Shattered

desk.
        “Hey, good news! I know you must have been worried about getting stuck-”
        “Wasn't worried at all, Mr. Doyle. If you hadn't reserved it, I'd have had to rent it to coons.
        Doyle was weary from a long day on the road, and he could not decide what the clerk meant. “Coons?”
        “Naggers,” the clerk said. “Three times they came in. If I didn't have your reservation, I'd have had to let one of them take 22 for the night. And I hate that. I'd rather let a room stand empty all night then rent to one of them.”
        Doyle felt as if he were giving his approval to the man's bigotry when he signed the registration paper. He wondered, briefly, why he, dressed and groomed as he was, made any better impression than the blacks who had stopped before him.
        When the handsome young man gave Doyle the room key, he said, “What kind of gas mileage you get on that T-Bird?”
        Alex had known his share of bigots, and he was expecting this one, like the others, to continue with his practiced invective. He was surprised, then, by the change of subject. “Mileage? I don't know. I never checked.”
        “I'm saving for a car like that. Gas hogs, but I love them. Car like that tells you about a man. You see a man in a T-Bird, you know he's making it.”
        Alex looked at the room key in his hand. “Twenty-two,' Where's that?”
        “To the right, clear at the end. Nice room, Mr. Doyle.”
        Alex went out to the car. He knew why the clerk accepted him. The Thunderbird was, for that man, a symbol which eclipsed reality. A car like that transformed a counterculture freak into a mere eccentric, so far as the clerk was concerned. That attitude depressed Alex. He had not expected that here in the heartlands a man was defined by his possessions.
        
        George Leland spent Tuesday night in a cheaper place three miles west of the Plains Motel. Though it was a tiny single room, he was not always alone. Courtney was often there. Sometimes he saw her standing in a corner, her back to the wall. Other times she sat on the foot of the bed or in the poorly padded plank chair by the bathroom door. He got angry with her more than once and told her to go away. She would vanish as quietly as she appeared. But then he would miss her and long for her-and she would return, making the cheaper place seem far more luxurious and grand than the Plains Motel.
        He slept fitfully.
        Two hours before dawn, unable to sleep at all any more, he got up and showered and dressed. He sat on the bed, several maps opened on the covers, and studied the route that would be followed Wednesday. He traced and retraced it with his blunt fingers.
        Leland knew that somewhere in those six hundred miles he would have to take care of Doyle and the boy. He no longer needed to conceal this truth from himself. Courtney had helped him face up to it. He must kill them, just as he had killed that highway patrolman who tried to stand between him and Courtney. It was much too dangerous to put this thing off any longer. By tomorrow night they would be well over halfway to San Francisco. If Doyle decided to change their route for the last long leg of the journey, Leland might lose them for good.
        Tomorrow, then. Somewhere between Lawrence, Kansas, and Denver. Leland would finally be striking back at Them, at everyone who had put him down and worked against him these last two years. This was the new beginning. From now on, he was not going to be pushed around. He would teach everyone to respect him. His luck would pick up, too. With Doyle and the kid out of the way, he and Courtney could go on together with their wonderful life. He would be all that she had, and she would cling to him.
        
        A few minutes past six o'clock Tuesday evening, a call came through from the police lab. Detective Ernie Hoval took it in his sparsely furnished office on the second floor of the divisional headquarters building. “This about the Pulham case?” he asked before the man on the other end of the line could say anything. “If it's not, take it to someone else. I'm on the Pulham until it's solved, and nothing else.”
        “You'll want this,” the lab man said. He sounded like the same balding, sallow, narrow man who had not been humbled by Detective Hoval the night before. “We got the fingerprint report from Washington. Just came in on the teletype.”
        “And?
        “No