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first stop had been bad, but this second one was worse.
    Parked slightly crooked (and blocking what appeared to be the fire exit) was a filthy, dinged-up Ford Explorer with two bumper stickers on the back. MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT THE STATE CORRECTIONAL FACILITY, one read. The other was even more succinct: I BRAKE FOR JACK DANIELS.
    “Maybe we oughtta do it right here,” Robbie said. “While she’s inside slopping it up and watching the Titans.”
    It was a tempting idea, but Wesley shook his head. “We’ll wait. She’s got one more stop to make. Hopson, remember?”
    “That’s miles from here.”
    “Right,” Wesley said. “But we’ve got time to kill, and we’re going to kill it.”
    “Why?”
    “Because what we’re up to is changing the future. Or trying to, at least. We have no idea how tough that is. Waiting as long as possible improves our chances.”
    “Wesley, that is one drunk chick. She was drunk when she got out of that first juke-joint in Central City, and she’s going to be a lot drunker when she comes out of yonder shack. I can’t see her getting her car repaired in time to rendezvous with the girls’ bus forty miles from here. And what if we break down while we’re trying to follow her to her last stop?”
    Wesley hadn’t considered this. Now he did. “My instincts say wait, but if you have a strong feeling that we should do it now, we will.”
    “The only strong feeling I have is a scared-to-freakin’-death feeling,” Robbie said. He sat up. “Too late to do anything else, anyway. Here she comes, Miss America.”
    Candy Rymer emerged from The Broken Windmill in a moderate weave. She dropped her purse, bent down to get it, almost fell over, cursed, picked it up, laughed, and then continued to where her Explorer was parked, digging her keys out as she went. Her face was puffy, not quite hiding the remains of what must once have been very good looks. Her hair, blond on top and black at the roots, hung around her cheeks in lank curls. Her belly pooched out the front of elastic-waist jeans just below the hem of what had to be a Kmart smock top.
    She got in her beat-to-shit SUV, kicked the engine into life (it sounded in desperate need of a tune-up) and drove forward into the roadhouse’s fire door. There was a crunch. Then her backup lights came on and she reversed so fast that for one sickening moment Wesley thought she was going to hit his Malibu, crippling it and leaving them on foot as she drove off toward her appointment in Samarra. But she stopped in time and peeled onto the highway without pausing to look for traffic. A moment later Wesley was following as she headed east toward Hopson. And the intersection where the Lady Meerkats’ bus would arrive in four hours.
    .
     
    In spite of the terrible thing she was going to do, Wesley couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for her, and he had an idea Robbie felt the same. The follow-up story they’d read about her in the Echo told a tale as familiar as it was sordid.
    Candace “Candy” Rymer, age forty-one, divorced. Three children, now in the custody of their father. For the last twelve years of her life she’d been in and out of spin-dry facilities. According to an acquaintance (she seemed to have no friends), she had tried AA and decided it wasn’t for her. Too much holy-rolling. She had been arrested for DUI half a dozen times. She had lost her license after each of the last two, but in both cases it had been restored, the second time by special petition. She needed her license to get to her job at the fertilizer factory in Bainbridge, she told Judge Wallenby. What she didn’t tell him was that she had lost the job six months previouscand nobody checked. Candy Rymer was a booze-bomb waiting to go off, and the explosion was now very close.
    The story hadn’t mentioned her home address in Montgomery, but it didn’t need to. In what Wesley considered a rather brilliant piece of investigative journalism (especially for the Echo ), the reporter had retraced Candy’s final binge, from The Pot O’ Gold in Central City to The Broken Windmill in Eddyville to Banty’s Bar in Hopson. There the bartender was going to try to take her keys. Unsuccessfully. Candy was going to give him the finger and leave, shouting “I’m done giving my business to this dive!” back over her shoulder. That was at seven o’clock. The reporter theorized that Candy must have pulled over somewhere for a short nap, possibly on Route