《ur》(18)

Parked slightly crooked (and blocking what appeared to be the fire exit) was a filthy, dinged-up Ford Explorer with two bumper stickers on the back. MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT THE STATE CORRECTIONAL FACILITY, one read. The other was even more succinct: I BRAKE FOR JACK DANIELS.

"Maybe we oughtta do it right here," Robbie said. "While she's inside slopping it up and watching the Titans."

It was a tempting idea, but Wesley shook his head. "We'll wait. She's got one more stop to make. Hopson, remember?"

"That's miles from here."

"Right," Wesley said. "But we've got time to kill, and we're going to kill it."

"Why?"

"Because what we're up to is changing the future. Or trying to, at least. We have no idea how tough that is. Waiting as long as possible improves our chances."

"Wesley, that is one drunk chick. She was drunk when she got out of that first juke-joint in Central City, and she's going to be a lot drunker when she comes out of yonder shack. I can't see her getting her car repaired in time to rendezvous with the girls' bus forty miles from here. And what if we break down while we're trying to follow her to her last stop?"

Wesley hadn't considered this. Now he did. "My instincts say wait, but if you have a strong feeling that we should do it now, we will."

"The only strong feeling I have is a scared-to-freakin'-death feeling," Robbie said. He sat up. "Too late to do anything else, anyway. Here she comes, Miss America."

Candy Rymer emerged from The Broken Windmill in a moderate weave. She dropped her purse, bent down to get it, almost fell over, cursed, picked it up, laughed, and then continued to where her Explorer was parked, digging her keys out as she went. Her face was puffy, not quite hiding the remains of what must once have been very good looks. Her hair, blond on top and black at the roots, hung around her cheeks in lank curls. Her belly pooched out the front of elastic-waist jeans just below the hem of what had to be a Kmart smock top.

She got in her beat-to-shit SUV, kicked the engine into life (it sounded in desperate need of a tune-up) and drove forward into the roadhouse's fire door. There was a crunch. Then her backup lights came on and she reversed so fast that for one sickening moment Wesley thought she was going to hit his Malibu, crippling it and leaving them on foot as she drove off toward her appointment in Samarra. But she stopped in time and peeled onto the highway without pausing to look for traffic. A moment later Wesley was following as she headed east toward Hopson. And the intersection where the Lady Meerkats' bus would arrive in four hours.

In spite of the terrible thing she was going to do, Wesley couldn't help feeling a little sorry for her, and he had an idea Robbie felt the same. The follow-up story they'd read about her in the Echo told a tale as familiar as it was sordid.

Candace "Candy" Rymer, age forty-one, divorced. Three children, now in the custody of their father. For the last twelve years of her life she'd been in and out of spin-dry facilities. According to an acquaintance (she seemed to have no friends), she had tried AA and decided it wasn't for her. Too much holy-rolling. She had been arrested for DUI half a dozen times. She had lost her license after each of the last two, but in both cases it had been restored, the second time by special petition. She needed her license to get to her job at the fertilizer factory in Bainbridge, she told Judge Wallenby. What she didn't tell him was that she had lost the job six months previous...and nobody checked. Candy Rymer was a booze-bomb waiting to go off, and the explosion was now very close.

The story hadn't mentioned her home address in Montgomery, but it didn't need to. In what Wesley considered a rather brilliant piece of investigative journalism (especially for the Echo), the reporter had retraced Candy's final binge, from The Pot O' Gold in Central City to The Broken Windmill in Eddyville to Banty's Bar in Hopson. There the bartender was going to try to take her keys. Unsuccessfully. Candy was going to give him the finger and leave, shouting "I'm done giving my business to this dive!" back over her shoulder. That was at seven o'clock. The reporter theorized that Candy must have pulled over somewhere for a short nap, possibly on Route 124, before cutting across to Route 80. A little further down 80, she would make her final stop. A fiery one.

Once Robbie put the thought in his head, Wesley kept expecting his always-trustworthy Chevrolet to die and coast to a stop at the side of the two-lane blacktop, a victim of either a bad battery or the Paradox Laws. Candy Rymer's taillights would disappear from view and they would spend the following hours making frantic but useless calls (always assuming their phones would even work out here in the williwags) and cursing themselves for not disabling her vehicle back in Eddyville, while they still had a chance.

But the Malibu cruised as effortlessly as always, without a single gurgle or glitch. He stayed about half a mile behind Candy's Explorer.

"Man, she's all over the road," Robbie said. "Maybe she'll ditch the damn thing before she gets to the next bar. Save us the trouble of slashing her tires."

"According to the Echo, that doesn't happen."

"Yeah, but we know the future's not cast in stone, don't we? Maybe this is another Ur, or something."

Wesley didn't think it worked that way with UR LOCAL, but he kept his mouth shut. Either way, it was too late now.

Candy Rymer made it to Banty's without going in the ditch or hitting any oncoming traffic, although she could have done either; God knew she had enough close calls. When one of the cars that swerved out of her way passed Wesley's Malibu, Robbie said: "That's a family. Mom, Pop, three little kids goofin' around in the back."