Mr. Murder (41 page)

He could imagine no way in which they might secretly bring a shotgun inside with them, even a compact pistol-grip model like the Mossberg. He didn’t want to risk carrying the Beretta under his ski jacket because he wasn’t sure whether some bank-security systems included the ability to detect a hidden handgun on anyone who walked through the door. If a bank employee mistook him for a holdup man and the police were summoned by a silent alarm, the cops would never give him the benefit of the doubt—not considering the reputation he had with them after last night.

While Marty went directly to one of the teller’s windows, Paige took Charlotte and Emily to an arrangement of two short sofas and two armchairs at one end of the long room, where patrons waited when they had appointments with loan officers. The bank was not a cavernous marble-lined monument to money with massive Doric columns and vaulted ceiling, but a comparatively small place with an acoustic-tile ceiling and all-weather green carpet. Though Paige and the kids were only sixty feet from him, clearly visible any time he chose to glance their way, he didn’t like being separated from them by even that much distance.

The teller was a young woman—Lorraine Arakadian, according to the nameplate at her window—whose round tortoise-shell glasses gave her an owlish look. When Marty told her that he wanted to make a withdrawal of seventy thousand dollars from their savings account—which had a balance of more than seventy-four—she misunderstood, thinking he meant to transfer that amount to checking. When she put the applicable form in front of him to effect the transaction, he corrected her misapprehension and asked for the entire amount in hundred-dollar bills if possible.

She said, “Oh. I see. Well . . . that’s a larger transaction than I can make on my own authority, sir. I’ll have to get permission from the head teller or assistant manager.”

“Of course,” he said unconcernedly, as if he made large cash withdrawals every week. “I understand.”

She went to the far end of the long teller’s cage to speak to an older woman who was examining documents in one drawer of a large bank of files. Marty recognized her—Elaine Higgens, assistant manager. Mrs. Higgens and Lorraine Arakadian glanced at Marty, then put their heads together to confer again.

While he waited for them, Marty monitored both the south and east entrances to the lobby, trying to look nonchalant even though he expected The Other to walk through one door or another at any moment, this time armed with an Uzi.

A writer’s imagination. Maybe it wasn’t a curse, after all. At least not entirely. Maybe sometimes it was a survival tool. One thing for sure: even the most fanciful writer’s imagination had trouble keeping up with reality these days.

He needs more time than he expected to find plates to swap for those on the stolen Toyota Camry. He slept too late and took far too long to make himself presentable. Now the world is coming awake, and he hasn’t the advantage of the dead-of-night privacy that would make the switch easy. Large garden-apartment complexes, with shadowy carports and a plenitude of vehicles, offer the ideal shopping for what he requires, but as he tries one after another of these, he discovers too many residents out and about, on their way to work.

Eventually his diligent search is rewarded in the parking lot behind a church. A morning service is in progress. He can hear organ music. Parishioners have left fourteen cars from which he can select, not a large turnout for the Lord but adequate for his own purposes.

He leaves the engine of the Camry running while he looks for a car in which the owner has left the keys. In the third one, a green Pontiac, a full set dangles from the ignition.

He unlocks the trunk of the Pontiac, hoping it will contain at least an emergency tool kit with a screwdriver. Because he hot-wired the Camry, he doesn’t have keys to its trunk. Again, he is in luck: a complete road-emergency kit with flares, first-aid items, and a tool packet that includes four screwdrivers of different types.

God is with him.

In a few minutes he exchanges the Camry’s plates for those on the Pontiac. He returns the tool kit to the trunk of the Pontiac and the keys to the ignition.

As he’s walking to the Camry, the church organ launches into a hymn with which he is not familiar. That he doesn’t know the name of the hymn is not surprising, since he has only been to church three times that he can recall. In two instances, he had gone to church to kill time until movie theaters opened. On the third occasion he had been following a woman he’d seen on the street and with whom he would have liked to share sex and the special intimacy of death.

The music stirs him. He stands in the mild morning breeze, swaying dreamily, eyes closed. He is moved by the hymn. Perhaps he has musical talent. He should find out. Maybe playing an instrument of some kind and composing songs would be easier than writing novels.

When the song ends, he gets in the Camry and leaves.

Marty exchanged pleasantries with Mrs. Higgens when she returned with the teller. Evidently no one at the bank had seen the news about him, as neither woman mentioned the assault. His crew-neck sweater and button-down shirt concealed livid bruises around his neck. His voice was mildly hoarse but not sufficiently so to cause comment.

Mrs. Higgens observed that the cash withdrawal he wished to make was unusually large, phrasing her comment to induce him to explain why he would risk carrying so much money around. He merely agreed it was, indeed, unusually large and expressed the hope that he wasn’t putting them to much trouble. Unflagging affability was probably essential to completing the transaction as swiftly as possible.

“I’m not sure we can pay it entirely in hundreds,” Mrs. Higgens said. She spoke softly, discreetly, though there were only two other customers in the bank and neither of them nearby. “I’ll have to check our supply of bills in that denomination.”

“Some twenties, fifties are okay,” Marty assured her. “I’m just trying to prevent it from getting too bulky.”

Though both the assistant manager and the teller were smiling and polite, Marty was aware of their curiosity and concern. They were in the money business, after all, and they knew there weren’t many legitimate—and fewer sensible—reasons for anyone to carry seventy thousand in cash.

Even if he had felt comfortable leaving Paige and the kids in the car, Marty would not have done so. The first suspicion to cross a banker’s mind would be that the cash was needed to meet a ransom payment, and prudence would require a call to the police. With the entire family present, kidnapping could be ruled out.

Marty’s teller began to consult with other tellers, tabulating the number of hundreds contained in all their drawers, while Mrs. Higgens disappeared through the open door of the vault at the back of the cage.

He glanced at Paige and the girls. East entrance. South. His watch. Smiling, smiling all the while, smiling like an idiot.

We’ll be out of here in fifteen minutes, he told himself. Maybe as few as ten. Out of here and on our way and safe.

The dark wave hit him.

At a Denny’s, he uses the men’s room, then selects a booth by the windows and orders an enormous breakfast.

His waitress is a cute brunette named Gayle. She makes jokes about his appetite. She is coming on to him. He considers trying to make a date with her. She has a lovely body, slender legs.

Having sex with Gayle would be adultery because he is married to Paige. He wonders if it would still be adultery if, after having sex with Gayle, he killed her.

He leaves her a good tip and decides to return within a week or two and ask her for a date. She has a pert nose, sensuous lips.

In the Camry again, before he starts the engine, he closes his eyes, clears his mind, and imagines he is magnetized, likewise the false father, opposite poles toward each other. He seeks attraction.

This time he is pulled into the orbit of the other man quicker than he was when he tried to make a connection in the middle of the night, and the adducent power is immeasurably greater than before. Indeed, the pull is so strong, so instant, he grunts in surprise and locks his hands around the steering wheel, as if he is in real danger of being yanked out of the Toyota through the windshield and shooting like a bullet straight to the heart of the false father.

His enemy is immediately aware of the contact. The man is frightened, threatened.

East.

And south.

That will lead him back in the general direction of Mission Viejo, though he doubts the imposter feels safe enough to have returned home already.

A pressure wave, as from an enormous explosion, smashed into Marty and nearly rocked him off his feet. With both hands he clutched the countertop in front of the teller’s window to keep his balance. He leaned into the counter, bracing himself against it.

The sensation was entirely subjective. The air seemed compressed to the point of liquefaction, but nothing disintegrated, cracked, or fell over. He appeared to be the only person affected.

After the initial shock of the wave, Marty felt as if he’d been buried under an avalanche. Weighed down by immeasurable megatons of snow. Breathless. Paralyzed. Cold.

He suspected that his face had turned pale, waxy. He knew for certain that he would be unable to speak if spoken to. Were anyone to return to the teller’s window while the seizure gripped him, the fear beneath his casual pose would be revealed. He would be exposed as a man in desperate trouble, and they would be reluctant to hand so much cash to someone who was so clearly either ill or deranged.

He grew dramatically colder when he experienced a mental caress from the same malignant, ghostly presence that he’d sensed yesterday in the garage as he’d been trying to leave for the doctor’s office. The icy “hand” of the spirit pressed against the raw surface of his brain, as if reading his location by fingering data that was Brailled into the convoluted tissues of his cerebral cortex. He now understood that the spirit was actually the look-alike, whose uncanny powers were not limited to spontaneous recovery from mortal chest wounds.

He breaks the magnetic connection.

He drives out of the restaurant parking lot.

He turns on the radio. Michael Bolton is singing about love.

The song is touching. He is deeply moved by it, almost to tears. Now that he finally is somebody, now that a wife waits for him and two young children need his guidance, he knows the meaning and value of love. He wonders how he could have lived this long without it.

He heads south. And east.

Destiny calls.

Abruptly, the spectral hand lifted from Marty.

The crushing pressure was released, and the world snapped back to normal—if there was such a thing as normality any more.

He was relieved that the attack had lasted only five or ten seconds. None of the bank employees had been aware anything was wrong with him.

However, the need to obtain the cash and get out of there was urgent. He looked at Paige and the kids in the open lounge at the far end of the room. He shifted his gaze worriedly to the east entrance, the south entrance, east again.

The Other knew where they were. In minutes, at most, their mysterious and implacable enemy would be upon them.

The scrambled eggs on Oslett’s abandoned plate acquired a faint grayish cast as they cooled and congealed. The salty aroma of bacon, previously so appealing, induced in him a vague nausea.

Stunned by the consideration that Alfie might have developed into a creature with sexual urges and with the ability to satisfy them, Oslett was nonetheless determined not to appear concerned, at least not in front of Peter Waxhill. “Well, all of this still amounts to nothing but conjecture.”

“Yes,” said Waxhill, “but we’re checking the past to see if the theory holds water.”

“What past?”

“Police records in every city where Alfie has been on assignment in the past fourteen months. Rapes and rape-murders during the hours he wasn’t actually working.”

Oslett’s mouth was dry. His heart was thudding.

He didn’t care what happened to the Stillwater family. Hell, they were only Klingons.

He didn’t care, either, if the Network collapsed and all of its grand ambitions went unfulfilled. Eventually an organization similar to it would be formed, and the dream would be renewed.

But if their bad boy proved impossible to recapture or stop, the potential was here for a stain to spread deep into the Oslett family, jeopardizing its wealth and seriously diminishing its political power for decades to come. Above all, Drew Oslett demanded respect. The ultimate guarantor of respect had always been family, bloodline. The prospect of the Oslett name becoming an object of ridicule and scorn, target of public outrage, brunt of every TV comedian’s puerile jokes, and the subject of embarrassing stories in papers as diverse as the
New York Times
and the
National Enquirer
was soul-shaking.

“Didn’t you ever wonder,” Waxhill asked, “what your boy did with his free time, between assignments?”

“We monitored him closely, of course, for the first six weeks. He went to movies, restaurants, parks, watched television, did all the things that people do to kill time—just as we wanted him to act outside a controlled environment. Nothing strange. Nothing at all out of the ordinary. Certainly nothing to do with women.”

“He would have been on his best behavior, naturally, if he was aware that he was being watched.”

“He wasn’t aware. Couldn’t be. He never made our surveillance men. No way. They’re the best.” Oslett realized he was protesting too much. Nevertheless, he couldn’t keep from adding, “No way.”

“Maybe he was aware of them the same way he became aware of this Martin Stillwater. Some low-key psychic perception.”

Oslett was beginning to dislike Waxhill. The man was a hopeless pessimist.