through slightly opened lips. If she , her dreams must have been pat.
Hatch felt his heart pinch as he looked at her, for she seemed so
desperately young. He found it hard to believe that he had ever been as
young as Regina was just then, for youth was innocence. Having been
raised under the hateful and oppressive hand of his father, he had
surrendered innocence at an early age in return for an intuitive grasp
of aberrant psychology that had permitted him to survive in a home where
anger and brutal "discipline" were the rewards for innocent mistakes and
misunderstandings. He knew that Regina could not be as tender as she
looked, for life had given her reasons of her own to develop thick skin
and an armored heart.
Tough as they might be, however, they were both vulnerable, child and
man. In fact, at that moment Hatch felt more vulnerable than the girl.
If given a choice between her inability the game leg, the twisted and
incomplete hand-and whatever damage had been done to some deep region of
his brain, he would have opted for her physical impairments without
hesitation. After recent experiences, including the inexplicable
escalation of his anger into blind rage, Hatch did not feel entirely in
control of himself. And from the time he had been a small boy, with the
terrifying example of his father to shape his fears, he had feared
nothing half as much as being out of control.
I will not fail you, he promised the sleeping child.
He looked at Lindsey, to whom he owed his lives, both of them, before
and after dying. Silently he made her the same promise: I will not fail
you.
He wondered if they were promises he could keep.
Later, in their own room, with the lights out, as they lay on their
separate halves of the bed, Lindsey said, "The rest of the test results
should be back to Dr. Nyebern tomorrow."
Hatch had spent most of Saturday at the hospital, giving blood and urine
samples, submitting to the prying of X-ray and sonogram machines.
At one point he had been hooked up to more electrodes than the creature
that Dr. Frankenstein, in those old movies, had energized from kites
sent aloft in a lightning storm.
He said, "When I spoke to him today, he told me everything was looking
good. I'm sure the rest of the tests will all come in negative, too.
Whatever's happening to me, it has nothing to do with any mental or
physical damage from the accident or from be.... dead. I'm healthy,
I'm okay."
"Oh, God, I hope so."
"I'm just fine."
"Do you really think so?"
"Yes, I really think so, I really do." He wondered how he could lie to
her so smoothly. Maybe because the lie was not meant to hurt or harm,
merely to soothe her so she could get some sleep.
"I love you," she said.
"I love you, too."
In a couple of minutes- shortly before midnight, according to the
digital clock at the bedside-she was asleep, snoring softly.
Hatch was unable to sleep, worrying about what he might learn of his
future-or lack of it-tomorrow. He suspected that Dr. Nyebern would be
gray-faced and grim, bearing somber news of some meaningful shadow
detected in one lobe of Hatch's brain or another, a patch of dead cells,
lesion, cyst, or tumor. Something deadly. Inoperable. And certain to
get worse.
His confidence had been increasing slowly ever since he had gotten past
the events of Thursday night and Friday morning, when he had dreamed of
the blonde's murder and, later, had followed the trail of the killer to
the Route 133 off-ramp from the San Diego Freeway. The weekend had been
uneventful. The day just past, enlivened and uplifted by Regina's
arrival, had been delightful. Then he had seen the newspaper piece
about Cooper, and had lost control.
He hadn't told Lindsey about the stranger's reflection that he had seen
in the den mirror. This time he was unable to pretend that he might
have been sleepwalking, half awake, half dreaming He had been wide
awake, which meant the image in the mirror was an hallucination of one
kind or another. A healthy, undamaged brain didn't hallucinate. He
hadn't shared that terror with her because he knew, with the receipt of
the test results tomorrow, there would be fear enough to go around.
Unable to sleep, he began to think about the newspaper story again, even
though he didn't want to chew on it any more. He tried to direct his
thoughts away from William Cooper, but he returned to the subject the
way he might have obsessively probed at a sore tooth with his tongue.
It almost seemed as if he were being forced to think about the truck
driver, as if a giant mental magnet was pulling his attention inexorably
in that direction. Soon, to his dismay, anger rose in him again. Worse,
almost at once, the anger exploded into fury and a hunger for violence
so intense that he had to fist his hands at his sides and clench his
teeth and struggle to keep from letting loose a primal cry of rage.
From the banks of mailboxes in the breezeway at the main entrance to the
garden apartments, Vassago learned that William Cooper was in apartment
twenty-eight. He followed the breezeway into the courtyard, which was
lined with palms and ficuses and ferns and too many landscape lights to
please him, and he climbed an exterior staircase to the covered balcony
that served the second-floor units of the two-story complex.
No one was in sight. Palm Court was silent, peaceful.
Though it was a few minutes past midnight, lights were on in the Cooper
apartment. Vassago could hear a television turned low.
The window to the right of the door was covered with Levolor blinds.
The slats were not tightly closed. Vassago could see a kitchen
illuminated only by the low-wattage bulb in the range hood.
To the left of the door a larger window looked onto the balcony and
courtyard from the apartment living room. The drapes were not drawn all
the way shut. Through the gap, a man could be seen slumped in a big
recliner with his feet up in front of the television. this head was
tilted to one side, his face toward the window, and he appeared to be
asleep. A glass containing an inch of golden liquid stood beside a
half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel's on a small table next to the
recliner.
A bag of cheese puffs had been knocked off the table, and some of the
bright orange contents had scattered across the bile-green carpet.
Vassago scanned the balcony to the left, right, and on the other side of
the courtyard. Still d.
He tried to slide open Cooper's living-room window, but it was either
corroded or locked. He moved to the right again, toward the kitchen
window, but he stopped at the door on the way and, without any real
hope, tried it. The door was unlocked. He pushed it open, went inside
and locked it behind him.
The man in the recliner, probably Cooper, did not stir as Vassago
quietly pulled the drapes all the way shut across the big living-room
window. No one else, passing on the balcony, would be able to look
&
nbsp; inside.
Already assured that the kitchen, dining area, and living room were
deserted, Vassago moved catlike through the bathroom and two bedrooms
(one without furniture, used primarily for storage) that comprised the
rest of the apartment. The man in the recliner was alone.
On the dresser in the bedroom, Vassago spotted a wallet and a ring of
keys. In the wallet he found fifty-eight dollars, which he took, and a
driver's license in the name of William X. Cooper. The photograph on
the license was of the man in the living room, a few years younger and,
of course, not in a drunken stupor.
He returned to the living room with the intention of waking Cooper and
having an informative little chat with him. Who is Lindsey? Where does
she live?
But as he approached the recliner, a current of anger shot through him,
too sudden and causeless to be his own, as if he were a human radio that
received other people's emotions. And what he was receiving was the
same anger that had suddenly struck him while he had been with his
collection in the funhouse hardly an hour ago. As before, he opened
himself to it, amplified the current with his own singular rage,
wondering if he would receive visions, as he had on that previous
occasion. But this time, as he stood looking down on William Cooper,
the anger Bared too abruptly into insensate fury, and he lost control.
From the table beside the recliner, he grabbed the Jack Daniel's by the
neck of the bottle.
Lying rigid in his bed, hands fisted so tightly that even his blunt
fingernails were gouging painfully into his palms, Hatch had the crazy
feeling that his mind had been invaded. His flicker of anger had been
like opening a door just a hairline crack but wide enough for something
on the other side to get a grip and tear it off its hinges. He felt
something unnameable storming into him, a force without form or
features, defined only by its hatred and rage. Its fury was that of the
hurricane, the typhoon, beyond mere human dimensions, and he knew that
he was too small a vessel to contain all of the anger that was pumping
into him. He felt as if he would explode, shatter as if he were not a
man but a crystal figurine.
The half-full bottle of Jack Daniel's whacked the side of the sleeping
man's head with such impact that it was almost as loud as a shotgun
blast.
Whiskey and sharp fragments of glass showered up, rained down,
splattered and clinked against the television set, the other furniture,
and the walls. The air was filled with the velvety aroma of corn-mash
bourbon, but underlying it was the scent of blood, for the gashed and
battered side of Cooper's face was bleeding copiously.
The man was no longer merely sleeping. He had been hammered into a
deeper level of unconsciousness.
Vassago was left with just the neck of the bottle in his hand. It
terminated in three sharp spikes of glass that dripped bourbon and made
him think of snake fangs glistening with venom. Shifting his grip, he
raised the weapon above his head and brought it down, letting out a
fierce hiss of rage, and the glass serpent bit deep into William
Cooper's face.
The volcanic wrath that erupted into Hatch was unlike anything he had
ever experienced belbee, far beyond any rage that his father had ever
achieved. Indeed, it was nothing he could have generated within himself
for the same reason that one could not manufacture sulfuric acid in a
paper cauldron: the vessel would be dissolved by the substance it was
required to contain. A high-pressure lava flow of anger gushed into
him, so hot that he wanted to scream, so white-hot that he had no time
to scream. Consciousness was burned away, and he fell into a mercifully
dreamless darkness where there was neither anger nor terror.
Vassago realized that he was shouting with wordless, savage glee.
After a dozen or twenty blows, the glass weapon had utterly
disintegrated. He finally, reluctantly dropped the short fragment of
the bottle neck still in his white-knuckled grip. Snarling, he threw
himself against the Naugahyde recliner, tipping it over and rolling the
dead man onto the bile-green carpet. He picked up the end table and
pitched it into the television set, where Humphrey Bogart was sitting in
a military courtroom, rolling a couple of ball bearings in his leathery
hand, talking about strawberries.
The screen imploded, and Bogart was transformed into a shower of yellow
sparks, the sight of which ignited new fires of destructive fury in
Vassago. He kicked over a coffee table, tore two It Mart prints off the
walls and smashed the glass out of the frames, swept a collection of
better than to have continued from one end of the apartment to the
other, pulling all the dishes out of the kitchen cabinets and smashing
them, reducing all the glassware to bright shards, seizing the food in
the refrigerator and heaving it against the walls, hammering one piece
of furniture against another until everything was broken and splintered,
but he was halted by the sound of a siren, distant now, rapidly drawing
nearer, the meaning of it penetrating even through the mist of blood
frenzy that clouded his thoughts. He headed for the door, then swinging
away from it, realizing that people might have come out into the
courtyard or might be watching from their windows. He ran out of the
living room, back the short hall, to the window in the master bedroom,
where he pulled aside the drapes and looked onto the roof over the
building-long carport. An alleyway, bordered by a block wall, lay
beyond. He twisted open the latch on the double-hung window, shoved up
the bottom hall, squeezed through, dropped onto the roof of the long
carport, rolled to the edge, fell to the pavement, and landed on his
feet as if he were a cat. He lost his sunglasses, scooped them up, put
them on again. He sprinted left, toward the back of the property, with
the siren louder now, much louder, very close. When he came to the next
flank of the eight-foot-high concrete-block wall that ringed the
property, he swiftly clambered over it with the agility of a spider
skittering up any porous surface, and then he was over, into another
alleyway serving carports along the back of another apartment complex,
and so he ran from serviceway to serviceway, picking a route through the
maze by sheer instinct, and came out on the street where he had parked,
half a block from the pearl-gray Honda. He got in the car, started the
engine, and drove away from there as sedately as he could manage,
sweating and breathing so hard that he steamed up the windows.
Reveling in the fragrant melange of bourbon, blood, and perspiration, he
was tremendously excited, so profoundly satisfied by the violence he had
unleashed that he pounded the steering wheel and let out peels of
laughter that had a shrieky edge.
For a while he drove randomly from one street to another with no idea
where he was headed. After hi
s laughter faded, when his heart stopped
racing, he gradually oriented himself and struck out south and east, in
the general direction of his hideaway.
If William Cooper could have provided any connection to the woman named
Lindsey, that lead was now closed to Vassago forever. He wasn't
worried. He didn't know what was happening to him, why Cooper or
Lindsey or the man in the mirror had been brought to his attention by
these supernatural means. But he knew that if he only trusted in his
dark god, everything would eventually be made clear to him.
He was beginning to wonder if Hell had let him go willingly, returning
him to the land of the living in order to use him to deal with certain
people whom the god of darkness wanted dead. Perhaps he'd not been
stolen from Hell, after all, but had been sent back to life on a mission
of destruction that was only slowly becoming comprehensible.
If that were the case, he was pleased to make himself the instrument of
the dark and powerful divinity whose company he longed to rejoin, and he
anxiously awaited whatever task he might he assigned next.
Toward dawn, after several hours in a deep slumber of almost deathlike
perfection, Hatch woke and did not know where he was. For a moment he
drifted in confusion, then washed up on the shore of memory: the
bedroom, Lindsey breathing softly in her sleep beside him, the ash-gray
first light of morning like a fine silver dust on the windowpane When he
Bed the inexplicable and inhuman fit of rage that had slammed through
him with paralytic force, Hatch stiffened with fear. He tried to
remember where that spiraling anger had led, in what act of violence it