by the man in sunglasses fell in several jurisdictions. When the
sheriff’s operator answered, Hatch talked fast, talked over her when she
began to interrupt, because he knew they could trace him to a pay phone
given enough time. “The man who killed the blonde and dumped her on the
freeway last week is the same guy who killed William Cooper last night,
and tonight he’s going to murder Steven Honell, the writer, if you don’t
give him protection quick, and I mean right now. Honell lives in
Silverado Canyon, I don’t know the address, but he’s probably in your
jurrisdiction, and He’s a dead man if you don’t move now.”
He hung up, turned away from the phone, and headed for his car, jamming
the Kleenex into his pocket. He felt less relieved than he had expected
to, and more of a fool than seemed reasonable.
On his way back to the car, he was walking into the wind. All the
laurel leaves, sucked dry by the winds, were now blown toward him
instead of with him. They hissed against the blacktop and crunched
under his shoes.
He knew that the trip had been a waste and that his effort to help
Honell had been ineffective. The sheriff’s department would probably
treat it like just another crank call.
When he got home, he parked in the driveway, afraid that the clatter of
the garage door would wake Regina His scalp prickled when he got out of
the car. He stood for a minute, surveying the shadows along the house,
around the shrubbery, under the trees. Nothing.
Lindsey was pouring a cup of coffee for him when he walked into the
kitchen.
He took it, sipped gratefully at the hot brew. Suddenly he was colder
than he had been while standing out in the night chill.
“What do you think?” she asked worriedly. “Did they take you
seriously?”
“Pissing in the wind,” he said.
Vassago was still driving the pearl-gray Honda belonging to Renata
Desseux, the woman he had overpowered in the mall parking lot on
Saturday night and later added to his collection. It was a fine car and
handled well on the twisting roads as he drove down the canyon from
Honell’s place, heading for more populated areas of Orange County.
As he rounded a fairly sharp curve, a patrol car from the sheriff’s
department swept past him heading up the canyon. Its siren was not
blaring, but its emergency beacons splashed red and blue light on the
shale banks and on the gnarled branches of the overhanging trees.
He divided his attention between the winding road ahead and the
dwindling lights of the patrol car in his rear-view mirror, until it
rounded another bend upslope and vanished. He was sure the cop was
going to Honell’s. The unanswered madly ringing telephone, which had
interrupted his interrogation of the author, was the trigger that had
set the sheriff’s department in motion, but he could not figure how or
why.
Vassago did not drive faster. At the end of Silverado Canyon, he turned
south on Santiago Canyon Road and maintained the legal speed limit as
any good citizen was expected to do.
8
In bed in the dark, Hatch felt his world crumbling around him. He was
going to be left with dust.
Happiness with Lindsey and Regina was within hisgrasp. Or was that an
illusion? Were they immediately beyond his reach?
He wished for an insight that would give him a new perspective on these
apparently supernatural events. Until he could understand the nature of
the evil that had entered his life he could not fight it.
Dr. Nyebern’s voice spoke softly in his mind: I believe evil is a very
real force, an energy quite apart from us’ a presence in the word He
thought he could smell a lingering trace of smoke from the heat-browned
pages of Arts American. He had put the magazine in the desk in the den
downstairs, in the drawer with a lock. He had added the small key to
the ring he carried.
He had never locked anything in the desk before. He was not sure why he
had done so this time. protecting evidence, he’d told himself.