Red sun shooting streaks through a louvered bathroom window. Somebody already playing tennis outside. bonk. bonk... bonk... undoubtedly more agents....
They'd tried awfully hard to be nice. The San Dominican police. CIA. They'd left him pretty much by himself the night before. Not bugged him with too many questions....
He'd sat alone in a dark bedroom in the condominium most of the night. Big New York-cut steak untouched on a tray. Asparagus tips. StraWherry parfait sundae ' Feeling like a little kid left alone in a big house. Having some kind of bizarre Kodachrome-quality memory of the first time he and Janie had been together. A three-day cross- island trip while they were still practically strangers. The kind of great, dopey, romantic stuff that could happen only in a vacation spot. Making him cry, he missed her so badly.
Peter turned his body in the hot, soapy tub. The hot water felt unreal in the rush of air-conditioning. Like lying under the covers with the window open in winter... everything weird, and unreal, and impossible to relate to.
His mind had just gone snap. Snap, crackle, pop.
Peter didn't give a shit. He did: but he didn't.
What he wanted now-what he'd been thinking about since late last night-was how he could get his revenge. Everything was beautifully simple, for a change. Just one guiding light. Get the blond mercenary somehow. Blow his brains out. Just like Jane, only slower.
Sitting in the bathtub, Peter figured out one other important thing. He figured that he probably wouldn't have to worry about looking for the blond Englishman. One day he'd look up-and the blond man would just be there. Just like at Turtle Bay.
At nine o'clock Damian sat inside a Coastown church and carefully studied the place.
A small black boy came up to him, and Damian made the most horrifying face he could imagine. The boy laughed like a banshee. Visitors in the church turned to complain, then they began to smile, too. Meanwhile the hired English killer was accelerating the merry wild-mouse chase around San Dominica. He was also managing to round out Damian's flat and, until then, rather bloodless character. Clive Lawson was getting Rose labeled as a first-class pervert.
Sitting on one of the stonework terraces of the ramshackle Royal Caribbean Hotel, Lawson eyed a cocky little stinkpot chugging up toward Coastown under big mackerel clouds.
In a dilapidated white-wicker chair two feet across from him, a naked, mewing seventeen-year- was expounding some sort of psychedelic ami-Moon-Castaneda gibberish about oric orgasms. The adult-breasted teen had gray streaks in very long black hair. Her face was long, too, spare and striking.
'Like... like saffron and ocher paints... are like mixing on the insides of my eyelids,' she said in a whispery voice that made the revelation sexy if nothing else.
Meanwhile she stuck two long fingers deep inside herself.
Clive Lawson watched the girl's fingers work back and forth, back and forth, like two long legs walking in dune grass. Very slowly he masturbated himself with both hands.
The girl's name was Stormy Lascher. Half of her brain had been blasted away by acid and psilocybin; the other half departed while she was working at a massage parlor inside New York's once mediocre Connnodore Hotel.
The blond Englishman, she was discoveringchauvinist and dirty old thirty-three-year-old that he was-also had an interesting (blue-veined, cockyhatted, well-muscled) Capricorn prick. In fact, his standard equipment compared favorably with the slinnner, cuter rocketships on so many of the college boys from nearby Sunshower Beach.
'I'm going to come any sec,' the seventeenyear-old screamed, pointing her dirty silver-toed feet up like a ballet dancer. 'Oh, Jesus. Jesus Christ.
Stormy started to shiver, moan, and she brought a long tab of amyl nitrite up to her little pug nose. As she broke open the tab, she heard the blond man say very clearly, 'I'm the one they're looking for. The Englishman. Now there's one for your record book, Storm.
The long-haired girl nodded her head once-then nothing but bright, mixing paints were there.
By ten A.M. the English killer was on the road up to Coastown, heading toward another of his targets. By ten Denise 'Stormy' Lascher was sitting out on the terrace of room 334, screaming like the hopeless madwoman she would one day become.
At a little after eleven the police, the army, and the CIA swarmed over the Royal Caribbean like ants on a gingerbread castle. Harold Hill and Brooks Campbell marched through the ornate front lobby together, Campbell carrying a bulky M- 16 rifle. The police stopped all regular elevator service and began to search the ancient, sprawling dinosaur from the cellar up to the gabled rooftops.
Hill, Campbell, and Dr. Johnson went directly to room 334, where Denise Lascher was being detained. The hysterical teenager told them that the man must have left before all the police came bursting in. She didn't know for sure.... Yes, he was tall. Blond-haired. Like Michael Caine, she said.
No, she didn't remember anything specific he'd said. Just that he was the one... the machete killer everyone was looking for.
Harold Hill rummaged through the trash baskets in the suite's bedroom and bath. The gray-haired CIA director found empty, crushed packs of Dunhill cigarettes, marijuana roaches, an empty carton for Remington rifle shells, a box of French ticklers. Garbage.
Meanwhile Meral Johnson had put out an alert for the car the tall blond man had been seen driving. A blue 1979 Mustang, license number 3984-A, according to the hotel register.
Johnson sent his men and the American inspectors around the hotel to interview as many of the guests and help as possible. At the same time he had roadblocks set up outside Carolinsted and all through the surrounding villages.
Dr. Johnson had the feeling that they might finally be closing in on him. The black man hadn't slept for two days now; he was obsessed with getting the blond mercenary. More so than any of them, he believed privately... Johnson alone understood that the tall blond man had destroyed San Dominica. In front of the hotel, Campbell and Harold Hill leaned on a driftwood fence railing, both of them chain-smoking.
