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Show 178 the picture returned. He was moving down the corridor again, past more windows and closed doors, sensing something behind each door that wanted to spring out and look at him, and hoping it wouldn't. He rounded a corner, moving rapidly now, looked left and right, and pushed open the door to the men's room and was horribly face to face with Dennis McBride's wife in white shorts, and jolted awake. That broke the connection, and his next drift was along a mountain road, following a small black Renault driven by someone whose face he saw very clearly but could not place. It was a loose, rubbery face, with a fixed smile that did not move when its owner spoke. It occurred to him to wonder how he could see it when he was far behind the car it was in and occasionally lost sight even of the car as it disappeared around a bend. He also wondered what road he was on. The yucca plants thrusting like white candles out of their nests of spines on the slope beside him suggested the Angeles Crest Highway north of Pasadena that he had been on once when he had driven to Antelope Valley to paint in the desert; but something in the color of the rock, the hairpin turns and the occasional glimpse of strings of cars on a road that snaked far below him suggested the road to the summit of Emigration Canyon east of Salt Lake. He was enjoying the ride but the immobility of the face in the Renault up ahead disturbed him. It was someone he knew, he was sure of that, but someone determined to be secretive, someone who hunched over the wheel in the tiny black bubble of a car and kept his face turned away when he tried to look. Still, Lorin knew what it looked like down to the smallest detail. He heard himself describing it to his companion, whom he did not turn to look at. He described the crushed forehead in the car up ahead, the warped beak of a nose, the running gash in the cheek. He was surprised at how much he knew. He went on to describe the creepy feel of the rubber between your fingers and the |