When he finished, she said, “So he makes a golem and uses it to kill, while he stays safe somewhere.”
“Maybe.”
“Makes a golem out of dirt.”
“Or sand or old brush or maybe just about anything.”
“Makes it with the power of his mind.”
Harry didn’t respond.
She said, “With the power of his mind or with magic like in the folktales?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. It’s all so crazy.”
“And you still think he can also possess people, use them like puppets?”
“Probably not. No proof of it so far.”
“What about Ordegard?”
“I don’t think there’s any connection between Ordegard and this Ticktock.”
“Oh? But you wanted to go to the morgue because you thought—”
“I did, but I don’t now. Ordegard was just an ordinary, garden-variety, pre-millennium nutcase. When I blew him away in the attic yesterday afternoon, that was the end of it.”
“But Ticktock showed up here at Ordegard’s—”
“Because we were here. He knows how to find us somehow. He came here because we were here, not because he has anything to do with James Ordegard.”
A forced stream of hot air poured out of the dashboard vents. It washed over him without melting the ice he imagined he could feel in the pit of his stomach.
“We just ran into two psychos within a couple of hours of each other,” Harry said. “First Ordegard, then this guy. It’s been a bad day for the home team, that’s all.”
“One for the record books,” Connie agreed. “But if Ticktock isn’t Ordegard, if he wasn’t angry with you for shooting Ordegard, why’d he fixate on you? Why’s he want you dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“Back at your place, before he burned it down, didn’t he say you couldn’t shoot him and think that was the end of it?”
“Yeah, that’s part of what he said.” Harry tried to recall the rest of what the vagrant-golem had thundered at him, but the memory was elusive. “Now that I think of it, he never mentioned Ordegard’s name. I just assumed…. No. Ordegard’s been a false trail.”
He was afraid she was going to ask how they could pick up the real trail, the right one, that would lead them to Ticktock. But she must have realized that he was completely at a loss, because she didn’t put him on the spot.
“It’s getting too hot in here,” she said.
He lowered the temperature control on the heater.
At the bone, he was still chilled.
In the light from the instrument panel, he noticed his hands. They were coated with grime, like the hands of a man who, buried prematurely, had desperately clawed his way out of a fresh grave.
Harry backed the Honda out of the driveway and drove slowly down through the steep hills of Laguna. The streets in those residential neighborhoods were virtually deserted at that late hour. Most of the houses were dark. For all they knew, they might have been descending through a modern ghost town, where all of the residents had vanished like the crew of the old sailing ship Mary Celeste, beds empty in the darkened houses, televisions aglow in deserted family rooms, midnight snacks laid out on plates in silent kitchens where no one remained to eat.
He glanced at the dashboard clock. 12:18.
Little more than six hours until dawn.
“I’m so tired I can’t think straight,” Harry said. “And, damn it, I’ve got to think.”
“Let’s find some coffee, something to eat. Get our energy back.”
“Yeah, all right. Where?”
“The Green House. Pacific Coast Highway. It’s one of the few places open this late.”
“Green House. Yeah, I know it.”
After a silence during which they descended another hill, Connie said, “You know what I found weirdest about Ordegard’s house?”
“What?”
“It reminded me of my apartment.”
“Really? How?”
“Don’t shine me on, Harry. You saw both places tonight.”
Harry had noticed a certain similarity, but he hadn’t wanted to think about it. “He has more furniture than you do.”
“Not a whole damn lot more. No knickknacks, none of what they call decorative pieces, no family photos. One piece of art hanging in his place, one in mine.”
“But there’s a big difference, a huge difference — you’ve got that sky-diver’s eye-view poster, bright, exhilarating, gives you a sense of freedom just to look at it, nothing like that ghoul chewing on human body parts.”
“I’m not so sure. The painting in his bedroom’s about death, human fate. Maybe my poster isn’t so exhilarating, really. Maybe what it’s really about is death, too, about falling and falling and never opening the chute.”
Harry glanced away from the street. Connie wasn’t looking at him. Her head was tilted back, eyes closed.
“You’re not any more suicidal than I am,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“The hell you do.”
He stopped at a red traffic light at Pacific Coast Highway, and looked at her again. She still hadn’t opened her eyes. “Connie—”
“I’ve always been chasing freedom. And what is the ultimate freedom?”
“Tell me.”
“The ultimate freedom is death.”
“Don’t get Freudian on me, Gulliver. One thing I’ve always liked about you is, you don’t try to psychoanalyze everyone.”
To her credit, she smiled, evidently remembering that she had used those words on him in the burger restaurant after the shooting of Ordegard, when he had wondered if she was as hard inside as she pretended to be.
She opened her eyes, checked the traffic light. “Green.”
“I’m not ready to go.”
She looked at him.
He said, “First I want to know if you’re just jiving or if you really think you’ve got something in common with a fruitcake like Ordegard.”
“All this shit I go on about, how you have to love chaos, have to embrace it? Well, maybe you do, if you want to survive in this screwed-up world. But tonight I’ve been thinking maybe I used to like surfing on it because, secretly, I hoped it would wipe me out one day.”
“Used to?”
“I don’t seem to have the same taste for chaos that I once did.”
“Ticktock give you your fill of it?”
“Not him. It’s just… earlier, right after work, before your condo was burned down and everything went to hell, I discovered I’ve got a reason to live that I never knew about.”
The light had turned red again. A couple of cars whooshed past on the coast highway, and she watched them go.
Harry said nothing because he was afraid that any interruption would discourage her from finishing what she had begun to tell him. In six months, her arctic reserve had never thawed until, for the briefest moment in her apartment, she had seemed about to disclose something both private and profound. She had quickly frozen again; but now the face of the glacier was cracking. His desire to be let into her world was so intense that it revealed as much about his own need for connections as it did about the extent to which she had heretofore guarded her privacy; he was prepared to expend all of his last six hours of life at that traffic light, if necessary, waiting for her to provide him with a better understanding of the special woman that he believed existed under the hard veneer of the streetwise cop.
“I had a sister,” she said. “Never knew about her until recently. She’s dead. Been dead five years. But she had a child. A daughter. Eleanor. Ellie. Now I don’t want to be wiped out, don’t want to surf on the chaos any more. I just want to have a chance to meet Ellie, get to know her, see if I can love her, which I think maybe I can. Maybe what happened to me when I was a kid didn’t burn love out of me forever. Maybe I can do more than hate. I’ve got to find out. I can’t wait to find out.”