Mr. Murder

“You’re not neurotic, smug, selfish, insecure, or conceited. ”

“That just proves you haven’t been listening to me all these years.”

“Okay, I’ll give you the neurotic part.”

“Thank you, dear,” he said. “It’s nice to know you’ve been listening at least some of the time.”

“But you’re also wonderful. A wonderfully neurotic writer. I wish I was a wonderfully neurotic writer, too, dispensing medicine.”

“Bite your tongue.”

She said, “I mean it.”

“Maybe you can live with a writer, but I don’t think I’d have the stomach for it.”

She rolled onto her right side to face him, and he turned onto his left side, so they could kiss. Tender kisses. Gentle. For a while they just held each other, listening to the surf.

Without resorting to words, they had agreed not to discuss any further their worries or what might need to be done in the morning. Sometimes a touch, a kiss, or an embrace said more than all the words a writer could marshal, more than all the carefully reasoned advice and therapy that a counselor could provide.

In the body of the night, the great heart of the ocean beat slowly, reliably. From a human perspective, the tide was an eternal force; but from a divine view, transitory.

On the downslope of consciousness, Paige was surprised to realize that she was sliding into sleep. Like the sudden agitation of a blackbird’s wings, alarm fluttered through her at the prospect of lying unaware—therefore vulnerable—in a strange place. But her weariness was greater than her fear, and the solace of the sea wrapped her and carried her, on tides of dreams, into childhood, where she rested her head against her mother’s breast and listened with one ear for the special, secret whisper of love somewhere in the reverberant heartbeats.

3

Still wearing a set of headphones, Drew Oslett woke to gunfire, explosions, screams, and music loud enough and strident enough to be God’s background theme for doomsday. On the TV screen, Glover and Gibson were running, jumping, punching, shooting, dodging, spinning, leaping through burning buildings in a thrilling ballet of violence.

Smiling and yawning, Oslett checked his wristwatch and saw that he had been asleep for over two and a half hours. Evidently, after the movie had played once, the stewardess, seeing how like a lullaby it was to him, had rewound and rerun it.

They must be close to their destination, surely much less than an hour out of John Wayne Airport in Orange County. He took off the headset, got up, and went forward in the cabin to tell Clocker what he had learned earlier in his telephone conversation with New York.

Clocker was asleep in his seat. He had taken off the tweed jacket with the leather patches and lapels, but he was still wearing the brown porkpie hat with the small brown and black duck feather in the band. He wasn’t snoring, but his lips were parted, and a thread of drool escaped the corner of his mouth; half his chin glistened disgustingly.

Sometimes Oslett was half convinced that the Network was playing a colossal joke on him by pairing him with Karl Clocker.

His own father was a mover and shaker in the organization, and Oslett wondered if the old man would hitch him to a ludicrous figure like Clocker as a way of humiliating him. He loathed his father and knew the feeling was mutual. Finally, however, he could not believe that the old man, in spite of deep and seething antagonism, would play such games—largely because, by doing so, he would be exposing an Oslett to ridicule. Protecting the honor and integrity of the family name always took precedence over personal feelings and the settling of grudges between family members.

In the Oslett family, certain lessons were learned so young that Drew almost felt as if he’d been born with that knowledge, and a profound understanding of the value of the Oslett name seemed rooted in his genes. Nothing—except a vast fortune—was as precious as a good name, maintained through generations; from a good name sprang as much power as from tremendous wealth, because politicians and judges found it easier to accept briefcases full of cash, by way of bribery, when the offerings came from people whose bloodline had produced senators, secretaries of state, leaders of industry, noted champions of the environment, and much-lauded patrons of the arts.

His pairing with Clocker was simply a mistake. Eventually he would have the situation rectified. If the Network bureaucracy was slow to rearrange assignments, and if their renegade was recovered in a condition that still allowed him to be handled as before, Oslett would take Alfie aside and instruct him to terminate Clocker.

The paperback Star Trek novel, spine broken, lay open on Karl Clocker’s chest, pages down. Careful not to wake the big man, Oslett picked up the book.

He turned to the first page, not bothering to mark Clocker’s stopping place, and began to read, thinking that perhaps he would get a clue as to why so many people were fascinated by the starship Enterprise and its crew. Within a few paragraphs, the damned author was taking him inside the mind of Captain Kirk, mental territory that Oslett was willing to explore only if his alternatives were otherwise limited to the stultifying minds of all the presidential candidates in the last election. He skipped ahead a couple of chapters, dipped in, found himself in Spock’s prissily rational mind, skipped more pages and discovered he was in the mind of “Bones” McCoy.

Annoyed, he closed Journey to the Rectum of the Universe, or whatever the hell the book was called, and slapped Clocker’s chest with it to wake him.

The big man sat straight up so suddenly that his porkpie hat popped off and landed in his lap. Sleepily, he said, “Wha? Wha?”

“We’ll be landing soon.”

“Of course we will,” Clocker said.

“There’s a contact meeting us.”

“Life is contact.”

Oslett was in a foul mood. Chasing a renegade assassin, thinking about his father, pondering the possible catastrophe represented by Martin Stillwater, reading several pages of a Star Trek novel, and now being peppered with more of Clocker’s cryptograms was too much for any man to bear and still be expected to keep his good humor. He said, “Either you’ve been drooling in your sleep, or a herd of snails just crawled over your chin and into your mouth.”

Clocker raised one burly arm and wiped the lower part of his face with his shirt sleeve.

“This contact,” Oslett said, “might have a lead on Alfie by now. We have to be sharp, ready to move. Are you fully awake?”

Clocker’s eyes were rheumy. “None of us is ever fully awake.”

“Oh, please, will you cut that half-baked mystical crap? I just don’t have any patience for that right now.”

Clocker stared at him a long moment and then said, “You’ve got a turbulent heart, Drew.”

“Wrong. It’s my stomach that’s turbulent from having to listen to this crap.”

“An inner tempest of blind hostility.”

“Fuck you,” Oslett said.

The pitch of the jet engines changed subtly. A moment later the stewardess approached to announce that the plane had entered its approach to the Orange County airport and to ask them to put on their seatbelts.

According to Oslett’s Rolex, it was 1:52 in the morning, but that was back in Oklahoma City. As the Lear descended, he reset his watch until it showed eight minutes to midnight.

By the time they landed, Monday had ticked into Tuesday like a bomb clock counting down toward detonation.

The advance man—who appeared to be in his late twenties, not much younger than Drew Oslett—was waiting in the lounge at the private-aircraft terminal. He told them his name was Jim Lomax, which it most likely