‘I don’t know who the hell did it. I’m not sure that I care. All I know is that the whole thing is totally squalid, totally underhand, and if I could lay my hands on just one of the people responsible. I’d screw their head off.’

Della shielded her eyes, and looked up at the dark purple sky, and the birds which circled above them with tireless patience.

‘It’s like the end of the world,’ she said, quietly.

Ed’s mechanics managed to get the Mercury to limp at fifteen mph as far as Tucumcari. There, its cooling system gave out completely, and the seven people who had been riding in it stood around like relatives at a funeral while Dyson Kane poked inside the steamy hood again, and pronounced it dead.

‘We just don’t have the spares,’ he said. ‘And it looks like the whole engine’s been damaged beyond repair. I’m afraid it’s RIP.’

Ed and Dyson left everybody beside the highway while they drove around Tucumcari, looking for abandoned cars or wagons. They found three, but all three of them were wrecked, or had wheels missing. There was only one reasonable-looking vehicle in the whole place, a shiny 1968 Cadillac parked outside an odd asbestos and corrugated-iron house in a sloping street with a view of Tucumcari Peak. It was almost dark now, and they were getting desperate.

Dyson jumped down from the Chevy and quickly crossed the street to where the Cadillac was parked.

‘It’s locked,’ he called, trying the handle. ‘Maybe I can open it up with a length of wire.’

Ed looked around the untidy interior of the wagon. There was a wire coat-hanger in back, and he leaned over the seat to reach for it. He heard a snap, like someone slamming a book shut, and at first he thought it was his seat mounting, clicking into place. But then he looked up and saw Dyson huddled up on the road beside the Cadillac, with a dark river of blood already sliding across the dusty blacktop from a wound in his head.

Ed immediately ducked low in his seat, and reached for his automatic. He couldn’t find it. Either it had slid backwards into the garbage on the floor, or someone had taken it. Peter Kaiser, maybe, when he wasn’t looking? There was another snap, and a high-powered bullet pinged off the hub of the offside front wheel.

Inch by inch, Ed raised his head, until his eyes appeared over the sill of the Chevy’s window. It was impossible to see where the shooting was coming from, although he guessed the sniper was concealed in the old asbestos house. He could hardly see Dyson now, in the gloom of the evening, but there wasn’t any question at all that he was dead. Half of his head was lying on the road.