Shattered

milk; his arms ached dully from holding the damned steering wheel for hour after hour, mile after mile…
        “You awake?” he asked Colin. In the darkness, with the gentle country music coming out of the radio, the boy should have been asleep.
        “I'm here,” Colin said.
        “Should try to catch a few winks.”
        “I'm afraid the car is going to break down,” Colin said. “I can't sleep for worrying about it.”
        “The car's okay,” Doyle said. “The body got dented in a little, but that's all. The only reason it begins to shake when we go past eighty-five is that the wheel starts brushing against the indented metal.”
        “I'll still worry,” Colin said.
        “We'll stop at the next likely place and freshen up,” Doyle said. “We both need it. And the car's low on gas.”
        Late Thursday afternoon they had headed southwest across Utah on a series of back roads, then picked up the secondary two-lane Route 21, which carried them northwest again. The swift desert sunset came, faded rapidly from a fiery orange-red to solemn purple and then a deep and velvety black. And still they drove, crossing into Nevada and switching over to Route 50, which they intended to follow from one end of the Silver State clear to the other.
        Shortly after ten o'clock they stopped to get gasoline and to call Courtney from a pay phone. They pretended that they were at their motel, because Alex could not see any good reason to worry her now. Though they had been through a harrowing ordeal, it was probably all finished now. They had lost their stalker. There was no need to alarm her unnecessarily. They could give her the full story when they finally got into San Francisco.
        From ten-thirty Thursday night until two o'clock Friday morning, they passed through what had once been the heart of the romantic Old West. The forbidding sand plains lay dark and empty to the left and right. Hard, barren mountains thrust up without warning and fell sharply away, out of place even if they had spent millennia here. Cactus loomed at both sides of the road, and rabbits occasionally fled across the pavement in the yellow glare of their headlights. If the trip had gone differently, if there had been no madman on their tail for the last two thousand miles, perhaps Nevada would have been a pleasure, a chance to indulge in nostalgia and a few of Colin's games. But now it was a bore, just something to be passed through before they could get to San Francisco.
        At two-thirty they stopped at a combination service station and all-night diner. While the Thunderbird was topped off with gas and oil, Colin used the bathroom, freshened up for the next long leg of the marathon drive. In the diner, they ordered hamburgers and French fries. And while those were sizzling, Alex went into the men's room to shave and wash his face.
        And to take two caffeine tablets.
        He had bought a package of them earlier in the night, at the service station where they had stopped just before leaving Utah. Colin had been in the car at the time and had not witnessed the purchase. Alex did not want the boy to know about the tablets. Colin was already too tense for his own good. It would not be good for him to find out that Doyle, despite all his assurances, was getting sleepy at the wheel.
        He looked at his reflection in the cracked mirror above the dirty washbasin, grimaced. “You look terrible.”
        The reflection remained mute.
        
        They by-passed the exit to Reno and stayed on Route 50 until they found a motel just east of Carson City. It was a shabby place, decaying at the edges. But neither of them had the energy to look any farther. The dashboard clock read eight-thirty-more than twenty-two hours since they had left Denver.
        In their room, Colin went straight for his bed and flopped down. “Wake me in six months,” he said.
        Alex went into the bath and closed the door. He used his electric razor to touch up the shave he had taken six hours before, brushed his teeth, took a hot shower. When he came back into the main room, Colin was asleep; the boy had not even bothered to undress. Doyle put on clean clothes, then woke him.
        “What's the matter?” the boy asked, nearly leaping off the bed when Doyle touched his shoulder.
        “You can't sleep yet.”
        “Why not?” Colin rubbed at his face.
        “I'm going out. I won't leave you alone, so I