traced back to me. Now, I got Danny’s energy in me, along with a lot of others.”
The gun was in the glove box.
Some small hope could be taken from the knowledge that the gun was in the glove
box.
While Nora was visiting Dr. Weingold, Travis whipped up and baked a double batch
of chocolate cookies with peanut-butter chips. Living alone, he
had learned to cook, but he had never taken pleasure in it. During the past few
months, however, Nora had improved his culinary skills to such an extent that he
enjoyed cooking, especially baking.
Einstein, who usually hung around dutifully throughout a baking session, in the
anticipation of receiving a sweet morsel, deserted him before he had finished
mixing the batter. The dog was agitated and moved around the house from window
to window, staring out at the rain.
After a while, Travis got edgy about the dog’s behavior and asked if something
was wrong.
In the pantry, Einstein made his reply.
I FEEL A LITTLE STRANGE.
“Sick?” Travis asked, worried about a relapse. The retriever was recovering
well, but still recovering. His immune system was not in condition for a major
new challenge.
NOT SICK.
“Then what? You sense . . . The Outsider?”
NO. NOT LIKE BEFORE.
“But you sense something?”
BAD DAY.
“Maybe it’s the rain.”
MAYBE.
Relieved but still edgy, Travis returned to his baking.
The highway was silver with rain.
The daytime fog grew slightly thicker as they drove south along the coast,
forcing Nora to slow to forty miles an hour, thirty in some places.
Using the fog as an excuse, could she slow the truck enough to risk throwing
open her door and leaping out? No. Probably not. She would have to let their
speed drop below five miles an hour in order not to hurt herself or her unborn
child, and the fog simply was not dense enough to justify reducing speed that
far. Besides, Vince kept the revolver pointed at her while he talked, and he
would shoot her in the back as she turned to make her exit.
The pickup’s headlamps and those of the few oncoming cars were refracted by the
mist. Halos of light and scintillate rainbows bounced off the shifting curtains
of fog, briefly seen, then gone.
She considered running the truck off the road, over the edge in one of the few
places where she knew the embankment to be gentle and the drop endurable. But
she was afraid she would misjudge where she was and, by mistake, drive off the
brink into a two-hundred-foot emptiness, crashing with terrible force into the
rocky coastline below. Even if she went over at the right point, a calculated
and survivable crash might knock her unconscious or induce a miscarriage, and if
possible she wanted to get out of this with her life and the life of the child
within her.
Once Vince started talking to her, he could not stop. For years he had husbanded
his great secrets, had hidden his dreams of power and immortality from the
world, but his desire to speak of his supposed greatness evidently had never
diminished after the fiasco with Danny Slowicz. It was as if he had stored up
all the words he had wanted to say to people, had put them on reels and reels of
mental recording tape, and now he was playing them back at high speed, spewing
out all this craziness that made Nora sick with dread.
He told her how he had learned of Einstein—the killing of the research
scientists in charge of various programs under the Francis Project at Banodyne.
He knew of The Outsider, too, but was not afraid of it. He was, he said, on the
brink of immortality, and gaining ownership of the dog was one of the final
tasks he had to complete in order to achieve his Destiny. He and the dog were
destined to be together because each of them was unique in this world, one of a
kind. Once Vince had achieved his Destiny, he said, nothing could stop him, not
even The Outsider.
Half the time, Nora didn’t understand what he was saying. She supposed that if