seduction and expressive instrument of scorn, had changed. It was
raspy, marked by a wet gurgle, thoroughly disgusting.
“I would like to know who Lindsey Sparling is,” the young man said
dispassionately, “and where I can find her.”
Hatch was surprised to find Honell’s number in the telephone book. Of
course, the author’s name was not as familiar to the average citizen as
it had been during his brief glory years, when he had published Mss
Culvert and Mrs. Towers. Honell didn’t need to be worried about
privacy these days; evidently the public gave him more of it than he
desired.
While Hatch called the number, Lindsey paced the length of the bedroom
and back. She had made her position clear: she didn’t think Honell
would interpret Hatch’s warning as anything other than a cheap threat.
Hatch agreed with her. But he had to try.
He was spared the humiliation and frustration of listening to Honell’s
reaction, however, because no one answered the phone out there in the
far canyons of the desert night. He let it ring twenty times.
He was about to hang up, when a series of images snapped through his
mind with a sound like short circuiting electrical wires: a disarranged
bed quilt; a bleeding, rope encircled wrist; a pair of frightened,
bloodshot, myopic eyes. .. and in the eyes, the twin reflections of a
dark face looming close, distinguished only by a pair of sunglasses.
Hatch slammed down the phone and backed away from it as if the receiver
had turned into a rattlesnake in his hand. “It’s happening now.”
The ringing phone fell silent.
Vassago stared at it, but the ringing did not resume.
He returned his attention to the man who was tied spread-eagle to the
brass posts of the bed. “So Lindsey Harrison is the married name?”
“Yes,” the old guy croaked.
“Now what I most urgently need, sir, is an address.”
The public telephone was outside of a cony store in a shopping center
just two miles from the Harrison house. It was protected from the
elements by a Plexiglas hood and surrounded by a curved sound shield.
Hatch would have preferred the greater privacy of a real booth, but
those were hard to find these days, a luxury of less cost-conscious
times.
He parked at the end of the center, at too great a distance for anyone
in the glass-fronted convenience store to notice-and perhaps This
license number.
He walked through a cool, blustery wind to the telephone. The center’s
Indian laurels were infested with the winds, and drifts of dead, tightly
curled leaves blew along the pavement at Hatch’s feet. They made a dry,
scuttling sound. In the urine-yellow glow of the parking-lot ights,
they almost looked like hordes of insects, queerly mutated their
subterranean hive.
The convenience store was not busy, and everything else in the shopping
center was closed. He hunched his shoulders and head into the pay phone
sound shield, convinced he wouldn’t be overheard.
He did not want to call the police from home, because he knew they had
equipment that printed out every caller’s number at their end. If they
found Honell dead, Hatch didn’t want to become their prime suspect.
And if his concern for Honell’s safety proved to be unfounded, he didn’t
want to be on record with the police as some kind of nut case or
hysteric.
Even as he punched in the number with one bent knuckle and held the
handset with a Kleenex to avoid leaving prints, he was uncertain what to
say.
He knew what he could not say: Hi, I was dead eighty minutes, then
brought back to life, and now I have this crude but at times effective
telepathic connection to a psychotic killer, and I think I should warn
you he is about to strike again. He could not imagine the authorities
taking him any more seriously than they would take a guy who wore a
pyramid-shaped aluminum-foil hat to protect his brain from sinister
radiation and who bothered them with complaints about evil, mind-warping
extraterrestrials next door.
He had decided to call the Orange County Sheriff’s Department rather
than any particular city’s police agency, because the crimes committed
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