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behind her in the backseat doesn’t say anything. She can hear him breathing, cornered-animal style, and it sounds like he’s trying to keep every nerve in his body from bursting through his skin all at once. Sue keeps her eyes on the road. She flashes back through everything that just happened and sees it all clearly, though it doesn’t make any more sense than when it first happened. There’s no question that the old farm truck was the same truck she saw out on the road an hour or so earlier, when she was first trying to dial Phillip’s number in Malibu. It’s the same truck that flagged her down after the night at the pumpkin patch. Probably the same truck that chased her out of the Prudential Center. And those are just the times she noticed it. So the kid has to be an integral part of it whether he admits it or not.

    “Why did you run away the last time you saw me?” she asks.

    No reply. Sue looks back. Then she sees the headlights coming up behind them fast. Right away she knows it has to be the van.

    It’s approaching fast, and she doesn’t see any particular reason to try to outrun it, especially not with the roads the way they are. So she just lets it get up close behind her, until the kid cowering in her backseat realizes that it’s there too and starts freaking out again.

    “Wait a second, what are you doing?” he asks. “He’s getting too close. He’s going to see me.”

    “Then keep your head down,” Sue says, and pulls the wheel hard to the right, giving the van plenty of room to pass. Sure enough, the van swings into the oncoming lane, right alongside them, and the kid in her backseat shuts up, ducking his head. Sue is aware of the looming dark shape of the van holding at fifty miles an hour to her immediate left. Then a flashlight beam sweeps out of the driver’s side of the van, trained directly on Sue’s face, and it’s so bright that when she looks over she can’t see anything but white light that makes her eyes ache.

    “Don’t look at him!” the kid’s voice pipes up from behind her. “Don’t let him see your face!”

    For about half a second she considers hitting the brakes to get the light off her face and then disregards the idea—again, why bother? The van’s driver apparently sees whatever he was looking for, a scared woman in her thirties with a dead body partially uncovered in the passenger seat, and the flashlight beam goes off, leaving spots flashing in Sue’s eyes. The van’s engine revs and it goes blasting up ahead of her, disappearing around the next curve.

    “He’s gone,” she tells the kid. “You can come up now.”

    “He’s not gone.” He sits up, climbing and unfolding himself into the backseat right behind her head. “He’s just playing with you.”

    “Who is he? Who are you ?”

    “My name’s Jeff Tatum.” He tosses it out there so offhandedly that it has to be the truth. “You don’t know me. I live in Gray Haven.”

    “You’ve been following me for months.” This is just a guess but she’s pretty sure that if she’s wrong, he’ll tell her. “What do you want? How do you know me?”

    Big surprise, the kid doesn’t answer. Sue realizes that he’s reached between the seats and grabbed the map with the route planned out on it. He stares at it. “Where did you get this?”

    “It was stuck to Marilyn’s body.”

    “Punished, what does that mean?”

    “It means he was punishing me. Killing Marilyn and leaving her body here was my punishment. Why—”

    “What did you do?”

    She turns around, looks at him. “I’m done answering questions here. So far you haven’t told me anything.”

    But Jeff Tatum is just staring at the map, reading the names of the towns aloud. “Winslow, Stoneview, Ashford, Wickham…” He jerks his head up at the road in front of them. “Whoa, wait a second. You’re not actually following this route, are you?”

    “Yes.”

    “Oh hell no. You can’t. You can’t do that.”

    He