into Laguna Beach. At the last moment he hit the brakes too hard and whipped the wheel to the right. The Mitsubishi slid as they departed the interstate, but he decreased speed and immediately regained full control.
“He got off here?” Lindsey asked.
“Yes.”
Hatch followed the new road to the right.
“Did he go into Laguna?”
“I … don't think so.”
He braked to a complete halt at a crossroads marked by a stop sign. He pulled onto the shoulder. Open country lay ahead, hills dressed in crisp brown grass. If he went straight through the crossroads, he'd be heading into Laguna Canyon, where developers had not yet managed to raze the wilderness and erect more tract homes. Miles of brushland and scattered oaks flanked the canyon route all the way into Laguna Beach. The killer also might have turned left or right. Hatch looked in each direction, searching for … for whatever invisible signs had guided him that far.
After a moment, Lindsey said, “You don't know where he went from here?”
“Hideaway.”
“Huh?”
Hatch blinked, not sure why he had chosen that word. “He went back to his hideaway … into the ground. …”
“Ground?” Lindsey asked. With puzzlement she surveyed the sere hills.
“… into the darkness …”
“You mean he went underground somewhere?”
“… cool, cool silence …”
Hatch sat for a while, staring at the crossroads as a few cars came and went. He had reached the end of the trail. The killer was not there; he knew that much, but he did not know where the man had gone. Nothing more came to him — except, strangely, the sweet chocolate taste of Oreo cookies, as intense as if he had just bitten into one.
9
At The Cottage in Laguna Beach, they had a late breakfast of homefries, eggs, bacon, and buttered toast. Since he had died and been resuscitated, Hatch didn't worry about things like his cholesterol count or the long-term effects of passive inhalation of other people's cigarette smoke. He supposed the day would come when little risks would seem big again, whereupon he would return to a diet high in fruits and vegetables, scowl at smokers who blew their filth his way, and open a bottle of fine wine with a mixture of delight and a grim awareness of the health consequences of consuming alcohol. At the moment he was appreciating life too much to worry unduly about losing it again — which was why he was determined not to let the dreams and the death of the blonde push him off the deep end.
Food had a natural tranquilizing effect. Each bite of egg yolk soothed his nerves.
“Okay,” Lindsey said, going at her breakfast somewhat less heartily than Hatch did, “let's suppose there was brain damage of some sort, after all. But minor. So minor it never showed up on any of the tests. Not bad enough to cause paralysis or speech problems or anything like that. In fact, by an incredible stroke of luck, a one in a billion chance, this brain damage had a freak effect that was actually beneficial. It could've made a few new connections in the cerebral tissues, and left you psychic.”
“Bull.”
“Why?”
“I'm not psychic.”
“Then what do you call it?”
“Even if I was psychic, I wouldn't say it was beneficial.”
Because the breakfast rush had passed, the restaurant was not too busy. The nearest tables to theirs were vacant. They could discuss the morning's events without fear of being overheard, but Hatch kept glancing around self-consciously anyway.
Immediately following his reanimation, the media had swarmed to Orange County General Hospital, and in the days after Hatch's release, reporters had virtually camped on his doorstep at home. After all, he had been dead longer than any man alive, which made him eligible for considerably more than the fifteen minutes of fame that Andy Warhol had said would eventually be every person's fate in celebrity-obsessed America. He'd done nothing to earn his fame. He didn't want it. He hadn't fought his way out of death; Lindsey, Nyebern, and the resuscitation team had dragged him back. He was a private person, content with just the quiet respect of the better antique dealers who knew his shop and traded with him sometimes. In fact, if the only respect he had was Lindsey's, if he was famous only in her eyes and only for being a good husband, that would be enough for him. By steadfastly refusing to talk to the press, he had finally convinced them to leave him alone and chase after whatever newly born two-headed goat — or its equivalent — was available to fill newspaper space or a minute of the airwaves between deodorant commercials.
Now, if he revealed that he had come back from the dead with some strange power to connect with the mind of a psycho killer, swarms of newspeople would descend on him again. He could not tolerate even the prospect of it. He would find it easier to endure a plague of killer bees or a hive of Hare Krishna solicitors with collection cups and eyes glazed by spiritual transcendence.
“If it's not some psychic ability,” Lindsey persisted, “then what
“I don't know.”
“That's not good enough.”
“It could pass, never happen again. It could be a fluke.”
“You don't believe that.”
“Well … I want to believe it.”
“We have to deal with this.”
“Why?”
“We have to try to understand it.”
“Why?”
“Don't 'why' me like a five-year-old child.”
“Why?”
“Be serious, Hatch. A woman's dead. She may not be the first. She may not be the last.”
He put his fork on his half-empty plate, and swallowed some orange juice to wash down the homefries. “Okay, all right, it's like a psychic vision, yeah, just the way they show it in the movies. But it's more than that. Creepier.”
He closed his eyes, trying to think of an analogy. When he had it, he opened his eyes and looked around the restaurant again to be sure no new diners had entered and sat near them.
He looked regretfully at his plate. His eggs were getting cold. He sighed.
“You know,” he said, “how they say identical twins, separated at birth and raised a thousand miles apart by utterly different adopted families, will still grow up to live similar lives?”
“Sure, I've heard of that. So?”
“Even raised apart, with totally different backgrounds, they'll choose similar careers, achieve the same income levels, marry women who resemble each other, even give their kids the same names. It's uncanny. And even if they don't know they're twins, even if each of them was told he was an only child when he was adopted, they'll sense each other out there, across the miles, even if they don't know who or what they're sensing. They have a bond that no one can explain, not even geneticists.”
“So how does this apply to you?”
He hesitated, then picked up his fork. He wanted to eat instead of talk. Eating was safe. But she wouldn't let him get away with that. His eggs were congealing. His tranquilizers. He put the fork down again.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I see through this guy's eyes when I'm sleeping, and now sometimes I can even feel
