All the way back to Special Projects in Laguna Niguel, the scenery and the streets were familiar, nothing mysterious about the other motorists that he passed, nothing otherworldly about the play of headlights in the nickel-bright rain or the metallic clicking that the cold droplets made against the skin of the sedan, nothing eerie about the silhouettes of palm trees against the iron sky. Yet he was overcome by a feeling of the uncanny, and he struggled to avoid the conclusion that he had brushed up against something… supernatural.
Ticktock, ticktock…
He thought about the rest of what the hobo had said after appearing out of the whirlwind: You’ll be dead by dawn.
He glanced at his watch. The crystal was still filmed with rainwater, the face distorted, but he could read the time: twenty-eight minutes past three.
When was sunrise? Six o’clock? Six-thirty? Thereabouts, somewhere between. At most, fifteen hours away.
The metronomic thump of the windshield wipers began to sound like the ominous cadence of funeral drums.
This was ridiculous. The derelict couldn’t have followed him all the way to Enrique’s house from Laguna Beach — which meant the hobo was not real, merely imagined, and therefore posed no threat.
He was not relieved. If the hobo was imaginary, Harry was in no danger of dying by dawn. But as far as he could see, that left a single alternative explanation, and not one that was reassuring: he must be having a nervous breakdown.
4
Harry’s side of the office was comforting. The blotter and pen set were perfectly squared with each other and precisely aligned with the edges of the desk. The brass clock showed the same time as did his wristwatch. The leaves of the potted palm, Chinese evergreens, and pothos were all clean and glossy.
The blue screen of the computer monitor was soothing, as well, and all the Special Projects forms were installed as macros, so he could complete them and print them without resort to a typewriter. Uneven spacing inevitably resulted when one attempted to fill in the blanks on forms with that antiquated technology.
He was an excellent typist, and he could compose case narrative in his head almost as fast as he could type. Anyone was capable of filling in blank spaces or making Xs in boxes, but not everyone was skilled at the part of the job he liked to call the “essay test.” His case narratives were written in language both more vivid and succinct than that of any other detective he had ever known.
As his fingers flew across the keyboard, crisp sentences formed on the screen, and Harry Lyon was more at peace with the world than he had been at any time since he had sat at his breakfast table that morning, eating English muffins with lemon marmalade and enjoying the view of the meticulously trimmed condominium greenbelt. When James Ordegard’s killing spree was summarized in spare prose stripped of value-weighted verbs and adjectives, the episode didn’t seem half as bizarre as when Harry actually had been a part of it. He hammered out the words, and the words soothed.
He was even feeling sufficiently relaxed to allow himself to get more casual in the office than was his habit. He unbuttoned the collar of his shirt and slightly loosened the knot of his tie.
He took a break from the paperwork only to walk down the hall to the vending-machine room to get a cup of coffee. His clothes were still damp in spots and hopelessly wrinkled, but the frost in his marrow had melted.
On his way back to the office with the coffee, he saw the hobo. The hulking vagrant was at the far end of the hall, crossing the intersection, passing left to right in another corridor. Facing forward, never looking toward Harry, the guy moved purposefully, as if in the building on other business. In a few long strides he was through the intersection and out of sight.
As Harry hurried along the hall to see where the man had gone, trying not to spill the coffee, he told himself that it hadn’t been the same person. There had been a vague resemblance, that was all; imagination and frayed nerves had done the rest.
His denials were without conviction. The figure at the end of the corridor had been the same height as his nemesis, with those bearish shoulders, that barrel chest, the same filthy mane of hair and tangled beard. The long black raincoat had spread around him like a robe, and he’d had that leonine self-possession, as if he were some mad prophet mystically transported from the days of the Old Testament and dropped into modern times.
Harry braked at the end of the hallway by sliding into the intersection, wincing as hot coffee slopped out of the cup and stung his hand. He looked right, where the vagrant had been headed. The only people in that corridor were Bob Wong and Louis Yancy, loan-outs from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, who were consulting over a manila file folder.
Harry said, “Where’d he go?”
They blinked at him, and Bob Wong said, “Who?”
“The hairball in the black raincoat, the hobo.”
The two men were puzzled.
Yancy said, “Hobo?”
“Well, if you didn’t see him, you had to smell him.”
“Just now?” Wong asked.
“Yeah. Two seconds ago.”
“Nobody came through here,” Yancy said.
Harry knew they weren’t lying to him, weren’t part of some immense conspiracy. Nevertheless, he wanted to walk past them and inspect all of the rooms along the corridor.
He restrained himself only because they were already staring at him curiously. He suspected he was something of a sight— disheveled, pale, wild-eyed.
He could not tolerate the idea that he was making a spectacle of himself. He’d built a life on the principles of moderation, orderliness, and self-control.
Reluctantly he returned to his office. He took a cork coaster from his top desk drawer, put it on the blotter, and set the dripping cup of coffee on it.
He kept a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle of Windex in the bottom drawer of one of the filing cabinets. He used a couple of the towels to blot his coffee-damp hands, then wiped off the wet cup.
He was pleased to see that his hands were not shaky.
Whatever the hell was happening, he would eventually figure it out and deal with it. He could deal with anything. Always had. Always would. Self-control. That was the key.
He took several slow, deep breaths. With both hands he smoothed his hair back from his forehead.
Heavy as a slab of slate, the lowering sky had pressed twilight into an earlier appearance. It was only a few minutes after five o’clock, an hour until sunset, but the day had surrendered to a protracted dusk. Harry turned on the overhead fluorescent lights.
For a minute or two he stood at the partially fogged window, watching tons of rain crash straight down on the parking lot. The thunder and lightning were long past, and the air was too heavy to permit wind, so the deluge had a tropical intensity, a grueling relentlessness that led the mind to ancient myths involving divine punishment, arks, and lost continents vanished beneath swollen seas.
Calmed somewhat, he returned to his desk chair and swung around to the computer. He was about to call up the case-narrative document that he had saved before going down the hall for coffee, when he realized that the screen was not blank, as it should have been.
Another document had been created in his absence. It consisted of a single word centered on the screen: TICKTOCK.
5
It was nearly six o’clock when Connie Gulliver returned to the office from the crime scene, having caught a ride in a Laguna Beach Police Department black-and-white. She was grousing about the media, one television reporter in particular who had dubbed her and Harry “Batwoman and Batman,” for God-alone-knew what reason, maybe because their desperate pursuit of James Ordegard involved so much derring-do, or maybe just because there had been a flock of bats in the attic where they had nailed the bastard. Electronic journalists did not always have discernibly logical reasons or credible justifications for doing and saying some of the things they did and said. Reporting the news was neither a sacred trust nor a public service to them, it was show business, where you needed flash and splash more than facts and figures. Connie had been around long enough to know all of that and to be resigned to it, but she was hot about it anyway, haranguing Harry from the moment she walked through the door.