Bent forward, intently studying the dusty ground before them, uniformed
officers were walking the shoulder of the highway and picking through
the dry grass beyond it. They were evidently conducting an expanded
search for evidence to discover anything else that might have fallen out
of the killer’s car before, with, or after the blonde.
He noticed that every one of the cops was wearing sunglasses, as were he
and Lindsey. The day was eye-stingingly bright.
But the killer had been wearing sunglasses, too, when he had looked in
the rearview mirror. Why would he have been wearing them in the dark in
dense fog, for God’s sake?
Shades at night in bad weather was more than just affectation or
eccentricity. It was weird.
Hatch still had the imaginary gun in his hand, withdrawn from under the
seat. But because they were moving so much slower than the killer had
been driving, they had not yet reached the spot at which the revolver
had been fired.
Traffic was creeping bumper-to-bumper not because the rush hour was
heavier than usual but because motorists were slowing to stare at the
police. It was what the radio traffic reporters called “gawkers’
block.”
“He was really barreling along,” Hatch said.
“In heavy log”
“And sunglasses.”
“Stupid,” Lindsey said.
“No. This guy’s smart.”
“Sounds stupid to me.”
“Fearless.” Hatch tried to settle back into the skin of the man with
whom he had shared a body in the nightmare. It wasn’t easy. Something
about the killer was totally alien and simply resisted analysis. “He’s
extremely cold… cold and dark inside … he doesn’t think like you
or me.
Hatch struggled to find words to convey what the killer had felt like.
“Dirty.” He shook his head. “I don’t mean he was unwashed, nothing like
that. It’s more as … . well, as if he was contaminated.” He sighed
and gave up. “Anyway, he’s utterly fearless. Nothing scares him. He
believes that nothing can hurt him. But in his case that’s not the same
as recklessness. Because… somehow he’s right.”
“What’re you saying-that he’s invulnerable?”
“No. Not exactly. But nothing you could do to him… would matter to
him.”
Lindsey hugged herself. “You make him sound… inhuman.”
At the moment the police search for evidence was concentrated in the
quarter of a mile just south of the Culver Boulevard eNt. When Hatch
got past that activity, traffic began to move faster.
The imaginary gun in his right hand seemed to take on greater substance.
He could almost feel the cold steel against his palm.
When he pointed the phantom revolver at Lindsey and glanced at her, she
winced. He saw her clearly, but he could also see, in memory, the face
of the blonde as she had looked up from her purse with too little
reaction time even to show surprise.
“Here, right here, two shots, fast as I… as he could pull the
trigger,” Hatch said, shuddering because the memory of violence was far
easier to recapture than were the mood and malign spirit of the gunman.
“Big holes in her.” He could see it so clearly. “Jesus, it was awful.”
He was really into it. “The way she tore open. And the sound like
thunder, the end of the world.” The bitter taste of stomach acid rose in
his throat. “She was thrown back by the impact, against the door,
instantly dead, but the door flew open. He wasn’t expecting it to fly
open. He wanted her, she was part of his collection now, but then she
was gone, out into the night, gone, rolling like a piece of litter along
the blacktop.”
Caught up in the dream memory, he rammed his foot down on the brake
pedal, as the killer had done.
“Hatch, no!”
A car, then another, then a third, swerved around them in Sashes of
chrome and sun-silvered glass, horns blaring, narrowly avoiding a
collision.
Shaking himself out of the memory, Hatch accelerated again, back into
the traffic flow. He was aware of people staring at him from other
cars.
He didn’t care about their scrutiny, for he had picked up the trail as
if he were a bloodhound. It was not actually a scent that he followed.