Life Expectancy

condition would allow, Lorrie squinted back toward the house.
        I could see nothing in my mirrors other than empty highway directly behind us and a tumult of snow whipped into horizontal spirals by our wake wind, reflecting our taillights.
        "See anything?" I asked.
        "He's coming."
        "We'll outrun him."
        "Can we?"
        The Hummer had a more powerful engine than the Explorer. Because he didn't have a pregnant woman aboard, the gunman would be quicker to take risks, to push his vehicle to its limits.
        "Call 911," I said.
        The cell phone was plugged into the cigarette lighter, nestled in a console cup holder She plucked it up, switched it on, made an impatient wordless sound as she waited for the phone-company logo and the preliminary data to fade.
        Headlights appeared in my rearview mirror. They were higher off the pavement than the lights of the average SUV. The Hummer.
        Lorrie keyed in 911. She waited, listened, pressed end, and entered the three digits again.
        Cell phone service in some rural areas wasn't as good in 1998 as it is now, just seven years later. Complicating matters, the storm chopped the signal.
        The Hummer had gained on us: about twenty yards back, a vehicle with a personality, beetle-browed and belligerent.
        I had to weigh which risk was worse for mother and baby: pushing the Explorer faster in terrible weather, or waiting to see if the Hummer could catch us.
        We were already doing forty, too fast for these conditions. Accumulated snow concealed the lane markings. I couldn't easily tell where the pavement ended and the shoulder of the road began.
        Having often traveled this highway, I knew in some places the westside shoulder was wide, in other places narrow. Guardrails edged the steepest drop-offs; but some of the unprotected slopes beyond the shoulder were abrupt enough to tip us into a roll if I went more than two feet off the pavement.
        I accelerated to fifty, and like a ghost ship fading into haunted fog, the Hummer receded into thickening snow.
        "Damn phone," Lorrie said.
        "Keep trying."
        The night abruptly grew blustery. Rugged land looms over Hawks-bill Road in the east. In certain storms, the wind comes down off those slopes and builds velocity on its way into the lowlands, scourging the highway.
        Higher-profile vehicles-big rigs and motor homes-are sometimes blown over along this route if their drivers ignore wind advisories from the highway patrol. Fierce gusts hammered us, hampering my best efforts to keep the Explorer in what I perceived to be the southbound lane.
        Feverishly I wracked my brain for a better strategy than this headlong flight. I couldn't think of one.
        Lorrie groaned louder than before, sucked breath between her clenched teeth. "Oh, baby," she told our unborn, "please take your time. No rush, baby, no hurry."
        Out of the glittering white murk, the Hummer reappeared behind us: black, big, blazing, like a demon-possessed vehicle in a bad horror movie..
        We hadn't gone a mile. The outskirts of Snow Village still lay over four miles away.
        The tire chains made a bell song on exposed blacktop, churned with much crunching and creaking across ice. In spite of the chains and the SUV's four-wheel drive, any speed above fifty invited catastrophe.
        Headlights flared in the rearview mirror.
        Lorrie was having no success with the phone. She made a rude suggestion to our service provider, and I seconded her sentiments.
        For the first time in this pursuit, I detected the growl of the Hummer's engine separate from the roar of the Explorer. It was just a machine, not capable of intention, not evil, yet it sounded sinister.
        Regardless of the risks of speed, I couldn't let the gunman ram us from behind. On this snowy pavement, we would spin out of control, tip over, and roll along the road or off it.
        I pushed the Ford to fifty-five. Sixty. When we came to the next descending stretch of roadway, it would feel as though I had driven onto a bobsled chute.
        The Hummer dwindled in the mirror as I accelerated, then almost at once began to gain on us again.
        In a blizzard as daunting as this, sheriff's deputies sometimes cruise Hawksbill Road in Suburbans equipped with plows and winches and multiple thermoses of hot coffee, searching for motorists in