“Of all the fucking nerve!” Hatch said fiercely between clenched teeth.
Dropping most of the newspaper at his feet, crumpling the page with the story in his right hand, he hurried out of the bedroom and descended the stairs two at a time. In the den, he threw the paper on the desk, banged open a sliding closet door, and jerked out the top drawer on a three-drawer filing cabinet.
He had saved Cooper's handwritten letters, and although they were not on printed stationery, he knew the trucker had included not only a return address but a phone number on both pieces of — correspondence. He was so disturbed, he flicked past the correct file folder — labeled MISCELLANEOUS BUSINESS — cursed softly but fluently when he couldn't find it, then searched backward and pulled it out. As he pawed through the contents, other letters slipped out of the folder and clattered to the floor at his feet.
Cooper's second letter had a telephone number carefully handprinted at the top. Hatch put the disarranged file folder on the cabinet and hurried to the phone on the desk. His hand was shaking so badly that he couldn't read the number, so he put the letter on the blotter, in the cone of light from the brass desk lamp.
He punched William Cooper's number, intent on telling him off. The line was busy.
He jammed his thumb down on the disconnect button, got the dial tone, and tried again. Still busy.
“Sonofabitch!” He slammed down the receiver, but snatched it up again because there was nothing else he could do to let off steam. He tried the number a third time, using the redial button. It was still busy, of course, because no more than half a minute had passed since the first time he had tried it. He smashed the handset into the cradle so hard he might have broken the phone.
On one level he was startled by the savagery of the act, the childishness of it. But that part of him was not in control, and the mere awareness that he was over the top did not help him regain a grip on himself.
“Hatch?”
He looked up in surprise at the sound of his name and saw Lindsey, in her bathrobe, standing in the doorway between the den and the foyer.
Frowning, she said, “What's wrong?”
“What's wrong?” he asked, his fury growing irrationally, as if she were somehow in league with Cooper, as if she were only pretending to be unaware of this latest turn of events. “I'll tell you what's wrong. They let this Cooper bastard off the hook! The son of a bitch kills me, runs me off the goddamned road and kills me, then slips off the hook and has the nerve to try to use the letter I wrote him to get his job back!” He snatched up the crumpled newspaper and shook it at her, almost accusingly, as if she knew what was in it. “Get his job back — so he can run someone else off the fucking road and kill them!”
Looking worried and confused, Lindsey stepped into the den. “They let him off the hook? How?”
“A technicality. Isn't that cute? A cop misspells a word on the citation or something, and the guy walks!”
“Honey, calm down—”
“Calm down? Calm down?” He shook the crumpled newspaper again. “You know what else it says here? The jerk sold his story to that sleazy tabloid, the one that kept chasing after me, and I wouldn't have anything to do with them. So now this drunken son of a bitch sells them the story about”—he was spraying spittle he was so angry; he flattened out the newspaper, found the article, read from it—“about 'his emotional ordeal and his role in the rescue that saved Mr. Harrison's life.' What role did he have in my rescue? Except he used his CB to call for help after we went off the road, which we wouldn't have done if he hadn't been there in the first place! He's not only keeping his driver's license and probably going to get his job back, but he's making money off the whole damn thing! If I could get my hands on the bastard, I'd kill him, I swear I would!”
“You don't mean that,” she said, looking shocked.
“You better believe I do! The irresponsible, greedy bastard. I'd like to kick him in the head a few times to knock some sense into him, pitch him into that freezing river—”
“Honey, lower your voice—”
“Why the hell should I lower my voice in my own—”
“You'll wake Regina.”
It was not the mention of the girl that jolted him out of his blind rage, but the sight of himself in the mirrored closet door beside Lindsey. Actually, he didn't see himself at all. For an instant he saw a young man with thick black hair falling across his forehead, wearing sunglasses, dressed all in black. He knew he was looking at the killer, but the killer seemed to be him. At that moment they were one and the same. That aberrant thought — and the young man's image — passed in a second or two, leaving Hatch staring at his familiar reflection.
Stunned less by the hallucination than by that momentary confusion of identity, Hatch gazed into the mirror and was appalled as much by what he saw now as by the brief glimpse of the killer. He looked apoplectic. His hair was disarranged. His face was red and contorted with rage, and his eyes were … wild. He reminded himself of his father, which was unthinkable, intolerable.
He could not remember the last time he had been that angry. In fact he had never been in a comparable rage. Until now, he'd thought he was incapable of that kind of outburst or of the intense anger that could lead to it.
“I … I don't know what happened.”
He dropped the crumpled page of the newspaper. It struck his desk and fell to the floor with a crisp rustling noise that wrought an inexplicably vivid picture in his mind—
dry brown leaves tumbling in a breeze along the cracked pavement in a crumbling, abandoned amusement park
— and for just a moment he was there, with weeds sprouting up around him from cracks in the blacktop, dead leaves whirling past, the moon glaring down through the elaborate open-beam supports of a roller-coaster track. Then he was in his office again, leaning weakly against his desk.
“Hatch?”
He blinked at her, unable to speak.
“What's wrong?” she asked, moving quickly to him. She touched his arm tentatively, as if she thought he might shatter from the contact — or perhaps as if she expected him to respond to her touch with a blow struck in anger.
He put his arms around her, and hugged her tightly. “Lindsey, I'm sorry. I don't know what happened, what got into me.”
“It's all right.”
“No, it isn't. I was so … so furious.”
“You were just angry, that's all.”
“I'm sorry,” he repeated miserably.
Even if it had appeared to her to be nothing but anger, he knew that it had been more than that, something strange, a terrible rage. White hot. Psychotic. He had felt an edge beneath him, as if he were teetering on the brink of a precipice, with only his heels planted on solid ground.
To Vassago's eyes, the monument of Lucifer cast a shadow even in absolute darkness, but he could still see and enjoy the cadavers in their postures of degradation. He was enraptured by the organic collage that he had created, by the sight of the humbled forms and the stench that arose from them. His hearing was not remotely as acute as his night vision, but he did not believe that he was entirely imagining the soft, wet sounds of decomposition to which he swayed as a music lover might sway to strains of Beethoven.
When he was suddenly overcome by anger, he was not sure why. It was a quiet sort of rage at first, curiously unfocused. He opened himself to it, enjoyed it, fed it to make it grow.