Shattered

exactly like Hoffman-when he's trying to look ugly, that is.” He had gaped at her. “When he's trying to look ugly , for Christ's sake?” She grimaced. “I meant… Well, Hoffman can't really look ugly, even when he tries. When you smile, then, you look like Hoffman but not as handsome…” He watched her trying to extricate herself from the embarrassing hole she'd dug, and he had begun to laugh. His laughter had infected her. Soon they were giggling like idiots, expanding on the joke and making it funnier, laughing until they were sick and then settling down and then making love with a paradoxically fierce affection. Ever since that night Doyle tried to remember to smile a lot.
        On the right-hand side of the street a sign announced the entrance to the Schuylkill Expressway. “Give your FBI man a break,” Alex told the boy. “Let him tail us in peace for a while. The expressway's coming up, so you better turn around and buckle your seatbelt.”
        “Just a minute,” Colin said.
        “No,” Alex said. “Get your seatbelt on, or I'll also make you use the shoulder strap.”
        Colin despised being bound up by both belts.
         “Half a minute,” the boy said, straining even harder against the back of the seat as Alex drove the car onto the approach ramp leading up to the superhighway.
        “Colin-”
        The boy turned around and bounced down onto the seat. “I just wanted to see if he followed us onto the expressway. He did.”
        “Well, of course he did,” Alex said. “An FBI man wouldn't be restricted to the city limits. He could follow us anywhere.”
        “Clear across the country?” the boy asked.
        “Sure. Why not?”
        Colin laid his head back against the seat and laughed. “That'd be funny. What would he do if he followed us clear across country and found out we weren't the radicals he was after?
        At the top of the ramp, Alex looked southeast at the two empty lanes of blacktop. He eased his foot down on the accelerator, and they started west. “You going to put your seatbelt on?”
        “Oh sure,” Colin said, fumbling for the half of the buckle that was rolle up in the trough beside the passenger's door. “I forgot.” He had not forgotten, of course. Colin never forgot anything. He just didn't like to wear the belt.
        Briefly taking his eyes from the empty highway ahead of them, Alex glanced sideways at the boy and saw him struggling with the two halves of the seatbelt. Colin grimaced, cursed the apparatus, making problems with it so Doyle would know just what he thought of being tied down like a prisoner.
        “You might as well grin and bear it,” Alex said, grinning himself as he looked ahead at the highway again. “You're going to wear that belt the whole way to California, whether you like it or not.”
        “I won't like it,” Colin assured him. The seatbelt in place, he smoothed the wrinkles out of his King Kong T-shirt until the silk-screened photograph of the gigantic, raging gorilla was neatly centered on his frail chest. He pushed his thick hair out of his eyes and straightened the heavy wire-framed glasses which his button nose was hard-pressed to hold in place. “Thirty-one hundred miles,” he said, watching the gray roadway roll under and behind them. The Thunderbird's power seat elevated high enough to give him a good view. “How long will it take to drive that far?”
        “We wont be lolling around,” Alex said “We ought to get into San Francisco Saturday morning.”
        “Five days,” Colin said. “Hardly more than six hundred miles a day.” He sounded disappointed by the pace.
        “If you could spell me at the wheel,” Alex said, “we'd do better. But I wouldn't want to handle much more than six hundred a day all by myself.”
        “So why didn't Courtney drive out with us?” Colin asked.
        “She's getting the house ready. She met the movers there, and she's arranging for drapes and carpeting - all that stuff.”
        “Did you know that when I flew up to Boston to stay with Pauline while you two were on your honeymoon-that was my first plane ride?”
        “I know,” Alex said. Colin had talked about it for two solid days after he came back.
        “I really liked that plane ride.”
        “I know.”
        Colin frowned. “Why couldn't we sell this car and fly out to California with Courtney? “
        “You know the answer to that,” Alex said. “The car's only