He closed the metal box, stood, and looked around at the quiet,
well-groomed street. All was harmony. Every house had a tile roof in
shades of tan and sand and h, not the more stark orange-red tiles of
many older California homes. The stucco walls were cream-colored or
within a narrow range of coordinated pastels specified by the
"Covenants, Conventions a Restrictions" that came with the grant deed
and mortgage. Lawns were green and recently mown, flower beds were well
tended, and trees were neatly trimmed. It was difficult to believe that
unspeakable violence could ever intrude from the outer world into such
an orderly, upwardly mobile community, and inconceivable that anything
supernatural could stalk those streets.
The neighborhood's normalcy was so solid that it seemed like encircling
stone ramparts crowned with battlements.
Not for the first time, he thought that Lindsey and Regina might be
perfectly safe there-but for him. If madness had invaded this fortress
of normalcy, he had opened the door to it. Maybe he was mad himself;
maybe his weird experiences were nothing as grand as psychic visions,
merely the hallucinations of an insane mind. He would bet everything he
owned on his sanity-though he also could not dismiss the slim
possibility that he would lose the bet. In any event, whether or not he
was insane, he was the conduit for whatever violence might rain down on
them, and perhaps they would be better off if they went away for the
duration, put some distance between themselves and him until this crazy
business was over. Sending them away seemed wise and responsible-except
that a small voice deep inside him spoke against that option. He had a
terrible hunch-or was it more than a hunch?-that the killer would not be
coming after him but after Lindsey and Regina.
If they went away somewhere, just Lindsey and the girl, that homicidal
monster would follow them, leaving Hatch to wait alone for a showdown
that would never happen.
All right, then they had to stick together. Like a family. Rise or
fall as one.
Before leaving to pick Regina up at school, he slowly circled the house,
looking for lapses in their defenses. The only one he found was an
unlocked window at the back of the garage. The latch had been loose for
a long time, and he had been meaning to fix it. He got some tools from
one of the garage cabinets and worked on the mechanism until the bolt
seated securely in the catch.
As he'd told Lindsey earlier, he didn't think the man in his visions
would come as soon as tonight, probably not even this week, maybe not
for a month or longer, but he would come eventually. Even if that
unwelcome visit was days or weeks away, it felt good to be prepare 2
Vassago woke.
Without opening his eyes, he knew that night was coming. He could feel
the oppressive sun rolling off the world and slipping over the edge of
the horizon. When he did open his eyes, the last fading light coming
through the attic vents confirmed that the waters of the night were on
the rise.
Hatch found that it was not exactly easy to conduct a normal domestic
life while waiting to be stricken by a terrifying, maybe even bloody,
vision so powerful it would blank out reality for its duration. It was
hard to sit in your pleasant dining room, smile, enjoy the pasta and
Parmesan bread, make with the light banter, and tease a giggle from the
young lady with the solemn gray eyes-when you kept thinking of the
loaded shotgun secreted in the corner behind the Coromandel screen or
the handgun in the adjacent kitchen atop the refrigerator, above the
line of sight of a small girls eyes.
He wondered how the man in black would enter when he came. At night,
for one thing. He only came out at night. They didn't have to worry
about him going after Regina at school. But would he boldly ring the
bell or knock smartly on the door, while they were still up and around
with all the lights on, hoping to catch them off-guard at a civilized
hour when they might assume it was a neighbor come to call? Or would he
wait until they were asleep, lights off, and try to slip through their
defenses to take them unaware?
Hatch wished they had an alarm system, as they did at the store. When
they sold the old house and moved into the new place following Jimmy's
death, they should have called Brinks right away. Valuable antiques
graced every room. But for the longest time after Jimmy had been taken
from them, it hadn't seemed to matter if anything-or every Uungse was
taken as well.
Throughout dinner, Lindsey was a trooper. She ate a mound of rigatoni
as if she had an appetite, which was something Hatch could not manage,
and she filled his frequent worried silences with natural-sounding
patter, doing her best to preserve the feeling of an ordinary night at
home.
Regina was sufficiently observant to know something was wrong. And
though she was tough enough to handle nearly anything, she was also
infected with seemingly chronic self-doubt that would probably lead her
to interpret their uneasiness as dissatisfaction with her.
Earlier Hatch and Lindsey had discussed what they might be able to tell
the girl about the situation they faced, without alarming her more than
was nary. The answer seemed to be: nothing. She had been with them
only two days. She didn't know them well enough to have this crazy'
stuff thrown at her. She'd hear about Hatch's bad dreams, his walking
hallucinations, the heat-browned magazine, the murders, all of it, and
figure she had been entrusted to a couple of lunatics.
anyway the kid didn't really need to be warned at this stage. They
could look out for her; it was what they were sworn to do.
Hatch found it difficult to believe that just three days ago the problem
of his repetitive nightmares had not seemed significant enough to delay
a trial adoption. But Honell and Cooper had not been dead then, and
supernatural forces seemed only the material of popcorn movies and
National Enquirer stories.
Halfway through dinner he heard a noise in the kitchen. A click and
scrape. Lindsey and Regina were engaged in an intense conversation
about whether Nancy Drew, girl detective of countless books, was a
"dorkette," which was Regina's view, or whether she was a smart and
savvy girl for her times but just old-fashioned when you looked at her
from a more modern viewpoint. Either they were too engrossed in their
debate to hear the noise in the kitchen-or there had been no noise, and
he had imagined it.
"Excuse me," he said, getting up from the table, "I'll be right back."
He pushed through the swinging door into the large kitchen and looked
around suspiciously. The only movement in the deserted room was a faint
ribbon of steam still unraveling from the crack between the tilted lid
and the pot of hot spaghetti sauce that stood on a c pad on the counter
beside the stove.
Something thumped softly in the Sped family room, which opened off the
kitchen. He
could see part of that room from where he-stood but not all
of it. He stepped silently across the kitchen and through the archway,
taking the Browning 9 MM off the top of the refrigerator as he went.
The family room was also deserted. But he was sure that he had not
imagined that second noise. He stood for a moment, looking around in
bafflement.
His skin prickled, and he whirled toward the short hallway that led from
the family room to the foyer inside the front door. Nothing. He was
alone.
So why did he feel as if someone was holding a nice cube against the
back of his neck?
He moved cautiously into the hallway until he came to the coat closet.
The door was closed. Directly across the hall was the powder room.
That door was also shut. He felt drawn toward the foyer, and his
inclination was to trust his hunch and move on, but he didn't want to
put either of those closed doors at his back.
When he jerked open the closet door, he saw at once that no one was in
there. He felt stupid with the gun thrust out in front of him and
pointing at nothing but a couple of coats on hangers, playing a movie
cop or something. Better hope it wasn't the final reeL Sometimes, when
the story required it, they killed off the good guy in the end.
He checked the powder room, found it also empty, and continued into the
foyer. The uncanny feeling was still with him but not as strong as
before. The foyer was deserted. He glanced at the stairs, but no one
was on them.
He looked in the living room. No one. He could see a corner of the
dining-room table through the archway at the end of the living room.
Although he could hear Lindsey and Regina still discussing Nancy Drew,
he couldn't see them.
He checked the den, which was also off the entrance foyer. And the
closet in the den. And the kneehole space under the desk.
Back in the foyer, he tried the front door. It was locked, as it should
have been.
No good. If he was this jumpy already, what in the name of God was he
going to be like in another day or week? Lindsey would have to pry him
off the ceding just to give him his morning coffee each day.
Nevertheless, reversing the route he had just taken through the house,
he stopped in the family room to try the sliding glass doors that served
the patio and backyard. They were locked with the burglar-foiling bar
inserted properly in the floor track.
In the kitchen once more, he tried the door to the garage. It was and
unlocked, again he felt as if spiders were crawling on his scalp.
He eased the door open. The garage was dark. He fumbled for the
switch, clicked the lights on. Banks of big fluorescent tubes dropped a
flood of harsh light straight down the width and breadth of the room,
virtually eliminating shadows, revealing nothing out of the ordinary.
Stepping over the threshold, he let the door ease shut behind him.
He cautiously walked- the length of the room with the large roll-up
sectional doors on his right, the backs of the two cars on his left.
The middle stall was empty.
His rubber-soled Rockports made no sound. He expected to surprise
someone crouched along the far side of one of the cars, but no one was
sheltering behind either of them. At the end of the garage, when he was
past the Chevy, he abruptly dropped to the floor and looked under the
car. He could see all the way 11 across the room, beneath the
Mitsubishi, as well. No one was hiding under either vehicle. As best
as he could tell, considering that the tires provided blind spots, no
one appeared to be circling the cars to keep out of his sight.
He got up and turned to a regular door in the end wall. It served the
side yard and had a thumb-turn dead-bolt lock, which was engaged. No
one could get in that way.
Returning to the kitchen door, he stayed to the back of the garage. He
tried only the two storage cabinets that had tall doors and were large
enough to provide a hiding place for a grown man. Neither was occupied.
He checked the window latch he had repaired earlier in the day. It was
secure, the bolt seated snugly in the vertically mounted hasp.
Again, he felt foolish. Like a grown man engaged in a boy's game,
fancying himself a movie hero.
How fast would he have reacted if someone had been hiding in one of
those tall cabinets and had flung himself outward when the door opened?
Or what if he had dropped to the floor to look under the Chevy, and
right there had been the man in black, face-to-face with him, inches
away?
He was glad he hadn't been required to learn the answer to either of
those unnerving questions. But at least, having asked them, he no
longer felt foolish, because indeed the man in black might have been
there.
Sooner or later the bastard would be there. Hatch was no less than ever
premonition, call it Christmas turkey if you liked, but he knew that he
could trust the small warning voice within him.
As he was passing the front of the Mitsubishi, he saw what a- to be a
dent on the hood. He stopped, sure that it must be a trick of light,
the shadow of the pulled that hung from the ceiling trap. It was
directly over the hood. He swatted the dangling cord, but the mark on
the car didn't leap and dance as it would have done if it had been just
the cord shadow.
Leaning over the grille, he touched the smooth sheet metal and felt the
depression, shallow but as big as his hand. He sighed heavily. The car
was still new, and already it needed a session in the body shop.
Take a brand new car to the mall, and an hour after it's out of the
showroom, some damn fool would park beside it and slam open his door
into yours. It never failed.
He hadn't noticed the dent either when he had come home this afternoon
from the gun shop or when he'd brought Regina back from school.
Maybe it wasn't as visible from inside the car, behind the steering
wheel; maybe you had to be out in front, looking at it from the right
angle. It sure seemed big enough to be seen from anywhere.
He was trying to figure how it could have happened-somebody must have
been passing by and dropped something on the car-when he saw the
footprint. It was in a gossamer coating of beige dust on the red paint,
the sole and part of the heel of a walking shoe probably not much
different from the ones he was wearing. Someone had stood on or walked
across the hood of the Mitsubishi.
It must have happened outside St. Thomas's School, because it was the
kind of thing a kid might do, showing off to friends. Having allowed
too much time for bad traffic, Hatch had arrived at St. Tom's twenty
minutes before classes let out. Rather than wait in the car, he'd gone
for a walk to work off some excess nervous energy. Probably, some
wise-ass and his buddies from the adjacent high school-the footprint was
too big to belong to a smaller kid-sneaked out a little ahead of the
final bell, and were showing off for each ot
her as they raced away from
the school, maybe leaping and clambering over obstacles instead of going
around them, as if they'd escaped from a prison with the bloodhounds
close on Their "Hatch?"
Startled out of his train of thought just when it to be leading
somewhere, he spun around toward the voice as if it did not sound
familiar to him, which of course it did.
Lindsey stood in the doorway between the garage and kitchen. She looked
at the gun in his hand, met his eyes. "What's wrong?"
"I "Thought I heard something."
"And?"
"Nothing." She had startled him so much that he had forgotten the
footprint and dent on the car hood. As he followed her into the
kitchen, he said, "This door was open. I locked it earlier."
"Oh, Regina left one of her books in the car when she came home from
school. She went out just before dinner to get it."
"You should have made sure she locked up."
"It's only the door to the garage," Lindsey said, heading toward the
dining room.
He put a hand on her shoulder to stop her, turned her around. "It's a
point of vulnerability," he said with perhaps more anxiety than such a
minor breach of security warranted.
"Aren't the outer garage doors locked?"
"Yes, and this one should be locked, too."
"But as many times as we go back and forth from the kitchen"-they had a
second refrigerator in the garage it's just convenient to leave the door
unlocked. We've always left it unlocked."