Intensity

sound oddly like a hard strum on a banjo, but the windshield didn't shatter.
        The engine stuttered. Either the fuel had been exhausted at last or the crash had done severe mechanical damage.
        Gasping for breath after the cinching punishment of the shoulder harness, praying that the engine wouldn't fail just yet, Chyna popped the car into reverse again.
        Ideally, the Honda would be blocking the road when the killer came around the bend. She had to force him to stop-and to get out of his motor home.
        The battered car wheezed, almost stalled, then unexpectedly revved, and Chyna said gratefully, "Jesus," as it rolled backward onto the pavement.
        She pulled across both lanes but swung around a little, angling the car uphill so the killer would be able to see the damaged front end as soon as he negotiated the curve.
        The engine clunked twice and died, but that was all right. She was in position.
        Without the engine noise for competition, the rain seemed to be falling more forcefully than before, rattling on the roof and snapping against the glass.
        At the upper curve, darkness still held.
        She put the Honda in park, so it would not coast backward when she took her foot off the brake.
        The headlights were both broken out, but the windshield wipers continued to thump back and forth, operating on battery power. She didn't switch them off.
        She opened the driver's door and, feeling horribly exposed in the dome light, started to get out. She needed to be away from the car and in hiding by the time the motor home appeared-which would be in maybe twenty seconds, maybe ten, hard to say because she had lost track of how much time had passed since she herself had driven around the bend.
        The gun.
        Before she fully escaped the car, Chyna remembered the revolver. She swung back inside, reached for the weapon-but it was no longer on the seat.
        In the first or second crash, the gun must have been thrown onto the floor. Leaning across the console between the front seats, she felt frantically in the darkness, found cold steel, the barrel, her finger actually slipping into the smooth muzzle. With a wordless murmur of relief, she fished the gun from the foot space and reversed her grip on it.
        With the weapon firmly in hand, she scrambled out of the Honda. She left the driver's door standing open.
        Rain chilled her, and wind.
        In the direction from which she had come, the night brightened faintly, and the redwood trunks near the shoulder of the curve began to glow as if in the radiance of a sudden moon.
        Chyna sprinted off the slippery blacktop and splashed through another shallow drainage ditch, shuddering as the icy water poured over the tops of her shoes. On this side of the pavement, the trees were set back twenty or thirty feet from the shoulder. She headed for the colossal woods at a point directly across the highway from the behemoth into which she had driven the Honda.
        Long before she reached the nearest tree, she skidded on the spongy mat of wet needles, fell, and landed on a cluster of redwood cones. The cones crumbled slightly-a hard crunching sound against the small of her back-although judging by the flash of pain, it almost seemed as though her spine was the source of the cracking.
        She would have preferred to crawl on her hands and knees to concealment, but she had to hold on to the revolver, and she was concerned that, crawling, she would inadvertently plug the barrel with dirt or wet needles. She was up and moving at once, therefore, as the highway behind her flared with light and an engine quarreled noisily with the storm.
        The motor home had turned the bend.
        She was only fifteen feet or so from the highway, which wasn't far enough, because there was little underbrush to provide cover beneath the giant redwoods-largely ferns, and more of them in the gloom ahead than in the area immediately around her. He must not see her. All was lost if he glimpsed her as she dashed for cover.
        Fortunately, her blue jeans were dark, not stone-washed and highly reflective, and her sweater was cranberry red, which was not as bad as if it had been white or yellow, and her hair was not blond but dark. Yet she could have felt no more visible if she had been trying to run to cover in a wedding dress.
        He would be focused on the Honda, surprised to see it