shining day.
He dressed and left his hideaway.
By seven o'clock that early-spring night, Lindsey and Hatch were at
Zov's, a small but busy restaurant in Tustin. The decor was mainly
black and white, with lots of big windows and mirrors. The staff,
unfailingly friendly and efficient, were dressed in black and white to
complement the long room. The food they served was such a perfect
sensual experience that the monochromatic bistro seemed ablaze with
color.
The noise level was congenial rather than annoying. They did not have
to raise their voices to hear each other, and felt as if the background
buzz provided a screen of privacy from nearby tables. Through the first
two coursealamari; black-bean southey spoke of trivial things.
But when the main course was served-swordfish for both of them-Lindsey
could no longer contain herself.
She said, "Okay, all right, we've had all day to brood about it. We
haven't colored each other's opinions. So what do you think of Regina?"
"What do you think of Regina?"
"You first." ment were brighter and bolder than things were supposed to
be in real life.
She had hoped for just that reaction from him, but she hadn't known what
he would say, really hadn't had a clue, because the meeting had been ...
well, one apt word would be "daunting."
"Oh, God, I love her," Lindsey said. "She's so sweet."
"She's a tough cookie."
"That's an act."
"She was putting on an act for us, yeah, but she's tough just the same.
She's had to be tough. Life didn't give her a choice."
"But it's a good tough."
"It's a great tough," he agreed. "I'm not saying it put me off. I
admired it, I loved her."
"She's so bright."
"Struggling so hard to make herself unappealing," Hatch said, "and that
only made her more appealing."
"The poor kid. Afraid of being rejected again, so she took the
offensive."
"When I heard her coming down the hall, I thought it was-"
"Godzilla!"
Lindsey said.
"At least. And how'd you like Binky the talking goldfish?"
"Shit on the mayonnaise!" Lindsey said.
They both laughed, and people around them turned to look, either because
of their laughter or because some of what Lindsey said was overheard,
which only made them laugh harder.
"She's going to be a handful," Hatch said.
"She'll be a dream."
"Nothing's that easy."
"She will be."
"One problem."
"What's that?"
He hesitated. "What if she doesn't want to come with us?"
Lindsey's smile froze. "She will. She'll come."
"Maybe not."
"Don't be negative."
"I'm only saying we've got to be prepared for disappointment."
Lindsey shook her head adamantly. "No. It's going to work out. It has
to. We've had more than our share of bad luck, bad times. We deserve
better. The wheel has turned. We're going to put a family together
again.
Life is goIng to be good, it's going to be so line. The worst is behind
us now."
3
That Thursday night, Vassago enjoyed the conveniences of a motel room.
Usually he used one of the fields behind the abandoned amusement park as
a toilet. He also washed each evening with bottled water and liquid
soap. He shaved with a straight razor, an aerosol can of lather, and a
piece of a broken mirror that he had found in a corner of the park.
When rain fell at night, he liked to bathe in the open, letting the
downpour sluice over him. If lightning accompanied the storm, he sought
the highest point on the paved midway, hoping that he was about to
receive the grace of Satan and be recalled to the land of the dead by
one scintillant bolt of electricity. But the rainy season in southern
California was over now, and most likely would not come around again
until December. If he earned his way back into the fold of the dead and
damned before then, the means of his deliverance from the hateful world
of the living would be some other force than lightning.
Once a week, sometimes twice, he rented a motel room to use the shower
and make a better job of grooming than he could in the primitive
conditions of his hideaway, though not because hygiene was important to
him.
Filth had its powerful attractions. The air and water of Hades, to
which he longed to return, were filth of ate variety. But if he was to
move among the living and prey upon them, building the collection that
might win him readmission to the realm of the damned, there were certain
conventions that had to be followed in order not to draw undue attention
to himself. Among them was a certain degree of cleanliness.
Vassago always used the same motel, the Blue Skies, a seedy hole toward
the southern end of Santa Ana, where the unshaven desk clerk accepted
only cash, asked for no identification, and never booked guests in few
men who did not check in with a whore in tow. He stayed only an hour or
two, however, which was in keeping with the duration of the average
customer's use of the accommodations, and he was allowed the same
anonymity as those who, grunting and sweating, noisily rocked the
headboards of their beds against the walls in rooms adjoining his.
He could not have lived there full time, if only because his awareness
of the frenzied coupling of the sluts and their johns filled him with
anger, ahxiety, and nausea at the urgent needs and frenetic rhythms of
the living.
The atmosphere made it difficult to think clearly and impossible to
rest, even though the perversion and dementia of the place was the very
thing in which he had reveled when he had been one of the fully alive.
No other motel or boarding house would have been safe. They would have
wanted identification. Besides, he could pass among the living as one
of them only as long as their contact with him was casual. Any motel
clerk or landlord who took a deeper interest in his character and
encountered him repeatedly would soon realize that he was different from
them in some indefinable yet deeply disturbing way.
Anyway, to avoid drawing attention to himself, he preferred the
amusement park as primary quarters. The authorities looking for him
would be less likely to find him there than anywhere else. Most
important, the park offered solitude, graveyard stillness, and regions
of perfect darkness to which he could escape during daylight hours when
his sensitive eyes could not tolerate the insistent brightness of the
sun.
Motels were tolerable only between dusk and dawn.
That pleasantly warm Thursday night, when he came out of the Blue Skies
Motel office with his room key, he noticed a familiar Pontiac parked in
shadows at the back of the lot, beyond the end unit, not nose-in to the
motel but facing the office. The car had been there on Sunday, the last
time Vassago had used the Blue Skies. A man was slumped behind the
wheel, as if sleeping or just passing time while he waited for someone
to meet him.
He had been there Sunday night, features veiled by the night and the
haze of reflected light on his windshield.
Vassago drove the Camaro to unit six, about in the middle of the long
arm of the L-shaped structure, parked in front, and let himself into his
room. He carried only a change of clothes-all black like the clothes he
was wearing.
Inside the room, he did not turn on the light. He never did.
For a while he stood with his back against the door, thinking about the
Pontiac and the man behind the steering wheel. He might have been just
a drug dealer working out of his car. The number of dealers crawling
the neighborhood was even greater than the number of cockroaches
swarming inside the walls of that decaying motel. But where were his
customers with their quick nervous eyes and greasy wads of money?
Vassago dropped his clothes on the bed, put his sunglasses in his jacket
pocket, and went into the small bathroom. It smelled of hastily sloshed
disinfectant that could not mask a melange of vile biological odors.
A rectangle of pale light marked a window above the back wall of the
shower. Sliding open the glass door, which made a scraping noise as it
moved along the corroded track, he stepped into the stall. If the
window had been hxed, or if it had been divided vertically into two
panes, he would have been foiled. But it swung outward from the top on
rusted hinges. He gripped the sill above his head, pulled himself
through the window, and wriggled out into the service alley behind the
motel.
He paused to put on his sunglasses again. A nearby sodium-vapor
streetlamp cast a urine-yellow glare that scratched like windblown sand
at his eyes. The glasses mellowed it to a muddy amber and clarified his
vision.
He went right, all the way to the end of the block, turned right on the
side street, then right again at the next corner, circling the motel.
He slipped around the end of the short wing of the L-shaped building and
moved along the covered walkway in front of the last units until he was
behind the Pontiac.
At the moment that end of the motel was quiet. No one was coming or
going from any of the rooms.
The man behind the wheel was sitting with one arm out of the open car
window. If he had glanced at the side mirror, he might have seen
Vassago coming up on him, but his attention was focused on room six in
the other wing of the L.
Vassago jerked open the door, and the guy actually started to fall out
because he'd been leaning against it. Vassago hit him hard in the face,
using his elbow like a battering ram, which was better than a list,
except he didn't hit him squarely enough. The guy was rocked but not
finished, so he pushed up and out of the Pontiac, trying to grapple with
Vassago.
He was overweight and slow. A knee driven hard into his crotch slowed
him even more. The guy went into a prayer posture, gagging, and Vassago
stepped back far enough to kick him. The stranger fell over onto his
side, so Vassago kicked him again, in the head this time. The guy was
out cold, as still as the pavement on which he was sprawled.
haired blond hooker in a miniskirt and a middle-aged guy in a cheap suit
and a bad toupee. They were coming out of the nearest room. They gaped
at the man on the ground. At Vassago. He stared back at them until
they reentered their room and quietly pulled the door shut behind them.
The unconscious man was heavy, maybe two hundred pounds, but Vassago was
more than strong enough to lift him. He carried the guy around to the
passenger side and loaded him into the other front seat.
Then he got behind the wheel, started the Pontiac, and departed the Blue
Skies.
Several blocks away, he turned onto a street of tract homes built thirty
years ago and aging badly. Ancient Indian laurels and coral trees
flanked the canted sidewalks and lent a note of grace in spite of the
neighborhood's decline. He pulled the Pontiac to the curb. He switched
off the engine and the lights.
As no streetlamps were nearby, he removed his sunglasses to search the
unconscious man. He found a loaded revolver in a shoulder holster under
the guy's jacket. He took it for himself.
The stranger was carrying two wallets. The first, and thicker,
also held credit cards, photographs of people he didn't know, a receipt
from a dry cleaner, a buy-ten-get-one-free punch card from a
frozen-yogurt shop, a driver's license that identified the man as Morton
Redlow of Anaheim, and insignificant odds and ends. The second wallet
was quite thin, and it proved to be not a real wallet at all but a
leather ID holder. In it were Redlow's license to operate as a private
investigator and another license to carry a concealed weapon.
In the glove compartment, Vassago found only candy bars and a paperback
detective novel. In the console between seats, he found chewing gum,
breath mints, another candy bar, and a bent Thomas Brothers map book of
Orange County.
He studied the map book for a while, then started the car and pulled
away from the curb. He headed for Anaheim and the address on Redlow's
driver's license.
When they were more than halfway there, Redlow began to groan and
twitch, as if he might come to his senses. Driving with one hand,
Vassago picked up the revolver he had taken off the man and clubbed him
alongside the head with it. Redlow was quiet again.
really like Friday afternoons, and you know why?" He didn't give anyone
a chance to express a lack of interest. "Because Thursday night we
always have beans and pea soup, so by Friday afternoon you can really
cut some ripefarts."
The other kids groaned in disgust. Regina just ignored him.
Nerd or not, Carl was right: Thursday dinner at St. Thomas's Home for
Children was always split-pea soup, ham, green beans, potatoes in herb
butter sauce, and a square of fruited Jell-O with a blob of fake whipped
cream for dessert. Sometimes the nuns got into the sherry or just went
wild from too many years in their suffocating habits, and if they lost
control on a Thursday, you might get corn instead of green beans or, if
they were really over the top, maybe a pair of vanilla cookies with the
Jell-O.
That Thursday the menu held no surprises, but Regina would not have
cared-and might not have noticed-if the fare had included filet mignon
or, conversely, cow pies. Well, she probably would have noticed a cow
pie on her plate, though she wouldn't have cared if it was substituted
for the green beans because she didn't like green beans. She liked ham.
She had lied when she'd told the Harrisons she was a vegetarian,
figuring they would find dietary fussiness one more reason to reject her
flat-out, at the start, instead of later when it would hurt more.
But even as she ate, her attention was not on her food and not on the
conversation of the other kids at her table, but on the meeting in Mr.
Gujilio's office that afternoon.
She had screwed up.
They were going to have to build a Museum of Famous Screwups just to
have a place for a statue of her, so people could come from all over the
world, from France and Japan and Chile, just to see it. school kids
would come, whole classes at a time with their teachers, to study her so
they could learn what not to do and how not to act. Parents would point
at her statue and ominously warn their children, "Anytime you think
you're so smart, just remember her and think how you might wind up like
that, a figure of pity and ridicule, laughed at and reviled."
Two thirds of the way through the interview, she had realized the
Harrisons were special people. They probably would never treat her as
badly as she had been treated by the Infamous Dotteriields, the couple
who accepted her and took her home and then rejected her in two weeks
when they discovered they were going to have a child of their own,
Satan's child, no doubt, who would one day destroy the world and turn
against even the Dotterfields, burning them alive with a flash of fire
from his demonic little pig eyes. (Uhh. Wishing harm to another. The
thought is as bad as the deed. Remember that for confession, Reg.)
Anyway, the Harrisons were different, which she began to realize slowly