Vassago scanned the balcony to the left, right, and on the other side of
the courtyard. Still d.
He tried to slide open Cooper’s living-room window, but it was either
corroded or locked. He moved to the right again, toward the kitchen
window, but he stopped at the door on the way and, without any real
hope, tried it. The door was unlocked. He pushed it open, went inside
and locked it behind him.
The man in the recliner, probably Cooper, did not stir as Vassago
quietly pulled the drapes all the way shut across the big living-room
window. No one else, passing on the balcony, would be able to look
inside.
Already assured that the kitchen, dining area, and living room were
deserted, Vassago moved catlike through the bathroom and two bedrooms
(one without furniture, used primarily for storage) that comprised the
rest of the apartment. The man in the recliner was alone.
On the dresser in the bedroom, Vassago spotted a wallet and a ring of
keys. In the wallet he found fifty-eight dollars, which he took, and a
driver’s license in the name of William X. Cooper. The photograph on
the license was of the man in the living room, a few years younger and,
of course, not in a drunken stupor.
He returned to the living room with the intention of waking Cooper and
having an informative little chat with him. Who is Lindsey? Where does
she live?
But as he approached the recliner, a current of anger shot through him,
too sudden and causeless to be his own, as if he were a human radio that
received other people’s emotions. And what he was receiving was the
same anger that had suddenly struck him while he had been with his
collection in the funhouse hardly an hour ago. As before, he opened
himself to it, amplified the current with his own singular rage,
wondering if he would receive visions, as he had on that previous
occasion. But this time, as he stood looking down on William Cooper,
the anger Bared too abruptly into insensate fury, and he lost control.
From the table beside the recliner, he grabbed the Jack Daniel’s by the
neck of the bottle.
Lying rigid in his bed, hands fisted so tightly that even his blunt
fingernails were gouging painfully into his palms, Hatch had the crazy
feeling that his mind had been invaded. His flicker of anger had been
like opening a door just a hairline crack but wide enough for something
on the other side to get a grip and tear it off its hinges. He felt
something unnameable storming into him, a force without form or
features, defined only by its hatred and rage. Its fury was that of the
hurricane, the typhoon, beyond mere human dimensions, and he knew that
he was too small a vessel to contain all of the anger that was pumping
into him. He felt as if he would explode, shatter as if he were not a
man but a crystal figurine.
The half-full bottle of Jack Daniel’s whacked the side of the sleeping
man’s head with such impact that it was almost as loud as a shotgun
blast.
Whiskey and sharp fragments of glass showered up, rained down,
splattered and clinked against the television set, the other furniture,
and the walls. The air was filled with the velvety aroma of corn-mash
bourbon, but underlying it was the scent of blood, for the gashed and
battered side of Cooper’s face was bleeding copiously.
The man was no longer merely sleeping. He had been hammered into a
deeper level of unconsciousness.
Vassago was left with just the neck of the bottle in his hand. It
terminated in three sharp spikes of glass that dripped bourbon and made
him think of snake fangs glistening with venom. Shifting his grip, he
raised the weapon above his head and brought it down, letting out a
fierce hiss of rage, and the glass serpent bit deep into William
Cooper’s face.
The volcanic wrath that erupted into Hatch was unlike anything he had
ever experienced belbee, far beyond any rage that his father had ever
achieved. Indeed, it was nothing he could have generated within himself