Intensity

bold as forcing her off the highway. Then one of the tires on the Mustang had blown. Traveling at such high speed, she nearly spun out, nearly rolled, swerved from lane to lane, blue smoke pouring off the tires, but then she got control and pulled the car off the road onto the shoulder. Mr. Vess had stopped to assist her. She had been grateful for his offer of help, smiling and pleasantly shy, a nice girl with a one-inch gold cross on a chain around her neck, and later she had wept so bitterly and struggled so excitingly to resist surrendering her beauty, to turn her face away from his various sharp instruments, just a high-spirited young woman full of life and on the way to Reno until coincidence gave her to him.
        And if a blown tire, why not a malfunctioning lock?
        If coincidence can give, it can take.
        Mr. Vess lives with intensity but not without caution.
        Now this woman, calling for Ariel, has come into his life, like a blown tire, and suddenly he's not sure if she is a gift to him or he to her.
        Remembering her revolver and wishing for Dobermans, he glides across the laundry room to the cellar door.
        The woman's voice rises from the stairs below: "China Shepherd untouched and alive."
        The words are so strange-the meaning so mysterious-that they seem to be an incantation, encoded and cryptic.
        Confirming that perception, the woman repeats herself, as though she is chanting: "China Shepherd untouched and alive."
        Though Vess is not usually superstitious, he experiences a heightened sense of the supernatural, beyond anything he's felt thus far. His scalp prickles, and the flesh on the nape of his neck crawls, and his hand tightens on the pistol.
        After a hesitation, he leans through the open door and looks down the cellar stairs.
        The woman is only a few steps from the bottom. She's got one hand on the railing, the revolver held out in front of her in the other hand.
        Not a cop. An amateur.
        Nonetheless, she might be Mr. Vess's blown tire, and he's jumpy, twitchy, still extremely curious about her but prepared to put his safety ahead of his curiosity.
        He eases through the doorway onto the upper landing.
        As close as she is, she does not hear him because all is concrete, nothing to creak.
        He aims his pistol at the center of her back. The first shot will catapult her off her feet, send her flying with her arms spread toward the basement below, and the second shot will take her as she is in flight. Then he'll race down the stair behind her, firing the third and fourth rounds, hitting her in the legs if possible. He'll drop on top of her, press the muzzle into the back of her head, and then, then, then when he's totally in control of her, dominant, he can decide whether she's still a threat or not, whether he can risk questioning her or whether she's so dangerous that nothing will do but to put a couple of rounds in her brain.
        As the woman passes under the light near the foot of the stairs, Mr. Vess gets a better look at her revolver. It is indeed a Smith & Wesson.38 Chief's Special, as he had thought earlier, when he had seen it from the second-floor bedroom window, but suddenly the make and model of the weapon have electrifying meaning for him.
        He smells a Slim Jim sausage. He remembers liquid-night eyes widening in shock, terror, and despair.
        He has seen two of these guns in the past several hours. The first belonged to the young Asian gentleman at the service station, who drew it from under the counter in self-defense but never had the opportunity to fire.
        Although the Chief's Special is a popular revolver, it is not so universally admired that one sees it everywhere in use. Edgler Vess knows , with the certainty of a fox on the scent of a rabbit in the weeds, that this is the same gun.
        Although there are still many mysteries about the woman on the stairs below him, though her presence here is no less astonishing to him than it was before, there is nothing supernatural about her. She knows the name Ariel not because she has been watching from some world beyond this one, not because she is in the dutiful service of some higher force, but simply because she must have been there , in the service station, when Vess was chatting up the two clerks and when, moments later, he killed them.
        Where she could have been hiding, how he could have