to reach the spot where the other car had just disappeared. His heart was going like a cop pounding on a junkie's door. Sweat was breaking out clammy at his temples. This was the guy, the killer. He knew it. He felt it. Only yards away behind the rental's wheel. Invisible all this time, silent as cancer all this time, and now there he was, within striking distance. A mistake. That business with the cars and the lighted windows. The killer had made a mistake after all this time.
It was all Weiss needed. He could get him now. He could end it here.
And then the dark blue rental was gone. That quick.
Weiss sped to a second stop sign, past the school. Braked not to stop but to take the corner. Took the corner and came around onto a dark street of houses. House light after house light glowed yellow in the shadows.
But the red taillights of the navy blue car were nowhere to be seen.
Weiss kept his foot on the brake, bore down. The Taurus moved slower and slower. It had happened too fast, he told himself. The car had disappeared too fast. It couldn't have reached the far corner before he'd made the turn behind it. Which meant it was still here. Somewhere. Somewhere on this street. That's what he told himself.
The cold sweat trickled down Weiss's temples and fell. His eyes searched the shadowy block, left side, right side. Small houses, small lawns. Cars in garages and in driveways, cars parked nose to tail along the curb. Weiss's eyes went over all of them, one by one, looking for the navy blue rental in the dark.
It was no good. Too hard to see. Weiss finally pulled the Taurus up against the line of parked cars. He opened the glove compartment. His. 38 was in there, in its holster. He worked the gun out of the leather, slipped it into his jacket pocket.
He left the engine running and stepped out into the street. The block was quiet. Above the hoarse whisper of the Ford's motor, he could hear the occasional car, the occasional truck going past on the nearby four-lane. Other than that, there was nothing, silence, not even a cricket in the night.
Then-suddenly: a metallic clang behind him. Weiss caught his breath, spun around. His hand slapped against his gun pocket.
But no, it was just a guy, some guy, a home owner, closing the lid of the trash can at the end of his driveway after tossing the bag in.
'Hey,' Weiss said. He walked toward him.
The home-owner guy hesitated, wary as the big detective approached him in the darkness.
'You see a car just now, a blue car?' Weiss asked him. He got closer to the man, closer until he could make out his face in the dim light from the houses. The killer-his killer-had been in prison only once, in North Wilderness, a supermax, impossible to escape. The killer had escaped, but because he'd been there, there was a mug shot of him. Weiss had seen it. Seen the face. This wasn't that face. This was just a guy. Just a home owner in a brown suede windbreaker. Medium height, round head, dark hair. Weiss asked him again: 'You see a blue car just now?'
'What, you mean go by?'
'Pull over, park somewhere on the street. A navy blue car, a big one.'
The guy looked up along the street as if he thought he might spot it even now. He slipped his hands into the wind-breaker's pockets. He frowned, shook his head. 'I just came out to take out the garbage. I didn't see anything.'
Weiss nodded but went on standing there, looking the guy over. Just a home owner in a brown suede windbreaker.
The guy shrugged. 'Sorry.'
Finally, Weiss nodded. 'Thanks.'
'Sorry I couldn't help you.'
The guy turned and walked up the path to his house, his hands in the windbreaker's pockets. Weiss turned away. He looked up the street. He scanned the driveways and the garages and the parked cars. It would be easy to miss the blue car here. Easy for the blue car to hide. Or maybe he'd been wrong-maybe the rental really had had enough time to reach the next corner, to get away. He wasn't sure anymore.
Weiss walked back to the Taurus idling in the street. He climbed back in and popped it into drive. He cruised slowly along the street, reluctant to leave it, still turning his head back and forth, back and forth, scanning every driveway, every parked car, every open garage. It was a working-class neighborhood. The cars were family four- doors and pickup trucks and aging American sports models. The new American rental would've stood out, he told himself. Or maybe it wouldn't have. In this light, with all these models. He just couldn't be sure.
He cruised to the next corner, stopped at the sign. He considered turning around, going over the block again. But it was no good. The killer was gone. He'd lost him. He eased down the gas and turned right. He headed back toward the four-lane.
Later, about an hour later, with the dark at every window, with the desert all around him in the dark, Weiss started to wonder about the home owner at the trash can. Does a guy put on a windbreaker just to take the garbage to the end of the driveway? And how come he hadn't heard the door to the house open when the guy came out or close when the guy went back inside? Had the guy gone back inside at all? He hadn't seen it. He didn't know.
He wondered about these things later, when his heart had slowed and his sweat had dried and the dark was at the windows.
But by then he was long gone from Hannock. He was well on his way to Nevada.
18.
In the town, on the dark street of houses, the man who called himself John Foy slipped back behind the wheel of the blue rental car. His brown suede windbreaker was thin and the night was cold, but he was sweating all the same.
He sat a long time, just breathing, just gazing out through the windshield with his strangely flat eyes. He did not see the things he was gazing at. He did not see anything outside himself. He was thinking about his tower. He was up in his tower in the calm and empty sky. The red waves of his rage were crashing, crashing against the base of the tower far below. He sat behind the wheel of the car and breathed.
The man who called himself John Foy liked to think of himself as a cool professional. We all have our self- deceptions; this was his. He liked to think of himself as a dispassionate tradesman who did what he did without emotion, without anger or remorse. The truth was very different. In truth, the killer was all rage. What in someone else might be a self or a soul in him was rage alone. There was nothing else there. Sometimes he remembered his boyhood, the wounds and blood and the faces laughing, and he thought he felt sorry for the child he'd been. But he didn't, not really. Really, that was just his rage disguising itself in a sentimental form. Other times he felt a lofty, almost intellectual competence in his work, a sense of himself as a living clockwork of plans and action. But that was also just an illusion-an illusion created by his rage.
When these forms and illusions failed him, when the rage rose red in him as nothing but itself, it was agony. It felt as if he were being burned and strangled at the same time. It felt as if some consuming flame within him and the choking malevolence of the cruel world without had become one thing. It was unbearable. He went away from it, climbed away. Up into his tower to stand there, empty, in the empty sky.
It was several minutes before he could come back to himself. Slowly then, his surroundings took shape through the windshield. He was in a garage, the rented Chrysler 300 squeezed in next to a large motorcycle. It was dark, but he could make out the bike and the silhouettes of shelves on the walls, power tools, paint cans, small glass jars.
He had spotted the garage and turned in, headlights off, only seconds before Weiss came around the corner behind him. He had leaped from the car and hidden there, crouched in the shadows, waiting to see what Weiss would do. When Weiss got out of his car to search the street for him, he had come out into the driveway. He pretended to throw garbage in the can to draw Weiss's eyes away from the garage and the blue Chrysler.
It'd been a risky move. If Weiss had caught on, he would've had to kill him. He had had his hand wrapped around the compact. 45 in the suede windbreaker's pocket the whole time. He had thought, any moment, he would have to pull the trigger, blow a hole in Weiss's paunch.
