“Way cool!” Connie said.
He didn’t know if she was being sarcastic or approving. With her love of speed and risk, it could be either.
“What I’m saying,” he told her, struggling to keep his anger white-hot, “is that I don’t want to be like that, always pointing the finger somewhere else. When I’m responsible, I want to choke on my responsibility.”
“I hear you.”
“I’m responsible for Ricky.”
“Whatever you say.”
“If I’d been smarter, he’d still be alive.”
“Whatever.”
“He’s on my conscience.”
“Fine with me.”
“I’m responsible.”
“And I’m sure you’ll rot in Hell for it.”
He couldn’t help it: he laughed. The laughter was dark, and for a moment he was afraid it was going to turn into tears for Ricky, but she was not about to let that happen.
She said, “Sit for eternity in a pit of dog vomit, if that’s what you think you deserve.”
Though Harry wanted to keep his rage at full blaze, it was dimming — as it should. He glanced at her and laughed harder.
She said, “You’re such a bad guy, you’ll have to eat maggots and drink demon bile for, oh, maybe a thousand years—”
“I hate demon bile—”
She was laughing, too: “—and for sure you’ll have to let Satan give you a high colonic—”
“—and watch Hudson Hawk ten thousand times—”
“Oh, no, even Hell has its limits.”
They were both howling now, letting off steam, and the laughter didn’t fade for a while.
When silence finally settled between them, Connie was the one to break it: “You okay?”
“I feel rotten.”
“But better?”
“A little.”
“You’ll be okay.”
He said, “I will be, I guess.”
“Of course you will. When everything’s said and done, maybe that’s the real tragedy. Somehow we grow scabs over all the hurts and losses, even the worst ones, deepest ones. We go on, and nothing hurts forever, though sometimes it seems right that it should.”
They continued north. Sea to the left. Dark hills speckled with house lights to the right.
They were in Laguna Beach again, but he didn’t know where they were going. What he wanted to do was keep driving toward the top of the compass, all the way up the coast, past Santa Barbara, along Big Sur, over the Golden Gate, into Oregon, Washington, Canada, maybe up into Alaska, far and away, see some snow and feel the bite of arctic wind, watch moonlight glimmer on glaciers, then keep right on going across the Bering Strait, the car handling water with all the magic ease of some fairy-tale conveyance, then down the frozen coast of what had once been the Soviet Union, thence into China, stopping for some good Szechwan cooking.
He said, “Gulliver?”
“Yeah.”
“I like you.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“I mean it.”
“Well, I like you too, Lyon.”
“Just thought I’d say it.”
“Glad you did.”
“Doesn’t mean we’re going steady or anything.”
She smiled. “Good. By the way, where are we going?”
He resisted suggesting spicy duck in Beijing. “Ordegard’s place. You wouldn’t happen to know the address, I guess.”
“I don’t just know it — I’ve been there.”
He was surprised. “When?”
“Between leaving the restaurant and coming back to the office, while you were typing reports. Nothing special about the place, creepy, but I don’t think we’ll find anything helpful there.”
“When you were there before, you didn’t know about Ticktock. Now you’ll be looking at things with a different attitude.”
“Maybe. Two blocks ahead, turn right.”
He did, and they went up into the hills, along cramped and winding streets canopied by palms and overgrown eucalyptuses. A white owl with a three-foot wingspan swooped from the chimney of one house to the gabled roof of another, sailing through the night like a lost soul seeking heaven, and the starless sky pressed down so close that Harry could almost hear it grinding softly against the high points of the eastern ridges.
10
Bryan opened one of the pair of French doors and stepped onto the master-bedroom balcony.
The doors were unlocked, as were all others in the house. Though it was prudent to keep a low profile until he had Become, he feared no one, never had. Other boys were cowards, not him. His power made him confident to an extent that perhaps no one else in the history of the world had ever been. He knew that no one could prevent him from fulfilling his destiny; his journey to the ultimate throne was ordained, and all he needed was patience in order to finish Becoming.
The hour before midnight was cool and humid. The balcony deck was beaded with dew. A refreshing breeze swept in from the sea. His red robe was belted tightly at the waist, but around his legs the hem belled out like a spreading pool of blood.
The lights of Santa Catalina, twenty-six miles to the west, were hidden by a thick bank of fog lying more than twenty miles offshore and invisible itself. In the wake of the rain, the sky remained low, forbidding any relief from starlight, moonlight. He could not see his neighbors’ bright windows, for his house sat farthest out on the point, with the bluff falling away on three sides of the rear yard.
He felt wrapped by a darkness as comforting as his fine silk robe. The rumble and splash and ceaseless susurration of the surf was soothing.
Like a sorcerer at a lonely altar high upon a pinnacle of rock, Bryan closed his eyes and got in touch with his power.
He ceased to feel the cool night air and the chilly dew on the. balcony deck. He could no longer feel the robe billowing around his legs, either, or hear the waves breaking on the shore below.
First he reached out to find the five diseased cattle that were awaiting the axe. He had marked each of them with a loop of psionic energy for easy location. With eyes closed, he felt as if he were floating high above the earth, and gazing down he saw five special lights, auras different from all other sources of energy along the southern coast. The objects of his blood sport.
Employing clairvoyance — or “far-seeing”—he could observe these cattle, one at a time, as well as their immediate surroundings. He couldn’t hear them, which was occasionally frustrating. However, he assumed that he would develop full five-sense clairvoyance when at last he Became the new god.
Bryan looked in upon Sammy Shamroe, whose torments had been postponed due to the unanticipated need to deal with the smartass hero cop. The booze-soaked loser was not huddled in his crate under the drooping boughs of alleyway oleander, not sucking down his second double-liter jug of wine, as Bryan expected. Instead he was on the move in downtown Laguna, carrying what appeared to be a thermos bottle, stumbling drunkenly past shuttered shops, leaning for a moment against the trunk of a tree to catch his breath and orient himself. Then he staggered ten or twenty steps only to lean against a brick wall and hang his head, evidently considering whether to heave up his guts. Deciding against regurgitation, he staggered forth again, blinking furiously, squinting, head thrust forward, an uncharacteristic look of determination on his face, as if he had some meaningful destination in mind, although he was most likely on a random ramble, driven by irrational ox-stupid motivations that would be explicable only to someone whose brain, like his, was pickled in alcohol.