Strange Highways

said. "Maybe my future, our future. Or maybe only one possible future. I don't know how that works - or that it'll even help to think about it."
     Joey had a bitter taste in his mouth - as though biting into a hard truth could produce a flavor as acrid as chewing on dry aspirin. "Whether it was one possible future or the only future, I still have to carry some of the guilt for all those he killed after Beverly, because could've put an end to it that night."
     "Which is why you're here now, tonight, with me. To undo it all, Not just to save me but everyone who came after ... and to save yourself." She picked up the 12-gauge and chambered a shell. "But what I meant was that I think he's killed before Beverly. He was just too cool with you, Joey, too smooth with that story about her running in front of his car up on Pine Ridge. If she'd been his first, he'd have been easily rattled. When you opened that trunk and found her, he'd have been more shaken. The way he handled you - he's used to carting dead women around in his car, looking for a safe place to dump them. He's had a lot of time to think about what he'd do if anyone ever caught him with a body before he was able to dispose of it."
     Joey suspected that she was right about this, just as she was right about the weather not being responsible for the dead telephone.
     No wonder he had reacted with blind panic in Henry Kadinska's office when the attorney revealed the terms of his father's last will and testament. The money in the estate had originally come from P.J. It was blood money in more ways than one, as tainted as Judas's thirty pieces of silver. Cash accepted from the devil himself could have been no less clean.
     He chambered a shell in his shotgun. "Let's go."

    13

OUTSIDE, THE SLEET STORM HAD PASSED, AND RAIN WAS FALLING ONCE more. The brittle ice on the sidewalks and in the streets was swiftly melting into slush.
     Joey had been wet and cold all night. In fact, he had lived in a perpetual chill for twenty years. He was used to it.
     Halfway along the front walk, he saw that the hood was standing open on the Mustang. By the time he got to the car, Celeste was shining the flashlight into the engine compartment. The distributor cap was gone.
     "P.J.," Joey said. "Having his fun."
     "Fun."
     "To him it's all fun."
     "I think he's watching us right now."
     Joey surveyed the nearby abandoned houses, the wind-stirred trees between them: south to the end of the next block where the street terminated and the forested hills began, north one block to the main drag through town.
     "He's right here somewhere," she said uneasily.
     Joey agreed, but in the tumult of wind and rain, his brother's presence was even less easily detected than a reluctant spirit at a seance.
     "Okay," he said, "so we're on foot. No big deal. It's a small town anyway. Who's closer - the Dolans or the Bimmers?"
     "John and Beth Bimmer."
     "And his mother."
     She nodded. "Hannah. Sweet old lady."
     "Let's hope we're not too late," Joey said.
     "P.J. can't have had time to come here from the church ahead of us, cut the phone line, wait around to disable the car, and still go after anyone."
     Nevertheless, they hurried through the slush in the street. On that treacherous pavement, however, they didn't dare to run as fast as they would have liked.
     They had gone only half a block when the subterranean rumble began again, markedly louder than before, building swiftly until the ground quivered under them - as though no boats plied the River Styx any more, leaving the transport of all souls to deep-running, clamorous railroads. As before, the noise lasted no more than half a minute, with no catastrophic surface eruption of the seething fires below.
     The Bimmers lived on North Avenue, which wasn't half grand enough to be called an avenue. The pavement was severely cracked and buckled as though from a great and incessant pressure below. Even in the gloom, the once-white houses appeared too drab - as if they were not merely in need of a fresh coat of paint but were all heavily mottled with soot. Some of the evergreens were deformed, stunted; others were dead. At least North Avenue was on the north side of town: across Coal Valley Road from the Baker house and one block farther east.
     Six-foot-tall vent pipes,