luggage out to the parking lot, where he loaded it in the trunk of a
green Oldsmobile.
Lomar was one of those Californians who had made a temple of his body
and then had proceeded to more elaborate architecture. The
exercise-and-health-food ethic had long ago spread into every corner of
the country, and for years Americans had been striving for hard buns and
healthy hearts to the farthest outposts of snowy Maine.
However, the Golden State was where the first carrot-juice cocktail had
been poured, where the first granola bar had been made, and was still
the only place where a significant number of people believed that sticks
of raw jicama were a satisfactory substitute for french fries, so only
certain fanatically dedicated Californians had enough determination to
exceed the structural requirements of a temple. Jim Lomar had a neck
like a granite column, shoulders like limestone door lintels, a chest
that could buttress a nave wall, a stomach as flat as an altar stone,
and had pretty much made a great cathedral out of his body.
Although a storm front had passed through earlier in the night and the
air was still damp and chilly, Lomar was wearing just jeans and a
T-shirt on which was a photo of Madonna with her breasts bared (the rock
singer, not the mother of God), as if the elements affected him as
little as they did the quarried walls of any mighty fortress. He
virtually strutted instead of walking, performing every task with
calculated grace and evident self-consciousness, obviously aware and
pleased that people were prone to watch and envy him.
Oslett suspected Lomar was not merely a proud man but profoundly vain,
even narcissistic. The only god worshipped in the cathedral of his body
was the ego that inhabited it.
Nevertheless Oslett liked the guy. The most appealing thing about Lomar
was that, in his company, Karl Clocker appeared to be the smaller of the
two. In fact it was the only appealing thing about the guy, but it was
enough. Actually, Lomar was probably only slightly–if at all–larger
than Clocker, but he was harder and better honed. By comparison,
Clocker seemed slow, shambling, old, and soft. Because he was sometimes
intimidated by Clocker’s size, Oslett delighted at the thought of
Clocker intimidated by Lomar–though, frustratingly, if the Trekker was
at all impressed, he didn’t show it.
Lomar drove. Oslett sat up front, and Clocker slumped in the back seat.
Leaving the airport, they turned right onto MacArthur Boulevard.
They were in an area of expensive office towers and complexes, many of
which seemed to be the regional or national headquarters of major
corporations, set back from the street behind large and meticulously
maintained lawns, flowerbeds, swards of shrubbery, and lots of trees,
all illuminated by artfully placed landscape lighting.
“Under your seat,” Lomar told Oslett, “you’ll find a Xerox of the
Mission Viejo Police report on the incident at the Stillwater house.
Wasn’t easy to get hold of. Read it now, ’cause I have to take it with
me and destroy it.”
Clipped to the report was a penlight by which to read it. As they
followed MacArthur Boulevard south and west into Newport Beach, Oslett
studied the document with growing astonishment and dismay.
They reached the Pacific Coast Highway and turned south, traveling all
the way through Corona Del Mar before he finished.
“This cop, this Lowbock,” Oslett said, looking up from the report, “he
thinks it’s all a publicity stunt, thinks there wasn’t even an
intruder.”
“That’s a break for us,” Lomar said. He grinned, which was a mistake,
because it made him look like the poster boy for some charity formed to
help the willfully stupid.
Oslett said, “Considering the whole damn Network is maybe being sucked
down a drain here, I think we need more than a break.
We need a miracle.”
“Let me see,” Clocker said.
Oslett passed the report and penlight into the back seat, and then said
to Lomar, “How did our bad boy know Stillwater was even out here, how
did he find him?”
Lomar shrugged his limestone-lintel shoulders. “Nobody knows.”
Oslett made a wordless sound of disgust.
To the right of the highway, they passed a pricey gate-guarded