behind them. She was stunned at how suddenly they had taken another
nasty plunge.
She said’ “God’ Hatch, I love you.” In the darkness he moved close to
her and took her in his arms. Until long after dawn, they just held
each other, saying nothing because, for the moment, everything had been
said.
Later, after they showered and dressed, they went downstairs and had
more coffee at the breakfast table. Mornings, they always listened to
the radio, an all-news station. That was how they heard about Lisa
Blaine, the blonde who had been shot twice and thrown from a moving car
on the San me to Freeway the previous night-at precisely the time that
Hatch, standing in the kitchen, had a vision of the trigger being pulled
and the body tumbling along the pavement in the wake of the car.
8
For reasons he could not understand, Hatch was compelled to see the
section of the freeway where the dead woman had been found. “Maybe
something will click,” was all the explanation he could offer.
He drove their new red Mitsubishi. They went north on the coast
highway, then east on a series of surface streets to the South Coast
Plaza Shopping Mall, where they entered the San Diego Freeway heading
south.
He wanted to come upon the site of the murder from the same direction in
which the killer had been traveling the previous night. By nine-n,
rush-hour traffic should have abated, but all of the lanes were still
clogged. They made halting progress southward in a haze of exhaust
fumes, from which the car airconditioning spared them.
The marine layer that surged in from the Pacific during the night had
burned off. Trees stirred in a spring breeze, and birds swooped in
giddy arcs across the cloudless, piercingly blue sky. The day did not
seem like one in which anyone would have reason to think of death.
They passed the MacArthur Boulevard exit, then Jamboree, and with every
turn of the wheels, Hatch felt the muscles growing tenser in his neck
and shoulders. He was overcome by the uncanny feeling that he actually
had followed this route last night, when fog had obscured the airport,
hotels, office buildings, and the brown hills in the distance, though in
fact he had been at home.
“They were going to El Toro,” he said, which was a detail he had not
remembered until now. Or perhaps he had only now perceived it by the
grace of some sixth sense.
“Maybe that’s where she lives where he lives.”
Frowning, Hatch said, “I don’t think so.”
As they crept forward through the snarled traffic, he began to recall
not just details of the dream but the feeling of it, the edgy atmosphere
of pending violence.
His hands slipped on the steering wheel. They were clammy. He blotted
them on his shirt.
“I think in some ways,” he said, “the blonde was almost as dangerous as
I. .. as he was….”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s just the feeling I had then.”
Sunshine glimmered on-and glinted off-the multitude of vehicles that
churned both north and south in two great rivers of steel and chrome and
glass. Outside, the temperature was hovering around eighty degrees. But
Hatch was cold.
As a sign notified them of the upcoming Culver Boulevard exit, Hatch
leaned forward slightly. He let go of the steering wheel with his right
hand and reached under his seat. “It was here that he went for the….
. pulled it out… she was looking in her purse for something…..
He would not have been too surprised if he had found a gun under his
seat, for he still had a frighteningly clear recollection of how fluidly
the dream and reality had mingled, separated, and mingled again last
night.
Why not now, even in daylight? He let out a hiss of relief when he
found that the space beneath his seat was empty.
“Cops,” Lindsey said.
Hatch was so caught up in the reconstruction of the events in the
nightmare that he didn’t immediately realize what Lindsey was talking
about.
Then he saw black-and-whites and other police vehicles parked along the
interstate.