Shattered

his radio.
        He did not look at the scenery.
        He did not smoke, chew gum, or talk to himself.
        Mile after mile, his attention was on the road, the car ahead, the machine that hummed satisfactorily all around him. Not once in those first hours of the journey did he think specifically about the man and the boy in the Thunderbird. His discordant thoughts, but for his driving, were vague and undetailed. Mostly he was riveted by a broad mesmeric hatred that had no single focus. Somehow the car ahead would eventually become that focus. He knew this. But for the moment he only followed like a machine.
        From Harrisburg, the Thunderbird went west on the turnpike, switched from that to Interstate 70, and passed across the northernmost sliver of West Virginia. Past Wheeling, barely inside of Ohio, the car signaled its intention to take an exit lane into a service area full of gasoline stations, motels, and restaurants.
        The moment he saw the flashing signal, Leland braked and allowed the van to fall a mile behind Doyle. When he took the ramp a minute after the Thunderbird, the big black car was nowhere in sight. At the bottom of the ramp, Leland hesitated only a second, then turned west toward the heaviest concentration of tourist facilities. He drove slowly, looking for the car. He found it parked in front of a rectangular aluminum diner that looked like an old-fashioned railroad passenger car. The T-Bird was cooling in the shade of a huge sign that proclaimed Harry's Fine Food.
        Leland drove until he came to Breen's, the last diner in the chrome, plastic, fake-stone, neon jungle of the interchange. He parked the Chevrolet on the far side of the small structure so that no one down at Harry's Fine Food, five hundred yards away, would see it. He got out, locked the van, and went to have his own lunch.
        Breen's was, at least on the outside, much like the restaurant where Doyle and the kid had stopped. It was eighty feet long, an aluminum tube designed to look like a railroad passenger car, with one long narrow window row around three sides and an entrance cubicle tacked on the front almost as an afterthought.
        Inside, a single width of cracked plastic-coated booths was built onto the wall beside the contiguous windows. Each booth was equipped with a scarred ashtray, cylindrical glass sugar dispenser, glass salt and pepper shakers, a stainless-steel napkin dispenser, and a selector for the jukebox that stood next to the rest rooms at the extreme east end of the restaurant. A wide aisle separated the booths from the counter that ran from one end of the place to the other.
        Leland turned right when he went in, walked to the end of the counter, and sat on the curve where he could occasionally look out the windows beyond the booths and see the Thunderbird down at Harry's.
        Because it was the last restaurant in the complex, and because the rush-hour rush had passed by two-thirty in the afternoon, Breen's was almost deserted. In a booth just inside the door, a middle-aged couple worked at hot roast beef sandwiches in mutual stony silence. An Ohio State Police lieutenant occupied the booth behind them, facing Leland. He was busy with a cheeseburger and French fries. In the booth at the far end of the room from Leland, a frowsy waitress with bleached hair smoked a cigarette and stared at the yellowed tile ceiling.
        The only other person in the place was the counter waitress, who came to see what Leland wanted. She was perhaps nineteen, a fresh and pretty blonde with eyes as blue as Leland's. Her uniform was off the rack of a discount house, but she had personalized it. The skirt was hemmed eight inches above her shapely knees. A small embroidered chipmunk capered on one skirt pocket, a rabbit on the other. She had replaced the uniform's original white buttons with red ones. On her left breast stood an embroidered bird, and on her right breast was her name in fancy script: Janet . And a cheerful greeting just below the name: Hi there! She had a sweet smile, a curiously charming way of cocking her head, an almost Mickey Mouse cuteness-and she was obviously an easy lay.
        “Seen the menu?” she asked. Her voice was at once throaty and childlike.
        “Coffee and a cheeseburger,” Leland said.
        “French fries too? They're already made.”
        “Well, okay,” he said.
        She wrote it down, then winked at him. “Back in a