Shattered

all. By chance, he's stayed in the approximate area where we've stayed each night-and equally by chance, he's started out around the same hour each morning that we started out. It's purely coincidental, the way he keeps catching up to us.” He knew that this was the only rational explanation, as weak as it was, the only thing that made any sense. Yet he did not believe a word of it. “You read about dozens of wilder coincidences in the newspapers. All the time.” He was talking, now, only to calm the boy. That old, familiar, dreaded fear of his had returned, and he knew that he would not be calm again, himself, until they were safely in San Francisco.
        He pressed down on the accelerator.
        The Thunderbird surged forward, opening a gap between them and the Chevrolet. The gap rapidly widened, even though the Automover put on its own burst of speed.
        “You'll have a lot more driving to do if we go the back way,” the boy said, a vague apprehension in his voice.
        “Not necessarily. We can go north and pick up Route 36 again,” Doyle said, watching the van dwindle in the rearview mirror. “That's a pretty good road up there.”
        “It'll still mean an extra couple of hours. Yesterday you were really tired when we got to the motel.”
        “I'll be all right,” Doyle said. “Don't you worry about me.”
        They took Connecting Route 77 north to Route 36 and went west across the top of the state.
        Colin no longer found the fields, grain elevators, oil derricks, and dust storms especially interesting. He hardly looked at the scenery. He tucked in his Frankenstein T-shirt and smoothed it down, played tunes on his bony knees, cleaned his thick glasses, and smoothed his shirt some more. The minutes passed like snails.
        
        Leland let the van slow down to seventy, quieting the furniture and household goods which rattled noisily in the cargo hold when he drove any faster. He looked at the golden, transparent girl beside him. “They must have turned off somewhere along the way. We won't catch up with them until we get into Denver this evening.”
        She said nothing.
        “I should have stayed back a ways until I saw a chance to run them off the road. I shouldn't have pressured him like that right away.”
        She only smiled.
        “Well,” he said, “I guess you're right. The highway's too public a place to take care of them. Tonight, at the motel, will be better. I might be able to do it with the knife, if I can sneak up on them. No noise that way. And they won't be expecting anything there.”
        The fields flashed past. The leaden sky grew lower, and rain spattered across the windshield. The wipers thumped hypnotically, like a club slammed again and again into something soft and warm.
        

    Nine
        
        The Rockies Motor Hotel, on the eastern edge of Denver, was an enormous complex in the shape of a two-story tick-tack-toe grid, with one hundred rooms in each of its four long wings. Despite its size-nearly two miles of concrete-floored, open-air, metal-roofed corridors-the place seemed small, for it stood in the architectural shadow of the city's high-rise buildings and, more impressively, in view of the magnificent snowcapped Rocky Mountains which loomed up to the west and south. During the day the high country sun gleamed on the ranks of precisely duplicated windows and on the steel rain spouting, transformed the tops of the long walkway awnings into corrugated mirrors, shimmered on the Olympic swimming pool in the enclosed center of the courtyard grid. At night warm orange lamps glowed behind the curtains in most of the rooms, and there were also lights in the pool and around the pool; and the front of the motel was a blaze of yellow, white, and red lights which were there chiefly to draw attention to the office, lobby, restaurant, and Big Rockies Cocktail Lounge.
        At ten o'clock Wednesday night, however, the motel was dim and drab. Although all the usual lights were burning, they could not cast back the driving gray rain and the thin night mist which carried a reminder of the winter chill that had not been long gone from the city. The cold rain bounced on the macadam parking lot, thundered on the rows of cars, and pattered against the sheet-glass walls of the lobby and restaurant. It drummed insistently on the roofs and on the rippled awnings that covered the promenades on every wing, a pleasant sound which