Hideaway

  He heard a woman say, “My name’s Lisa. What’s yours?”

  He turned his head and saw the blonde. She was at his side, keeping pace with him across the parking lot.

  Instead of answering her right away, he tipped the Corona to his mouth, sucked down the last couple of ounces, and dropped the empty bottle on the gravel. “My name—”

  —he gasped as cold Pepsi foamed from the dropped can, and puddled around his bare feet. The gravel had disappeared. A spreading pool of cola glistened on the peach-colored Santa Fe tiles of his kitchen floor.

  In Redlow’s Pontiac, Lisa told Vassago to take the San Diego Freeway south. By the time he traveled eastward on fog-filled surface streets and eventually found a freeway entrance, she had extracted capsules of what she said was PCP from the pharmacopoeia in her purse, and they had washed them down with the rest of her beer.

  PCP was an animal tranquilizer that often had the opposite of a tranquilizing effect on human beings, exciting them into destructive frenzies. It would be interesting to watch the impact of the drug on Lisa, who seemed to have the conscience of a snake, to whom the concept of morality was utterly alien, who viewed the world with unrelenting hatred and contempt, whose sense of personal power and superiority did not preclude a self-destructive streak, and who was already so full of tightly contained psychotic energy that she always seemed about to explode. He suspected that, with the aid of PCP, she’d be capable of highly entertaining extremes of violence, fierce storms of bloody destruction that he would find exhilarating to watch.

  “Where are we going?” he asked as they cruised south on the freeway. The headlights drilled into a white mist that hid the world and made it seem as if they could invent any landscape and future they wished. Whatever they imagined might take substance from the fog and appear around them.

  “El Toro,” she said.

  “That’s where he lives?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who is he?”

  “You need a name?”

  “No, ma’am. Why do you want him dead?”

  She studied him for a while. Gradually a smile spread across her face, as if it were a wound being carved by a slow-moving and invisible knife. Her small white teeth looked pointy. Piranha teeth. “You’ll really do it, won’t you?” she asked. “You’ll just go in there and kill the guy to prove I oughta want you.”

  “To prove nothing,” he said. “Just because it might be fun. Like I told you—”

  “First make some death together, then make some sex,” she finished for him.

  Just to keep her talking and make her feel increasingly at ease with him, he said, “Does he live in an apartment or a house?”

  “Why’s it matter?”

  “Lots more ways to get into a house, and neighbors aren’t as close.”

  “It’s a house,” she said.

  “Why do you want him dead?”

  “He wanted me, I didn’t want him, and he felt he could take what he wanted anyway.”

  “Couldn’t have been easy taking anything from you.”

  Her eyes were colder than ever. “The bastard had to have stitches in his face when it was over.”

  “But he still got what he wanted?”

  “He was bigger than me.”

  She turned away from him and gazed at the road ahead.

  A breeze had risen from the west, and the fog no longer eddied lazily through the night. It churned across the highway like smoke billowing off a vast fire, as if the entire coastline was ablaze, whole cities incinerated and the ruins smouldering.

  Vassago kept glancing at her profile, wishing that he could go with her to El Toro and see how deep in blood she would wade for vengeance. Then he would have liked to convince her to come with him to his hideaway and give herself, of her own free will, to his collection. Whether she knew it or not, she wanted death. She would be grateful for the sweet pain that would be her ticket to damnation. Pale skin almost luminescent against her black clothes, filled with hatred so intense that it made her darkly radiant, she would be an incomparable vision as she walked to her destiny among Vassago’s collection and accepted the killing blow, a willing sacrifice for his repatriation to Hell.

  He knew, however, that she would not accede to his fantasy and die for him even if death was what she wanted. She would die only for herself, when she eventually concluded that termination was her deepest desire.

  The moment she began to realize what he really wanted from her, she would lash out at him. She would be harder to control—and would do more damage—than Neon. He preferred to take each new acquisition to his museum of death while she was still alive, extracting the life from her beneath the malevolent gaze of the funhouse Lucifer. But he knew that he did not have that luxury with Lisa. She would not be easy to subdue, even with a sudden unexpected blow. And once he had lost the advantage of surprise, she would be a fierce adversary.

  He was not concerned about being hurt. Nothing, including the prospect of pain, could frighten him. Indeed, each blow she landed, each cut she opened in him, would be an exquisite thrill, pure pleasure.

  The problem was, she might be strong enough to get away from him, and he could not risk her escape. He wasn’t worried that she would report him to the cops. She existed in a subculture that was suspicious and scornful of the police, seething with hatred for them. If she slipped out of his grasp, however, he would lose the chance to add her to his collection. And he was convinced that her tremendous perverse energy would be the final offering that would win him readmission to Hell.

  “You feeling anything yet?” she asked, still looking ahead at the fog, into which they barreled at a dangerous speed.

  “A little,” he said.

  “I don’t feel anything.” She opened her purse again and began rummaging through it, taking stock of what other pills and capsules she possessed. “We need some kind of booster to help the crap kick in good.”

  While Lisa was distracted by her search for the right chemical to enhance the PCP, Vassago drove with his left hand and reached under his seat with his right to get the revolver that he had taken off Morton Redlow. She looked up just as he thrust the muzzle against her left side. If she knew what was happening, she showed no surprise. He fired two shots, killing her instantly.

  Hatch cleaned up the spilled Pepsi with paper towels. By the time he stepped to the kitchen sink to wash his hands, he was still shaking but not as badly as he had been.

  Terror, which had been briefly all-consuming, made some room for curiosity. He hesitantly touched the rim of the stainless-steel sink and then the faucet, as if they might dissolve beneath his hand. He struggled to understand how a dream could continue after he had awakened. The only explanation, which he could not accept, was insanity.

  He turned on the water, adjusted hot and cold, pumped some liquid soap out of the container, began to lather his hands, and looked up at the window above the sink, which faced onto the rear yard. The yard was gone. A highway lay in its place. The kitchen window had become a windshield. Swaddled in fog and only partially revealed by two headlight beams, the pavement rolled toward him as if the house was racing over it at sixty miles an hour. He sensed a presence beside him where there should have been nothing but the double ovens. When he turned his head he saw the blonde clawing in her purse. He realized that something was in his hand, firmer than mere lather, and he looked down at a revolver—

  —the kitchen snapped completely out of existence. He was in a car, rocketing along a foggy highway, pushing the muzzle of the revolver into the blonde’s side. With horror, as she looked up at him, he felt his finger squeeze the trigger once, twice. She was punched sideways by the dual impact as the ear-shattering crash of the shots slammed through the car.

  Vassago could not have anticipated what happened next.

  The gun must have been loaded with magnum cartridges, for the two shots ripped through the blonde more violently than he expected and slammed her into the passenger door. Either her door was no
t properly shut or one of the rounds punched all the way through her, damaging the latch, because the door flew open. Wind rushed into the Pontiac, shrieking like a living beast, and Lisa was snatched out into the night.

  He jammed on the brakes and looked at the rearview mirror. As the car began to fishtail, he saw the blonde’s body tumbling along the pavement behind him.

  He intended to stop, throw the car into reverse, and go back for her, but even at that dead hour of the morning, other traffic shared the freeway. He saw two sets of headlights maybe half a mile behind him, bright smudges in the mist but clarifying by the second. Those drivers would encounter the body before he could reach it and scoop it into the Pontiac.

  Taking his foot off the brake and accelerating, he swung the car hard to the left, across two lanes, then whipped it back to the right, forcing the door to slam shut. It rattled in its frame but didn’t pop open again. The latch must be at least partially effective.

  Although visibility had declined to about a hundred feet, he put the Pontiac up to eighty, bulleting blindly into the churning fog. Two exits later, he left the freeway and rapidly slowed down. On surface streets he made his way out of the area as swiftly as possible, obeying speed limits because any cop who stopped him would surely notice the blood splashed across the upholstery and glass of the passenger door.

  In the rearview mirror, Hatch saw the body tumbling along the pavement, vanishing into the fog. Then for a brief moment he saw his own reflection from the bridge of his nose to his eyebrows. He was wearing sunglasses even though driving at night. No. He wasn’t wearing them. The driver of the car was wearing them, and the reflection at which he stared was not his own. Although he seemed to be the driver, he realized that he was not, because even the dim glimpse he got of the eyes behind the tinted lenses was sufficient to convince him that they were peculiar, troubled, and utterly different from his own eyes. Then—

  —he was standing at the kitchen sink again, breathing hard and making choking sounds of revulsion. Beyond the window lay only the backyard, blanketed by night and fog.

  “Hatch?”

  Startled, he turned.

  Lindsey was standing in the doorway, in her bathrobe. “Is something wrong?”

  Wiping his soapy hands on his sweatshirt, he tried to speak, but terror had rendered him mute.

  She hurried to him. “Hatch?”

  He held her tightly and was glad for her embrace, which at last squeezed the words from him. “I shot her, she flew out of the car, Jesus God Almighty, bounced along the highway like a rag doll!”

  7

  At Hatch’s request, Lindsey brewed a pot of coffee. The familiarity of the delicious aroma was an antidote to the strangeness of the night. More than anything else, that smell restored a sense of normalcy that helped settle Hatch’s nerves. They drank the coffee at the breakfast table at one end of the kitchen.

  Hatch insisted on closing the Levolor blind over the nearby window. He said, “I have the feeling ... something’s out there ... and I don’t want it looking in at us.” He could not explain what he meant by “something.”

  When Hatch had recounted everything that had happened to him since waking from the nightmare of the icy blonde, the switchblade, and the mutilated eye, Lindsey had only one explanation to offer. “No matter how it seemed at the time, you must not have been fully awake when you got out of bed. You were sleepwalking. You didn’t really wake up until I stepped into the kitchen and called your name.”

  “I’ve never been a sleepwalker,” he said.

  She tried to make light of his objection. “Never too late to take up a new affliction.”

  “I don’t buy it.”

  “Then what’s your explanation?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “So sleepwalking,” she said.

  He stared down into the white porcelain cup that he clasped in both hands, as if he were a Gypsy trying to foresee the future in the patterns of light on the surface of the black brew. “Have you ever dreamed you were someone else?”

  “I suppose so,” she said.

  He looked hard at her. “No supposing. Have you ever seen a dream through the eyes of a stranger? A specific dream you can tell me about?”

  “Well ... no. But I’m sure I must’ve, at one time. I just don’t remember. Dreams are smoke, after all. They fade so fast. Who remembers them for long?”

  “I’ll remember this one for the rest of my life,” he said.

  Although they returned to bed, neither of them could get to sleep again. Maybe it was partly the coffee. She thought he had wanted the coffee precisely because he hoped that it would prevent sleep, sparing him a return to the nightmare. Well, it had worked.

  They both were lying on their backs, staring at the ceiling.

  At first he had been unwilling to turn off the bedside lamp, though he had revealed his reluctance only in the hesitancy with which he clicked the switch. He was almost like a child who was old enough to know real fears from false ones but not quite old enough to escape all of the latter, certain that some monster lurked under the bed but ashamed to say as much.

  Now, with the lamp off and with only the indirect glow of distant streetlamps piercing the windows between the halves of the drapes, his anxiety had infected her. She found it easy to imagine that some shadows on the ceiling moved, bat-lizard-spider forms of singular stealth and malevolent purpose.

  They talked softly, on and off, about nothing special. They both knew what they wanted to talk about, but they were afraid of it. Unlike the creepy-crawlies on the ceiling and things that lived under children’s beds, it was a real fear. Brain damage.

  Since waking up in the hospital, reanimated, Hatch had been having bad dreams of unnerving power. He didn’t have them every night. His sleep might even be undisturbed for as long as three or four nights in a row. But he was having them more frequently, week by week, and the intensity was increasing.

  They were not always the same dreams, as he described them, but they contained similar elements. Violence. Horrific images of naked, rotting bodies contorted into peculiar positions. Always, the dreams unfolded from the point of view of a stranger, the same mysterious figure, as if Hatch were a spirit in possession of the man but unable to control him, along for the ride. Routinely the nightmares began or ended—or began and ended—in the same setting: an assemblage of unusual buildings and other queer structures that resisted identification, all of it unlighted and seen most often as a series of baffling silhouettes against a night sky. He also saw cavernous rooms and mazes of concrete corridors that were somehow revealed in spite of having no windows or artificial lighting. The location was, he said, familiar to him, but recognition remained elusive, for he never saw enough to be able to identify it.

  Until tonight, they had tried to convince themselves that his affliction would be short-lived. Hatch was full of positive thoughts, as usual. Bad dreams were not remarkable. Everyone had them. They were often caused by stress. Alleviate the stress, and the nightmares went away.

  But they were not fading. And now they had taken a new and deeply disturbing turn: sleepwalking.

  Or perhaps he was beginning, while awake, to hallucinate the same images that troubled his sleep.

  Shortly before dawn, Hatch reached out for her beneath the sheets and took her hand, held it tight. “I’ll be all right. It’s nothing, really. Just a dream.”

  “First thing in the morning, you should call Nyebern,” she said, her heart sinking like a stone in a pond. “We haven’t been straight with him. He told you to let him know immediately if there were any symptoms—”

  “This isn’t really a symptom,” he said, trying to put the best face on it.

  “Physical or mental symptoms,” she said, afraid for him—and for herself if something was wrong with him.

  “I had all the tests, most of them twice. They gave me a clean bill of health. No brain damage.”

  “Then you’ve nothing to worry about, do you? No reason to del
ay seeing Nyebern.”

  “If there’d been brain damage, it would’ve showed up right away. It’s not a residual thing, doesn’t kick in on a delay.”

  They were silent for a while.

  She could no longer imagine that creepy-crawlies moved through the shadows on the ceiling. False fears had evaporated the moment he had spoken the name of the biggest real fear that they faced.

  At last she said, “What about Regina?”

  He considered her question for a while. Then: “I think we should go ahead with it, fill out the papers—assuming she wants to come with us, of course.”

  “And if ... you’ve got a problem? And it gets worse?”

  “It’ll take a few days to make the arrangements and be able to bring her home. By then we’ll have the results of the physical, the tests. I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

  “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.

  8

  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.”