CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set by Billie Sue Mosiman

First he'd overslept, then lost time on the exits, and now the flat made him lose more precious time.
    "Molly, God, Molly, where are you?" he mumbled into the thickening clot of darkness overtaking the car's interior.
    Got to find her , he thought, a fierceness entering into his attitude that hadn't been there before. Clamping his hands tight on the steering wheel, he drove furiously, bypassing even the speeding truckers who had less reason to reach a destination than he.
    A line of traffic trailed him and eventually disappeared into the murk of night as headlights began to sprinkle the oncoming lanes. It was crazy, what he was doing, he admitted that much earlier in the trip. He was always so obsessed with results, and this time he might not have any. He could drive straight into the far Pacific Ocean and still never reach his goal.
    But that wouldn't stop him.
    Nothing could stop him short of finding his girl.
    #

    Cruise drove at a steady fifty-five miles an hour west across the Texas desert. He periodically dipped a big hand into a bag of Cheetos, munching them as he told Molly a story. He had eaten the huevos rancheros in the White Elephant, but still felt hungry as a bear cub fed on berries for a month.
    "I had a buddy in Vietnam once," he said, "we called Boots. He had these big goddamned feet, size sixteen or something. He said he'd been called that ever since he was a kid and he got lost in North Michigan, up in the thumb--that's a spit of land that heads up toward the Canadian border--anyway, he was up there with his old man ice fishing one winter."
    "Yeah? Bet that was cold. I've never been up north."
    Cruise, a good storyteller who added facial expressions, sounds, and gestures, shivered and shook himself all over.
    "Cold wasn't the word for it, Boots said. He was sent to look for firewood and a blizzard came up. He was lost, couldn't find the camp, and he was trying to follow his footprints--had big feet even back then. But the snow blew so hard, it was wiping out the trail. He was just lucky to stumble back in his old man's arms to miss freezing to death. From then on his family called him Boots.
    "So me and Boots, we get caught in the middle of an enemy attack in 'Nam. Our whole platoon gets scattered. Guys were falling all around us. We took off together in one direction and we outsmart the Cong, but we lose our platoon leader."
    "Geez."
    Cruise paused to eat a handful of Cheetos. The sound of the crunching coming through his jaws to his ears reminded him of walking on little sticks, trying to be quiet. "It was real bad. All we had were our rifles and side arms. We didn't have any food or a radio, not even a map or a compass. But we knew there was going to be a chopper rescue lift forty miles to the west in four days. We started heading that way. It was the only choice we had. No way could we ever find the base, far as we'd been out on maneuvers."
    "Did you have to go four days without food?"
    "More or less. We ate roots and shit, but we threw up most of it, just couldn't keep it down. We had to drink from stagnant ponds, rice paddies, muddy little streams, anywhere we could find water. I was a kid then, eighteen, and Boots was older than me. I was tired, pessimistic about our chances of making it. I kept complaining and wanting to stop to rest. But there were Cong every-fucking-where.
    "Boots kept telling me I could make it, we could make it, we just had to have heart, we had to have faith.
    "Then to keep me going, he'd tell me stories..."
    "Kind of like you tell me, huh?" Molly asked.
    "Well, sort of except the stories Boots told were all about how he made it out of the blizzard just because he kept going. Then about being a Boy Scout and wandering off from the troop when camping and falling off a mountain path. Broke his leg. He was lying there on the edge of a cliff, just a kid, and he told me how he had to last out until they found him. I knew these were true stories because Boots was that kind of guy. A