Intensity

all lost girls are the same girl, united by their suffering.
        She kept her foot pressed firmly on the accelerator, and the Honda crested a hill, and the aged motor home was on the long gradual downslope ahead, five hundred feet away. Her breath caught in her throat, and then she exhaled with a whispered, " Oh, Jesus. "
        She was approaching him at too great a speed. She eased off the accelerator.
        By the time she was two hundred feet from the motor home, she had matched speeds with it. She fell back farther, hoping that he hadn't noticed her initial haste.
        He was driving between fifty and fifty-five miles per hour, a prudent pace on that highway, especially as they were now traveling on a stretch without a median strip and with somewhat narrower lanes than previously. He wouldn't necessarily expect her to pass him, and he shouldn't be suspicious when she remained behind; after all, at this sleepy hour, not every driver in California was in a blistering hurry or suicidally reckless.
        At this more reasonable speed, she didn't have to concentrate as intently as before on the road ahead, and she quickly searched the immediate interior of the car in hopes of finding a cellular telephone. She was pessimistic about the chances that a night clerk at a service station would have a portable phone, but on the other hand, half the world seemed to have them now, not just salesmen and Realtors and lawyers. She checked the console box. Then the glove box. Under the driver's seat. Unfortunately, her pessimism proved well founded.
        Southbound traffic passed in the oncoming lanes: a big rig with a lead-footed driver, a Mercedes close in its wake-then, following a long gap, a Ford. Chyna paid special attention to the cars, hoping that one of them would be a police cruiser.
        If she spotted a cop, she intended to get his attention with the car horn and by making a weaving spectacle of herself in his rearview mirror. If she was too late with the horn and if the cop didn't look back and catch a glimpse of her reckless slalom, she would turn and pursue him, reluctantly letting the motor home out of her sight.
        She wasn't hopeful about finding a cop anytime soon.
        All the luck seemed to be with the killer. He conducted himself with a confidence that unnerved Chyna. Perhaps that confidence was the only guarantor of his good luck-although even for one as rooted in reality as Chyna, it was easy to let superstition overwhelm her, attributing to him powers dark and supernatural.
        No. He was only a man.
        And now she had a revolver. She was no longer helpless.
        The worst was past.
        Lightning traveled the northern sky again, but this time it was not pale or diffused through cloud layers. The bolts were as bright as though the naked sun were breaking through from the other side of the night.
        In those stroboscopic flashes, the motor home seemed to vibrate, as if divine wrath would shatter it and its driver.
        In this world, however, retribution was left to mortal men and women. God was content to wait for the next life to mete out punishment; in Chyna's view, this was His only cruel aspect, but in this was cruelty enough.
        Explosions of thunder followed the lightning. Although something above should have broken, nothing did, and the rain remained bottled higher in the night.
        She hoped to spot a sign for a highway patrol depot, where she could seek help, but none appeared. The nearest town of appreciable size, where she might be fortunate enough to find a police station or a cruising squad car, was Eureka, which was hardly a metropolis. And even Eureka was at least an hour away.
        As a child, flat under beds and curled in the backs of closets, perched on rooftops and balanced in the upper reaches of trees, in winter barns and on warm night beaches, she had hidden and waited out the passions and the rages of adults, always with dread but also with patience and with a Zen-like disconnection from the realities of time. Now impatience plagued her as never before. She wanted to see this man caught, manacled, harried to justice, hurt . Desperately she wanted this and without a single additional minute of delay, before he could kill again . Her own survival wasn't currently at stake but that of a teenage girl whom she had never met, and she was surprised-and made uneasy-to discover that she could care so ferociously