Robbie considered. ‘Yeah. Worth a try.’

Wesley took his phone out of his briefcase. Robbie had gone back to the story, using the Next Page button to access the rest.

The phone rang twice … three times … four.

Wesley was preparing to deliver his message to voicemail when Ellen answered. ‘Wesley, I can’t talk to you now. I thought you understood that—’

‘Ellen, listen—’

‘—but if you got my message, you know we’re going to talk.’ In the background he could hear raucous, excited girls – Josie would be among them – and lots of loud music.

‘Yes, I did get the message, but we have to talk n—’

‘No!’ Ellen said. ‘We don’t. I’m not going to take your calls this weekend, and I’m not going to listen to your messages.’ Her voice softened. ‘And hon – every one you leave is going to make it harder. For us, I mean.’

‘Ellen, you don’t understa—’

‘Goodbye, Wes. I’ll talk to you next week. Do you wish us luck?’

‘Ellen, please!’

‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ she said. ‘And you know what? I guess I still care about you, even though you are a lug.’

With that she was gone.

He poised his finger over Redial, then made himself not push it. It wouldn’t help. Ellen was wearing her my-way-or-the-highway hat. It was insane, but there it was.

‘She won’t talk to me except on her schedule. What she doesn’t realize is that after Sunday night she may not have a schedule. You’ll have to call Ms Quinn.’ In his current state, the girl’s first name escaped him.

‘Josie’d think I was prankin’ on her,’ Robbie said. ‘A story like that, any girl’d think I was prankin’ on her.’ He was still studying the Kindle’s screen. ‘Want to know something? The woman who caused the accident – who will cause it – hardly gets hurt at all. I’ll bet you next semester’s tuition she was just as drunk as a goddam skunk.’

Wesley hardly heard this. ‘Tell Josie that Ellen has to take my call. Have her say it’s not about us. Tell her to say it’s an emer—’

‘Dude,’ Robbie said. ‘Slow down and listen. Are you listening?’

Wesley nodded, but what he heard most clearly was his own pounding heart.

‘Point one, Josie would still think I was prankin’ on her. Point two, she might think we both were. Point three, I don’t think she’d go to Coach Silverman anyway, given the mood Coach has been in lately … and she gets even worse on game trips, Josie says.’ Robbie sighed. ‘You have to understand about Josie. She’s sweet, she’s smart, she’s sexy as hell, but she’s also a timid little mousie. It’s sort of what I like about her.’

‘That probably says heaps of good things about your character, Robbie, but you’ll pardon me if right now I don’t give a rat’s ass. You’ve told me what won’t work; do you have any idea what might?’

‘That’s point four. With a little luck, we won’t have to tell anybody about this. Which is good, since they wouldn’t believe it.’

‘Elucidate.’

‘Huh?’

‘Tell me what you’ve got in mind.’

‘First, we need to use another one of your Echo downloads.’

Robbie punched in November 25, 2009. Another girl, a cheerleader who had been horribly burned in the explosion, had died, raising the death toll to eleven. Although The Echo didn’t come right out and say so, more were likely to die before the week was out.

Robbie only gave this story a quick scan. What he was looking for was a boxed story on the lower half of page 1:

CANDACE RYMER CHARGED WITH MULTIPLE COUNTS OF VEHICULAR HOMICIDE

There was a gray square in the middle of the story – her picture, Wesley assumed, only the pink Kindle didn’t seem able to reprint news photographs. But it didn’t matter, because now he got it. It wasn’t the bus they had to stop; it was the woman who was going to hit the bus.

Candace Rymer was point four.

VI – Candy Rymer

At five o’clock on a gray Sunday afternoon – as the Lady Meerkats were cutting down basketball nets in a not-too-distant part of the state – Wesley Smith and Robbie Henderson were sitting in Wesley’s modest Chevy Malibu, watching the door of a roadhouse in Eddyville, twenty miles north of Cadiz. The parking lot was oiled dirt and mostly empty. There was almost certainly a TV inside The Broken Windmill, but Wesley guessed discriminating tipplers would rather do their drinking and NFL-watching at home. You didn’t have to go inside the joint to know it was a hole. Candy Rymer’s first stop had been bad, but this second one was worse.

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 telling: I BRAKE FOR JACK DANIELS.

‘Maybe we oughta 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.’

Robbie sat up. ‘Too late. Here comes Miss America.’

Candy Rymer emerged from The Broken Windmill in a kind of slalom. 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 to 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. During the last dozen years of her life she’d been in and out of four spin-dry facilities, roughly one every three years. 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.