Dan screamed with Abra’s voice, knowing it wasn’t quite her voice. Almost, but not quite. Crow heard the difference, but didn’t know what it was. The hat woman would have; it was the hat woman who had unwittingly shown Abra this mindswap trick.
“But before we get rolling, we’re going to have an understanding. No more lies, that’s the understanding. The next time you lie to your Daddy, this old geezer snoring beside me is dead meat. I won’t use the dope, either. I’ll pull in at a camp road and put a bullet in his belly. That way it takes awhile. You’ll get to listen to him scream. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Dan whispered.
“Little girl, I fucking hope so, because I don’t chew my cabbage twice.”
Crow slammed the door and walked quickly around to the driver’s side. Dan closed Abra’s eyes. He was thinking about the spoons at the birthday party. About opening and shutting drawers—that, too. Abra was too physically weak to grapple with the man now getting behind the wheel and starting the engine, but part of her was strong. If he could find that part . . . the part that had moved the spoons and opened drawers and played air-music . . . the part that had written on his blackboard from miles away . . . if he could find it and then take control of it . . .
As Abra had visualized a female warrior’s lance and a stallion, Dan now visualized a bank of switches on a control room wall. Some worked her hands, some her legs, some the shrug of her shoulders. Others, though, were more important. He should be able to pull them; he had at least some of the same circuits.
The truck was moving, first reversing, then turning. A moment later they were back on the road.
“That’s right,” Crow said grimly. “Go to sleep. What the hell did you think you were going to do back there? Jump in the toilet and flush yourself away to . . .”
His words faded, because here were the switches Dan was looking for. The special switches, the ones with the red handles. He didn’t know if they were really there, and actually connected to Abra’s powers, or if this was just some mental game of solitaire he was playing. He only knew that he had to try.
Shine on, he thought, and pulled them all.
6
Billy Freeman’s pickup was six or eight miles west of the gas station and rolling through rural Vermont darkness on 108 when Crow first felt the pain. It was like a small silver band circling his left eye. It was cold, pressing. He reached up to touch it, but before he could, it slithered right, freezing the bridge of his nose like a shot of novocaine. Then it circled his other eye as well. It was like wearing metal binoculars.
Or eyecuffs.
Now his left ear began to ring, and suddenly his left cheek was numb. He turned his head and saw the little girl looking at him. Her eyes were wide and unblinking. They didn’t look doped in the slightest. For that matter, they didn’t look like her eyes. They looked older. Wiser. And as cold as his face now felt.
(stop the truck)
Crow had capped the hypo and put it away, but he was still holding the gun he’d taken from beneath the seat when he decided she was spending way too much time in the crapper. He raised it, meaning to threaten the geezer and make her stop whatever it was she was doing, but all at once his hand felt as if it had been plunged into freezing water. The gun put on weight: five pounds, ten pounds, what felt like twenty-five. Twenty-five at least. And while he was struggling to raise it, his right foot came off the F-150’s gas pedal and his left hand turned the wheel so that the truck veered off the road and rolled along the soft shoulder—gently, slowing—with the right-side wheels tilting toward the ditch.
“What are you doing to me?”
“What you deserve. Daddy.”
The truck bumped a downed birch tree, snapped it in two, and stopped. The girl and the geezer were seatbelted in, but Crow had forgotten his. He jolted forward into the steering wheel, honking the horn. When he looked down, he saw the geezer’s automatic turning in his fist. Very slowly turning toward him. This shouldn’t be happening. The dope was supposed to stop it. Hell, the dope had stopped it. But