Koontz, Dean R. - Hideaway

by Hideaway(Lit)

  was empty which he already knew from his vision.

  At the open window he looked out at the collapsed trellis and tangled

  vines on the lawn below. There was no sign of the man in sunglasses or

  of Regina.

  "Shit!" Hatch hurried back across the room, grabbing Lindsey, turning

  her around, pushing her through the door, into the hall, toward the head

  of the stairs. "You take the front, I'll take the back, he's got her,

  stop him, 1 go, go." She didn't resist, picked up at once on what he was

  saying, and flew down the steps with him at her heels.

  "Shoot him, bring him down, aim for the legs, can't worry about hitting

  Regina, he's getting away!"

  In the foyer Lindsey reached the front door even as Hatch was coming off

  the bottom step and turning toward the short hallway. He dashed into

  the family room, then into the kitchen, peering out the back windows of

  the house as he ran past them. The lawn and patios were well lighted,

  but he didn't see anyone out there.

  He tore open the door between the kitchen and the garage, stepped

  through, switched on the lights. He raced across the three stalls,

  behind the cars, to the exterior door at the far end even before the

  last of the fluorescent tubes had stopped flickering and come all the

  way on.

  He disengaged the dead-bolt lock, stepped out into the narrow side yard,

  and glanced to his right. No killer. No Regina. The front of the

  house lay in that direction, the street, more houses facing theirs from

  the other side. That was part of the territory Lindsey already was

  covering.

  His heart knocked so hard, it seemed to drive each breath out of his

  lungs before he could get it all the way in.

  She's only ten, only tea He turned left and ran along the side of the

  house, around the corner of the garage, into the backyard, where the

  fallen trellis and trumpet vines lay in a heap.

  So small, a little thing. God, please.

  Afraid of stepping on a nail and disabling himself, he skirted the

  debris and searched frantically along the perimeter of the property,

  plunging recklessly into the shrubbery, probing behind the tall

  eugenias.

  No one was in the backyard.

  He reached the side of the property farthest from the garage, almost

  slipped and fell as he skidded around the corner, but kept his balance.

  He thrust the Browning out in front of him with both hands, covering the

  walkway between the house and the fence. No one there, either.

  He'd heard nothing from out front, certainly no , which meant Lindsey

  must be having no better luck than he was. If the killer had not gone

  that way, the only other thing he could have done was scale the fence on

  one side or another, escaping into someone else's property.

  Turning away from the front of the house, Hatch surveyed the seven

  foot-high fence that encircled the backyard, separating it from the

  abutting yards of the houses to the east, west, and south.

  Developers and Realtors called it a fence in southern California,

  although it was actually a wall, concrete blocks reinforced with steel

  and covered with stucco, capped with bricks, painted to match the

  houses. Most neighborhoods had them, guarantors of privacy at swimming

  pools or barbecues. Good fences make good neighbors, make strangers for

  neighbor and make it damn easy for an intruder to scramble over a single

  barrier and vanish from one part of the maze into another.

  Hatch was on an emotional wire-walk across a chasm of despair, his

  balance sustained only by the hope that the killer couldn't move fast

  with Regina in his arms or over his shoulder. He looked east, west,

  south, frozen by indecision.

  Finally he started toward the back wall, which was on their southern

  flank. He halted, gasping and bending forward, when the mysterious

  connection between him and the man in sunglasses was re-established.

  Again Hatch saw through the other man's eyes, and in spite of the

  sunglasses the night seemed more like late twilight. He was in a car,

  behind the steering wheel, leaning across the console to adjust the

  unconscious girl in the passenger seat as if she were a mannequin.

  Her wrists were lashed together in her lap, and she was held in place by

  the safety harness.

  After arranging her auburn hair to cover the scarf that crossed the back

  of her head, he pushed her against the door, so she slumped with her

  face turned away from the side window. People in passing cars would not

  be able to see the gag in her mouth. She appeared to be sleeping.

  Indeed she was so pale and still, he suddenly wondered if she was dead.

  No point in taking her to his hideaway if she was already dead.

  Might as well open the door and push her out, dump the little bitch

  right there. He put his hand against her cheek. Her skin was

  wonderfully smooth but seemed cool.

  Pressing his fingertips to her throat, he detected her heartbeat in a

  carotid artery, thumping strongly, so strongly. She was so alive, even

  more vital than she had seemed in the vision with the butterfly flitting

  around her head. He had never before made an acquisition of such value,

  and he was grateful to all the powers of Hell for giving her to him. He

  thrilled at the prospect of reaching deep within and clasping that

  strong young heart as it twitched and thudded into final stillness, all

  the while staring into her beautiful gray eyes to watch life pass out of

  her and death enter Hatch's cry of rage, anguish, and terror broke the

  psychic connection.

  He was in his backyard again, holding his right hand up in front of his

  face, staring at it in horror, as if Regina's blood already stained his

  trembling fingers.

  He turned away from the back fence, and sprinted along the east side of

  the house, toward the front.

  But for his own hard breathing, all was quiet. Evidently some of the

  neighbors weren't home. Others hadn't heard anything, or at least not

  enough to bring them outside.

  The serenity of the community made him want to scream with frustration.

  Even as his own world was falling apart, however, he realized the

  appearance of normality was exactly that-merely an appearance, not a

  reality. God knew what might be happening behind the walls of some of

  those houses, horrors equal to the one that had overcome him and Lindsey

  and Regina, perpetrated not by an intruder but by one member of a family

  upon another. The human species pose a knack for creating monsters, and

  the beasts themselves often had a talent for hiding away behind

  convincing masks of sanity.

  When Hatch reached the front lawn, Lindsey was nowhere to be seen.

  He hurried to the walkway, through the open door-and discovered her in

  the den, where she was standing beside the desk, making a phone call.

  "You find her?" she asked.

  "No. What're you doing?"

  "Calling the police."

  Taking the receiver out of her hand, dropping it onto the phone, he

  said, "By the time they get here, listen to our story, and start to do

  something, he'll be gone, he'll have
Regina so far away they'll never

  find her-until they stumble across her body someday."

  "But we need help-" Snatching the shotgun off the desk and pushing it

  into her hands, he said, "We're going to follow the bastard. He's got

  her in a car. A Honda, I think."

  "You have a license number?"

  "No."

  "Did you see if-"

  "I didn't actually see anything," he said, jerking open the desk drawer,

  plucking out the box of 12-gauge ammunition, handing that to her as

  well, desperately aware of the seconds ticking away. "I'm connecting

  with him, it flickers in and out, but I think the link is good enough,

  strong enough."

  He pulled his ring of keys from the desk lock, in which he had left them

  dangling when he had taken the magazine from the drawer. "We can stay

  on his ass if we don't let him get too far ahead of us." Hurrying into

  the foyer, he said, "But we have to move."

  "Hatch, wait!"

  He stopped and swiveled to face her as she followed him out of the den.

  She said, "You go, follow them if you think you can, and I'll stay here

  to talk to the cops, get them started-" Shaking his head, he said, "No.

  I need you to drive. These... these visions are like being punched, I

  sort of black out, I'm disoriented while it's happening. There's no way

  I won't run the car right off the damn road.

  Put the shotgun and the shells in the Mitsubishi." Climbing the stairs

  two at a time, he shouted back to her: "And get flashlights."

  "Why?"

  "I don't know, but we'll need them."

  He was lying. He had been somewhat surprised to hear himself ask for

  flashlights, but he knew his subconscious was driving him at the moment,

  and he had a hunch why flashlights were going to be essential.

  In his nightmares over the past couple of months, he had often moved

  through cavernous rooms and a made of concrete corridors that were

  somehow revealed in spite of having no windows or artificial lighting.

  One tunnel in particular, sloping down into perfect blackness, into

  something unknown, him with such dread that his heart swelled and

  pounded as if it would burst. That was why they needed

  flashlights-because they were going where he had previously been only in

  dreams or in visions, into the heart of the nightmare.

  He was all the way upstairs and entering Regina's room before he that he

  didn't know why he had gone there. Stopping just inside the threshold,

  he looked down at the broken doorknob and the overturned desk chair,

  then at the closet where clothes had fallen off the hangers and were

  lying in a pile, then at the open window where the night breeze had

  begun to stir the drapenes.

  Something... something important. Right here, right now, in this room,

  something he needed.

  But what?

  He switched the Browning to his left hand, wiped the damp palm of his

  right hand against his jeans. By now the son of a bitch in the

  sunglasses had started the car and was on his way out of the

  neighborhood with Regina, probably on Crown Valley Parkway already.

  Every second counted.

  Although he was beginning to wonder if he had flown upstairs in a panic

  rather than because there was anything he really needed, Hatch decided

  to trust the compulsion a little further. He went to the corner desk

  and let his gaze travel over the books, pencils, and a notebook. The

  bookcase next to the desk. One of Lindsey's paintings on the wall

  beside it.

  Come on, come on. Something he needed... needed as badly as the

  flashlights, as badly as the shotgun and the box of shells.

  Something.

  He turned, saw the crucifix, and went straight for it. He scrambled

  onto Regina's bed and wrenched the cross from the wall behind it.

  Off the bed and on the floor again, heading out of the room and along

  the hall toward the stairs, he gripped the icon tightly, fisted his

  right hand around it. He realized he was holding it as if it were not

  an object of religious symbolism and veneration but a weapon, a hatchet

  or cleaver.

  By the time he got to the garage, the big sectional door was rolling up.

  Lindsey had started the car.

  When Hatch got in the passenger's side, Lindsey looked at the crucifix.

  "What's that for?"

  "We'll need it."

  Backing out of the garage, she said, "Need it for what?"

  "I don't know."

  As the car rolled into the street, she looked at Hatch curiously. "A

  crucifix.?", "I don't know, but maybe it'll be useful. When linked with

  him he was he felt thankful to all the powers of Hell, that's how it

  went through his mind, thankful to all the powers of Hell for giving

  Regina to him." He pointed left. "That way."

  Fear had aged Lindsey a few years in the past ten minutes. Now the

  lines in her face grew deeper still as she threw the car in gear and

  left.

  "Hatch, what are we dealing with here, one of those Satanists, those

  crazies, guys in these cults you read about in the paper, when they

  catch one of them, they find severed heads in the refrigerator, bones

  buried under the front porch?"

  "Yeah, maybe, something like that." At the intersection he said, "Left

  here. Maybe something like that... but worse, I think."

  "We can't handle this, Hatch."

  "The hell we can't," he said sharply. "There's no time for anybody else

  to handle it. If we don't, Regina's dead."

  They came to an intersection with Crown Valley Parkway, which was a wide

  four- to six-lane boulevard with a garden strip and trees planted down

  the center. The hour was not yet late, and the parkway was busy, though

  not crowded.

  "Which way?" Lindsey asked.

  Hatch put his Browning on the floor. He did not let go of the crucifix.

  He held it in both hands. He looked left and right, left and right,

  waiting for a feeling, a sign, something. The headlights of passing

  cars washed over them but brought no revelations.

  "Hatch?" Lindsey said worriedly.

  Left and right, left and right. Nothing. Jesus.

  Hatch thought about Regina. Auburn hair. Gray eyes. Her right hand

  curled and twisted like a claw, a gift from God. No, not from God.

  Not this time. Can't blame them all on God. She might have been right:

  a gift from her parents, drug-users' legacy.

  A car pulled up behind them, waiting to get out onto the main street.

  The way she walked, determined to the limp. The way she never cn her

  deformed hand, neither ashamed nor proud of it, just accepting. Going

  to be a writer. Intelligent pigs from outer space.

  The driver waiting behind them blew his horn.

  "Hatch?"

  Regina, so small under the weight of the world, yet always standing

  straight, her head never bowed. Made a deal with God. In return for

  something precious to her, a promise to eat beans. And Hatch knew what

  the precious thing was, though she had never said it, knew it was a

  family, a chance to escape the orphanage.

  The other driver blew his horn again.

  Lindsey was shaking. She started to cry.

  A chance.
Just a chance. All the girl wanted. Not to be alone any

  more.

  A chance to sleep in a painted bed with flowers. a chance to love, be

  loved, grow up. The small curled hand. The small sweet smile. Good

  night. .

  . Dad The driver behind them blew his horn insistently.

  "Right," Hatch said abruptly. "Go right."

  With a sob of relief, Lindsey turned right onto the parkway. She drove

  faster than she usually did, changing lanes as traffic required,

  crossing the southern flatlands toward the distant food and the

  night-shrouded mountains in the east.

  At first Hatch was not sure that he had done more than guess at what

  direction to take. But soon conviction came to him. The boulevard led

  east between endless tracts of houses that speckled the hills with

  lights as if they were thousands of memorial flames on the tiers of

  immense votivedle racks, and with each mile he sensed more strongly that

  he and Lindsey were following in the wake of the beast.

  Because he had agreed there would be no more secrets between them,

  because he thought she should know-and could handle-a full understanding

  of the extremity of Regina's circumstances, Hatch said, "What he wants