It was the goddam motherless fuel pump!

Rudy Solis identified immediately the gasp and drag of the old Chevy's engine, automatically checked his rear-vision mirror, and scanned the dark, straight, two-lane highway ahead, though he knew there was nothing resembling a light in fifty miles. With all of Southern California to choose from, naturally the thing would decide to give up the ghost in the dead, endless stretch of desert and hill country that lay between Barstow and San Bernardino, miles from anywhere in the middle of Sunday night.

Rudy wondered if he could make it back to the party.

Be a lot of sorrow and tears if I can't, he thought to himself, glancing over his shoulder at the ten cases of beer stacked amid the shredded foam, old newspapers, and greasy articles of unidentifiable clothing heaped in the sagging back seat. The engine faltered, coughed apologetically, and chugged on. Rudy cursed the owner of the car, the seventh-magnitude rock-and-roll star at whose party he'd been drinking and sunburning himself into a stupor all weekend, and the buddies who'd volunteered him to make the beer run, thirty miles down the hills to Barstow; cursed them impersonally, and threw in a few curses at himself as well for being euchred into going.

Well, serves 'em right. Next time they want somebody to buy their beer for 'em, they can damn well lend me a decent car.

But the fact was that most people had arrived at Tarot's party on motorcycles, as Rudy himself had. And Tarot-who had started out life as James Carrow and was still known as Jim when not wearing his flameout stage makeup-wasn't about to lend his custom Eldorado to anybody, no matter how few cases of beer were left.