final offering that would win him readmission to Hell.
“You feeling anything yet?” she asked, still looking ahead at the fog,
into which they barreled at a dangerous speed.
“k little,” he said.
“I don’t feel anything.” She opened her purse again and began rummaging
through it, taking stock of what other pills and capsules she possessed.
“We need some kind of booster to help the crap kick in good.”
While Lisa was distracted by her search for the right chemical to
enhance the PCP, Vassago drove with his left hand and reached under his
seat with his right to get the revolver that he had taken off Morton
Redlow. She looked up just as he thrust the muzzle against her left
side.
If she knew what was happening, she showed no surprise. He fired two
shots, killing her instantly.
Hatch cleaned up the spilled Pepsi with paper towels. By the time he
stepped to the kitchen sink to wash his hands, he was still shaking but
not as badly as he had been.
Terror, which had been briefly allonsuming, made some room for
curiosity. He hesitantly touched the rim of the stainless-steel sink
and then the faucet, as if they might dissolve beneath his hand. He
struggled to understand how a dream could continue after he had
awakened. The only explanation, which he could not accept, was
insanity.
He turned on the water, adjusted hot and cold, pumped some liquid soap
out of the container, began to lather his hands, and looked up at the
window above the sink, which faced onto the rear yard. The yard was
gone. A highway lay in its place. The kitchen window had become a
windshield. Swaddled in fog and only partially revealed by two
headlight beams, the pavement rolled toward him as if the house was
racing over it at sixty miles an hour. He sensed a presence beside him
where there should have been nothing but the double ovens. When he
turned his head he saw the blonde clawing in her purse. He realized
that something was in his hand, firmer than mere lather, and he looked
down at a revolver-the kitchen snapped completely out of existence. He
was in a car, rocketing along a foggy highway, pushing the muzzle of the
revolver into the blonde’s side. With horror, as she looked up at him,
he felt his finger squeeze the trigger once, twice. She was punched
sideways by the dual impact as the ear-shattering crash of the shots
slammed through the car.
Vassago could not have anticipated what happened next.
The gun must have been loaded with magnum cartridges, for the two shots
ripped through the blonde more violently than he expected and slammed
her into the passenger door. Either her door was not properly shut or
one of the rounds punched all the way through her, damaging the latch,
because the door flew open. Wind rushed into the Pontiac, shrieking
like a living beast, and Lisa was snatched out into the night.
He jammed on the brakes and looked at the rearview mirror. As the car
began to fishtail, he saw the blonde’s body tumbling along the pavement
behind him.
He intended to stop, throw the car into reverse, and go back for her,
but even at that dead hour of the morning, other traffic shared the
freeway. He saw two sets of headlights maybe half a mile behind him,
bright smudges in the mist but clarifying by the second. Those drivers
would encounter the body before he could reach it and scoop it into the
Pontiac.
Taking his foot off the brake and accelerating, he swung the car hard to
the left, across two lanes, then whipped it back to the right, forcing
the door to slam shut. It rattled in its frame but didn’t pop open
again. The latch must be at least partially effective.
Although visibility had declined to about a hundred feet, he put the
Pontiac up to eighty, bulleting blindly into the churning fog. Two
exits later, he left the freeway and rapidly slowed down. On surface
streets he made his way out of the area as swiftly as possible, obeying
speed limits because any cop who stopped him would surely notice the