It seems like days ago since he stepped foot in this automobile, unthinking, unfeeling: a pure gut reaction to what he had just discovered. Bending down to embrace the stiffening body, he felt the life rush out of him as forcefully as the blood must have poured out of Paula, his fiercely loved and murdered fiancée.

What else could he have done? Relied on the police? The wait -to have waited any amount of time at all- would have killed him right then. The only thing he could do was jump in his Chevrolet series AK pickup and....just drive, and pray he can get to Michigan in time to stop her killer from striking again, this time against Paula's family.

Every mile is an interminable stretch. The unchanging desert terrain makes it seem like the faster he goes, the more he is just speeding in place. The frustration is one of swimming against a jet stream, especially in a race such as this: against time and a killer on the loose. The driver ponders “Bakersfield” and “38” and they give rise to a jolt of anger.

“Shit! Am only out undred an’ ten, undred an’ tweny, mies a’most. An it’s arready dark”, the driver laments, searching the sky for some residual fragments of day, increasingly rare in these, the shortest days of winter.

When alone for long enough, the voice one uses to think becomes his only voice; louder and more real than the one he’s used to. The driver ponders this, perhaps aloud, but the voice he hears seems to whistle in off the wind blowing past the window.

“S'dammed cold for th'desert.”

It’s not so much a complaint as a wry affirmation. His face –tanned but pale in the early evening’s haze- doesn't change from a catatonic stare. It's been the same since he discovered her body sprawled in a pool of blood on the front steps of their home, ten hours prior. Most men would have panicked, called the police, and before they knew it, they'd be hauled in themselves for questioning; the most obvious evidence pointing to a domestic dispute turned deadly. Not in this case.