“He has to stop sometime.” Ed rubbed his leg.

“Closest I’ve seen him to stopped is when he slows to shake those birds off onto his kills. He’s trying to outrun them. Hoping the fresh kill will give him time to get away. Scavenge or be scavenged.” I climbed into the driver’s seat.

“So you’re saying what?”

“We have to wait for him out front of where we know he’s going to be.”

“He’s all over these roads. How we going to know where he’s going to be next?”

“Well, idiot, he’ll be wherever the next body is buried.”

***

Problem was, the next body run off the road by the mad Winnebago was buried in a fluffy pile of airbags, powdered like a baby’s bottom—and crying like a baby, too, when we pulled him from his mangled Prius.

“What do we do now?” Ed asked, fingering the revolver in his belt.

“Shut up, Ed. Sir, if you can walk all right, I’m going to need your license and registration.”

The heaving man hauled himself upright and stumbled back to his car, the back of his tweed trousers clinging, dark and wet.

“Think the birds will eat him anyway?” Ed stood on his good toes, whispering in my ear.

“No, Ed, I don’t.”

The powdered man returned with his papers. Ed paced around the wreck while I read over his stats. “Portland? You a hippie?”

The man raised his hand to his head. “No—other Portland—other coast. Lobsters, not whales.”

“Wales? Ain’t that another country?”

“I said shuttup, Ed!”

Ed fished through the cans in the back of the truck and pulled out the shovel.

The lobster man raised his eyebrows. A goose egg had started swelling above his eye.

“Looks like you hit your head pretty hard, Mr. . . . Brooke.”

He prodded his forehead with his fingertips, swaying on his feet.

“You’re not drunk, are you, Mr. Brooke?”

“No! I’m not. I’m just on my way to look at a house in Arizona. I never even saw him till he was right on top of me.”

“You get a look at the driver?”

“No. He was moving too fast. I was watching the road.”

“Did he have a pack of birds after him?” Ed leaned on the shovel, stirring up a pile of loose rock.

“Birds?” Mr. Brooke looked to me, touching his head again like maybe he’d hit it harder than he thought.

“That’s deep enough, Ed.”

“No it ain’t.”

“The chain, Ed.”

Ed threw the shovel like a javelin and it crashed into the bed of cans.

Mr. Brooke jumped a foot in the air, shaking. He folded his knees and sat right down in the road.