It landed with the driver’s window facing up to the sky, about eighty feet away from the pillar of fire that had been its cargo. By then Vince was running back along his own skid mark. He saw the figure that tried to pull itself through the misshapen window. The face turned toward him, except there was no face, only a mask of blood. The driver emerged to the waist before collapsing back inside. One tanned arm—the one with the tattoo—stuck up like a submarine’s periscope. The hand dangled limp on the wrist.

Vince stopped at Lemmy’s bike, gasping for breath. For a moment he thought he was going to pass out, but he leaned over, put his hands on his knees, and presently felt a little better.

“You got him, Cap.” Lemmy’s voice was hoarse with emotion.

“We better make sure,” Vince said. Although the stiff periscope arm and the hand dangling limp at the end of it suggested that would just be a formality.

“Why not?” Lemmy said. “I gotta take a piss anyway.”

“You’re not pissing on him, dead or alive,” Vince said.

There was an approaching roar: Race’s Harley. He pulled up in a showy skid stop, killed the engine, and got off. His face, although dusty, glowed with delight and triumph. Vince hadn’t seen Race look that way since the kid was twelve. He had won a dirt-track race in a quarter-midget Vince had built for him, a yellow torpedo with a souped-up Briggs & Stratton engine. Race had come leaping from the cockpit with that exact same expression on his face, right after taking the checkered flag.

He threw his arms around Vince and hugged him. “You did it! You did it, Dad! You cooked his fucking ass!”

For a moment Vince allowed the hug. Because it had been so long. And because this was his spoiled son’s better angel. Everybody had one; even at his age, and after all he’d seen, Vince believed that. So for a moment he allowed the hug, and relished the warmth of his son’s body, and promised himself he would remember it.

Then he put his hands against Race’s chest and pushed him away. Hard. Race stumbled backward on his custom snakeskin boots, the expression of love and triumph fading—

No, not fading. Merging. Becoming the look Vince had come to know so well: distrust and dislike. Quit, why don’t you? That’s not dislike and never was.

No, not dislike. Hate, bright and glowing.

All squared away, sir, and fuck you.

“What was her name?” Vince asked.

“What?”

“Her name, John.” He hadn’t called Race by his actual name in years, and there was no one but them to hear it now. Lemmy was sliding down the soft earth of the embankment, toward the crushed metal ball that had been LAUGHLIN’S cab, letting them have this tender father-son moment in privacy.