Hideaway (23 page)

“You’re too relaxed about this.”

“Stress kills.”

“If Nyebern finds something seriously wrong ... ?”

“Then we’ll ask the orphanage for a postponement if we have to. The thing is, if we tell them I’m having problems that don’t allow me to go ahead with the papers tomorrow, they might have second thoughts about our suitability. We might be rejected and never have a chance with Regina.”

The day had been so perfect, from their meeting in Salvatore Gujilio’s office to their lovemaking before the fire and again in the massive old Chinese sleigh bed. The future had looked so bright, the worst behind them. She was stunned at how suddenly they had taken another nasty plunge.

She said, “God, Hatch, I love you.”

In the darkness he moved close to her and took her in his arms. Until long after dawn, they just held each other, saying nothing because, for the moment, everything had been said.

Later, after they showered and dressed, they went downstairs and had more coffee at the breakfast table. Mornings, they always listened to the radio, an all-news station. That was how they heard about Lisa Blaine, the blonde who had been shot twice and thrown from a moving car on the San Diego Freeway the previous night—at precisely the time that Hatch, standing in the kitchen, had a vision of the trigger being pulled and the body tumbling along the pavement in the wake of the car.

For reasons he could not understand, Hatch was compelled to see the section of the freeway where the dead woman had been found. “Maybe something will click,” was all the explanation he could offer.

He drove their new red Mitsubishi. They went north on the coast highway, then east on a series of surface streets to the South Coast Plaza Shopping Mall, where they entered the San Diego Freeway heading south. He wanted to come upon the site of the murder from the same direction in which the killer had been traveling the previous night.

By nine-fifteen, 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 air-conditioning 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 lived—or 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 gun ... 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 re-creation 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 fog.”

“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 firmly 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 if ... 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 exit. 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 flashes 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.”

Realizing 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.

“Then what?”

“Sensing ...”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Somehow.” He simply could not explain it better than that. “Somehow,” 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 any traffic 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 flanked 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.

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 long-term 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 passed, 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-consciously anyway.