revolver, with which the woman had been shot, and his car, out of which
she had fallen. The car was safely hidden in the farthest corner of the
long-abandoned park garage. The gun was in the Styrofoam cooler with
the Oreo cookies and other snacks, at the bottom of the elevator shaft
more than two Boors below the lnnhouse. He did not intend to use it
again.
He was unarmed when, after driving far north into the county, he arrived
at the address he had seen on the hand-written letter in the vision.
William X. Cooper, whoever the hell he was and if he existed, lived in
an attractive garden-at complex called Palm Coort. The name of the
place and the street number were carved in a decorative wooden sign,
floodlit from the front and backed by the promised palms.
Vassago drove pastPalmCourt, turned right attheoorner,aadparked two
blocks away. He didn’t want anyone to remember the Honda sitting in
front of the building. He didn’t flat-out intend to kill this Cooper,
just talk to him, ask him some questions about the dark-a dark-eyed
bitch named Lindsey. Ilu the was situation he did not understand, and
he to take every precaution. Besides, the truth was, these days he
killed most of the people to whom he bothered to talk with for any
length of time.
After closing the file drawer and turning off the lamp in the den, Hatch
and Lindsey stopped at Regina’s room to make sure she was all right,
moving quietly to the side of her bed. The hall light, falling through
her door, revealed that the girl was sound asleep. The small knuckles
of one fisted hand were against her chin. She was breathing evenly
through slightly opened lips. If she , her dreams must have been pat.
Hatch felt his heart pinch as he looked at her, for she seemed so
desperately young. He found it hard to believe that he had ever been as
young as Regina was just then, for youth was innocence. Having been
raised under the hateful and oppressive hand of his father, he had
surrendered innocence at an early age in return for an intuitive grasp
of aberrant psychology that had permitted him to survive in a home where
anger and brutal “discipline” were the rewards for innocent mistakes and
misunderstandings. He knew that Regina could not be as tender as she
looked, for life had given her reasons of her own to develop thick skin
and an armored heart.
Tough as they might be, however, they were both vulnerable, child and
man. In fact, at that moment Hatch felt more vulnerable than the girl.
If given a choice between her inability the game leg, the twisted and
incomplete hand-and whatever damage had been done to some deep region of
his brain, he would have opted for her physical impairments without
hesitation. After recent experiences, including the inexplicable
escalation of his anger into blind rage, Hatch did not feel entirely in
control of himself. And from the time he had been a small boy, with the
terrifying example of his father to shape his fears, he had feared
nothing half as much as being out of control.
I will not fail you, he promised the sleeping child.
He looked at Lindsey, to whom he owed his lives, both of them, before
and after dying. Silently he made her the same promise: I will not fail
you.
He wondered if they were promises he could keep.
Later, in their own room, with the lights out, as they lay on their
separate halves of the bed, Lindsey said, “The rest of the test results
should be back to Dr. Nyebern tomorrow.”
Hatch had spent most of Saturday at the hospital, giving blood and urine
samples, submitting to the prying of X-ray and sonogram machines.
At one point he had been hooked up to more electrodes than the creature
that Dr. Frankenstein, in those old movies, had energized from kites
sent aloft in a lightning storm.
He said, “When I spoke to him today, he told me everything was looking
good. I’m sure the rest of the tests will all come in negative, too.
Whatever’s happening to me, it has nothing to do with any mental or