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terminated.
    At least he didn’t have to worry about being a bad cop anymore.
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    W hen Jared returned home from the hospital Anna was gone, and barely a week later their mail-order divorce ensued.   He didn’t contest it, they had no children, and she wanted nothing from him. Even before Winter fired him she was the big breadwinner of the two.   He never had to face her in court; he filed the paperwork and it was over.   He hadn’t heard from her since.
    He never heard back from Lillian either.   The only lasting legacy from his fling with her, ironically enough, was the inability to fuck.
    Lucky, Anna’s pet name for it once upon a time, had unlearned all its best tricks.   No more stand up , roll over , or shake hands . All Lucky did now was play dead.   Nerve damage, mechanical failure, or good old-fashioned psychological scarring—it could have been any or all.   Either way, it came to the same thing.   No more roaming—Jared was one well-neutered dog.
    Still, after almost a year of no boom-boom, his libido had not diminished.
    As he returned home from the night shift at Aljo Security, he debated: start that paperback he’d been eyeballing for the past few weeks, one of Shannon’s detective novels, or watch a skin flick.   By the time he walked through the front door of the house he now shared with his sister instead of his wife, he had settled on the skin flick.
    All amorous thoughts vanished when he saw Shannon sitting, eyes wide and staring, in a chair in the middle of the living room.   Laid out on the old sofa before her was a girl of about nine, haggard and sleeping badly.   For a second Jared thought it was his dead niece, Alicia.

Chapter 7
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    G ordon Chambers slept, parked at a rest area along side of Washington 95.   His dreams were short little horror movies, punctuated by the sound of the occasional big rig and other infrequent night traffic.   Sleep came in bits and pieces, making the short rest stretch an eternity, and when the sun rose, he felt more drained than before.   He lay back in his Mazda’s reclined seat for a while and watched the Cedar skyline through the car’s bug-flecked windshield.   It shifted from violet, to orange, to powder blue.
    Oregon was behind him now; Eugene, Salem, Portland, and The Dalles , all left in his proverbial dust.   Gordon had crossed The Columbia River in the black of night, scarcely aware in his exhaustion.   He’d fought sleep grimly since his last pit stop outside of Portland, almost running off the road minutes after crossing into Washington.   The decision to stop and rest was made grudgingly.
    The rising sun slowly burned his lethargy away and the urgency of his trip returned.
    He stepped out of his car, flinching at the bright flashes reflecting off its hood, and stretched as he walked to the restroom.   He peed, washed his hands, his face, then stuck his head under the running water.   The chill of the early June morning and the cold water did their job.   He pulled a comb quickly through his thinning blond hair, and with a grimace at his reflection decided he was as ready as he would ever be.
    As he walked to his car a mini-van parked beside it and a family of five spilled from its open doors—a husband and wife, both older than him, and three children.   The youngest climbed clumsily from the side door; she could not have been over three.
    Gordon stopped, eyes fixed on the toddler.   He watched her struggle for the ground.   She made small, aggravated sounds, and let out a shout of triumph when her feet found the blacktop.   He stood there, staring at her, and when her parents noticed him and exchanged anxious looks, he made himself get into the car and drive.
    He drove for the next few hours with her bright face burned into his mind’s eye.
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    H e made another pit stop in Yakima—pumped gas, peed again, and drank more