Mr. Murder

Four

1

Immediately after leaving the roadside rest area where the dead retirees relaxed forever in the cozy dining nook of their motorhome, heading back along I-40 toward Oklahoma City with the inscrutable Karl Clocker behind the wheel, Drew Oslett used his state-of-the-art cellular phone to call the home office in New York City. He reported developments and requested instructions.

The telephone he used wasn’t yet for sale to the general public. To the average citizen, it would never be available with all of the features that Oslett’s model offered.

It plugged into the cigarette lighter like other cellulars; however, unlike others, it was operable virtually anywhere in the world, not solely within the state or service area in which it was issued. Like the SATU electronic map, the phone incorporated a direct satellite up-link. It could directly access at least ninety percent of the communications satellites currently in orbit, bypassing their land-based control stations, override security-exclusion programs, and connect with any telephone the user wished, leaving absolutely no record that the call had been made. The violated phone company would never issue a bill for Oslett’s call to New York because they would never know that it had been placed using their system.

He spoke freely to his New York contact about what he had found at the rest stop, with no fear that he would be overheard by anyone, because his phone also included a scrambling device that he activated with a simple switch. A matching scrambler on the home-office phone rendered his report intelligible again upon receipt, but to anyone who might intercept the signal between Oklahoma and the Big Apple, Oslett’s words would sound like gibberish.

New York was concerned about the murdered retirees only to the extent that there might be a way for the Oklahoma authorities to link their killing to Alfie or to the Network, which was the name they used among themselves to describe their organization. “You didn’t leave the shoes there?” New York asked.

“Of course not,” Oslett said, offended at the suggestion of incompetence.

“All of the electronics in the heel—”

“I have the shoes here.”

“That’s right-out-of-the-lab stuff. Any knowledgeable person who sees it, he’s going to go apeshit and maybe—”

“I have the shoes,” Oslett said tightly.

“Good. Okay, then let them find the bodies and bang their heads against the wall trying to solve it. None of our business. Somebody else can haul away the garbage.”

“Exactly.”

“I’ll be back to you soon.”

“I’m counting on it,” Oslett said.

After disconnecting, while he waited for a response from the home office, he was filled with uneasiness at the prospect of passing more than a hundred black and empty miles with no company but himself and Clocker. Fortunately, he was prepared with noisy and involving entertainment. From the floor behind the driver’s seat, he retrieved a Game Boy and slipped the headset over his ears. Soon he was happily distracted from the unnerving rural landscape by the challenges of a rapidly paced computer game.

Suburban lights speckled the night when Oslett next looked up from the miniature screen in response to a tap on the shoulder from Clocker. On the floor between his feet, the cellular phone was ringing.

The New York contact sounded as somber as if he had just come from his own mother’s funeral. “How soon can you get to the airport in Oklahoma City?”

Oslett relayed the question to Clocker.

Clocker’s impassive face didn’t change expressions as he said, “Half an hour, forty minutes—assuming the fabric of reality doesn’t warp between here and there.”

Oslett relayed to New York only the estimated traveling time and left out the science fiction.

“Get there quick as you can,” New York said. “You’re going to California.”

“Where in California?”

“John Wayne Airport, Orange County.”

“You have a lead on Alfie?”

“We don’t know what the fuck we’ve got.”

“Please don’t make your answers so darn technical,” Oslett said. “You’re losing me.”

“When you get to the airport in Oklahoma City, find a newsstand. Buy the latest issue of People magazine. Look on pages sixty-six, sixty-seven, sixty-eight. Then you’ll know as much as we do.”

“Is this a joke?”

“We just found out about it.”

“About what?” Oslett asked. “Look, I don’t care about the latest scandal in the British royal family or what diet Julia Roberts follows to keep her figure.”

“Pages sixty-six, sixty-seven, and sixty-eight. When you’ve seen it, call me. Looks as if we might be standing hip-deep in gasoline, and someone just struck a match.”

New York disconnected before Oslett could respond.

“We’re going to California,” he told Clocker.

“Why?”

“People magazine thinks we’ll like the place,” he said, deciding to give the big man a taste of his own cryptic dialogue.

“We probably will,” Clocker replied, as if what Oslett had said made perfect sense to him.

As they drove through the outskirts of Oklahoma City, Oslett was relieved to find himself surrounded by signs of civilization—though he would have blown his brains out rather than live there. Even at its busiest hour, Oklahoma City didn’t assault all five senses the way Manhattan did. He didn’t merely thrive on sensory overload; he found it almost as essential to life as food and water, and more important than sex.

Seattle had been better than Oklahoma City, although it still hadn’t measured up to Manhattan. Really, it had far too much sky for a city, too little crowding. The streets were so comparatively quiet, and the people seemed so inexplicably . . . relaxed. You would think they didn’t know that they, like everyone else, would die sooner or later.

He and Clocker had been waiting at Seattle International at two o’clock yesterday afternoon, Sunday, when Alfie had been scheduled to arrive on a flight from Kansas City, Missouri. The 747 touched down eighteen minutes late, and Alfie wasn’t on it.

In the nearly fourteen months that Oslett had been handling Alfie, which was the entire time that Alfie had been in service, nothing like that had ever happened. Alfie faithfully showed up where he was supposed to, traveled wherever he was sent, performed whatever task was assigned to him, and was as punctual as a Japanese train conductor. Until yesterday.

They had not panicked right away. It was possible that a snafu—perhaps a traffic accident—had delayed Alfie on his way to the airport, causing him to miss his flight.

Of course, the moment he went off schedule, a “cellar command,” implanted in his deep subconscious, should have been activated, compelling him to call a number in Philadelphia to report his change of plans. But that was the trouble with a cellar command: sometimes it was so deeply buried in the subject’s mind that the trigger didn’t work and it stayed buried.

While Oslett and Clocker waited at the airport in Seattle to see if their boy would show up on a later flight, a Network contact in Kansas City drove to the motel where Alfie had been staying to check it out. The concern was that their boy might have dumped his entire conditioning and training, much the way that information could be lost when a computer hard disk crashed, in which case the poor geek would still be sitting in his room, in a catatonic condition.

But he hadn’t been at the motel.

He had not been on the next Kansas City/Seattle flight, either.

Aboard a private Learjet belonging to a Network affiliate, Oslett and Clocker flew out of Seattle. By the time they arrived in Kansas City on Sunday night, Alfie’s abandoned rental car had been found in a residential neighborhood in Topeka, an hour or so west. They could no longer avoid facing the truth. They had a bad boy on their hands. Alfie was renegade.

Of course, it was impossible for Alfie to become a renegade. Catatonic, yes. AWOL, no. Everyone intimately involved with the program was convinced of that. They were as confident as the crew of the Titanic prior to the kiss of the iceberg.

Because it monitored the police communications in Kansas City, as elsewhere, the Network knew that Alfie had killed his two assigned targets in their sleep sometime in the hour between Saturday midnight and one o’clock Sunday morning. Up to that point, he had been right on schedule.

Thereafter, they could not account for his whereabouts. They had to assume that he’d snapped and gone on the run as early as one A.M. Sunday, Central Standard Time, which meant that in three hours he would have been renegade for two full days.

Could he have driven all the way to California in forty-eight hours? Oslett wondered as Clocker turned into the approach road to the Oklahoma City airport.

They believed Alfie was in a car because a Honda had been stolen off a residential street not far from where the rental car had been abandoned.

Kansas City to Los Angeles was seventeen or eighteen hundred miles. He could have driven that far in a lot less than forty-eight hours, assuming he had been single-minded about it and hadn’t slept. Alfie could go three or four days without sleep. And he was as single-minded as a politician pursuing a crooked dollar.

Sunday night, Oslett and Clocker had gone to Topeka to examine the abandoned rental car. They had hoped to turn up a lead on their wayward assassin.

Because Alfie was smart enough not to use the fake credit cards with which they had supplied him—and by which he could be tracked—and because he had all of the skills needed to make a splendid success of armed robbery, they used Network contacts to access and review computerized files of the Topeka Police Department. They discovered that a convenience store had been held up by persons unknown at approximately four o’clock Sunday morning; the clerk had been shot once in the head, fatally, and from the ejected cartridge found at the scene, it had been ascertained that the murder weapon fired 9mm ammunition. The gun with which Alfie had been supplied for the Kansas City job was a Heckler & Koch P7 9mm pistol.

The clincher was the nature of the last sale the clerk had made minutes before being killed, which the police had ascertained from an examination of the computerized cash register records. It was an inordinately large purchase for a convenience store: multiple units of Slim Jims, cheese crackers, peanuts, miniature doughnuts, candy bars, and other high-calorie items. With his racing metabolism, Alfie would have stocked up on items like those if he had been on the run with the intention of forgoing sleep for a while.

And at that point they had lost him for too long.

From Topeka he could have gone west on Interstate 70 all the way into Colorado. North on Federal Highway 75. South by diverse routes to Chanute, Fredonia, Coffeyville. Southwest to Wichita. Anywhere.

Theoretically, minutes after he had been judged a renegade, it should have been possible to activate the transponder in his shoe by means of a coded microwave signal broadcast via satellite to the entire continental United States. Then they should have been able to use a series of geosynchronous tracking satellites to pinpoint his location, hunt him down, and bring him home within a few hours.

But there had been problems. There were always problems. The kiss of the iceberg.

Not until Monday afternoon had they located the transponder signal in Oklahoma, east of the Texas border. Oslett and Clocker, on standby in Topeka, had flown to Oklahoma City and taken a rental car west on Interstate 40, equipped with the electronic map, which had led them to the dead senior citizens and the pair of Rockport shoes with one heel shaved to expose the electronics.

Now they were at the Oklahoma City airport again, rolling back and forth like two pinballs inside the slowest game machine in the known universe. By the time they drove into the rental agency lot to leave the car, Oslett was ready to scream. The only reason he didn’t scream was because there was no one to hear him except Karl Clocker. Might as well scream at the moon.

In the terminal he found a newsstand and purchased the latest issue of People magazine.

Clocker bought a pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, a lapel button that said I’VE BEEN TO OKLAHOMA—NOW I CAN DIE, and the paperback edition of the gazillionth Star Trek novelization.

Outside in the promenade, where pedestrian traffic was neither as heavy nor as interestingly bizarre as it was at either JFK or La Guardia in New York, Oslett sat on a bench framed by sickly greenery in large planters. He riffled through the magazine to pages sixty-six and sixty-seven.

MR. MURDER IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, MYSTERY NOVELIST MARTIN STILLWATER SEES DARKNESS AND EVIL WHERE OTHERS SEE ONLY SUNSHINE.

The two-page spread that opened the three-page piece was largely occupied by a photograph of the writer. Twilight. Ominous clouds. Spooky trees as a backdrop. A weird angle. Stillwater was sort of lunging at the camera, his features distorted, eyes shining with reflected light, making like a zombie or crazed killer.

The guy was obviously a jackass, an obnoxious self-promoter who would be happy to dress up in Agatha Christie’s old clothes if it would sell his books. Or license his name for a breakfast cereal: Martin Stillwater’s Mystery Puffs, made of oats and enigmatic milling by-products; a free action figure included in each box, one in a series of eleven murder victims, each wasted in a different fashion, all wounds detailed in “Day-Glo” red; start your collection today and, at the same time, let our milling by-products do your bowels a favor.

Oslett read the text on the first page, but he still didn’t see why the article had put the New York contact’s blood pressure in the stroke-risk zone. Reading about Stillwater, he thought the headline ought to be “Mr. Tedium.” If the guy ever did license his name for a cereal, it wouldn’t need high fiber content because it would be guaranteed to bore the crap out of you.

Drew Oslett disliked books as intensely as some people disliked dentists, and he thought that the people who wrote them—especially novelists—had been born into the wrong half of the century and ought to get real jobs in computer design, cybernetic management, the space sciences, or applied fiber optics, industries that had something to contribute to the quality of life here on the cusp of the millennium. As entertainment, books were so slow. Writers insisted on taking you into the minds of characters, showing you what they were thinking. You didn’t have to put up with that in the movies. Movies never took you inside characters’ minds. Even if movies could show you what the people in them were thinking, who would want to go inside the mind of Sylvester Stallone or Eddie Murphy or Susan Sarandon, anyway, for God’s sake? Books were just too intimate. It didn’t matter what people thought, only what they did. Action and speed. Here on the brink of a new high-tech century, there were only two watchwords: action and speed.

He turned to the third page of the article and saw another picture of Martin Stillwater.

“Holy shit.”

In this second photograph, the writer was sitting at his desk, facing the camera. The quality of light was strange, since it seemed to come mainly from a stained-glass lamp behind and to one side of him, but he looked entirely different from the blazing-eyed zombie on the previous pages.

Clocker was sitting on the other end of the bench, like a huge trained bear dressed in human clothes and patiently waiting for the circus orchestra to strike up his theme music. He was engrossed in the first chapter of the Star Trek novelization Spock Gets the Clap or whatever the hell it was called.

Holding out the magazine so Clocker could see the photo, Oslett said, “Look at this.”

After taking the time to finish the paragraph he was reading, Clocker glanced at People. “That’s Alfie.”

“No, it isn’t.”

Gnawing on his wad of Juicy Fruit, Clocker said, “Sure looks like him.”

“Something’s very wrong here.”

“Looks exactly like him.”

“The kiss of the iceberg,” Oslett said ominously.

Frowning, Clocker said, “Huh?”

In the comfortable cabin of the twelve-passenger private jet, which was warmly and tastefully decorated in soft camel-brown suede and contrasting crackle-finish leather with accents in forest green, Clocker sat toward the front and read The Alien Proctology Menace or whatever the damned paperback was titled. Oslett sat toward the middle of the plane.

As they were still ascending out of Oklahoma City, he phoned his contact in New York. “Okay, I’ve seen People.”

“Like a kick in the face, isn’t it?” New York said.

“What’s going on here?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“You think the resemblance is just a coincidence?”

“No. Jesus, they’re like identical twins.”

“Why am I going to California—to get a look at this writer jerk?”

“And maybe to find Alfie.”

“You think Alfie’s in California?”

New York said, “Well, he had to go somewhere. Besides, the minute this People thing fell on us, we started trying to learn everything we could about Martin Stillwater, and right away we find out there was some trouble at his house in Mission Viejo late this afternoon, early this evening.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“The police report’s been written up, but it isn’t logged into their computer yet, so we can’t just access it. We need to get our hands on a hard copy. We’re working on that. So far, we know there was an intruder in the house. Stillwater apparently shot somebody, but the guy got away.”

“You think it has something to do with Alfie?”

“Nobody here’s a big believer in coincidence.”

The pitch of the Lear engines changed. The jet had come out of its climb, leveled off, and settled down to cruising speed.

Oslett said, “But how would Alfie know about Stillwater?”

“Maybe he reads People,” New York said, and laughed nervously.

“If you’re thinking the intruder was Alfie—why would he go after this guy?”

“We don’t have a theory yet.”

Oslett sighed. “I feel as if I’m standing in a cosmic toilet, and God just flushed it.”

“Maybe you should’ve taken more care with the way you were handling him.”

“This wasn’t a handling screwup,” Oslett bristled.

“Hey, I’m making no accusations. I’m only telling you one of the things that’s being said back here.”

“Seems to me the big screwup was in satellite surveillance. ”

“Can’t expect them to locate him after he took off the shoes.”

“But how come they needed a day and a half to find the damned shoes? Bad weather over the Midwest. Sunspot activity, magnetic disturbances. Too many hundreds of square miles in the initial search zone. Excuses, excuses, excuses.”

“At least they have some,” New York said smugly.

Oslett fumed in silence. He hated being away from Manhattan. The moment the shadow of his plane crossed the city line, the knives came out, and the ambitious pygmies started trying to whittle his reputation down to their size.

“You’ll be met by an advance man in California,” New York said. “He’ll give you an update.”

“Terrific.”

Oslett frowned at the phone and pressed END, terminating the call.

He needed a drink.

In addition to the pilot and co-pilot, the flight crew included a stewardess. With a button on the arm of his chair, he could summon her from the small galley at the back of the plane. In seconds she arrived, and he ordered a double Scotch on the rocks.

She was an attractive blonde in a burgundy blouse, gray skirt, and matching gray jacket. He turned in his seat to watch her walk back to the galley.

He wondered how easy she was. If he charmed her, maybe she’d let him take her into the john and do it to her standing up.

For all of a minute, he indulged that fantasy, but then faced reality and put her out of his mind. Even if she was easy, there would be unpleasant consequences. Afterward, she would want to sit beside him, probably all the way to California, and share with him her thoughts and feelings about everything from love and fate to death and the significance of Cheez Whiz. He didn’t care what she thought and felt, only what she could do, and he was in no mood to pretend to be a sensitive nineties kind of guy.

When she brought the Scotch, he asked what videotapes were available. She gave him a list of forty titles. The best movie of all time was in the plane’s library: Lethal Weapon 3. He had lost track of how many times he’d seen it, and the pleasure he took from it did not diminish with repetition. It was the ideal film because it had no story line that made enough sense to bother following, did not expect the viewer to watch the characters change and grow, was composed entirely of a series of violent action sequences, and was louder than a stockcar race and a Megadeth concert combined.

Four separately positioned monitors made it possible for four films to be shown simultaneously to different passengers. The stewardess ran Lethal Weapon 3 on the monitor nearest to Oslett and gave him a set of headphones.

He put on the headset, turned the volume high, and settled back in his seat with a grin.

Later, after he finished the Scotch, he dozed off while Danny Glover and Mel Gibson screamed unintelligible dialogue at each other, fires raged, machine guns chattered, explosives detonated, and music thundered.

2

Monday night they stayed in a pair of connecting units in a motel in Laguna Beach. The accommodations didn’t qualify as five- or even four-star lodging, but the rooms were clean and the bathrooms had plenty of towels. With the holiday weekend gone and the summer tourist season months in the future, at least half of the motel was unoccupied, and though they were right off Pacific Coast Highway, quiet ruled.

The events of the day had taken their toll. Paige felt as if she had been awake for a week. Even the too-soft and slightly lumpy motel mattress was as enticing as a bed of clouds on which gods and goddesses might sleep.

For dinner they ate pizza in the motel. Marty went out to fetch it—also salads and cannoli with deliciously thick ricotta custard—from a restaurant a couple of blocks away.

When he returned with the food, he pounded insistently on the door, and he was pale and hollow-eyed when he rushed inside, arms laden with take-out boxes. At first Paige thought he had seen the look-alike cruising the area, but then she realized he expected to return and find them gone—or dead.

The outer doors of both rooms featured sturdy dead-bolt locks and security chains. They engaged these and also wedged straight-backed desk chairs under the knobs.

Neither Paige nor Marty could imagine any means by which The Other could possibly find them. They wedged the chairs under the knobs anyway. Tight.

Incredibly, in spite of the terror they had been through, the kids were willing to let Marty convince them that the night away from home was a special treat. They were not accustomed to staying in motels, so everything from the coin-operated vibrating mattress to the free stationery to the miniature bars of fragrant soap was sufficiently exotic to fascinate them when Marty drew their attention to it.

They were especially intrigued that the toilet seats in both rooms were wrapped by crisp white paper bands on which were printed assurances in three languages that the facilities had been sanitized. From this, Emily deduced that some motel guests must be “real pigs” who didn’t know enough to clean up after themselves, and Charlotte speculated about whether such a special notice indicated that more than soap or Lysol had been used to sterilize the surfaces, perhaps flamethrowers or nuclear radiation.

Marty was clever enough to realize that the more exotic flavors of soft drinks in the motel vending machines, which the girls did not get at home, would also delight them and lift their spirits. He bought chocolate Yoo-Hoo, Mountain Dew, Sparkling Grape, Cherry Crush, Tangerine Treat, and Pineapple Fizz. The four of them sat on the two queen-size beds in one of the rooms, containers of food spread around them on the mattresses, bottles of colorful sodas on the nightstands. Charlotte and Emily had to taste some of each beverage before the end of dinner, which made Paige queasy.

Through her family-counseling practice, Paige had long ago learned that children were potentially more resilient than adults when it came to coping with trauma. That potential was best realized when they enjoyed a stable family structure, received large doses of affection, and believed themselves to be respected and loved. She felt a rush of pride that her own kids were proving so emotionally elastic and strong—then superstitiously and surreptitiously knocked one knuckle softly against the wooden headboard, silently asking God not to punish either her or the children for her hubris.

Most surprisingly, once Charlotte and Emily had bathed, put on pajamas, and been tucked into the beds in the connecting room, they wanted Marty to conduct his usual story hour and continue the verses about Santa’s evil twin. Paige recognized an uncomfortable—in fact, uncanny—similarity between the fanciful poem and recent frightening events in their own lives. She was sure Marty and the girls were also aware of the connection. Yet Marty seemed as pleased by the opportunity to share more verses as the kids were eager to hear them.

He positioned a chair at the foot of—and exactly between—the two beds. In their rush to get packed and out of the house, he had even remembered to bring the notebook that was labeled Stories for Charlotte and Emily, with its clip-on, battery-powered reading lamp. He sat down and held the notebook at reading distance.

The shotgun lay on the floor beside him.

The Beretta was on the dresser, where Paige could reach it in two seconds flat.

Marty waited for the silence to develop the proper quality of expectation.

The scene was remarkably like the one Paige had witnessed so often in the girls’ room at home, except for two differences. The queen-size beds dwarfed Charlotte and Emily, making them seem like children in a fairy tale, homeless waifs who had sneaked into a giant’s castle to steal some of his porridge and enjoy his guest rooms. And the miniature reading lamp clipped to the notebook was not the sole source of light; one of the nightstand lamps was aglow as well, and would remain so all night—the girls’ only apparent concession to fear.

Surprised to discover that she, too, was looking forward with pleasure to the continuation of the poem, Paige sat on the foot of Emily’s bed.

She wondered what it was about storytelling that made people want it almost as much as food and water, even more so in bad times than good. Movies had never drawn more patrons than during the Great Depression. Book sales often improved in a recession. The need went beyond a mere desire for entertainment and distraction from one’s troubles. It was more profound and mysterious than that.

When a hush had fallen on the room and the moment seemed just right, Marty began to read. Because Charlotte and Emily had insisted he start at the beginning, he recited the verses they had already heard on Saturday and Sunday nights, arriving at that moment when Santa’s evil twin stood at the kitchen door of the Stillwater house, intent upon breaking inside.

“With picks, loids, gwizzels, and zocks, he quickly and silently opens both locks. He enters the kitchen without a sound. Now chances for devilment truly abound. He opens the fridge and eats all the cake, pondering what sort of mess he can make. He pours the milk all over the floor, pickles, pudding, ketchup, and Coors. He scatters the bread—white and rye— and finally he spits right in the pie.”

“Oh, gross,” Charlotte said.

Emily grinned. “Hocked a greenie.”

“What kind of pie was it?” Charlotte wondered.

Paige said, “Mincemeat.”

“Yuck. Then I don’t blame him for spitting in it.”

“At the corkboard by the phone and stool, he sees drawings the kids did at school. Emily has painted a kind, smiling face. Charlotte has drawn elephants in space. The villain takes out a red felt-tip pen, taps it, uncaps it, chuckles, and then, on both pictures, scrawls the word ‘Poo!’ He always knows the worst things to do.”

“He’s a critic!” Charlotte gasped, making fists of her small hands and punching vigorously at the air above her bed.

“Critics,” Emily said exasperatedly and rolled her eyes the way she had seen her father do a few times.

“My God,” Charlotte said, covering her face with her hands, “we have a critic in our house.”

“You knew this was going to be a scary story,” Marty said.

“Mad giggles from him continue to bubble, while he gets into far greater trouble. He’s hugely more evil than he is brave, so then after he loads up the microwave with ten whole pounds of popping corn (oh, we should rue the day he was born), he turns and runs right out of the room, because that old oven is gonna go BOOM!”

“Ten pounds!” Charlotte’s imagination swept her away. She rose up on her elbows, head off the pillows, and babbled excitedly: “Wow, you’d need a forklift and a dump truck to carry it all away, once it was popped, ’cause it’d be like snowdrifts only popcorn, mountains of popcorn. We’d need a vat of caramel and maybe a zillion pounds of pecans just to make it all into popcorn balls. We’d be up to our asses in it.”

“What did you say?” Paige asked.

“I said you’d need a forklift—”

“No, that word you used.”

“What word?”

“Asses,” Paige said patiently.

Charlotte said, “That’s not a bad word.”

“Oh?”

“They say it on TV all the time.”

“Not everything on TV is intelligent and tasteful,” Paige said.

Marty lowered the story notebook. “Hardly anything, in fact.”

To Charlotte, Paige said, “On TV, I’ve seen people driving cars off cliffs, poisoning their fathers to get the family inheritance, fighting with swords, robbing banks—all sorts of things I better not catch either of you doing.”

“Especially the father-poisoning thing,” Marty said.

Charlotte said, “Okay, I won’t say ‘ass.’ ”

“Good.”

“What should I say instead? Is ‘butt’ okay?”

“How does ‘bottom’ strike you?” Paige asked.

“I guess I can live with that.”

Trying not to burst out laughing, not daring to glance at Marty, Paige said: “You say ‘bottom’ for a while, and then as you get older you can slowly work your way up to ‘butt,’ and when you’re really mature you can say ‘ass.’ ”

“Fair enough,” Charlotte agreed, settling back on her pillows.

Emily, who had been thoughtful and silent through all of this, changed the subject. “Ten pounds of unpopped corn wouldn’t fit in the microwave.”

“Of course it would,” Marty assured her.

“I don’t think so.”

“I researched this before I started writing,” he said firmly.

Emily’s face was puckered with skepticism.

“You know how I research everything,” he insisted.

“Maybe not this time,” she said doubtfully.

Marty said, “Ten pounds.”

“That’s a lot of corn.”

Turning to Charlotte, Marty said, “We have another critic in the house.”

“Okay,” Emily said, “go on, read some more.”

Marty raised one eyebrow. “You really want to hear more of this poorly researched, unconvincing claptrap?”

“A little more, anyway,” Emily acknowledged.

With an exaggerated, long-suffering sigh, Marty glanced slyly at Paige, raised the notebook again, and continued to read:

“He prowls the downstairs—wicked, mean— looking to cause yet one more bad scene. When he spies the presents under the tree, he says, ‘I’ll go on a gift-swapping spree! I’ll take out all of the really good stuff, then box up dead fish, cat poop, and fluff. In the morning, the Stillwaters will find coffee grounds, peach pits, orange rinds. Instead of nice sweaters, games, and toys, they’ll get slimy, stinky stuff that annoys.’ ”

“He won’t get away with this,” Charlotte said.

Emily said, “He might.”

“He won’t.”

“Who’s gonna stop him?”

“Charlotte and Emmy are up in their beds, dreams of Christmas filling their heads. Suddenly a sound startles these sleepers. They sit up in bed and open their peepers. Nothing should be stirring, not one mouse, but the girls sense a villain in the house. You can call it psychic, a hunch, osmosis— or maybe they smell the troll’s halitosis. They leap out of bed, forgetting slippers, two brave and foolhardy little nippers. ‘Something’s amiss,’ young Emily whispers. But they can handle it—they’re sisters!”

This development—Charlotte and Emily as the heroines of the story—delighted the girls. They turned their heads to face each other across the gap between beds, and grinned.

Charlotte repeated Emily’s question: “Who’s gonna stop him?”

“We are!” Emily said.

Marty said, “Well . . . maybe.”

“Uh-oh,” Charlotte said.

Emily was hip. “Don’t worry. Daddy’s just trying to keep us in suspense. We’ll stop the old troll, all right.”

“Down in the living room, under the tree Santa’s evil twin is chortling with glee. He’s got a collection of gift replacements taken from dumps, sewers, and basements. He replaces a nice watch meant for Lottie with a nasty gift for a girl who’s naughty, which is one thing Lottie has never been. Forgetting her vitamins is her biggest sin. In place of the watch, he wraps up a clot of horrid, glistening, greenish toad snot. From a package for Emily, he steals a doll and gives her a new gift sure to appall. It’s oozing, rancid, and starting to fizz. Not even the villain knows what it is.”

“What do you think it is, Mom?” Charlotte asked.

“Probably those dirty kneesocks you misplaced six months ago.”

Emily giggled, and Charlotte said, “I’ll find those socks sooner or later.”

“If that’s what’s in the box, then for sure I ain’t opening it,” Emily said.

“I’m not opening it,” Paige corrected.

“Nobody’s opening it,” Emily agreed, missing the point. “Phew!”

“In jammies, slipperless, now on the prowl, the girls go looking for whatever’s foul. Right to the top of the stairs they zoom, making less noise than moths in a tomb. They’re both so delicate, slim, and petite, and both of them have such tiny pink feet. How can these small girls hope to fight a Santa who’s liable to kick and to bite? Are they trained in karate or Tae Kwon Do? No, no, I’m afraid that the answer is no. Grenades tucked in their jammie pockets? Lasers implanted inside their eye sockets? No, no, I’m afraid that the answer is no. Yet down, down the shadowy stairs they go. The danger below, they can’t comprehend. This Santa has gone far ’round the bend. He’s meaner than flu, toothaches, blisters. But they’re tough too—they’re sisters!”

Charlotte defiantly thrust one small fist into the air and said, “Sisters!”

“Sisters!” Emily said, thrusting her fist into the air as well.

When they discovered that they had reached the stopping point for the night, they insisted Marty read the new verses again, and Paige found that she, too, wanted to hear the lines a second time.

Though he pretended to be tired and needed some coaxing to oblige them, Marty would have been disappointed if he hadn’t been importuned to do another reading.

By the time her father reached the end of the last verse, Emily was only able to murmur sleepily, “Sisters.” Charlotte was already snoring softly.

Marty quietly returned the reading chair to the corner from which he had gotten it. He checked the locks on the door and the windows, then made sure there were no gaps in the drapes through which someone could look into the room from outside.

As Paige tucked the blankets around Emily’s shoulders, then around Charlotte’s, she kissed each of them goodnight. The love she felt for them was so intense, like a weight on her chest, that she could not draw a deep breath.

When she and Marty retired to the adjoining room, taking the guns with them, they didn’t turn off the nightstand lamp, and they left the connecting door wide open. Nevertheless, her daughters seemed dangerously far from her.

By unspoken agreement, she and Marty stretched out side by side on the same queen-size bed. The thought of being separated by even a few feet was intolerable.

One bedside lamp was lit, but he switched it off. Enough light came through the door from the adjoining unit to reveal the larger part of their own room. Shadows attended every corner, but deeper darkness was kept at bay.

They held hands and stared at the ceiling as if their fate could be read in the curiously portentous patterns of light and shadow on the plaster. It wasn’t only the ceiling; during the past few hours, virtually everything Paige looked at seemed to be filled with omens, menacingly significant.

Neither she nor Marty undressed for the night. Although it was difficult to believe they could have been followed without being aware of it, they wanted to be able to move fast.

The rain had stopped a couple of hours ago, but aqueous rhythms still lulled them. The motel was on a bluff above the Pacific, and the cadenced crashing of the surf was, in its metronomic certainty, a soothing and peaceful sound.

“Tell me something,” she said, speaking softly to prevent her voice from carrying into the other room.

He sounded tired. “Whatever the question is, I probably don’t have the answer.”

“What happened over there?”

“Just now? In the other room?”

“Yeah.”

“Magic.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I,” Marty said. “You can’t analyze the deeper effects that storytelling has on us, can’t figure out the why and how, any more than King Arthur could understand how Merlin could do and know the things he did.”

“We came here shattered, frightened. The kids were so silent, half numb with fear. You and I were snapping at each other—”

“Not snapping.”

“Yes, we were.”

“Okay,” he admitted, “we were, just a little.”

“Which, for us, is a lot. All of us were . . . uneasy with one another. In knots.”

“I don’t think it was that bad.”

She said, “Listen to a family counselor with some experience—it was that bad. Then you tell a story, a lovely nonsense poem but nonsense nonetheless . . . and everyone’s more relaxed. It helps us knit together somehow. We have fun, we laugh. The girls wind down, and before you know it, they’re able to sleep.”

For a while neither of them spoke.

The metrical susurration of the night surf was like the slow and steady beating of a great heart.

When Paige closed her eyes, she imagined she was a little girl again, curled in her mother’s lap as she had so seldom been allowed to do, her head against her mother’s breast, one ear attuned to the woman’s hidden heart, listening intently for some small sound that was not solely biological, a special whisper that she might recognize as the precious sound of love. She’d never heard anything but the lub-dub of atrium and ventricle, hollow, mechanical.

Yet she’d been soothed. Perhaps on a deep subconscious level, listening to her mother’s heart, she had recalled her nine months in the womb, during which that same iambic beat had surrounded her twenty-four hours a day. In the womb there is a perfect peace never to be found again; as long as we remain unborn, we know nothing of love and cannot know the misery that arises from being deprived of it.

She was grateful that she had Marty, Charlotte, Emily. But, as long as she lived, moments like this would occur, when something as simple as the surf would remind her of the deep well of sadness and isolation in which she’d dwelt throughout her childhood.

She always strived to ensure that her daughters never for an instant doubted they were loved. Now she was equally determined that the intrusion of this madness and violence into their lives would not steal any fraction of Charlotte’s or Emily’s childhood as her own had been stolen in its entirety. Because her own parents’ estrangement from each other had been exceeded by their estrangement from their only child, Paige had been forced to grow up fast for her own emotional survival; even as a grammar-school girl, she was aware of the cold indifference of the world, and understood that strong self-reliance was imperative if she was to cope with the cruelties life sometimes could inflict. But, damn it, her own daughters were not going to be required to learn such hard lessons overnight. Not at the tender ages of seven and nine. No way. She wanted desperately to shelter them for a few more years from the harsher realities of human existence, and allow them the chance to grow up gradually, happily, without bitterness.

Marty was the first to break the comfortable silence between them. “When Vera Conner had the stroke and we spent so much time that week in the lounge outside the intensive care unit, there were a lot of other people, came and went, waiting to learn whether their friends and relatives would live or die.”

“Hard to believe it’s almost two years Vera’s been gone.”

Vera Conner had been a professor of psychology at UCLA, a mentor to Paige when she had been a student, and then an exemplary friend in the years that followed. She still missed Vera. She always would.

Marty said, “Some of the people waiting in that lounge just sat and stared. Some paced, looked out windows, fidgeted. Listened to a Walkman with headphones. Played a Game Boy. They passed the time all kinds of ways. But—did you notice?—those who seemed to deal best with their fear or grief, the people most at peace, were the ones reading novels.”

Except for Marty, and in spite of a forty-year age difference, Vera had been Paige’s dearest friend and the first person who ever cared about her. The week Vera was hospitalized—first disoriented and suffering, then comatose—had been the worst week of Paige’s life; nearly two years later, her vision still blurred when she recalled the last day, the final hour, as she’d stood beside Vera’s bed, holding her friend’s warm but unresponsive hand. Sensing the end was near, Paige had said things she hoped God allowed the dying woman to hear: I love you, I’ll miss you forever, you’re the mother to me that my own mother never could be.

The long hours of that week were engraved indelibly in Paige’s memory, in more excruciating detail than she would have liked, for tragedy was the sharpest engraving instrument of all. She not only remembered the layout and furnishings of the ICU visitors’ lounge in dreary specificity, but could still recall the faces of many of the strangers who, for a time, shared that room with her and Marty.

He said, “You and I were passing the time with novels, so were some other people, not just to escape but because ... because, at its best, fiction is medicine.”

“Medicine?”

“Life is so damned disorderly, things just happen, and there doesn’t seem any point to so much of what we go through. Sometimes it seems the world’s a madhouse. Storytelling condenses life, gives it order. Stories have beginnings, middles, ends. And when a story’s over, it meant something, by God, maybe not something complex, maybe what it had to say was simple, even naive, but there was meaning. And that gives us hope, it’s a medicine.”

“The medicine of hope,” she said thoughtfully.

“Or maybe I’m just full of shit.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Well, I am, yes, probably at least half full of shit—but maybe not about this.”

She smiled and gently squeezed his hand.

“I don’t know,” he said, “but I think if some university did a long-term study, they’d discover that people who read fiction don’t suffer from depression as much, don’t commit suicide as often, are just happier with their lives. Not all fiction, for sure. Not the human-beings-are -garbage-life-stinks-there-is-no-God novels filled with fashionable despair.”

“Dr. Marty Stillwater, dispensing the medicine of hope.”

“You do think I’m full of shit.”

“No, baby, no,” she said. “I think you’re wonderful.”

“I’m not, though. You’re wonderful. I’m just a neurotic writer. By nature, writers are too smug, selfish, insecure and at the same time too full of themselves ever to be wonderful.”

“You’re not neurotic, smug, selfish, insecure, or conceited. ”

“That just proves you haven’t been listening to me all these years.”

“Okay, I’ll give you the neurotic part.”

“Thank you, dear,” he said. “It’s nice to know you’ve been listening at least some of the time.”

“But you’re also wonderful. A wonderfully neurotic writer. I wish I was a wonderfully neurotic writer, too, dispensing medicine.”

“Bite your tongue.”

She said, “I mean it.”

“Maybe you can live with a writer, but I don’t think I’d have the stomach for it.”

She rolled onto her right side to face him, and he turned onto his left side, so they could kiss. Tender kisses. Gentle. For a while they just held each other, listening to the surf.

Without resorting to words, they had agreed not to discuss any further their worries or what might need to be done in the morning. Sometimes a touch, a kiss, or an embrace said more than all the words a writer could marshal, more than all the carefully reasoned advice and therapy that a counselor could provide.

In the body of the night, the great heart of the ocean beat slowly, reliably. From a human perspective, the tide was an eternal force; but from a divine view, transitory.

On the downslope of consciousness, Paige was surprised to realize that she was sliding into sleep. Like the sudden agitation of a blackbird’s wings, alarm fluttered through her at the prospect of lying unaware—therefore vulnerable—in a strange place. But her weariness was greater than her fear, and the solace of the sea wrapped her and carried her, on tides of dreams, into childhood, where she rested her head against her mother’s breast and listened with one ear for the special, secret whisper of love somewhere in the reverberant heartbeats.

3

Still wearing a set of headphones, Drew Oslett woke to gunfire, explosions, screams, and music loud enough and strident enough to be God’s background theme for doomsday. On the TV screen, Glover and Gibson were running, jumping, punching, shooting, dodging, spinning, leaping through burning buildings in a thrilling ballet of violence.

Smiling and yawning, Oslett checked his wristwatch and saw that he had been asleep for over two and a half hours. Evidently, after the movie had played once, the stewardess, seeing how like a lullaby it was to him, had rewound and rerun it.

They must be close to their destination, surely much less than an hour out of John Wayne Airport in Orange County. He took off the headset, got up, and went forward in the cabin to tell Clocker what he had learned earlier in his telephone conversation with New York.

Clocker was asleep in his seat. He had taken off the tweed jacket with the leather patches and lapels, but he was still wearing the brown porkpie hat with the small brown and black duck feather in the band. He wasn’t snoring, but his lips were parted, and a thread of drool escaped the corner of his mouth; half his chin glistened disgustingly.

Sometimes Oslett was half convinced that the Network was playing a colossal joke on him by pairing him with Karl Clocker.

His own father was a mover and shaker in the organization, and Oslett wondered if the old man would hitch him to a ludicrous figure like Clocker as a way of humiliating him. He loathed his father and knew the feeling was mutual. Finally, however, he could not believe that the old man, in spite of deep and seething antagonism, would play such games—largely because, by doing so, he would be exposing an Oslett to ridicule. Protecting the honor and integrity of the family name always took precedence over personal feelings and the settling of grudges between family members.

In the Oslett family, certain lessons were learned so young that Drew almost felt as if he’d been born with that knowledge, and a profound understanding of the value of the Oslett name seemed rooted in his genes. Nothing—except a vast fortune—was as precious as a good name, maintained through generations; from a good name sprang as much power as from tremendous wealth, because politicians and judges found it easier to accept briefcases full of cash, by way of bribery, when the offerings came from people whose bloodline had produced senators, secretaries of state, leaders of industry, noted champions of the environment, and much-lauded patrons of the arts.

His pairing with Clocker was simply a mistake. Eventually he would have the situation rectified. If the Network bureaucracy was slow to rearrange assignments, and if their renegade was recovered in a condition that still allowed him to be handled as before, Oslett would take Alfie aside and instruct him to terminate Clocker.

The paperback Star Trek novel, spine broken, lay open on Karl Clocker’s chest, pages down. Careful not to wake the big man, Oslett picked up the book.

He turned to the first page, not bothering to mark Clocker’s stopping place, and began to read, thinking that perhaps he would get a clue as to why so many people were fascinated by the starship Enterprise and its crew. Within a few paragraphs, the damned author was taking him inside the mind of Captain Kirk, mental territory that Oslett was willing to explore only if his alternatives were otherwise limited to the stultifying minds of all the presidential candidates in the last election. He skipped ahead a couple of chapters, dipped in, found himself in Spock’s prissily rational mind, skipped more pages and discovered he was in the mind of “Bones” McCoy.

Annoyed, he closed Journey to the Rectum of the Universe, or whatever the hell the book was called, and slapped Clocker’s chest with it to wake him.

The big man sat straight up so suddenly that his porkpie hat popped off and landed in his lap. Sleepily, he said, “Wha? Wha?”

“We’ll be landing soon.”

“Of course we will,” Clocker said.

“There’s a contact meeting us.”

“Life is contact.”

Oslett was in a foul mood. Chasing a renegade assassin, thinking about his father, pondering the possible catastrophe represented by Martin Stillwater, reading several pages of a Star Trek novel, and now being peppered with more of Clocker’s cryptograms was too much for any man to bear and still be expected to keep his good humor. He said, “Either you’ve been drooling in your sleep, or a herd of snails just crawled over your chin and into your mouth.”

Clocker raised one burly arm and wiped the lower part of his face with his shirt sleeve.

“This contact,” Oslett said, “might have a lead on Alfie by now. We have to be sharp, ready to move. Are you fully awake?”

Clocker’s eyes were rheumy. “None of us is ever fully awake.”

“Oh, please, will you cut that half-baked mystical crap? I just don’t have any patience for that right now.”

Clocker stared at him a long moment and then said, “You’ve got a turbulent heart, Drew.”

“Wrong. It’s my stomach that’s turbulent from having to listen to this crap.”

“An inner tempest of blind hostility.”

“Fuck you,” Oslett said.

The pitch of the jet engines changed subtly. A moment later the stewardess approached to announce that the plane had entered its approach to the Orange County airport and to ask them to put on their seatbelts.

According to Oslett’s Rolex, it was 1:52 in the morning, but that was back in Oklahoma City. As the Lear descended, he reset his watch until it showed eight minutes to midnight.

By the time they landed, Monday had ticked into Tuesday like a bomb clock counting down toward detonation.

The advance man—who appeared to be in his late twenties, not much younger than Drew Oslett—was waiting in the lounge at the private-aircraft terminal. He told them his name was Jim Lomax, which it most likely was not.

Oslett told him that their names were Charlie Brown and Dagwood Bumstead.

The contact didn’t seem to get the joke. He helped them carry their luggage out to the parking lot, where he loaded it in the trunk of a green Oldsmobile.

Lomax 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 Lomax 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, Lomax 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 Lomax 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 Lomax 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, Lomax 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 Lomax—though, frustratingly, if the Trekker was at all impressed, he didn’t show it.

Lomax 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,” Lomax 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,” Lomax 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 Lomax, “How did our bad boy know Stillwater was even out here, how did he find him?”

Lomax shrugged his limestone-lintel shoulders. “No-body knows.”

Oslett made a wordless sound of disgust.

To the right of the highway, they passed a pricey gate-guarded golf-course community, after which the lightless Pacific lay so vast and black to the west that they seemed to be driving along the edge of eternity.

Lomax said, “We figure if we keep tabs on Stillwater, sooner or later our man will turn up, and we’ll recover him.”

“Where’s Stillwater now?”

“We don’t know.”

“Terrific.”

“Well, see, not half an hour after the cops left, there was this other thing happened to the Stillwaters, before we got to them, and after that they seemed to . . . go into hiding, I guess you’d say.”

“What other thing?”

Lomax frowned. “Nobody’s sure. It happened right around the corner from their house. Different neighbors saw different pieces, but a guy fitting Stillwater’s description fired a lot of shots at another guy in a Buick. The Buick slams into a parked Explorer, see, gets hung up on it for a second. Two kids fitting the description of the Stillwater girls tumble out the back seat of the Buick and run, the Buick takes off, Stillwater empties his gun at it, and then this BMW—which fits the description of one of the cars registered to the Stillwaters—it comes around the corner like a bat out of hell, driven by Stillwater’s wife, and all of them get in it and take off.”

“After the Buick?”

“No. It’s long gone. It’s like they’re trying to get out of there before the cops arrive.”

“Any neighbors see the guy in the Buick?”

“No. Too dark.”

“It was our bad boy.”

Lomax said, “You really think so?”

“Well, if it wasn’t him, it must’ve been the Pope.”

Lomax gave him an odd look, then stared thoughtfully at the highway ahead.

Before the dimwit could ask how the Pope was involved in all of this, Oslett said, “Why don’t we have the police report on the second incident?”

“Wasn’t one. No complaint. No crime victim. Just a report of the hit-and-run damage to the Explorer.”

“According to what Stillwater told the cops, our Alfie thinks he is Stillwater, or ought to be. Thinks his life was stolen from him. The poor boy’s totally over the edge, whacko, so to him it makes sense to go right back and steal the Stillwater kids because somehow he thinks they’re his kids. Jesus, what a mess.”

A highway sign indicated they would soon reach the city limits of Laguna Beach.

Oslett said, “Where are we going?”

“Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Dana Point,” Lomax replied. “You’ve got a suite there. I took the long way so you’d both have a chance to read the police report.”

“We napped on the plane. I sort of thought, once we landed, we’d get right into action.”

Lomax looked surprised. “Doing what?”

“Go to the Stillwater house for starters, have a look around, see what we can see.”

“Nothing to see. Anyway, I’m supposed to take you to the Ritz. You’re to get some sleep, be ready to go by eight in the morning.”

“Go where?”

“They expect to have a lead on Stillwater or your boy or both by morning. Someone will come to the hotel to give you a briefing at eight o’clock, and you’ve gotta be rested, ready to move. Which you should be, since it’s the Ritz. I mean, it’s a terrific hotel. Great food too. Even from room service. You can get a good, healthy breakfast, not typical greasy hotel crap. Egg-white omelets, seven-grain bread, all kinds of fresh fruit, non-fat yogurt—”

Oslett said, “I sure hope I can get a breakfast like I have in Manhattan every morning. Alligator embryos and chicken-fried eel heads on a bed of seaweed sautéed in a garlic butter, with a double side order of calves’ brains. Ahhh, man, you never in your life feel half as pumped as you do after that breakfast.”

So astonished that he let the speed of the Oldsmobile fall to half of what it had been, Lomax stared at Oslett. “Well, they have great food at the Ritz but maybe not as exotic as what you can get in New York.” He looked at the street again, and the car picked up speed. “Anyway, you sure that’s healthy food? Sounds packed with cholesterol to me.”

Not a hint of irony, not a trace of humor informed Lomax’s voice. It was clear that he actually believed Oslett ate eel heads, alligator embryos, and calves’ brains for breakfast.

Reluctantly, Oslett had to face the fact that there were worse potential partners than the one he already had. Karl Clocker only looked stupid.

In Laguna Beach, December was the off season, and the streets were nearly deserted at a quarter to one on a Tuesday morning. At the three-way intersection in the heart of town, with the public beach on the right, they stopped for the red traffic signal, even though no other moving car was in sight.

Oslett thought the town was as unnervingly dead as any place in Oklahoma, and he longed for the bustle of Manhattan: the all-night rush of police vehicles and ambulances, the noir music of sirens, the endless honking of horns. Laughter, drunken voices, arguments, and the mad gibbering of the drug-blasted schizophrenic street dwellers that echoed up to his apartment even in the deepest hours of the night were sorely lacking in this somnolent burg on the edge of the winter sea.

As they continued out of Laguna, Clocker passed the Mission Viejo Police report forward from the back seat.

Oslett waited for a comment from the Trekker. When none was forthcoming, and when he could no longer tolerate the silence that filled the car and seemed to blanket the world outside, he half-turned to Clocker and said, “Well?”

“Well what?”

“What do you think?”

“Not good,” Clocker pronounced from his nest of shadows in the back seat.

“Not good? That’s all you can say? Looks like one colossal mess to me.”

“Well,” Clocker said philosophically, “into every crypto-fascist organization, a little rain must fall.”

Oslett laughed. He turned forward, glanced at the solemn Lomax, and laughed harder. “Karl, sometimes I actually think maybe you’re not a bad guy.”

“Good or bad,” Clocker said, “everything resonates with the same movement of subatomic particles.”

“Now don’t go ruining a beautiful moment,” Oslett warned him.

4

In the deepest swale of the night, he rises from vivid dreams of slashed throats, bullet-shattered heads, pale wrists carved by razor blades, and strangled prostitutes, but he does not sit up or gasp or cry out like a man waking from a nightmare, for he is always soothed by his dreams. He lies in the fetal position upon the back seat of the car, half in and half out of convalescent sleep.

One side of his face is wet with a thick, sticky substance. He raises one hand to his cheek and cautiously, sleepily works the viscous material between his fingers, trying to understand what it is. Discovering prickly bits of glass in the congealing slime, he realizes that his healing eye has rejected the splinters of the car window along with the damaged ocular matter, which has been replaced by healthy tissue.

He blinks, opens his eyes, and can again see as well through the left as through the right. Even in the shadow-filled Buick, he clearly perceives shapes, variations of texture, and the lesser darkness of the night that presses at the windows.

Hours hence, by the time the palm trees are casting the long west-falling shadows of dawn and tree rats have squirmed into their secret refuges among the lush fronds to wait out the day, he will be completely healed. He will be ready once more to claim his destiny.

He whispers, “Charlotte . . .”

Outside, a haunting light gradually arises. The clouds trailing the storm are thin and torn. Between some of the ragged streamers, the cold face of the moon peers down.

“. . . Emily . . .”

Beyond the car windows, the night glimmers softly like slightly tarnished silver in the glow of a single candle flame.

“. . . Daddy is going to be all right . . . all right . . . don’t worry . . . Daddy is going to be all right. . . .”

He now understands that he was drawn to his double by a magnetism which arose because of their essential oneness and which he perceived through a sixth sense. He’d had no awareness that another self existed, but he’d been pulled toward him as if the attraction was an autonomic function of his body to the same extent that the beating of his heart, the production and maintenance of his blood supply, and the functioning of internal organs were autonomic functions proceeding entirely without need of conscious volition.

Still half embraced by sleep, he wonders if he can apply that sixth sense with conscious intention and reach out to find the false father any time he wishes.

Dreamily, he imagines himself to be a figure sculpted from iron and magnetized. The other self, hiding somewhere out there in the night, is a similar figure. Each magnet has a negative and positive pole. He imagines his positive is aligned with the false father’s negative. Opposites attract.

He seeks attraction, and almost at once he finds it. Invisible waves of force tug lightly at him, then less lightly.

West. West and south.

As during his frantic and compulsive drive across more than half the country, he feels the power of the attractant grow until it is like the ponderous gravity of a planet pulling a minor asteroid into the fiery promise of its atmosphere.

West and south. Not far. A few miles.

The pull is exigent, strangely pleasant at first but then almost painful. He feels as if, were he to get out of the car, he would instantly levitate off the ground and be drawn through the air at high speed directly into the orbit of the hateful false father who has taken his life.

Suddenly he senses that his enemy is aware of being sought and perceives the lines of power connecting them.

He stops imagining the magnetic attraction. Immediately he retreats into himself, shuts down. He isn’t quite ready to re-engage the enemy in combat and doesn’t want to alert him to the fact that another encounter is only hours away.

He closes his eyes.

Smiling, he drifts into sleep.

Healing sleep.

At first his dreams are of the past, peopled by those he has assassinated and by the women with whom he has had sex and on whom he has bestowed post-coital death. Then he is enraptured by scenes that are surely prophetic, involving those whom he loves—his sweet wife, his beautiful daughters, in moments of surpassing tenderness and gratifying submission, bathed in golden light, so lovely, all in a lovely golden light, flares of silver, ruby, amethyst, jade, and indigo.

Marty woke from a nightmare with the feeling that he was being crushed. Even when the dream shattered and blew away, though he knew that he was awake and in the motel room, he could not breathe or move so much as a finger. He felt small, insignificant, and was strangely certain he was about to be hammered into billions of disassociated atoms by some cosmic force beyond his comprehension.

Breath came to him suddenly, implosively. The paralysis broke with a spasm that shook him from head to foot.

He looked at Paige on the bed beside him, afraid that he had disturbed her sleep. She murmured to herself but didn’t wake.

He got up as quietly as possible, stepped to the front window, cautiously separated the drapery panels, and looked out at the motel parking lot and Pacific Coast Highway beyond. No one moved to or from any of the parked cars. As far as he remembered, all of the shadows that were out there now had been out there earlier. He saw no one lurking in any corner. The storm had taken all the wind with it into the east, and Laguna was so still that the trees might have been painted on a stage canvas. A truck passed, heading north on the highway, but that was the only movement in the night.

In the wall opposite the front window, draperies covered a pair of sliding glass doors beyond which lay a balcony overlooking the sea. Through the doors and past the deck railing, down at the foot of the bluff, lay a width of pale beach onto which waves broke in garlands of silver foam. No one could easily climb to the balcony, and the sward was deserted.

Maybe it had been only a nightmare.

He turned away from the glass, letting the draperies fall back into place, and he looked at the luminous dial of his wristwatch. Three o’clock in the morning.

He had been asleep about five hours. Not long enough, but it would have to do.

His neck ached intolerably, and his throat was mildly sore.

He went into the bathroom, eased the door shut, and snapped on the light. From his travel kit he took a bottle of Extra-Strength Excedrin. The label advised a dosage of no more than two tablets at a time and no more than eight in twenty-four hours. The moment seemed made for living dangerously, however, so he washed down four of them with a glass of water drawn from the sink tap, then popped a sore-throat lozenge in his mouth and sucked on it.

After returning to the bedroom and picking up the short-barreled shotgun from beside the bed, he went through the open connecting door to the girls’ room. They were asleep, burrowed in their covers like turtles in shells to avoid the annoying light of the nightstand lamp.

He looked out their windows. Nothing.

Earlier, he had returned the reading chair to the corner, but now he moved it farther out into the room, where light would reach it. He didn’t want to alarm Charlotte and Emily if they woke before dawn and saw an unidentifiable man in the shadows.

He sat with his knees apart, the shotgun across his thighs.

Although he owned five weapons—three of them now in the hands of the police—although he was a good shot with all of them, although he had written many stories in which policemen and other characters handled weapons with the ease of familiarity, Marty was surprised by how unhesitatingly he had resorted to guns when trouble arose. After all, he was neither a man of action nor experienced in killing.

His own life and then his family had been in jeopardy, but he would have thought, before learning differently, that he’d have reservations when his finger first curled around the trigger. He would have expected to experience at least a flicker of regret after shooting a man in the chest even if the bastard deserved shooting.

He clearly remembered the dark glee with which he had emptied the Beretta at the fleeing Buick. The savage lurking in the human genetic heritage was as accessible to him as to any man, regardless of how educated, well-read, and civilized he was.

What he had discovered about himself did not displease him as much as perhaps it should. Hell, it didn’t displease him at all.

He knew that he was capable of killing any number of men to save his own life, Paige’s life, or the lives of his children. And although he swam in a society where it was intellectually correct to embrace pacifism as the only hope of civilization’s survival, he didn’t see himself as a hopeless reactionary or an evolutionary throwback or a degenerate but merely as a man acting precisely as nature intended.

Civilization began with the family, with children protected by mothers and fathers willing to sacrifice and even die for them.

If the family wasn’t safe anymore, if the government couldn’t or wouldn’t protect the family from the depredations of rapists and child molesters and killers, if homicidal sociopaths were released from prison after serving less time than fraudulent evangelists who embezzled from their churches and greedy hotel-rich millionairesses who underpaid their taxes, then civilization had ceased to exist. If children were fair game—as any issue of a daily paper would confirm they were—then the world had devolved into savagery. Civilization existed only in tiny units, within the walls of those houses where the members of a family shared a love strong enough to make them willing to put their lives on the line in the defense of one another.

What a day they’d been through. A terrible day. The only good thing about it was—he had discovered that his fugue, nightmares, and other symptoms didn’t result from either physical or mental illness. The trouble was not within him, after all. The boogeyman was real.

But he could take minimal satisfaction from that diagnosis. Although he had regained his self-confidence, he had lost so much else.

Everything had changed.

Forever.

He knew that he didn’t even yet grasp just how dreadfully their lives had been altered. In the hours remaining before dawn, as he tried to think what steps they must take to protect themselves, and as he dared to consider the few possible origins of The Other that logic dictated, their situation inevitably would seem increasingly difficult and their options narrower than he could yet envision or admit.

For one thing, he suspected that they would never be able to go home again.

He wakes half an hour before dawn, healed and rested.

He returns to the front seat, switches on the interior light, and examines his forehead and left eye in the rearview mirror. The bullet furrow in his brow has knit without leaving any scar that he can detect. His eye is no longer damaged—or even bloodshot.

However, half his face is crusted with dried blood and the grisly biological waste products of the accelerated healing process. A portion of his countenance looks like something out of The Abominable Dr. Phibes or Darkman.

Rummaging in the glove compartment, he finds a small packet of Kleenex. Under the tissues is a travel-size box of Handi Wipes, moistened towelettes sealed in foil packets. They have a lemony scent. Very nice. He uses the Kleenex and towelettes to scrub the muck off his face, and he smooths out his sleep-matted hair with his hands.

He won’t frighten anyone now, but he is still not presentable enough to be inconspicuous, which is what he desires to be. Though the bulky raincoat, buttoned to the neck, covers his bullet-torn shirt, the shirt reeks of blood and the variety of foods that he spilled on it during his feeding frenzy in McDonald’s rainswept parking lot last evening, in the now-abandoned Honda, before he’d ever met the unlucky owner of the Buick. His pants aren’t pristine, either.

On the off chance he’ll find something useful, he takes the keys from the ignition, gets out of the car, goes around to the back, and opens the trunk. From the dark interior, lit only partially by an errant beam from the nearby tree-shrouded security lamp, the dead man stares at him with wide-eyed astonishment, as if surprised to see him again.

The two plastic shopping bags lie atop the body. He empties the contents of both on the corpse. The owner of the Buick had been shopping for a variety of items. The thing that looks most useful at the moment is a bulky crew-neck sweater.

Clutching the sweater in his left hand, he gently closes the trunk lid with his right to make as little noise as possible. People will be getting up soon, but sleep still grips most if not all of the apartment residents. He locks the trunk and pockets the keys.

The sky is dark, but the stars have faded. Dawn is no more than fifteen minutes away.

Such a large garden-apartment complex must have at least two or three community laundry rooms, and he sets out in search of one. In a minute he finds a signpost that directs him to the recreation building, pool, rental office, and nearest laundry room.

The walkways connecting the buildings wind through large and attractively landscaped courtyards under spreading laurels and quaint iron carriage lamps with verdigris patina. The development is well-planned and attractive. He would not mind living here himself. Of course his own house, in Mission Viejo, is even more appealing, and he is sure the girls and Paige are so attached to it that they will never want to leave.

The laundry-room door is locked, but it doesn’t pose a great obstacle. Management has installed a cheap lockset, a latch-bolt not a dead-bolt. Having anticipated the need, he has a credit card from the cadaver’s wallet, which he slips between the faceplate and the striker plate. He slides it upward, encounters the latch-bolt, applies pressure, and pops the lock.

Inside, he finds six coin-operated washing machines, four gas dryers, a vending machine filled with small boxes of detergents and fabric softeners, a large table on which clean clothes can be folded, and a pair of deep sinks. Everything is clean and pleasant under the fluorescent lights.

He takes off the raincoat and the grossly soiled flannel shirt. He wads up both the shirt and the coat and stuffs them into a large trash can that stands in one corner.

His chest is unmarked by bullet wounds. He doesn’t need to look at his back to know that the single exit wound is also healed.

He washes his armpits at one of the laundry sinks and dries with paper towels taken from a wall dispenser.

He looks forward to taking a long hot shower before the day is done, in his own bathroom, in his own home. Once he has located the false father and killed him, once he has recovered his family, he will have time for simple pleasures. Paige will shower with him. She will enjoy that.

If necessary, he could take off his jeans and wash them in one of the laundry-room machines, using coins taken from the owner of the Buick. But when he scrapes the crusted food off the denim with his fingernails and works at the few stains with damp paper towels, the result is satisfactory.

The sweater is a pleasant surprise. He expects it to be too large for him, as the raincoat was, but the dead man evidently did not buy it for himself. It fits perfectly. The color—cranberry red—goes well with the blue jeans and is also a good color for him. If the room had a mirror, he is sure it would show that he is not only inconspicuous but quite respectable and even attractive.

Outside, dawn is just a ghost light in the east.

Morning birds are chirruping in the trees.

The air is sweet.

Tossing the Buick keys into some shrubbery, abandoning the car and the dead man in it, he proceeds briskly to the nearest multiple-stall carport and systematically tries the doors of the vehicles parked under the bougainvillea-covered roof. Just when he thinks all of them are going to be locked, a Toyota Camry proves to be open.

He slips in behind the wheel. Checks behind the sun visor for keys. Under the seat. No such luck.

It doesn’t matter. He’s nothing if not resourceful. Before the sky has brightened appreciably, he hot-wires the car and is on the road again.

Most likely, the owner of the Camry will discover it’s missing in a couple of hours, when he’s ready to go to work, and will quickly report it stolen. No problem. By then the license plates will be on another car, and the Camry will be sporting a different set of tags that will make it all but invisible to the police.

He feels invigorated, driving through the hills of Laguna Niguel in the rose light of dawn. The early sky is as yet only a faded blue, but the high formations of striated clouds are runneled with bright pink.

It is the first day of December. Day one. He is making a fresh start. From now on, everything will go his way because he will no longer underestimate his enemy.

Before he kills the false father, he will put out the bastard’s eyes in retribution for the wound that he himself suffered. He will require his daughters to watch, for this will be an important lesson to them, proof that false fathers cannot triumph in the long run and that their real father is a man to be disobeyed only at the risk of severe punishment.