Hideaway by Dean R. Koontz

destruction that he would find exhilarating to watch.

“Where are we going?” he asked as they cruised south on the freeway.

The headlights drilled into a white mist that hid the world and made it

seem as if they could invent any landscape and future they wished.

Whatever they imagined might take substance from the fog and appear

around them.

“El Toro,” she said.

“That’s where he lives?”

“Yeah.”

“Who is he?”

“You need a name?”

“No, ma’am. Why do you want him dead?”

She studied him for a while. Gradually a smile spread across her face,

as if it were a wound being carved by a slow-moving and invisible knife.

Her small white teeth looked pointy. Piranha teeth. “You’ll really do

it, won’t you?” she asked. “You’ll just go in there and kill the guy to

prove I enoughúta want you.”

“To prove nothing,” he said. “Just because it might be fun. Like I

told you”

“First make some death together, then make some sex,” she finIshed for

him.

Just to keep her talking and make her feel increasingly at ease with

him, he said, “Does he live in an apartment or a house?”

“Why’s it matter?”

“Lots more ways to get into a house, and neighbors aren’t as close.”

“It’s a house,” she said.

“Why do you want him dead?”

“He wanted me, I didn’t want him, and he felt he could take what he

wanted anyway.”

“Couldn’t have been easy taking anything from you.”

Her eyes were colder than ever. “The bastard had to have stitches in

his face when it was over.”

“But he still got what he wanted?”

“He was bigger than me.”

She turned away from him and gazed at the road ahead.

A breeze had risen from the west, and the fog no longer eddied lazily

through the night. It churned across the highway like smoke billowing

off a vast fire, as if the entire coastline was ablaze, whole cities

incinerated and the remains smouldering.

Vassago kept glancing at her profile, wishing that he could go with her

to El Toro and see how deep in blood she would wade for vengeance.

Then he would have liked to convince her to come with him to his

hideaway and give herself, of her own free will, to his collection.

Whether she knew it or not, she wanted death. She would be grateful for

the sweet pain that would be her ticket to damnation. Pale skin almost

luminescent against her black clothes, filled with hatred so intense

that it made her darkly radiant, she would be an incomparable vision as

she walked to her destiny among Vassago’s collection and accepted the

killing blow, a willing sacrifice for his repatriation to Hell.

He knew, however, that she would not accede to his fantasy and die for

him even if death was what she wanted. She would die only for herself,

when she eventually concluded that termination was her deepest desire.

The moment she began to realize what he really wanted from her, she

would lash out at him. She would be harder to control-and would do more

damage-than Neon. He preferred to take each new acquisition to his

museum of death while she was still alive, extracting the life from her

beneath the malevolent gaze of the funhouse Lucifer. But he knew that

he did not have that luxury with Lisa. She would not be easy to subdue,

even with a sudden unexpected blow. And once he had lost the advantage

of surprise, she would be a fierce adversary.

He was not concerned about being hurt. Nothing, including the prospect

of pain, could frighten him. Indeed, each blow she landed, each cut she

opened in him, would be an exquisite thrill, pure pleasure.

The problem was, she might be strong enough to get away from him, and he

could not risk her escape. He wasn’t worried that she would report him

to the cops. She existed in a subculture that was suspicious and

scornful of the police, seething with hatred for them. If she slipped

out of his grasp, however, he would lose the chance to add her to his

collection.

And he was convinced that her tremendous perverse energy would be the