“What’s wrong with you?” Pure scorn. But when Vince reached out and tore off those fucking mirror shades, he saw the truth in John “Race” Adamson’s eyes. He knew what this was about. Vince was coming in five-by, as they used to say in ’Nam. Did they still say that in Iraq, he wondered, or had it gone the way of Morse code?

“What do you want to do now, John? Go on to Show Low? Roust Clarke’s sister for money that isn’t there?”

“It could be there.” Sulking now. Race gathered himself. “It is there. I know Clarke. He trusted that whore.”

“And the Tribe? Just . . . what? Forget them? Dean and Ellis and all the others? Doc?”

“They’re dead.” He eyed his father. “Too slow. And most of them too old.” You, too, the cool eyes said.

Lemmy was on his way back, his boots puffing up dust. He had something in his hand.

“What was her name?” Vince repeated. “Clarke’s girlfriend. What was her name?”

“Fuck’s it matter?” Race paused then, struggling to win Vince back, his expression coming as close as it ever did to pleading. “Jesus. Leave it, why don’t you? We won. We showed him.”

“You knew Clarke. Knew him in Fallujah, knew him back here in the World. You were tight. If you knew him, you knew her. What was her name?”

“Janey. Joanie. Something like that.”

Vince slapped him. Race blinked, startled. Dropped for a moment back to ten years old. But just for a moment. In another instant the hating look was back, a sick, curdled glare.

“He heard us talking there in that diner parking lot. The trucker,” Vince said. Patiently. As if speaking to the child this young man had once been. The young man he’d risked his life to save. Ah, but that had been instinct, and he wouldn’t have changed it. It was the one good thing in all this horror. This filth. Not that he’d been the only one operating on filial instinct. “He knew he couldn’t take us there, but he couldn’t let us go either. So he waited. Bided his time. Let us get ahead of him.”

“I have no clue what you’re talking about!” Very forceful. Only Race was lying, and they both knew it.

“He knew the road and went after us where the terrain favored him. Like any good soldier.”

Yes. And then had pursued them with a single-minded purpose, regardless of the almost certain cost to himself. Laughlin had settled on death before dishonor. Vince knew nothing about him but felt suddenly that he liked him better than he liked his own son. Such a thing should not have been possible, but there it was.

“You’re fucked in the head,” Race said.