch of kids.”

The pursuers drew closer, filling the old Ford with their headlights. They were easing up on either side now, like wolves shepherding wounded prey away from the herd, out to a nice, private killing ground. This abandoned stretch of the access road was probably just the sort of place they’d been waiting for. Rex’s plan had brought them to a perfect spot.

Angie pulled out a phone. “All right. I’m calling the police.”

“It won’t work out here,” Rex said softly. He and Dess had picked this route to make sure Angie couldn’t escape the blue time after the car ran out of gas. Since the new highway had been built, hardly anyone ever drove through Saddleback. There were no cell phone towers, no houses, no cops—just rattlesnakes, slither burrows, and plenty of places to bury a couple of bodies.

Rex checked his watch. If Dess’s calculations were on target, they’d be sputtering to a halt in about three minutes. He had to think of something soon or they were both dead.

But what could he do, trapped on a road with no turnoffs, no choices but to keep driving straight?

Suddenly Rex felt something deep inside himself laughing at his own paralysis. Why was he thinking like prey? Why was he letting his pursuers dictate the terms? Why not make them take some risks? He gritted his teeth and pulled the wheel sharply to the left. The Ford slid from the road and onto the sandy shoulder, where it swerved like a sidewinder for a few seconds. Then the tires gripped the hard-packed desert floor, and the car straightened, rattling like an old washing machine as it crashed through mounds of scrub grass and rumbled over prairie dog holes.

For a moment the pursuing headlights angled off into the distance behind them. But then the two Mercedes swerved from the road, turning onto the desert in pursuit.

“What are you doing?” Angie cried, her teeth snapping as the car shook.

“Out here there’s a chance one of them will get a flat.”

“Isn’t there also a chance of us getting a flat?” Rex only nodded, deciding not to explain that one way or another, the Ford was about to stop moving. “Have you got a better idea?”

“My better idea was not using a tapped phone!”

“You could have mentioned that in your note!”

“It was so obvious we were watching you! Jesus. How did you people ever take control of a whole town?”

“That wasn’t us who…” Rex’s words trailed off. Up ahead was a cluster of glistening humps, like a field of spiky basketballs glowing in the moonlight. He smiled at the sight. If all three cars were disabled, he and Angie might stand a chance of escaping on foot.

He aimed toward the humps, ignoring the Ford’s rattling complaints and building up as much speed as he could. Gas or no gas, tires or no tires—once Melissa’s car got going, it took a while to come to a stop.

“Rex? What is that ahead?”

“Big patch of rainbow cactus.”

“What the hell? Are you trying to get us killed?”

“No. But we’re about to run out of gas.”

“What?”

“Long story. This way at least we’ve got a chance.”

“Of what? A quick death?”

His answer was cut off by a sudden bang beneath the car, a sound like a watermelon hitting concrete at eighty miles an hour. More collisions rocked the Ford, Angie crying out as each cactus struck. The shock of the impacts shot up through the car seat, jolting Rex like a series of kicks in the butt.

Behind them a pair of headlights dropped back. One of the Mercedes had ground to a halt, with either a tire burst or an axle busted. As Rex watched in the shuddering rearview mirror, the car was overwhelmed by its own cloud of dust.

Only one to go.

Then, with a parting bang, the cactus patch fell behind them. Melissa’s Ford was wobbling, its right-front tire making a sound like a rubber flag in a strong wind. But the engine kept rumbling underneath Rex, and the desert still flashed past in front of their headlights.

“They’ll be getting nervous now,” Angie said, looking back.