Mr. Murder

left, going very fast, then turning sharply back to the right.
        Charlotte sensed they were going to crash into something. If they weren't smashed to smithereens in the wreck, she and Em had to be ready to move fast when they came to a stop, get out of the car, and out of the way so Daddy could deal with the fake.
        She had no doubt Daddy could handle the other man. Though she wasn't old enough to have read any of his novels, she knew he wrote about killers and guns and car chases, just this sort of thing, so he would know exactly what to do. The fake would be real sorry he had messed with Daddy, he would wind up in prison for a long, long time.
        The car swerved back to the left, and in the front seat the fake made small bleating sounds of pain that reminded her of the cries of wayne the Gerbil that time when somehow he'd gotten one small foot stuck in the mechanism of his exercise wheel. But wayne never cursed, of course, and this man was cursing more angrily than ever, not just using the S-word but God's name in vain, plus all sorts of words she had never heard before but knew were unquestionably bad language of the worst kind.
        Keeping a grip on Em, Charlotte felt along her seatbelt with her free hand, seeking the release button, found it, and held her thumb lightly on it.
        The car jolted over something, and the driver hit the brakes.
        They slid sideways on the wet street. The back end of the car swung around to the left, and her tummy turned over as if they were on an amusement-park ride.
        The driver's side of the car slammed hard into something, but not hard enough to kill them. She jammed her thumb on the release button, and her safety belt retracted. Fumbling at Em's waist-"Your belt, get your belt off!"-she found her sisters release button in a second or two.
        Em's door was jammed against whatever they had hit. They had to go out Charlotte's side.
        She pulled Em across her. Pushed open the door. Shoved Em through it.
        At the same time, Em was pulling her, as if Em herself was the one doing the rescuing, and Charlotte wanted to say, Hey, who's the big sister here?
        The fake daddy saw or heard them getting out. He lunged for them across the back of the front seat-"Little bitch!"-and grabbed Charlotte's floppy rain hat.
        She scooted out from under the hat, through the door, into the night and rain, tumbling onto her hands and knees on the blacktop.
        Looking up, she saw that Em was already tottering across the street toward the far sidewalk, wobbling like a baby that had just learned to walk. Charlotte scrambled up and ran after her sister.
        Somebody was shouting their names.
        Daddy.
        Their real Daddy.
        Three-quarters of a block away, the speeding Buick hit a broken tree branch in a huge puddle and slid on a churning foam of water.
        Marty was heartened by the chance to close the gap but horrified by the thought of what might happen to his daughters. The mental film clip of a car crash didn't just play through his mind again, it had never stopped playing. Now it seemed about to be translated out of his imagination, the way scenes were translated from mental images into words on the page, except that this time he was taking it one large step further, leaping over typescript, translating directly from imagination into reality. He had the crazy idea that the Buick wouldn't have gone out of control if he hadn't pictured it doing so, and that his daughters would burn to death in the car merely because he had imagined it happening.
        The Buick came to a sudden and noisy stop against the side of a parked Ford Explorer. Though the clang of the collision jarred the night, the car didn't roll or burn.
        To Marty's astonishment, the right-side rear passenger door flew open, and his kids erupted like a pair of joke snakes exploding from a tin can.
        As far as he could tell, they weren't seriously hurt, and he shouted at them to get away from the Buick. But they didn't need his advice.
        They had an agenda of their own, and immediately scrambled across the street, looking for cover.
        He kept running. Now that the girls were out of the car, his fury was greater than his fear. He wanted to hurt the driver, kill him.
        It wasn't a hot rage but cold, a mindless reptilian savagery that scared him even as he surrendered to it.
        He was less