He disengaged the dead-bolt lock, stepped out into the narrow side yard, and glanced to his right. No killer. No Regina. The front of the house lay in that direction, the street, more houses facing theirs from the other side. That was part of the territory Lindsey already was covering.
His heart knocked so hard, it seemed to drive each breath out of his lungs before he could get it all the way in.
She's only ten, only ten.
He turned left and ran along the side of the house, around the corner of the garage, into the backyard, where the fallen trellis and trumpet vines lay in a heap.
So small, a little thing. God, please.
Afraid of stepping on a nail and disabling himself, he skirted the debris and searched frantically along the perimeter of the property, plunging recklessly into the shrubbery, probing behind the tall eugenias.
No one was in the backyard.
He reached the side of the property farthest from the garage, almost slipped and fell as he skidded around the corner, but kept his balance. He thrust the Browning out in front of him with both hands, covering the walkway between the house and the fence. No one there, either.
He'd heard nothing from out front, certainly no gunfire, which meant Lindsey must be having no better luck than he was. If the killer had not gone that way, the only other thing he could have done was scale the fence on one side or another, escaping into someone else's property.
Turning away from the front of the house, Hatch surveyed the seven-foot-high fence that encircled the backyard, separating it from the abutting yards of the houses to the east, west, and south. Developers and Realtors called it a fence in southern California, although it was actually a wall, concrete blocks reinforced with steel and covered with stucco, capped with bricks, painted to match the houses. Most neighborhoods had them, guarantors of privacy at swimming pools or barbecues. Good fences make good neighbors, make strangers for neighbors — and make it damn easy for an intruder to scramble over a single barrier and vanish from one part of the maze into another.
Hatch was on an emotional wire-walk across a chasm of despair, his balance sustained only by the hope that the killer couldn't move fast with Regina in his arms or over his shoulder. He looked east, west, south, frozen by indecision.
Finally he started toward the back wall, which was on their southern flank. He halted, gasping and bending forward, when the mysterious connection between him and the man in sunglasses was re-established.
Again Hatch saw through the other man's eyes, and in spite of the sunglasses the night seemed more like late twilight. He was in a car, behind the steering wheel, leaning across the console to adjust the unconscious girl in the passenger seat as if she were a mannequin. Her wrists were lashed together in her lap, and she was held in place by the safety harness. After arranging her auburn hair to cover the scarf that crossed the back of her head, he pushed her against the door, so she slumped with her face turned away from the side window. People in passing cars would not be able to see the gag in her mouth. She appeared to be sleeping. Indeed she was so pale and still, he suddenly wondered if she was dead. No point in taking her to his hideaway if she was already dead. Might as well open the door and push her out, dump the little bitch right there. He put his hand against her cheek. Her skin was wonderfully smooth but seemed cool. Pressing his fingertips to her throat, he detected her heartbeat in a carotid artery, thumping strongly, so strongly. She was so alive, even more vital than she had seemed in the vision with the butterfly flitting around her head. He had never before made an acquisition of such value, and he was grateful to all the powers of Hell for giving her to him. He thrilled at the prospect of reaching deep within and clasping that strong young heart as it twitched and thudded into final stillness, all the while staring into her beautiful gray eyes to watch life pass out of her and death enter—
Hatch's cry of rage, anguish, and terror broke the psychic connection. He was in his backyard again, holding his right hand up in front of his face, staring at it in horror, as if Regina's blood already stained his trembling fingers.
He turned away from the back fence, and sprinted along the east side of the house, toward the front.
But for his own hard breathing, all was quiet. Evidently some of the neighbors weren't home. Others hadn't heard anything, or at least not enough to bring them outside.
The serenity of the community made him want to scream with frustration. Even as his own world was falling apart, however, he realized the appearance of normality was exactly that — merely an appearance, not a reality. God knew what might be happening behind the walls of some of those houses, horrors equal to the one that had overcome him and Lindsey and Regina, perpetrated not by an intruder but by one member of a family upon another. The human species possessed a knack for creating monsters, and the beasts themselves often had a talent for hiding away behind convincing masks of sanity.
When Hatch reached the front lawn, Lindsey was nowhere to be seen. He hurried to the walkway, through the open door — and discovered her in the den, where she was standing beside the desk, making a phone call.
“You find her?” she asked.
“No. What're you doing?”
“Calling the police.”
Taking the receiver out of her hand, dropping it onto the phone, he said, “By the time they get here, listen to our story, and start to do something, he'll be gone, he'll have Regina so far away they'll never find her — until they stumble across her body someday.”
“But we need help—”
Snatching the shotgun off the desk and pushing it into her hands, he said, “We're going to follow the bastard. He's got her in a car. A Honda, I think.”
“You have a license number?”
“No.”
“Did you see if—”
“I didn't actually see anything,” he said, jerking open the desk drawer, plucking out the box of 12-gauge ammunition, handing that to her as well, desperately aware of the seconds ticking away. “I'm connecting with him, it flickers in and out, but I think the link is good enough, strong enough.” He pulled his ring of keys from the desk lock, in which he had left them dangling when he had taken the magazine from the drawer. “We can stay on his ass if we don't let him get too far ahead of us.” Hurrying into the foyer, he said, “But we have to move.”
“Hatch, wait!”
He stopped and swiveled to face her as she followed him out of the den.
She said, “You go, follow them if you think you can, and I'll stay here to talk to the cops, get them started—”
Shaking his head, he said, “No. I need you to drive. These … these visions are like being punched, I sort of black out, I'm disoriented while it's happening. There's no way I won't run the car right off the damn road. Put the shotgun and the shells in the Mitsubishi.” Climbing the stairs two at a time, he shouted back to her: “And get flashlights.”
“Why?”
“I don't know, but we'll need them.”
He was lying. He had been somewhat surprised to hear himself ask for flashlights, but he knew his subconscious was driving him at the moment, and he had a hunch why flashlights were going to be essential. In his nightmares over the past couple of months, he had often moved through cavernous rooms and a maze of concrete corridors that were somehow revealed in spite of having no windows or artificial lighting. One tunnel in particular, sloping down into perfect blackness, into something unknown, filled him with such dread that his heart swelled and pounded as if it would burst. That was why they needed flashlights — because they were going where he had previously been only in dreams or in visions, into the heart of the nightmare.