Koontz, Dean R. - Hideaway

by Hideaway(Lit)

  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