Shattered

passed, eliciting a symphony of angrily blaring horns, they rocketed across Illinois at top speed for another five minutes, putting miles between themselves and the stranger in the van. They were half exhilarated and half panicked, caught up in the excitement of the chase.
        However, with the Chevrolet out of sight now, and the sense of being hotly pursued thus dimmed, Doyle was made aware of the risk that he was taking by maintaining such a terribly high speed even in this light traffic. If a tire blew…
        Above the shrieking wind and the manic music of the pavement rushing under them, Colin said, “What about radar?”
        If they were stopped for speeding, would any right-thinking highway patrolman believe that they were fleeing from a mysterious man in a rented Automover? Fleeing from a man they did not even know, had never met - had never really even seen? Fleeing from a man who had neither harmed nor threatened to harm them? Fleeing from a complete stranger whom Alex feared only because - well, only because he had always been afraid of that which he could not fully understand? No, that kind of story would look like a lie, a clumsy excuse. It was too fantastic and, at the same time, far too shallow. It would only antagonize a cop.
        Reluctantly Doyle eased back on the accelerator. The speedometer needle fell rapidly to the one-hundred mark, quivered there like a hesitant finger, then dropped even lower.
        Doyle looked in the mirror.
        The van was nowhere in sight. For a few minutes, anyway, they would be unobserved by the driver of the Chevrolet.
        “He's probably coming up fast,” Colin said.
        “Exactly.
        “What are we going to do?”
        Immediately ahead was the exit for Route 51 and signs announcing the distance to Decatur.
        “We'll use secondary roads for the rest of the day,” Alex said.
        “Let him hunt for us along Route 70 if he wants.”
        He used the Thunderbird's brakes for the first time in a long while, drove down the exit ramp into that flat country.
        

    Six
        
        From Decatur, they took the secondary Route 36 west to the end of the state, then followed it into Missouri. The land was even flatter than it had been during the morning; the fabled prairies were a monotonous spectacle. just past noon, Alex and the boy ate a quick lunch at a trim white-clapboard cafe' and then pressed on.
        Not far beyond the turnoff from Jacksonville, Colin said, “What do you think, then?”
        “About what?”
        “The man in the Chevrolet.”
        The westering sun glared on the windshield.
        “What about him?” Doyle asked.
        “Who could he be?”
        “Isn't he FBI?”
        “That was just a game.”
        For the first time Alex realized how much the ubiquitous van had affected the boy, how much it had unsettled him. If Colin was no longer interested in his games, he must be quite disturbed, and he deserved a straightforward reply.
        “Whoever he is,” Doyle said, shifting his aching buttocks on the vinyl seat, “he's dangerous. ”
        “Somebody we know?”
        “No. I think he's a complete stranger.”
        “Then why is he after us?”
        “Because he needs to be after someone.”
        “That's no answer.”
        Doyle thought about that special breed of madmen which had grown out of the previous decade, out of those pressure-cooker years when the very fabric of society had been heated to the boiling point and very nearly melted away. He thought about men like Charles Manson, Richard Speck, Charles Whitman, Arthur Bremer… Though Charles Whitman, the Texas tower sniper who had shot more than a dozen innocent people, might have been suffering from an undiagnosed brain tumor, the others had not required any physical illness or rational explanations for the bloodletting they had caused. The slaughter - which had been legitimized by a government which gloated over the “body counts” from Vietnam - had been, in itself, the reason and explanation for the event. There were at least a dozen other names that Doyle could no longer recall, men who had murdered wantonly but not sufficiently to gain immortality. Since a madman had to be either clever in his methods, selective enough to choose the famous as his targets, or ruthless enough to cut down a dozen or more people before he was at all memorable. The videotape replay of an assassination