Hideaway

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 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 certain than ever about the inevitability of a confrontation. Call it a hunch, call it a 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 appeared to be a dent on the hood. He stopped, sure that it must be a trick of light, the shadow of the pull-cord 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 wiseass 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 other 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 seemed 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?”

“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.”

“We don't any more,” he said firmly.

They were face-to-face, and she studied him worriedly. He knew she thought he was walking a fine line between prudent precautions and a sort of quiet hysteria, even treading the wrong way over that line sometimes. On the other hand, she hadn't had the benefit of his nightmares and visions.

Perhaps the same thought crossed Lindsey's mind, for she nodded and said, “Okay. I'm sorry. You're right.”

He leaned back into the garage and turned off the lights. He closed the door, engaged the deadbolt — and felt no safer, really.

She had started toward the dining room again. She glanced back as he followed her, indicating the pistol in his hand. “Going to bring that to the table?”

Deciding he had come down a little heavy on her, he shook his head and bugged his eyes out, trying to make a Christopher Lloyd face and lighten the moment: “I think some of my rigatoni are still alive. I don't like to eat them till they're dead.”

“Well, you've got the shotgun behind the Coromandel screen for that,” she reminded him.

“You're right!” He put the pistol on top of the refrigerator again. “And if that doesn't work, I can always take them out in the driveway and run them over with the car!”

She pushed open the swinging door, and Hatch followed her into the dining room.

Regina looked up and said, “Your food's getting cold.”

Still making like Christopher Lloyd, Hatch said, “Then we'll get some sweaters and mittens for them!”

Regina giggled. Hatch adored the way she giggled.

* * *

After the dinner dishes were done, Regina went to her room to study. “Big history test tomorrow,” she said.

Lindsey returned to her studio to try to get some work done. When she sat down at her drawing board, she saw the second Browning 9mm. It was still atop the low art-supply cabinet, where Hatch had put it earlier in the day.

She scowled at it. She didn't necessarily disapprove of guns themselves, but this one was more than merely a handgun. It was a symbol of their powerlessness in the face of the amorphous threat that hung over them.