has the nerve to try to use the letter I wrote him to get his job back!”
He snatched up the crumpled newspaper and shook it at her, almost
accusingly, as if she knew what was in it. “Get his job back-so he can
run someone else off the fucking road and kill them!”
Looking worried and confused, Lindsey stepped into the den. “They let
him off the hook? How?”
“A technicality. Isn’t that cute? A cop misspells a word on the
citation or something, and the guy walks!”
“Honey, calm down-”
“Calm down? Calm down?” He shook the crumpled newspaper again.
“You know what else it says here? The jerk sold his story to that
sleazy tabloid, the one that kept chasing after me, and I wouldn’t have
anything to do with them. So now this drunken son of a bitch sells them
the story about”-he was spraying spittle he was so angry; he flattened
out the newspaper, found the article, read from it-“about his emotional
ordeal and his role in the rescue that saved Mr. Harrison’s life.” What
role did he have in my rescue? Except he used his CB to call for help
after we went off the road, which we wouldn’t have done if he hadn’t
been there in the first place! He’s not only keeping his driver’s
license and probably going to get his job back, but he’s making money
off the whole damn thing! If I could get my hands on the bastard, I’d
kill him, I swear I would!”
“You don’t mean that,” she said, looking shocked.
“You better believe I do! The irresponsible, greedy bastard. I’d like
to kick him in the head a few times to knock some sense into him, pitch
him into that freezing riven”
“Honey, lower your void”
“Why the hell should I lower my voice in my own-”
“You’ll wake Regina.”
It was not the mention of the girl that jolted him out of his blind
rage, but the sight of himself in the mirrored closet door beside
Lindsey.
Actually, he didn’t see himself at all. for an instant he saw a young
man with thick black hair falling across his forehead, wearing glasses,
all in black. He knew he was looking at the killer, but the killer
seemed to be him At that moment they were one and the same. That
aberrant thought the young man’s image-a in a second or two, leaving
Hatch staring at his reflection.
Stunned less by the hallucination than by that momentary confusion of
identity, Hatch gazed into the mirror and was appalled as much by what
he saw now as by the brief glimpse of the killer. He looked apoplectic.
His hair was disarranged. His face was red and contorted with rage, and
his eyes were… wild. He reminded himself of his father, which was
unthinkable, intolerable.
He could not remember the last time he had been that angry. In fact he
had never been in a comparable rage. Until now, he’d thought he was
incapable of that kind of outburst or of the intense anger that could
lead to it.
“I… I don’t know what happens” He dropped the crumpled page of the
newspaper. It struck his desk and fell to the floor with a crisp
rustling noise that wrought an inexplicably vivid picture in his mind
dry brown leaves tumbling in a breeze along the cracked pavement in a
crumbling, condemned amusement park and for just a moment he was there,
with weeds sprouting up around him from cracks in the blacktop, dead
leaves whipping past, the moon glaring down through the elaborate
open-beam supports of a rollercoaster track. Then he was in his office
again, leaning weakly against his desk.
“Hatch”” He blinked at her, unable to speak.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, moving quickly to him. She touched his arm
tentatively, as if she thought he might shatter from the contact-or
perhaps as if she expected him to respond to her touch with a blow
struck in anger.
He put his arms around her, and hugged her tightly. “Lindsey, I’m
sorry. I don’t know what happened, what got into me.”
“It’s all right.”
“No, it isn’t. I was so. .. so furious.”