rush-hour traffic should have abated, but all of the lanes were still
clogged. They made halting progress southward in a haze of exhaust
fumes, from which the car airconditioning spared them.
The marine layer that surged in from the Pacific during the night had
burned off. Trees stirred in a spring breeze, and birds swooped in
giddy arcs across the cloudless, piercingly blue sky. The day did not
seem like one in which anyone would have reason to think of death.
They passed the MacArthur Boulevard exit, then Jamboree, and with every
turn of the wheels, Hatch felt the muscles growing tenser in his neck
and shoulders. He was overcome by the uncanny feeling that he actually
had followed this route last night, when fog had obscured the airport,
hotels, office buildings, and the brown hills in the distance, though in
fact he had been at home.
"They were going to El Toro," he said, which was a detail he had not
remembered until now. Or perhaps he had only now perceived it by the
grace of some sixth sense.
"Maybe that's where she lives where he lives."
Frowning, Hatch said, "I don't think so."
As they crept forward through the snarled traffic, he began to recall
not just details of the dream but the feeling of it, the edgy atmosphere
of pending violence.
His hands slipped on the steering wheel. They were clammy. He blotted
them on his shirt.
"I think in some ways," he said, "the blonde was almost as dangerous as
I. .. as he was...."
"What do you mean?"
"I don't know. It's just the feeling I had then."
Sunshine glimmered on-and glinted off-the multitude of vehicles that
churned both north and south in two great rivers of steel and chrome and
glass. Outside, the temperature was hovering around eighty degrees. But
Hatch was cold.
As a sign notified them of the upcoming Culver Boulevard exit, Hatch
leaned forward slightly. He let go of the steering wheel with his right
hand and reached under his seat. "It was here that he went for the....
. pulled it out... she was looking in her purse for something.....
He would not have been too surprised if he had found a gun under his
seat, for he still had a frighteningly clear recollection of how fluidly
the dream and reality had mingled, separated, and mingled again last
night.
Why not now, even in daylight? He let out a hiss of relief when he
found that the space beneath his seat was empty.
"Cops," Lindsey said.
Hatch was so caught up in the reconstruction of the events in the
nightmare that he didn't immediately realize what Lindsey was talking
about.
Then he saw black-and-whites and other police vehicles parked along the
interstate.
Bent forward, intently studying the dusty ground before them, uniformed
officers were walking the shoulder of the highway and picking through
the dry grass beyond it. They were evidently conducting an expanded
search for evidence to discover anything else that might have fallen out
of the killer's car before, with, or after the blonde.
He noticed that every one of the cops was wearing sunglasses, as were he
and Lindsey. The day was eye-stingingly bright.
But the killer had been wearing sunglasses, too, when he had looked in
the rearview mirror. Why would he have been wearing them in the dark in
dense fog, for God's sake?
Shades at night in bad weather was more than just affectation or
eccentricity. It was weird.
Hatch still had the imaginary gun in his hand, withdrawn from under the
seat. But because they were moving so much slower than the killer had
been driving, they had not yet reached the spot at which the revolver
had been fired.
Traffic was creeping bumper-to-bumper not because the rush hour was
heavier than usual but because motorists were slowing to stare at the
police. It was what the radio traffic reporters called "gawkers'
block."
"He was really barreling along," Hatch said.
"In heavy log"
"And sunglasses."
"Stupid," Lindsey said.
"No. This guy's smart."
"Sounds stupid to me."
"Fearless." Hatch tried to settle back into the skin of the man with
whom he had shared a body in the nightmare. It wasn't easy. Something
about the killer was totally alien and simply resisted analysis. "He's
extremely cold... cold and dark inside ... he doesn't think like you
or me.
Hatch struggled to find words to convey what the killer had felt like.
"Dirty." He shook his head. "I don't mean he was unwashed, nothing like
that. It's more as ... . well, as if he was contaminated." He sighed
and gave up. "Anyway, he's utterly fearless. Nothing scares him. He
believes that nothing can hurt him. But in his case that's not the same
as recklessness. Because... somehow he's right."
"What're you saying-that he's invulnerable?"
"No. Not exactly. But nothing you could do to him... would matter to
him."
Lindsey hugged herself. "You make him sound... inhuman."
At the moment the police search for evidence was concentrated in the
quarter of a mile just south of the Culver Boulevard eNt. When Hatch
got past that activity, traffic began to move faster.
The imaginary gun in his right hand seemed to take on greater substance.
He could almost feel the cold steel against his palm.
When he pointed the phantom revolver at Lindsey and glanced at her, she
winced. He saw her clearly, but he could also see, in memory, the face
of the blonde as she had looked up from her purse with too little
reaction time even to show surprise.
"Here, right here, two shots, fast as I... as he could pull the
trigger," Hatch said, shuddering because the memory of violence was far
easier to recapture than were the mood and malign spirit of the gunman.
"Big holes in her." He could see it so clearly. "Jesus, it was awful."
He was really into it. "The way she tore open. And the sound like
thunder, the end of the world." The bitter taste of stomach acid rose in
his throat. "She was thrown back by the impact, against the door,
instantly dead, but the door flew open. He wasn't expecting it to fly
open. He wanted her, she was part of his collection now, but then she
was gone, out into the night, gone, rolling like a piece of litter along
the blacktop."
Caught up in the dream memory, he rammed his foot down on the brake
pedal, as the killer had done.
"Hatch, no!"
A car, then another, then a third, swerved around them in Sashes of
chrome and sun-silvered glass, horns blaring, narrowly avoiding a
collision.
Shaking himself out of the memory, Hatch accelerated again, back into
the traffic flow. He was aware of people staring at him from other
cars.
He didn't care about their scrutiny, for he had picked up the trail as
if he were a bloodhound. It was not actually a scent that he followed.
It was an indefinable something that led him on, maybe psychic
vibrations, a disturbance in the
ether made by the killer's passage just
as a shark's fin would carve a trough in the surface of the sea,
although the ether had not repaired itself with the alacrity of water.
"He considered going back for her, knew it was hopeless, so he drove on,
Hatch said, aware that his voice had become low and slightly raspy, as
if he were recounting secrets that were painful to reveal.
"Then I walked into the kitchen, and you were making an odd choking,
gasping sound," Lindsey said. "Gripping the edge of the counter tight
enough to crack the granite. I thought you were having a heart attack-"
"Drove very fast," Hatch said, accelerating only slightly himself,
"seventy, eIghty, even faster, anxious to get away before the traffic
behind him encountered the body." remembering that he was not merely
speculating on what the killer had done, Lindsey said, "You're
remembering more than you dreamed, past the point when I came into the
kitchen and woke you."
"Not remembering," he said huskily.
what?"
"Sensing..."
"Now?"
"Yes."
"How?"
"Somehow." He simply could not explain it better than that. "Some how,"
he whispered, and he followed the ribbon of pavement across that largely
flat expanse of land, which seemed to darken in spite of the bright
morning sun, as if the killer cast a shadow vastly larger than himself,
a shadow that lingered behind him even hours after he had gone. "Eighty
... eighty-five... almost ninety miles an hour... able to see only a
hundred feet ahead." If anything had been there in the fog, the killer
would have crashed into it with cataclysmic force. "He didn't take the
first exit, wanted to get farther away than that . .
.
kept going going...."
He almost didn't slow down in time to make the exit for State Route 133,
which became the canyon road into Laguna Beach. At the last moment he
hit the brakes too hard and whipped the wheel to the right.
The Mitsubishi slid as they departed the interstate, but he decreased
speed and Immediately regained full control.
"He got off here?" Lindsey asked.
"Yes."
Hatch followed the new road to the right.
"Did he go into Laguna?"
"I... don't think so.
He braked to a complete halt at a crossroads marked by a stop sign. He
pulled onto the shoulder. Open country lay ahead, hills dressed in
crisp brown grass. If he went straight through the crossroads, he'd be
heading into Laguna Canyon, where developers had not yet managed to raze
the wilderness and erect more tract homes. Miles of brushland and
scattered oaks Banked the canyon route all the way into Laguna Beach.
The killer also might have turned left or right. Hatch looked in each
direction, searching for... for whatever invisible signs had guided him
that far.
After a moment, Lindsey said, "You don't know where he went from here?"
"Hideaway."
"Huh?"
Hatch blinked, not sure why he had chosen that word. "He went back to
his hideaway... into the ground...."
"Ground?" Lindsey asked. With puzzlement she surveyed the sere hills.
..... into the darkness..."
"You mean he went underground somewhere?"
..... cool, cool silence..."
Hatch sat for a while, staring at the crossroads as a few cars came and
went. He had reached the end of the trail. The killer was not there;
he knew that much, but he did not know where the man had gone. Nothing
more came to him-except, strangely, the sweet chocolate taste of Oreo
cookies, as intense as if he had just bitten into one.
9
At The Cottage in Laguna Beach, they had a late breakfast of homefries,
eggs, bacon, and buttered toast. Since he had died and been
resuscitated, Hatch didn't worry about things like his cholesterol count
or the longterm effects of passive inhalation of other people's
cigarette smoke. He supposed the day would come when little risks would
seem big again, whereupon he would return to a diet high in fruits and
vegetables, scowl at smokers who blew their filth his way, and open a
bottle of fine wine with a mixture of delight and a grim awareness of
the health consequences of consuming alcohol. At the moment he was
appreciating life too much to worry unduly about losing it again-which
was why he was determined not to let the dreams and the death of the
blonde push him off the deep end.
Food had a natural tranquilizing effect. Each bite of egg yolk soothed
his nerves.
"Okay," Lindsey said, going at her breakfast somewhat less heartily than
Hatch did, "let's suppose there was brain damage of some sort, after
all. But minor. So minor it never showed up on any of the tests. Not
bad enough to cause paralysis or speech problems or anything like that.
In fact, by an incredible stroke of luck, a one in a billion chance,
this brain damage had a freak effect that was actually beneficial. It
could've made a few new connections in the cerebral tissues, and left
you psychic."
"Bull."
"Why?"
"I'm not psychic."
"Then what do you call it?"
"Even if I was psychic, I wouldn't say it was beneficial."
Because the breakfast rush had subsided, the restaurant was not too
busy.
The nearest tables to theirs were vacant. They could discuss the
morning's events without fear of being overheard, but Hatch kept
glancing around self-conciously anyway.
Immediately following his reanimation, the media had swarmed to Orange
County General Hospital, and in the days after Hatch's release,
reporters had virtually camped on his doorstep at home. After all, he
had been dead longer than any man alive, which made him eligible for
considerably more than the fifteen minutes of fame that Andy Warhol had
said would eventually be every person's fate in celebrity America.
He'd done nothing to earn his fame. He didn't want it He hadn't fought
his way out of death; Lindsey, Nyebern, and the resuscitation team had
dragged him back He was a private person, content with just the quiet of
the better antique dealers who knew his shop and traded with him
sometimes. In fact, the only respect he had was Lindsey's, he was
famous only in her eyes and only for being a good husband, that would be
enough for him. By steadfastly refusing to talk to the press, he had
finally convinced them to leave him alone and chase after whatever newly
born two-headed goat-or its equivalent-was available to fill newspaper
space or a minute of the airwaves between deodorant commercials.
Now, if he revealed that he had come back from the dead with some
strange power to connect with the mind of a psycho killer, swarms of
newspeople would d on him again. He could not tolerate even the
prospect of it. He would find it easier to endure a plague of killer
bees or a hive of Hare Krishna solicitors with collection cups and eyes
glazed by spiritual transcendence.
"If it's not some psychic ability," Lindsey persisted, "then what it?"
"I don't know."
"That's not good enough."
"It could pass, never happen again. It could be a fluke."
"You don't believe that."
"Well. . . I want to believe it."
"We have to deal with this."
"Why?"
"We have to try to understand it."
"Why?"
"Don't why' me like a five-year-old child."
"Why?"
"Be serious, Hatch. A woman's dead. She may not be the first. She may
not be the last."
He put his fork on his half-empty plate, and swallowed some orange juice
to wash down the homefries. "Okay, all right, it's like a psychic
vision, yeah, just the way they show it in the movies. But it's more
than that. Creepier."
He closed his eyes, trying to think of an analogy. When he had it, he
opened his eyes and looked around the restaurant again to be sure no new
diners had entered and sat near them.
He looked regretfully at his plate. His eggs were getting cold. He
sighed.
"You know," he said, "how they say identical twins, separated at birth
Koontz, Dean R. - Hideaway Page 21