of the screen. Although the four letters had been there all along, the
importance of them hadn’t registered immediately.
“Live?” Marty said. “They don’t send reporters out live unless the
story’s ongoing.”
“It is ongoing,” Paige said. She was standing with her arms folded
across her chest, frowning down at the television. “The lunatic is
still out there somewhere.”
“I mean, like a robbery in progress or a hostage situation with a SWAT
team waiting to storm the place. By TV standards, this is boring, no
action, no one on scene to shove a microphone at, just an empty house
for visuals. It’s not the kind of story they use for a live spot, too
expensive and no excitement.”
The broadcast had gone back to the studio. To his surprise, the
anchorman wasn’t one of the second-string newsreaders from a Los Angeles
station, who would ordinarily have pulled duty on an early morning
program, but a well-known network face.
Astonished, Marty said, “This is national. Since when does a
breaking-and-entry report rate national news?”
“You were assaulted too,” Paige said.
“So what? These days, there’s a worse crime than this every ten seconds
somewhere in the country.”
“But you’re a celebrity.”
“The hell I am.”
“You may not like it, but you are.”
“I’m not that much of a celebrity, not with only two paperback
bestsellers. You know how hard it is to get on this program for one of
their chat segments, as an invited guest?” He rapped a knuckle against
the face of the anchorman on the screen. “Harder than getting an
invitation to a state dinner at the White House! Even if I hired a
publicist who’d sold his soul to the devil, he couldn’t get me on this
program, Paige. I’m just not big enough. I’m a nobody to them.”
“So . . . what’re you saying?”
He went to the window that provided a view of the parking lot, and
parted the draperies. Pale sunlight. Steady traffic out on Pacific
Coast Highway. The trees stirred lazily in the mildest of on-shore
breezes.
Nothing in the scene was threatening or unusual, yet it seemed ominous
to him. He felt that he was looking out at a world that was no longer
familiar, a world changed for the worse. The differences were
indefinable, subjective rather than objective, perceptible to the spirit
more than to the senses but nonetheless real. And the pace of that dark
change was accelerating. Soon the view from this room or any other
would be, to him, like something seen through the porthole of a
spacecraft on a far alien planet which superficially resembled his own
world but which was, below- its deceptive surface, infinitely strange
and inimical to human life.
“I don’t think,” he said, “that the police would ordinarily have
completed their tests on those blood samples so quickly, and I know it’s
not standard practice to release crime-lab results so casually to the
media.” He let the draperies fall into place and turned to Paige, whose
brow was furrowed with worry. “National news? Live, on the scene?
I don’t know what the hell is happening, Paige, but it’s even stranger
than I thought it was last night.”
‘ While Paige showered, Marty pulled up a chair in front of the
television and channel-hopped, searching for other news programs. He
caught the end of a second story about himself on a local channel and
then a third piece, complete, on a national show.
He was trying to guard against paranoia, but he had the distinct
impression that both stories suggested, without making accusations, that
the falsity of his statement to the Mission Viejo Police was a foregone
conclusion and that his real motive was either to sell more books or
something darker and weirder than mere career-pumping.
Both programs made use of the photograph from the current issue of
People, in which he resembled a movie zombie with glowing eyes, lurching
out of shadows, violent and demented. And both pointedly mentioned the
three guns of which he’d been relieved by the police, as if he might be
a suburban survivalist living atop a bunker packed solid with arms and
ammunition. Toward the end of the third report, he thought an