Mr. Murder

second violation, a chain-reaction of millions of tiny cracks webbed across the tempered glass, rendering it milky-opaque.
        The transition between the end of the dirt lane and the pavement wasn't smooth. They slammed backward onto the county road hard enough to make them bounce in their seats, and the crazed safety glass collapsed inward in gummy chunks.
        Marty pulled the wheel to the right, reversing uphill, and braked to a full stop when they were facing straight down the road. He could feel the heat of the flames that were eating the paint off the hood, but they didn't lick into the car.
        A bullet ricocheted off metal.
        He shifted out of reverse.
        Through his side window, he could see The Other standing spread-legged fifteen yards from the end of the driveway, gun in both hands.
        As Marty tramped on the accelerator, another round thudded into his door, below the window, but didn't penetrate to the interior of the car.
        The Other broke into a run again as the BMW shot downhill and away from him.
        Although the wind carried most of the smoke off to the right, there was suddenly a lot more of it, blacker than ever, and enough churned into the car to make them miserable. Paige started coughing, the girls were wheezing in the back seat, and Marty couldn't clearly see the road ahead.
        "Tire's burning!" Paige shouted above the howling wind.
        Two hundred yards farther downhill, the burning tire blew, and the BMW spun out of control on the snow-skinned blacktop. Marty turned the wheel into the slide, but applied physics didn't prove reliable this time. The car swung around a hundred and eighty degrees, simultaneously moving sideways, and they only stopped when they careened off the road and fetched up against the chain-link fence that marked the perimeter of the property owned by the defunct Prophetic Church of the Rapture.
        Marty climbed out of the car. He yanked open the back door, leaned in, and helped the frightened girls disentangle themselves from their seatbelts.
        He didn't even look to see if The Other was still coming because he knew the bastard was coming. This guy would never stop, never, not until they killed him, maybe not even then.
        As Marty extracted Emily from the back seat, Paige scrambled out of the driver's door because her side of the car was jammed into the chain-link. Having withdrawn the manila envelopes of cash from under her seat, she stuffed them inside her ski jacket. As she zipped shut, she looked uphill.
        "Shit," she said, and the shotgun boomed.
        Marty helped Charlotte out of the car as the Mossberg thundered again.
        He thought he heard the hard crack of small-arms fire, too, but the bullet must have gone wide of them.
        Shielding the girls, pushing them behind him and away from the burning car, he glanced uphill.
        The Other stood arrogantly in the center of the road, about a hundred yards away, convinced he was protected from the shotgun fire by distance, the deflecting power of the wailing wind, and perhaps his own supernatural ability to bounce back from serious damage. He was exactly Marty's size, yet even at a distance he seemed to tower over them, a dark and ominous figure. Maybe it was the perspective.
        Almost nonchalantly, he broke open the cylinder of his revolver and tipped expended cartridges into the snow.
        "He's reloading," Paige said, taking the opportunity to jam additional shells into the magazine of her shotgun, "let's get out of here."
        "Where?" Marty wondered, looking around frantically at the snow-whipped landscape.
        He wished a car would appear from one direction or another.
        Then he canceled his own wish because he knew The Other would kill any passersby who tried to interfere.
        They moved downhill, into the biting wind, using the time to put some distance between themselves and their pursuer while they figured what to do next.
        He ruled out trying to reach one of the other cabins scattered through the high woods. Most were vacation homes. No one would be in residence on a Tuesday in December unless, by morning, the new snow brought them in for the skiing. And if they stumbled into a cabin where someone was at home, with The Other trailing after them, Marty didn't want the deaths of innocent strangers on his conscience.
        Route 203 lay at the bottom of the county road.