Hideaway (26 page)

Cooper’s second letter had a telephone number carefully hand-printed at the top. Hatch put the disarranged file folder on the cabinet and hurried to the phone on the desk. His hand was shaking so badly that he couldn’t read the number, so he put the letter on the blotter, in the cone of light from the brass desk lamp.

He punched William Cooper’s number, intent on telling him off. The line was busy.

He jammed his thumb down on the disconnect button, got the dial tone, and tried again. Still busy.

“Sonofabitch!” He slammed down the receiver, but snatched it up again because there was nothing else he could do to let off steam. He tried the number a third time, using the redial button. It was still busy, of course, because no more than half a minute had passed since the first time he had tried it. He smashed the handset into the cradle so hard he might have broken the phone.

On one level he was startled by the savagery of the act, the childishness of it. But that part of him was not in control, and the mere awareness that he was over the top did not help him regain a grip on himself.

“Hatch?”

He looked up in surprise at the sound of his name and saw Lindsey, in her bathrobe, standing in the doorway between the den and the foyer.

Frowning, she said, “What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong?” he asked, his fury growing irrationally, as if she were somehow in league with Cooper, as if she were only pretending to be unaware of this latest turn of events. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong. They let this Cooper bastard off the hook! The son of a bitch kills me, runs me off the goddamned road and kills me, then slips off the hook and has the nerve to try to use the letter I wrote him to get his job back!” He snatched up the crumpled newspaper and shook it at her, almost accusingly, as if she knew what was in it. “Get his job back—so he can run someone else off the fucking road and kill them!”

Looking worried and confused, Lindsey stepped into the den. “They let him off the hook? How?”

“A technicality. Isn’t that cute? A cop misspells a word on the citation or something, and the guy walks!”

“Honey, calm down—”

“Calm down? Calm down?” He shook the crumpled newspaper again. “You know what else it says here? The jerk sold his story to that sleazy tabloid, the one that kept chasing after me, and I wouldn’t have anything to do with them. So now this drunken son of a bitch sells them the story about”—he was spraying spittle he was so angry; he flattened out the newspaper, found the article, read from it—“about ‘his emotional ordeal and his role in the rescue that saved Mr. Harrison’s life.’ What role did he have in my rescue? Except he used his CB to call for help after we went off the road, which we wouldn’t have done if he hadn’t been there in the first place! He’s not only keeping his driver’s license and probably going to get his job back, but he’s making money off the whole damn thing! If I could get my hands on the bastard, I’d kill him, I swear I would!”

“You don’t mean that,” she said, looking shocked.

“You better believe I do! The irresponsible, greedy bastard. I’d like to kick him in the head a few times to knock some sense into him, pitch
him
into that freezing river—”

“Honey, lower your voice—”

“Why the hell should I lower my voice in my own—”

“You’ll wake Regina.”

It was not the mention of the girl that jolted him out of his blind rage, but the sight of himself in the mirrored closet door beside Lindsey. Actually, he didn’t see himself at all. For an instant he saw a young man with thick black hair falling across his forehead, wearing sunglasses, dressed all in black. He knew he was looking at the killer, but the killer seemed to be
him.
At that moment they were one and the same. That aberrant thought—and the young man’s image—passed in a second or two, leaving Hatch staring at his familiar reflection.

Stunned less by the hallucination than by that momentary confusion of identity, Hatch gazed into the mirror and was appalled as much by what he saw now as by the brief glimpse of the killer. He looked apoplectic. His hair was disarranged. His face was red and contorted with rage, and his eyes were ... wild. He reminded himself of his father, which was unthinkable, intolerable.

He could not remember the last time he had been that angry. In fact he had
never
been in a comparable rage. Until now, he’d thought he was incapable of that kind of outburst or of the intense anger that could lead to it.

“I ... I don’t know what happened.”

He dropped the crumpled page of the newspaper. It struck his desk and fell to the floor with a crisp rustling noise that wrought an inexplicably vivid picture in his mind—

—and for just a moment he was there, with weeds sprouting up around him from cracks in the blacktop, dead leaves whirling past, the moon glaring down through the elaborate open-beam supports of a roller-coaster track. Then he was in his office again, leaning weakly against his desk.

“Hatch?”

He blinked at her, unable to speak.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, moving quickly to him. She touched his arm tentatively, as if she thought he might shatter from the contact—or perhaps as if she expected him to respond to her touch with a blow struck in anger.

He put his arms around her, and hugged her tightly. “Lindsey, I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened, what got into me.”

“It’s all right.”

“No, it isn’t. I was so ...
so furious. ”

“You were just angry, that’s all.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated miserably.

Even if it had appeared to her to be nothing but anger, he knew that it had been more than that, something strange, a terrible rage. White hot. Psychotic. He had felt an edge beneath him, as if he were teetering on the brink of a precipice, with only his heels planted on solid ground.

To Vassago’s eyes, the monument of Lucifer cast a shadow even in absolute darkness, but he could still see and enjoy the cadavers in their postures of degradation. He was enraptured by the organic collage that he had created, by the sight of the humbled forms and the stench that arose from them. His hearing was not remotely as acute as his night vision, but he did not believe that he was entirely imagining the soft, wet sounds of decomposition to which he swayed as a music lover might sway to strains of Beethoven.

When he was suddenly overcome by anger, he was not sure why. It was a quiet sort of rage at first, curiously unfocused. He opened himself to it, enjoyed it, fed it to make it grow.

A vision of a newspaper flashed through his mind. He could not see it clearly, but something on the page was the cause of his anger. He squinted as if narrowing his eyes would help him see the words.

The vision passed, but the anger remained. He nurtured it the way a happy man might consciously force a laugh beyond its natural span just because the sound of laughter buoyed him. Words blurted from him, “Of all the fucking nerve!”

He had no idea where the exclamation had come from, just as he had no idea why he had said the name “Lindsey” out loud in that lounge in Newport Beach, several weeks ago, when these weird experiences had begun.

He was so abruptly energized by anger that he turned away from his collection and stalked across the enormous chamber, up the ramp down which the gargoyle gondolas had once plunged, and out into the night, where the moon forced him to put on his sunglasses again. He could not stand still. He had to move, move. He walked the abandoned midway, not sure who or what he was looking for, curious about what would happen next.

Disjointed images flashed through his mind, none remaining long enough to allow contemplation: the newspaper, a book-lined den, a filing cabinet, a hand-written letter, a telephone.... He walked faster and faster, pivoting suddenly onto new avenues or into narrower passageways between the decaying buildings, in a fruitless search for a connection that would link him more clearly with the source of the pictures that appeared and swiftly faded from his mind.

As he passed the roller coaster, cold moonlight fell through the maze of supporting crossbeams and glinted off the track in such a way as to make those twin ribbons of steel look like rails of ice. When he lifted his gaze to stare at the monolithic—and suddenly mysterious—structure, an angry exclamation burst from him: “Pitch him into that freezing river!”

A woman said,
Honey, lower your voice.

Though he knew that her voice had arisen from within him, as an auditory adjunct to the fragmentary visions, Vassago turned in search of her anyway. She was there. In a bathrobe. Standing just this side of a doorway that had no right to be where it was, with no walls surrounding it. To the left of the doorway, to the right of it, and above it, there was only the night. The silent amusement park. But beyond the doorway, past the woman who stood in it, was what appeared to be the entrance foyer of a house, a small table with a vase of flowers, a staircase curving up to a second floor.

She was the woman he had thus far seen only in his dreams, first in a wheelchair and most recently in a red automobile on a sun-splashed highway. As he took a step toward her, she said,
You’ll wake Regina.

He halted, not because he was afraid of waking Regina, whoever the hell she was, and not because he still didn’t want to get his hands on the woman, which he did—she was so
vital—but
because he became aware of a full-length mirror to the left of the Twilight-Zone door, a mirror floating impossibly in the night air. It was filled with his reflection, except that it was not him but a man he had never seen before, his size but maybe twice his age, lean and fit, his face contorted in rage.

The look of rage gave way to one of shock and disgust, and both Vassago and the man in the vision turned from the mirror to the woman in the doorway. “Lindsey, I’m sorry,” Vassago said.

Lindsey. The name he had spoken three times at that lounge in Newport Beach.

Until now, he had not linked it to this woman who, nameless, had appeared so often in his recent dreams.

“Lindsey,” Vassago repeated.

He was speaking of his own volition this time, not repeating what the man in the mirror was saying, and that seemed to shatter the vision. The mirror and the reflection in it flew apart in a billion shards, as did the doorway and the dark-eyed woman.

As the hushed and moon-washed park reclaimed the night, Vassago reached out with one hand toward the spot where the woman had stood. “Lindsey.” He longed to touch her. So alive, she was. “Lindsey.” He wanted to cut her open and enfold her beating heart in both hands, until its metronomic pumping slowed ... slowed ... slowed to a full stop. He wanted to be holding her heart when life retreated from it and death took possession.

As swiftly as the flood of rage had poured into Hatch, it drained out of him. He balled up the pages of the newspaper and threw them in the waste can beside the desk, without glancing again at the story about the truck driver. Cooper was pathetic, a self-destructive loser who would bring his own punishment down upon himself sooner or later; and it would be worse than anything that Hatch would have done to him.

Lindsey gathered the letters that were scattered on the floor in front of the filing cabinet. She returned them to the file folder labeled MISCELLANEOUS BUSINESS.

The letter from Cooper was on the desk beside the telephone. When Hatch picked it up, he looked at the hand-written address at the top, above the telephone number, and a ghost of his anger returned. But it was a pale spirit of the real thing, and in a moment it vanished like a revenant. He took the letter to Lindsey and put it in the file folder, which she reinserted into the cabinet.

Standing in moonglare and night breeze, in the shadow of the roller coaster, Vassago waited for additional visions.

He was intrigued by what had transpired, though not surprised. He had traveled Beyond. He knew another world existed, separated from this one by the flimsiest of curtains. Therefore, events of a supernatural nature did not astonish him.

Just when he began to think that the enigmatic episode had reached a conclusion, one more vision flickered through his mind. He saw a single page of a hand-written letter. White, lined paper. Blue ink. At the top was a name. William X. Cooper. And an address in the city of Tustin.

“Pitch
him
into that freezing river,” Vassago muttered, and knew somehow that William Cooper was the object of the unfocused anger that had overcome him when he was with his collection in the funhouse, and which later seemed to link him with the man he had seen in the mirror. It was an anger he had embraced and amplified because he wanted to understand whose anger it was and why he could feel it, but also because anger was the yeast in the bread of violence, and violence was the staple of his diet.

From the roller coaster he went directly to the subterranean garage. Two cars waited there.

Morton Redlow’s Pontiac was parked in the farthest corner, in the deepest shadows. Vassago had not used it since last Thursday night, when he had killed Redlow and later the blonde. Though he believed the fog had provided adequate cover, he was concerned that the Pontiac might have been glimpsed by witnesses who had seen the woman tumble from it on the freeway.

He longed to return to the land of endless night and eternal damnation, to be once more among his own kind, but he did not want to be gunned down by police until his collection was finished. If his offering was incomplete when he died, he believed that he would be deemed as yet unfit for Hell and would be pulled back into the world of the living to start another collection.

The second car was a pearl-gray Honda that had belonged to a woman named Renata Desseux, whom he had clubbed on the back of the head in a shopping-mall parking lot on Saturday night, two nights after the fiasco with the blonde. She, instead of the neo-punker named Lisa, had become the latest addition to his collection.