CHAPTER 2

      Nash spun to see a jittery skeleton of a man, his frame draped with worn-edged jeans and a denim jacket over a splotchy white t-shirt, a gun in his hand, trembling like a leaf about to fall.

      Nash put his hands up a few inches, some sort of instinct telling him to do it even though he hadn’t been told to.

      “This is a mistake,” he said. “I just stopped for a Coke. I didn’t know what was going on so . . .” Nash realized explaining wasn’t going to help make him look any better in the gunman’s dilated eyes.

      “I seen you come in,” the man said. “Seen you take the bag.”

      Nash closed his eyes briefly. This guy had been watching the whole time. It was too late to make up a story about why the bag was in his hand.

      “Jacy, get to the car,” Nash said. Best he could do was to keep her safe. If this got ugly – uglier – he still wanted her to get away.

      Jacy backed slowly toward the Honda.

      “We didn’t see a thing,” Nash said. He slowly bent his knees and set the bag down on the parking lot concrete. “We’re just gonna be on our way.”

      “The fuck you didn’t see a thing,” the man said. The gun came up higher in his hand, his arm outstretched to the point that it looked painful. The barrel wavered and would send a bullet in a direction that no one would be able to guess if the man found the notion to shoot. “You saw me,” he said.

      “It’s dark, mister. Real dark. We didn’t see shit.” Nash took a tentative step backward to the car. He heard the passenger door creak on worn out hinges, and he knew Jacy had reached the car. He felt the keys rub against his thigh, pressed against the forgotten dollar bills in his front pocket.

      The gunman’s feet shuffled in place, the addict’s tap dance. Nash calculated the distance between his car behind him and the gunman ahead. Which was the better bet? He felt doubtful the man would let him drive away. And with the jitters and nervous sweat he could smell coming off the guy even from twenty feet away, Nash knew he had a chance at disarming him. But then what?

      Nash hadn’t been in a fight since the day he left Noirville, when they used to be a weekly occurrence. His skills were surely rusty. But this was exactly his kind of fight. Not one he started, but one he knew he could finish.

      The man wiped a runny nose with the back of his free hand. “Why’d you have to come here, man?”

      A question Nash was asking himself. “You let us go, and we were never here. Okay?”

      The man thought about it, his body twitching as the synapses fired trying to decide Nash’s fate. A dirty fingernail went into his mouth to be chewed, the tap dance reached a Gene Kelly climax.

      Nash tried banking on the complete sensory overload in the gunman. “I’m just gonna–”

      A bullet bit the pavement by Nash’s right foot. Nash bolted away, drawing fire away from the car and Jacy. As he rabbited across the parking spaces, he aimed for the shadow of the octagon. Another shot kicked up dry dirt in what were once flower beds but had fallen into arid voids in the wake of neglect from highway maintenance crews. Nash crouched as he ran, slowing him a little, but making him a smaller target.

      He found the center of the building, an open air pass way with a Men’s room on one side, a Women’s room on the other, and his original goal of two soft drink machines in between. He bypassed the Coke and ran for the far side of the building, into the blackness of the prairie at night.

      Nash paused at the far end of the corridor to listen and make sure the man had followed him. If he’d decided to skip going after Nash and attack Jacy instead, Nash would go back for her. But he heard uneven footsteps, like a giant toddler was chasing him.

      Nash ran into the darkness. His eyes were slow to adjust from the daylight-simulating lamps of the parking lot. His calves scraped against dead and half-dead plants of indeterminate size. He paused, hands on knees and sucking air, his own wheezing breath the only movement in the still night. On the horizon, he saw a cluster of white lights like a constellation fallen to earth. The tops of grain silos, easily two thirds of a mile away. Too far to run in the hopes of a phone or some help, and to leave the rest area, would mean leaving Jacy behind. To Nash, that defeated the whole purpose of coming back to get her out.

      Nash watched as the gunman appeared at the end of the pass way, a dark shape against the rectangle of light. He stopped and looked, arms outstretched and grasping at any clue as to which way to continue the chase. Nash figured that if he could lure him out into the dark, then loop around back to the parking lot, he could be gone with Jacy before the man realized what had happened. And even if he decided to give chase, that cube truck was no match for a hatchback.

      Nash bent down and felt the ground, his eyes seeing vague shapes now. He found a palm-sized rock and hurled it to his left. The gunman spun at the sound and fired, then followed his shot into the dark.

      Nash ran the opposite way around the far side of the octagon, back to Jacy.

      As he reached the harsh line separating light from dark under the overhead lamps, a pair of headlights crested a rise in the southbound lanes. Nash reached his car.

      “You okay?” he asked.

      “Yeah,” Jacy said. “What the fuck was that?”

      “I