Hideaway

Redlow cried out in pain. “Wait, wait, stop it, shit, please, stop it, no!”

The kid stopped. He took the pliers away. He said, “I'm sorry, sir, but I just want you to understand that if there isn't any cash in the trash can, I won't be happy. I'll figure if you lied to me about this, you lied to me about everything.”

“It's there,” Redlow assured him hastily.

“It's not nice to lie, sir. It's not good. Good people don't lie. That's what they teach you, isn't it, sir?”

“Go, look, you'll see it's there,” Redlow said desperately.

The kid went out of the living room, through the dining room archway. Soft footsteps echoed through the house from the tile floor of the kitchen. A clatter and rustle arose as the garbage bag was pulled out of the waste can.

Already damp with perspiration, Redlow began to gush sweat as he listened to the kid return through the pitch-black house. He appeared in the living room again, partly silhouetted against the pale-gray rectangle of a window.

“How can you see?” the detective asked, dismayed to hear a faint note of hysteria in his voice when he was struggling so hard to maintain control of himself. He was getting old. “What — are you wearing night-vision glasses or something, some military hardware? How in the hell would you get your hands on anything like that?”

Ignoring him, the kid said, “There isn't much I want or need, just food and changes of clothes. The only money I get is when I make an addition to my collection, whatever she happens to be carrying. Sometimes it's not much, only a few dollars. This is really a help. It really is. This much should last me as long as it takes for me to get back to where I belong. Do you know where I belong, Mr. Redlow?”

The detective did not answer. The kid had dropped down below the windows, out of sight. Redlow was squinting into the gloom, trying to detect movement and figure where he had gone.

“You know where I belong, Mr. Redlow?” the kid repeated.

Redlow heard a piece of furniture being shoved aside. Maybe an end table beside the sofa.

“I belong in Hell,” the kid said. “I was there for a while. I want to go back. What kind of life have you led, Mr. Redlow? Do you think, when I go back to Hell, that maybe I'll see you over there?”

“What're you doing?” Redlow asked.

“Looking for an electrical outlet,” the kid said as he shoved aside another piece of furniture. “Ah, here we go.”

“Electrical outlet?” Redlow asked agitatedly. “Why?”

A frightening noise cut through the darkness: zzzzrrrrrrrrrr.

“What was that?” Redlow demanded.

“Just testing, sir.”

“Testing what?”

“You've got all sorts of pots and pans and gourmet utensils out there in the kitchen, sir. I guess you're really into cooking, are you?” The kid rose up again, appearing against the backdrop of the dim ash-gray glow in the window glass. “The cooking — was that an interest before the second divorce, or more recent?”

“What were you testing?” Redlow asked again.

The kid approached the chair.

“There's more money,” Redlow said frantically. He was soaked in sweat now. It was running down him in rivulets. “In the master bedroom.” The kid loomed over him again, a mysterious and inhuman form. He seemed to be darker than anything around him, a black hole in the shape of a man, blacker than black. “In the c-closet. There's a w-w-wooden floor.” The detective's bladder was suddenly full. It had blown up like a balloon all in an instant. Bursting. “Take out the shoes and crap. Lift up the back f-f-floorboards.” He was going to piss himself. “There's a cash box. Thirty thousand dollars. Take it. Please. Take it and go.”

“Thank you, sir, but I really don't need it. I've got enough, more than enough.”

“Oh, Jesus, help me,” Redlow said, and he was despairingly aware that this was the first time he had spoken to God — or even thought of Him — in decades.

“Let's talk about who you're really working for, sir.”

“I told you—”

“But I lied when I said I believed you.”

Zzzzrrrrrrrrrrrr.

“What is that?” Redlow asked.

“Testing.”

“Testing what, damn it?”

“It works real nice.”

“What, what is it, what've you got?”

“An electric carving knife,” the kid said.

6

Hatch and Lindsey drove home from dinner without getting on a freeway, taking their time, using the coast road from Newport Beach south, listening to K-Earth 101.1 FM, and singing along with golden oldies like “New Orleans,” “Whispering Bells,” and “California Dreamin'.” She couldn't remember when they had last harmonized with the radio, though in the old days they had done it all the time. When he'd been three, Jimmy had known all the words to “Pretty Woman.” When he was four he could sing “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover” without missing a line. For the first time in five years, she could think of Jimmy and still feel like singing.

They lived in Laguna Niguel, south of Laguna Beach, on the eastern side of the coastal hills, without an ocean view but with the benefit of sea breezes that moderated summer heat and winter chill. Their neighborhood, like most south-county developments, was so meticulously laid out that at times it seemed as if the planners had come to community design with a military background. But the gracefully curving streets, iron streetlamps with an artificial green patina, just-so arrangements of palms and jacarandas and ficus benjaminas, and well-maintained greenbelts with beds of colorful flowers were so soothing to the eye and soul that the subliminal sense of regimentation was not stifling.

As an artist, Lindsey believed that the hands of men and women were as capable of creating great beauty as nature was, and that discipline was fundamental to the creation of real art because art was meant to reveal meaning in the chaos of life. Therefore, she understood the impulse of the planners who had labored countless hours to coordinate the design of the community all the way down to the configuration of the steel grilles in the street drains that were set in the gutters.

Their two-story house, where they had lived only since Jimmy's death, was an Italian-Mediterranean model — the whole community was Italian Mediterranean — with four bedrooms and den, in cream-colored stucco with a Mexican tile roof. Two large ficus trees flanked the front walk. Malibu lights revealed beds of impatiens and petunias in front of red-flowering azalea bushes. As they pulled into the garage, they finished the last bars of “You Send Me.”

Between taking turns in the bathroom, Hatch started a gas-log fire in the family-room fireplace, and Lindsey poured Baileys Irish Cream on the rocks for both of them. They sat on the sofa in front of the fire, their feet on a large, matching ottoman.

All the upholstered furniture in the house was modern with soft lines and in light natural tones. It made a pleasing contrast with — and good backdrop for — the many antique pieces and Lindsey's paintings.

The sofa was also hugely comfortable, good for conversation and, as she discovered for the first time, a great spot to snuggle. To her surprise, snuggling turned into necking, and their necking escalated into petting, as if they were a couple of teenagers, for God's sake. Passion overwhelmed her as it had not done in years.

Their clothes came off slowly, as in a series of dissolves in a motion picture, until they were naked without quite knowing how they had gotten that way. Then they were just as mysteriously coupled, moving together in a silken rhythm, bathed in flickering firelight. The joyful naturalness of it, escalating from a dreamy motion to breathless urgency, was a radical departure from the stilted and dutiful lovemaking they had known during the past