Shadowfires

a gun on Sharp if that became necessary, thus ruining his career but saving his soul. The latter course seemed an obvious choice, except that if he pulled a gun on Sharp he might be shot and killed. Sharp was cleverer and quicker than Peake, and Peake knew it. He had hoped that his failure to shoot at Shadway would have put him in such disfavor with the deputy director that he would be booted off the case, dropped with disgust, which would not have been good for his career but would sure have solved this dilemma. But Sharp's
talons were deep in Jerry Peake now, and Peake reluctantly
acknowledged that there would be no easy way out.
    What most bothered him was the certainty that a smarter man than
he would already have found a way to use this situation to his great
advantage. Having never known his mother, having been unloved by his
sullen widowed father, having been unpopular in school because he was
shy and introverted, Jerry Peake had long dreamed of remaking himself
from a loser into a winner, from a nobody into a legend, and now his
chance had come to start the climb, but he did not know what to do
with the opportunity.
    He tossed. He turned.
    He planned and schemed and plotted against Sharp and for his own
success, but his plans and schemes and plots repeatedly fell apart
under the weight of their own poor conception and naďveté. He wanted
so badly to be George Smiley or Sherlock Holmes or James Bond, but
what he felt like was Sylvester the Cat witlessly plotting to
capture and eat the infinitely clever Tweetie Bird.
    His sleep was filled with nightmares of falling off ladders and
off roofs and out of trees while pursuing a macabre canary that had
Anson Sharp's face.
Ben had wasted time ditching the stolen
Chevette at Silverwood Lake and finding another car to steal. It
would be suicidal to keep the Chevette when Sharp had both its
description and license number. He finally located a new black Merkur
parked at the head of a long footpath that led down to the lake, out
of sight of its fisherman owner. The doors were locked, but the
windows were open a crack for ventilation. He had found a wire coat
hanger in the trunk of the Chevette-along with an incredible
collection of other junk-and he had brought it along for just this
sort of emergency. He'd used it to reach through the open top of the window and pop the door latch, then had hot-wired the Merkur and headed for Interstate 15.
    He did not reach Barstow until four forty-five. He had already
arrived at the unnerving conclusion that he would never be able to
catch up to Rachael on the road. Because of Sharp, he had lost too
much time. When the lowering sky released a few fat drops of rain, he
realized that a storm would slow the Merkur down even more than the
reliably maneuverable Mercedes, widening the gap between him and
Rachael. So he swung off the lightly trafficked interstate, into the
heart of Barstow, and used a telephone booth at a Union 76 station to
call Whitney Gavis in Las Vegas.
    He would tell Whitney about Eric Leben hiding in the trunk of
Rachael's car. With any luck at all, Rachael would not stop on the road, would not give Eric an easy opportunity to go after her, so the dead man would wait in his hidey-hole until they were all the way into Vegas. There, forewarned, Whit Gavis could fire about six rounds of heavy buckshot into the trunk as Eric opened it from the inside, and Rachael, never having realized she was in danger, would be safe.
    Everything was going to be all right.
    Whit would take care of everything.
    Ben finished tapping in the number, using his AT&T card for
the call, and in a moment Whit's phone began to ring a hundred and sixty miles away.
    The storm was still having trouble breaking. Only a few big drops
of rain spattered against the glass walls of the booth.
    The phone rang, rang.
    The previously milky clouds had curdled into immense gray-black
thunderheads, which in turn had formed still-darker, knotted, more
malignant masses that were moving at great speed toward the
southeast.
    The phone rang again and again and again.
    Be there, damn it, Ben thought.
    But Whit was not there, and wishing him home would not make it
true. On the twentieth ring, Ben hung up.
    For a moment he stood in the telephone booth, despairing, not sure
what to do.
    Once,
he'd been a man of action, with never a doubt in a crisis. But in reaction to various unsettling discoveries about the world he lived in, he