The ATV seemed unusually fast—apparently built or modified for racing—but the BSA was faster. Within a mile, Gurney had reduced the gap between them to fifty, maybe forty yards—still too far for a pistol shot from a motorcycle. He figured he’d be close enough in another half mile or so.

Perhaps sensing the same possibility from the opposing point of view, Panikos veered off the paved road onto a roughly parallel farm track that ran along the verge of a long cornfield. Gurney did the same, in case the little man decided to head off into the cornfield itself.

Even more rutted than the Barrow Hill trail, the farm track imposed its own speed limit of twenty to thirty miles per hour, taking away the BSA’s open-road advantage and preserving Panikos’s lead—even widening it a bit, since the forks and shocks of his machine were more suited to the surface than Gurney’s.

The track and its adjacent cornfield sloped down to the relatively flatter but still severely uneven terrain of the river valley. At the end of the track, Panikos continued on into the abandoned pasture of what Gurney had been told was once the region’s largest dairy farm. Now a patchwork of large grassy hummocks and muddy rivulets, it gave the ATV a distinct advantage over the BSA, widening Panikos’s lead to the original hundred yards and then some, impelling Gurney to push the BSA at insane speeds through the equivalent of an unlit slalom course. There was a primal simplicity in hot pursuit that anesthetized fear and suppressed any reasonable calculation of risk.

In addition to the red taillights that he was zeroing in on, he began catching glimpses of other lights farther down the valley. Colored lights, white lights, some seemingly fixed in place, some moving. These at first had a disorienting effect on him. Where the hell was he? Bright arrays of lights were as uncommon in Walnut Crossing as meadowlarks in Manhattan. Then, when he saw an arc of orange lights slowly rotating, it came to him.

It was the Ferris wheel at the Summer Mountain Fair.

Panikos was still widening his lead through a wet depression of boggy land that separated the former pasture from the higher and drier square-mile field that was home to the fair and its parking areas. For a few desperate seconds, Gurney thought he’d lost Panikos in the sea of vehicles surrounding the perimeter fence of the fair itself. But then he caught sight of the familiar taillights moving along an outer parking lane in the direction of the exhibitors’ entrance.