It is the sixth day after the theft. She pulls off the Interstate in Tucson, a city she has never seen before. According to the atlas it is a county seat and the second largest city in Arizona-population half a million people.

It seems as good a place as any for a beginning.

The coppery taste on her tongue is a symptom of fear: a familiar companion but unwelcome all the same.

While a fat man with a bandit’s mustache fills the tank she puts a quarter into a newspaper vending machine and leafs through the Arizona Daily Star until she finds the address of its editorial offices.

She pays cash for the gasoline and asks directions and tries to ignore the lechery that leers from the fat man’s eyes when he thinks she’s not watching.

He has been neither articulate nor accurate; she has to stop twice to ask directions. These guide her along wide boulevards debased by plastic and neon, then into scrub desert beaten raw by the sun. Mountains loom all around in a moderate brown smog. The six-lane traffic is incongruously heavy: it seems out of kilter, out of time on this primitive ground.

She has turned the air conditioner all the way up but still the steering wheel is nearly too hot to hold. The car is four years old, 67,000 miles on the clock, not in the best of working order-she bought it for cash in a dying town near Scranton from an unemployed miner who’d taken an ad in one of the supermarket throwaways. In terms of probabilities she doubtless is lucky it’s still running at all.

The miner hated to part with the car but he needed the $1,500-he has mouths to feed-and she doubts he’ll get around to recording the transfer of title until he receives next year’s reregistration bill from the motor vehicle people. Long before then she’ll be rid of the car and in the meantime it is as anonymous a pale blue midsize as can be found and there’s a good chance no one will ever trace it to her.