was, and not because he still didn’t want to get his hands on the woman,
which he did-he was so vital-but because he became aware of a
full-length mirror to the left of the Twilight-the door, a mirror
floating impossibly in the night air. It was filled with his
reflection, except that it was not him but a man he had never seen
before, his size but maybe twice his age, lean and fit, his face
contorted in rage.
The look of rage gave way to one of shock and disgust, and both Vassago
and the man in the vision turned from the mirror to the woman in the
doorway. “Lindsey, I’m sorry,” Vassago said.
Lindsey. The name he had spoken three times at that lounge in Newport
Beach.
Until now, he had not linked it to this woman who, nameless, had
appeared so often in his recent dreams.
“Lindsey,” Vassago repeated.
He was speaking of his own volition this time, not repeating what the
man in the mirror was saying, and that seemed to shatter the vision.
The mirror and the reflection in it flew apart in a billion shards, as
did the doorway and the dark-eyed woman.
As the hushed and moon-washed park reclaimed the night, Vassago reached
out with one hand toward the spot where the woman had stood.
“Lindsey.” He longed to touch her. So alive, she was. “Lindsey.” He
wanted to cut her open and enfold her heating heart in both hands, until
its metronomic pumping slowed. .. slowed. .. slowed to a full stop.
He wanted to be holding her heart when life retreated from it and death
took possession.
As swiftly as the flood of rage had poured into Hatch, it drained out of
him. He balled up the pages of the newspaper and threw them in the
waste can beside the desk, without glancing again at the story about the
truck driver. Cooper was pathetic, a self-destructive loser who would
bring his own punishment down upon himself sooner or later; and it would
be worse than anything that Hatch would have done to him.
Lindsey gathered the letters that were scattered on the floor in front
of the filing cabinet. She returned them to the file folder labeled US
BUS.
The letter from Cooper was on the desk beside the telephone. When Hatch
picked it up, he looked at the hand-written address at the top, above
the telephone number, and a ghost of his anger returned. But it was a
pale spirit of the real thing, and in a moment it vanished like a
revenant.
He took the letter to Lindsey and put it in the file folder, which she
reinserted into the cabinet.
Standing in moonglare and night breeze, in the shadow of the roller
coaster, Vassago waited for additional visions.
He was intrigued by what had transpired, though not surprised. He had
traveled Beyond. He knew another world existed, separated from this one
by the flimsiest of curtains. Therefore, events of a supernatural
nature did not astonish him.
Just when he began to think that the enigmatic episode had reached a
conclusion, one more vision flickered through his mind. He saw a single
page of a hand-written letter. White, lined paper. Blue ink.
At the top was a name. William X. Cooper. And an address in the city
of Tustin.
“Pitch him into that freezing river,” Vassago muttered, and knew somehow
that William Cooper was the object of the unfocused anger that had
overcome him when he was with his collection in the funhouse, and which
later seemed to link him with the man he had see in the mirror.
It was an anger he had embraced and amplified because he wanted to
understand whose anger it was and why he could feel it, but also because
anger was the yeast in the bread of violence, and violence was the
staple of his diet.
From the roller coaster he went directly to the subterranean garage.
Two cars waited there.
Morton Redlow’s Pontiac was parked in the farthest corner, in the
deepest shadows. Vassago had not used it since last Thursday night,
when he had killed Redlow and later the blonde. Though he believed the