Shattered

guess you'll have to come with me.”
        “Out? Where?”
        Alex hesitated a moment. “To… To buy a gun.”
        Now Colin was wide awake. He stood up and straightened his Phantom of the Opera shirt. “Do you really think we need a gun? Do you think that man in the Automover-”
        “He probably won't show up again.”
        “Then-”
        “I only said he probably won't. But I just don't know any more… I've thought about it all night, all the way across Nevada, and I can't be sure of anything.” He wiped at his own face, pulling off his weariness. “And then when I'm pretty sure that we've lost him-well, I think about some of the people we've run into. That service station attendant near Harrisburg. The woman at the Lazy Time Motel. I think about Captain Ackridge… I don't know. It's not that I think those people are dangerous. It's just that they represent something that's happening… Well, it seems to me we ought to have a gun, more to keep it in the house in San Francisco than to protect us for the last few hours of this trip.”
        “Then why not buy it in San Francisco?”
        “I think I'll sleep better if we get it now,” Alex said.
        “But I thought you were a pacifist.”
        “I am.”
        Colin shook his head. “A pacifist who carries a gun?”
        “Stranger things happen every day,” Doyle said.
        
        A few minutes past eleven o'clock, an hour and a half after they had gone out, Doyle and the boy returned to the motel room. Alex closed the door, shutting out the insufferable desert heat. He twisted the dead lock and put the guard chain in place. He tried the knob, but it would not turn.
        Colin took the small, heavy pasteboard box to the bed and sat down with it. He lifted the lid and looked inside at the.32-caliber pistol and the box of ammunition. He had stayed in the car when Doyle went to buy it, and he had not been allowed to open the box on the short ride back. This was his first look at the weapon. He made a sour face. “You said the man in the sporting goods store called it a lady's gun.”
        “That's right,” Doyle said, sitting down on the edge of his bed and taking off his boots. He knew he was not going to be able to stay awake more than another minute or two.
        “Why did he say that?”
        “Compared to a.45, it has less punch, less kick, and makes a great deal less noise. It's the kind of pistol a woman usually buys.”
        “Did you have any trouble buying it, since you're from out of state and all?”
        Doyle stretched out on the bed. “No. In fact, it was too damned easy.”
        

    Nineteen
        
        Friday afternoon, George Leland drove across the Nevada badlands toward Reno, his eyes brimming with pain even though the sunglasses he wore cut out half the glare from the white-white sand. He did not make good time. He was unable to keep his mind on his driving.
        Since that especially severe headache he had suffered early Thursday morning when he had gone after Alex Doyle with a garden ax, Leland had found his thoughts wandering freely, almost beyond his control. He was not able to concentrate on anything for more than five minutes at a stretch. His mind jumped from subject to subject like a motion picture full of quick-cuts.
        Time and again he snapped back from a daydream, surprised to find himself behind the wheel of the van. He had driven miles and miles while his mind was elsewhere… Apparently some fraction of his attention was on the road ahead and the traffic around him; but it was a very small fraction. If he had been on a heavily used freeway instead of out here in the flat, open wastelands, he would have killed himself, would have demolished the van during one of those daydreams.
        Courtney was always there with him, in and out of the dreams. Now, as he came back again to the sand-flanked highway and the reality of the Chevrolet grumbling crankily beneath him, she was perched only a couple of feet away, her long legs drawn up on the seat beneath her.
        “I almost had them yesterday,” Leland said contritely. “But these damn worn tires… “
        “That's okay, George,” she said, close yet faraway.
        “No, Courtney. I should have nailed them. And… Last night, when I checked the motel in Salt Lake, they were not there .” He was puzzled by that. “In that book of his, it said they'd stay at the Highlands Motel in Salt Lake