for the same reason that one could not manufacture sulfuric acid in a
paper cauldron: the vessel would be dissolved by the substance it was
required to contain. A high-pressure lava flow of anger gushed into
him, so hot that he wanted to scream, so white-hot that he had no time
to scream. Consciousness was burned away, and he fell into a mercifully
dreamless darkness where there was neither anger nor terror.
Vassago realized that he was shouting with wordless, savage glee.
After a dozen or twenty blows, the glass weapon had utterly
disintegrated. He finally, reluctantly dropped the short fragment of
the bottle neck still in his white-knuckled grip. Snarling, he threw
himself against the Naugahyde recliner, tipping it over and rolling the
dead man onto the bile-green carpet. He picked up the end table and
pitched it into the television set, where Humphrey Bogart was sitting in
a military courtroom, rolling a couple of ball bearings in his leathery
hand, talking about strawberries.
The screen imploded, and Bogart was transformed into a shower of yellow
sparks, the sight of which ignited new fires of destructive fury in
Vassago. He kicked over a coffee table, tore two It Mart prints off the
walls and smashed the glass out of the frames, swept a collection of
cheap ceramic knickknacks off the mantel. He would have liked nothing
better than to have continued from one end of the apartment to the
other, pulling all the dishes out of the kitchen cabinets and smashing
them, reducing all the glassware to bright shards, seizing the food in
the refrigerator and heaving it against the walls, hammering one piece
of furniture against another until everything was broken and splintered,
but he was halted by the sound of a siren, distant now, rapidly drawing
nearer, the meaning of it penetrating even through the mist of blood
frenzy that clouded his thoughts. He headed for the door, then swinging
away from it, realizing that people might have come out into the
courtyard or might be watching from their windows. He ran out of the
living room, back the short hall, to the window in the master bedroom,
where he pulled aside the drapes and looked onto the roof over the
building-long carport. An alleyway, bordered by a block wall, lay
beyond. He twisted open the latch on the double-hung window, shoved up
the bottom hall, squeezed through, dropped onto the roof of the long
carport, rolled to the edge, fell to the pavement, and landed on his
feet as if he were a cat. He lost his sunglasses, scooped them up, put
them on again. He sprinted left, toward the back of the property, with
the siren louder now, much louder, very close. When he came to the next
flank of the eight-foot-high concrete-block wall that ringed the
property, he swiftly clambered over it with the agility of a spider
skittering up any porous surface, and then he was over, into another
alleyway serving carports along the back of another apartment complex,
and so he ran from serviceway to serviceway, picking a route through the
maze by sheer instinct, and came out on the street where he had parked,
half a block from the pearl-gray Honda. He got in the car, started the
engine, and drove away from there as sedately as he could manage,
sweating and breathing so hard that he steamed up the windows.
Reveling in the fragrant melange of bourbon, blood, and perspiration, he
was tremendously excited, so profoundly satisfied by the violence he had
unleashed that he pounded the steering wheel and let out peels of
laughter that had a shrieky edge.
For a while he drove randomly from one street to another with no idea
where he was headed. After his laughter faded, when his heart stopped
racing, he gradually oriented himself and struck out south and east, in
the general direction of his hideaway.
If William Cooper could have provided any connection to the woman named
Lindsey, that lead was now closed to Vassago forever. He wasn’t
worried. He didn’t know what was happening to him, why Cooper or
Lindsey or the man in the mirror had been brought to his attention by