Mr. Murder (37 page)

“Under your seat,” Lomax told Oslett, “you’ll find a Xerox of the Mission Viejo Police report on the incident at the Stillwater house. Wasn’t easy to get hold of. Read it now, ’cause I have to take it with me and destroy it.”

Clipped to the report was a penlight by which to read it. As they followed MacArthur Boulevard south and west into Newport Beach, Oslett studied the document with growing astonishment and dismay. They reached the Pacific Coast Highway and turned south, traveling all the way through Corona Del Mar before he finished.

“This cop, this Lowbock,” Oslett said, looking up from the report, “he thinks it’s all a publicity stunt, thinks there wasn’t even an intruder.”

“That’s a break for us,” Lomax said. He grinned, which was a mistake, because it made him look like the poster boy for some charity formed to help the willfully stupid.

Oslett said, “Considering the whole damn Network is maybe being sucked down a drain here, I think we need more than a break. We need a miracle.”

“Let me see,” Clocker said.

Oslett passed the report and penlight into the back seat, and then said to Lomax, “How did our bad boy know Stillwater was even out here, how did he find him?”

Lomax shrugged his limestone-lintel shoulders. “No-body knows.”

Oslett made a wordless sound of disgust.

To the right of the highway, they passed a pricey gate-guarded golf-course community, after which the lightless Pacific lay so vast and black to the west that they seemed to be driving along the edge of eternity.

Lomax said, “We figure if we keep tabs on Stillwater, sooner or later our man will turn up, and we’ll recover him.”

“Where’s Stillwater now?”

“We don’t know.”

“Terrific.”

“Well, see, not half an hour after the cops left, there was this other thing happened to the Stillwaters, before we got to them, and after that they seemed to . . . go into hiding, I guess you’d say.”

“What other thing?”

Lomax frowned. “Nobody’s sure. It happened right around the corner from their house. Different neighbors saw different pieces, but a guy fitting Stillwater’s description fired a lot of shots at another guy in a Buick. The Buick slams into a parked Explorer, see, gets hung up on it for a second. Two kids fitting the description of the Stillwater girls tumble out the back seat of the Buick and run, the Buick takes off, Stillwater empties his gun at it, and then this BMW—which fits the description of one of the cars registered to the Stillwaters—it comes around the corner like a bat out of hell, driven by Stillwater’s wife, and all of them get in it and take off.”

“After the Buick?”

“No. It’s long gone. It’s like they’re trying to get out of there before the cops arrive.”

“Any neighbors see the guy in the Buick?”

“No. Too dark.”

“It was our bad boy.”

Lomax said, “You really think so?”

“Well, if it wasn’t him, it must’ve been the Pope.”

Lomax gave him an odd look, then stared thoughtfully at the highway ahead.

Before the dimwit could ask how the Pope was involved in all of this, Oslett said, “Why don’t we have the police report on the second incident?”

“Wasn’t one. No complaint. No crime victim. Just a report of the hit-and-run damage to the Explorer.”

“According to what Stillwater told the cops, our Alfie thinks
he
is Stillwater, or ought to be. Thinks his life was stolen from him. The poor boy’s totally over the edge, whacko, so to him it makes sense to go right back and steal the Stillwater kids because somehow he thinks they’re
his
kids. Jesus, what a mess.”

A highway sign indicated they would soon reach the city limits of Laguna Beach.

Oslett said, “Where are we going?”

“Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Dana Point,” Lomax replied. “You’ve got a suite there. I took the long way so you’d both have a chance to read the police report.”

“We napped on the plane. I sort of thought, once we landed, we’d get right into action.”

Lomax looked surprised. “Doing what?”

“Go to the Stillwater house for starters, have a look around, see what we can see.”

“Nothing to see. Anyway, I’m supposed to take you to the Ritz. You’re to get some sleep, be ready to go by eight in the morning.”

“Go where?”

“They expect to have a lead on Stillwater or your boy or both by morning. Someone will come to the hotel to give you a briefing at eight o’clock, and you’ve gotta be rested, ready to move. Which you should be, since it’s the Ritz. I mean, it’s a terrific hotel. Great food too. Even from room service. You can get a good, healthy breakfast, not typical greasy hotel crap. Egg-white omelets, seven-grain bread, all kinds of fresh fruit, non-fat yogurt—”

Oslett said, “I sure hope I can get a breakfast like I have in Manhattan every morning. Alligator embryos and chicken-fried eel heads on a bed of seaweed sautéed in a garlic butter, with a double side order of calves’ brains. Ahhh, man, you never in your life feel half as
pumped
as you do after that breakfast.”

So astonished that he let the speed of the Oldsmobile fall to half of what it had been, Lomax stared at Oslett. “Well, they have great food at the Ritz but maybe not as exotic as what you can get in New York.” He looked at the street again, and the car picked up speed. “Anyway, you sure that’s healthy food? Sounds packed with cholesterol to me.”

Not a hint of irony, not a trace of humor informed Lomax’s voice. It was clear that he actually believed Oslett ate eel heads, alligator embryos, and calves’ brains for breakfast.

Reluctantly, Oslett had to face the fact that there were worse potential partners than the one he already had. Karl Clocker only
looked
stupid.

In Laguna Beach, December was the off season, and the streets were nearly deserted at a quarter to one on a Tuesday morning. At the three-way intersection in the heart of town, with the public beach on the right, they stopped for the red traffic signal, even though no other moving car was in sight.

Oslett thought the town was as unnervingly dead as any place in Oklahoma, and he longed for the bustle of Manhattan: the all-night rush of police vehicles and ambulances, the noir music of sirens, the endless honking of horns. Laughter, drunken voices, arguments, and the mad gibbering of the drug-blasted schizophrenic street dwellers that echoed up to his apartment even in the deepest hours of the night were sorely lacking in this somnolent burg on the edge of the winter sea.

As they continued out of Laguna, Clocker passed the Mission Viejo Police report forward from the back seat.

Oslett waited for a comment from the Trekker. When none was forthcoming, and when he could no longer tolerate the silence that filled the car and seemed to blanket the world outside, he half-turned to Clocker and said, “Well?”

“Well what?”

“What do you think?”

“Not good,” Clocker pronounced from his nest of shadows in the back seat.

“Not good? That’s all you can say? Looks like one colossal mess to me.”

“Well,” Clocker said philosophically, “into every crypto-fascist organization, a little rain must fall.”

Oslett laughed. He turned forward, glanced at the solemn Lomax, and laughed harder. “Karl, sometimes I actually think maybe you’re not a bad guy.”

“Good or bad,” Clocker said, “everything resonates with the same movement of subatomic particles.”

“Now don’t go ruining a beautiful moment,” Oslett warned him.

In the deepest swale of the night, he rises from vivid dreams of slashed throats, bullet-shattered heads, pale wrists carved by razor blades, and strangled prostitutes, but he does not sit up or gasp or cry out like a man waking from a nightmare, for he is always soothed by his dreams. He lies in the fetal position upon the back seat of the car, half in and half out of convalescent sleep.

One side of his face is wet with a thick, sticky substance. He raises one hand to his cheek and cautiously, sleepily works the viscous material between his fingers, trying to understand what it is. Discovering prickly bits of glass in the congealing slime, he realizes that his healing eye has rejected the splinters of the car window along with the damaged ocular matter, which has been replaced by healthy tissue.

He blinks, opens his eyes, and can again see as well through the left as through the right. Even in the shadow-filled Buick, he clearly perceives shapes, variations of texture, and the lesser darkness of the night that presses at the windows.

Hours hence, by the time the palm trees are casting the long west-falling shadows of dawn and tree rats have squirmed into their secret refuges among the lush fronds to wait out the day, he will be completely healed. He will be ready once more to claim his destiny.

He whispers,
“Charlotte . . .”

Outside, a haunting light gradually arises. The clouds trailing the storm are thin and torn. Between some of the ragged streamers, the cold face of the moon peers down.

Beyond the car windows, the night glimmers softly like slightly tarnished silver in the glow of a single candle flame.

He now understands that he was drawn to his double by a magnetism which arose because of their essential oneness and which he perceived through a sixth sense. He’d had no awareness that another self existed, but he’d been pulled toward him as if the attraction was an autonomic function of his body to the same extent that the beating of his heart, the production and maintenance of his blood supply, and the functioning of internal organs were autonomic functions proceeding entirely without need of conscious volition.

Still half embraced by sleep, he wonders if he can apply that sixth sense with conscious intention and reach out to find the false father any time he wishes.

Dreamily, he imagines himself to be a figure sculpted from iron and magnetized. The other self, hiding somewhere out there in the night, is a similar figure. Each magnet has a negative and positive pole. He imagines his positive is aligned with the false father’s negative. Opposites attract.

He seeks attraction, and almost at once he finds it. Invisible waves of force tug lightly at him, then less lightly.

West. West and south.

As during his frantic and compulsive drive across more than half the country, he feels the power of the attractant grow until it is like the ponderous gravity of a planet pulling a minor asteroid into the fiery promise of its atmosphere.

West and south. Not far. A few miles.

The pull is exigent, strangely pleasant at first but then almost painful. He feels as if, were he to get out of the car, he would instantly levitate off the ground and be drawn through the air at high speed directly into the orbit of the hateful false father who has taken his life.

Suddenly he senses that his enemy is aware of being sought and perceives the lines of power connecting them.

He stops imagining the magnetic attraction. Immediately he retreats into himself, shuts down. He isn’t quite ready to re-engage the enemy in combat and doesn’t want to alert him to the fact that another encounter is only hours away.

He closes his eyes.

Smiling, he drifts into sleep.

Healing sleep.

At first his dreams are of the past, peopled by those he has assassinated and by the women with whom he has had sex and on whom he has bestowed post-coital death. Then he is enraptured by scenes that are surely prophetic, involving those whom he loves—his sweet wife, his beautiful daughters, in moments of surpassing tenderness and gratifying submission, bathed in golden light, so lovely, all in a lovely golden light, flares of silver, ruby, amethyst, jade, and indigo.

Marty woke from a nightmare with the feeling that he was being crushed. Even when the dream shattered and blew away, though he knew that he was awake and in the motel room, he could not breathe or move so much as a finger. He felt small, insignificant, and was strangely certain he was about to be hammered into billions of disassociated atoms by some cosmic force beyond his comprehension.

Breath came to him suddenly, implosively. The paralysis broke with a spasm that shook him from head to foot.

He looked at Paige on the bed beside him, afraid that he had disturbed her sleep. She murmured to herself but didn’t wake.

He got up as quietly as possible, stepped to the front window, cautiously separated the drapery panels, and looked out at the motel parking lot and Pacific Coast Highway beyond. No one moved to or from any of the parked cars. As far as he remembered, all of the shadows that were out there now had been out there earlier. He saw no one lurking in any corner. The storm had taken all the wind with it into the east, and Laguna was so still that the trees might have been painted on a stage canvas. A truck passed, heading north on the highway, but that was the only movement in the night.

In the wall opposite the front window, draperies covered a pair of sliding glass doors beyond which lay a balcony overlooking the sea. Through the doors and past the deck railing, down at the foot of the bluff, lay a width of pale beach onto which waves broke in garlands of silver foam. No one could easily climb to the balcony, and the sward was deserted.

Maybe it had been only a nightmare.

He turned away from the glass, letting the draperies fall back into place, and he looked at the luminous dial of his wristwatch. Three o’clock in the morning.

He had been asleep about five hours. Not long enough, but it would have to do.

His neck ached intolerably, and his throat was mildly sore.

He went into the bathroom, eased the door shut, and snapped on the light. From his travel kit he took a bottle of Extra-Strength Excedrin. The label advised a dosage of no more than two tablets at a time and no more than eight in twenty-four hours. The moment seemed made for living dangerously, however, so he washed down four of them with a glass of water drawn from the sink tap, then popped a sore-throat lozenge in his mouth and sucked on it.