Vassago did not drive faster. At the end of Silverado Canyon, he turned south on Santiago Canyon Road and maintained the legal speed limit as any good citizen was expected to do.
8
In bed in the dark, Hatch felt his world crumbling around him. He was going to be left with dust.
Happiness with Lindsey and Regina was within his grasp. Or was that an illusion? Were they infinitely beyond his reach?
He wished for an insight that would give him a new perspective on these apparently supernatural events. Until he could understand the nature of the evil that had entered his life, he could not fight it.
Dr. Nyebern's voice spoke softly in his mind:
He thought he could smell a lingering trace of smoke from the heat-browned pages of
He had never locked anything in the desk before. He was not sure why he had done so this time. Protecting evidence, he'd told himself. But evidence of what? The singed pages of the magazine proved nothing to anyone about anything.
No. That was not precisely true. The existence of the magazine proved, to him if to no one else, that he wasn't merely imagining and hallucinating everything that was happening to him. What he had locked away, for his own peace of mind, was indeed evidence. Evidence of his sanity.
Beside him, Lindsey was also awake, either uninterested in sleep or unable to find a way into it. She said, “What if this killer …”
Hatch waited. He didn't need to ask her to finish the thought, for he knew what she was going to say. After a moment she said just what he expected:
“What if this killer is aware of you as much as you're aware of him? What if he comes after you … us … Regina?”
“Tomorrow we're going to start taking precautions.”
“What precautions?”
“Guns, for one thing.”
“Maybe this isn't something we can handle ourselves.”
“We don't have any choice.”
“Maybe we need police protection.”
“Somehow I don't think they'll commit a lot of manpower to protect a guy just because he claims to have a supernatural bond with a psychotic killer.”
The wind that had harried laurel leaves across the shopping-center parking lot now found a loose brace on a section of rain gutter and worried it. Metal creaked softly against metal.
Hatch said, “I went somewhere when I died, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Purgatory, Heaven, Hell — those are the basic possibilities for a Catholic, if what we say we believe turns out to be true.”
“Well … you've always said you had no near-death experience.”
“I didn't. I can't remember anything from … the Other Side. But that doesn't mean I wasn't there.”
“What's your point?”
“Maybe this killer isn't an ordinary man.”
“You're losing me, Hatch.”
“Maybe I brought something back with me.”
“Back with you?”
“From wherever I was while I was dead.”
“Something?”
Darkness had its advantages. The superstitious primitive within could speak of things that would seem too foolish to voice in a well-lighted place.
He said, “A spirit. An entity.”
She said nothing.
“My passage in and out of death might have opened a door somehow,” he said, “and let something through.”
“Something,” she said again, but with no note of inquiry in her voice, as there had been before. He sensed that she knew what he meant — and did not like the theory.
“And now it's loose in the world. Which explains its link to me — and why it might kill people who anger me.”
She was silent awhile. Then: “If something was brought back, it's evidently pure evil. What — are you saying that when you died, you went to Hell and this killer piggy-backed with you from there?”
“Maybe. I'm no saint, no matter what you think. After all, I've got at least Cooper's blood on my hands.”
“That happened after you died and were brought back. Besides, you don't share in the guilt for that.”
“It was my anger that targeted him, my anger—”
“Bullshit,” Lindsey said sharply. “You're the best man I've ever known. If housing in the afterlife includes a Heaven and Hell, you've earned the apartment with a better view.”
His thoughts were so dark, he was surprised that he could smile. He reached under the sheets, found her hand, and held it gratefully. “I love you, too.”
“Think up another theory if you want to keep me awake and interested.”
“Let's just make a little adjustment to the theory we already have. What if there's an afterlife, but it isn't ordered like anything theologians have ever described. It wouldn't have to be
“I don't like that much better.”
“If I'm going to deal with this thing, I have to find a way to explain it. I can't fight back if I don't even know where to throw my punches.”
“There's got to be a more logical explanation,” she said.
“That's what I tell myself. But when I try to find it, I keep coming back to the illogical.”
The rain gutter creaked. The wind soughed under the eaves and called down the flue of the master- bedroom fireplace.
He wondered if Honell was able to hear the wind wherever he was — and whether it was the wind of this world or the next.
Vassago parked directly in front of Harrison's Antiques at the south end of Laguna Beach. The shop occupied an entire Art Deco building. The big display windows were unlighted as Tuesday passed through midnight, becoming Wednesday.
Steven Honell had been unable to tell him where the Harrisons lived, and a quick check of the telephone book turned up no listed number for them. The writer had known only the name of their business and its approximate location on Pacific Coast Highway.
Their home address was sure to be on file somewhere in the store's office. Getting it might be difficult. A decal on each of the big Plexiglas windows and another on the front door warned that the premises were fitted with a burglar alarm and protected by a security company.
He had come back from Hell with the ability to see in the dark, animal-quick reflexes, a lack of inhibitions that left him capable of any act or atrocity, and a fearlessness that made him every bit as formidable an adversary as a robot might have been. But he could not walk through walls, or transform himself from flesh into vapor into
