Dark Rivers of the Heart

like it was. I want to go on just the way everything was.
        "That will never transpire, Mr. Descoteaux."
        "Why is this happening to me?"
        "Have you read the novels of Philip K. Dick, Mr. Descoteaux"
        "Who? No."
        The stranger shook his head with dismay.
        Harris felt more than ever as if he had crossed into White Rabbit and Cheshire Cat territory. "The futuristic world Mr. Dick wrote about is the world we're sliding into. It's a scary place, this Dicksian world.
        More than ever, a person needs friends."
        "Are you a friend?" Harris demanded. "Who are you people?"
        "Be patient and consider what I've said."
        The man started for the door.
        Harris reached out to stop him but decided against it. A moment later he was alone.
        His bowels were suddenly in turmoil. He hadn't lied to Jessica after all: He really did need to use the bathroom.
        Approaching Vail, high in the western Rockies, Roy Miro used the phone in the limousine to call the number of the cellular unit that Gary Duvall had given him earlier.
        "Clear?" he asked.
        "No sign of them yet," Duvall said.
        "We're almost there."
        "You really think they're going to show?"
        The stolen jetranger and its crew had been found in the Colorado National Monument. A call from the woman to the Grand Junction police had been traced to Montrose, indicating that she and Spencer Grant made it.
        He knew that they were fleeing south toward Durango. Roy didn't believe telephone calls could be deceptively routed with the assistance of a computer. He trusted not in a traced call but in the power of the past; where he would find the fugitives. the past and the present met, "They'll show," Roy said. "Cosmic forces are with us tonight." eh?" Duvall said, as if playing into a joke, waiting for the "Cosmic force punch line.
        "They'll show," Roy repeated, and he disconnected.
        Beside Roy, Steven Ackblom sat silent and serene.
        "We'll be there in 'Just a few minutes," Roy told him.
        Spencer had been driving for nearly an hour and a half before Ellie switched off the computer and unplugged it from the cigarette lighter. A dew of perspiration beaded her forehead, although the interior of the truck was not overheated.
        "God knows if I'm mounting a good defense or planning a double suicide," she said. "Could go either way. But now it's there for us to use if we have to."
        "Use what?"
        "I'm not going to tell you," she said bluntly. "It'll take too much time, Besides, you'd try t'o talk me out of it. Which would be a waste of time. I know the arguments against it, and I've already rejected them."
        "And this makes an argument so much easier-when you handle both sides of it."
        She remained somber. "If worse comes to worst, I'll have no choice but to use it, no matter how insane that seems."
        Rocky had awakened in the backseat a short while ago, and to him, Spencer said, "Pal, you're not confused back there, are you?"
        "Ask me anything else but not about that," Ellie said. "If I talk about it, if I even think too much about it, then I'll be too damn scared to do it when the time comes, if the time comes. I hope to God we don't need it."
        Spencer had never heard her babble before. She usually kept tight control of herself. Now she was spooking him.
        Panting, Rocky poked his head between the front seats. One ear up, one down: refreshed and interested.
        "I didn't think you were confused," Spencer told him. "Me, I'm twice as befuddled as a lightning bug bashing itself to bits to get out of an old mayonnaise jar. But I suppose that higher forms of intelligence, like the canine species, would have no trouble figuring out what she's ranting about."
        Ellie stared at the road ahead, rubbing absentmindedly at her chin with She had said that he could ask her about anything except that, whatever that might be, so he took her up on it.
        "Wherewas'BessBaer'going to settle down before I mucked things up?
        Where were you going to take that Rover and make a new life?"
        I "Wasn't going to settle again," she said, proving that she was listening.
        "I gave up on that. Sooner or later, they find me if I stay in one place too long. I spent a lot of the money I had… and some from friends… to buy that Rover and the gear in it. With