He was all the way upstairs and entering Regina's room before he realized that he didn't know why he had gone there. Stopping just inside the threshold, he looked down at the broken doorknob and the overturned desk chair, then at the closet where clothes had fallen off the hangers and were lying in a pile, then at the open window where the night breeze had begun to stir the draperies.
Something … something important. Right here, right now, in this room, something he needed.
But what?
He switched the Browning to his left hand, wiped the damp palm of his right hand against his jeans. By now the son of a bitch in the sunglasses had started the car and was on his way out of the neighborhood with Regina, probably on Crown Valley Parkway already. Every second counted.
Although he was beginning to wonder if he had flown upstairs in a panic rather than because there was anything he really needed, Hatch decided to trust the compulsion a little further. He went to the corner desk and let his gaze travel over the books, pencils, and a notebook. The bookcase next to the desk. One of Lindsey's paintings on the wall beside it.
Come on, come on. Something he needed … needed as badly as the flashlights, as badly as the shotgun and the box of shells. Something.
He turned, saw the crucifix, and went straight for it. He scrambled onto Regina's bed and wrenched the cross from the wall behind it.
Off the bed and on the floor again, heading out of the room and along the hall toward the stairs, he gripped the icon tightly, fisted his right hand around it. He realized he was holding it as if it were not an object of religious symbolism and veneration but a weapon, a hatchet or cleaver.
By the time he got to the garage, the big sectional door was rolling up. Lindsey had started the car.
When Hatch got in the passenger's side, Lindsey looked at the crucifix. “What's that for?”
“We'll need it.”
Backing out of the garage, she said, “Need it for what?”
“I don't know.”
As the car rolled into the street, she looked at Hatch curiously. “A crucifix?”
“I don't know, but maybe it'll be useful. When I linked with him he was … he felt thankful to all the powers of Hell, that's how it went through his mind, thankful to all the powers of Hell for giving Regina to him.” He pointed left. “That way.”
Fear had aged Lindsey a few years in the past ten minutes. Now the lines in her face grew deeper still as she threw the car in gear and turned left. “Hatch, what are we dealing with here, one of those Satanists, those crazies, guys in these cults you read about in the paper, when they catch one of them, they find severed heads in the refrigerator, bones buried under the front porch?”
“Yeah, maybe, something like that.” At the intersection he said, “Left here. Maybe something like that … but worse, I think.”
“We can't handle this, Hatch.”
“The hell we can't,” he said sharply. “There's no time for anybody else to handle it. If we don't, Regina's dead.”
They came to an intersection with Crown Valley Parkway, which was a wide four- to six-lane boulevard with a garden strip and trees planted down the center. The hour was not yet late, and the parkway was busy, though not crowded.
“Which way?” Lindsey asked.
Hatch put his Browning on the floor. He did not let go of the crucifix. He held it in both hands. He looked left and right, left and right, waiting for a feeling, a sign, something. The headlights of passing cars washed over them but brought no revelations.
“Hatch?” Lindsey said worriedly.
Left and right, left and right. Nothing. Jesus.
Hatch thought about Regina. Auburn hair. Gray eyes. Her right hand curled and twisted like a claw, a gift from God. No, not from God. Not this time. Can't blame them all on God. She might have been right: a gift from her parents, drug-users' legacy.
A car pulled up behind them, waiting to get out onto the main street.
The was she walked, determined to minimize the limp. The way she never concealed her deformed hand, neither ashamed nor proud of it, just accepting. Going to be a writer. Intelligent pigs from outer space.
The driver waiting behind them blew his horn.
“Hatch?”
Regina, so small under the weight of the world, yet always standing straight, her head never bowed. Made a deal with God. In return for something precious to her, a promise to eat beans. And Hatch knew what the precious thing was, though she had never said it, knew it was a family, a chance to escape the orphanage.
The other driver blew his horn again.
Lindsey was shaking. She started to cry.
A chance. Just a chance. All the girl wanted. Not to be alone any more. A chance to sleep in a bed painted with flowers. A chance to love, be loved, grow up. The small curled hand. The small sweet smile. Goodnight… Dad.
The driver behind them blew his horn insistently.
“Right,” Hatch said abruptly. “Go right.”
With a sob of relief, Lindsey turned right onto the parkway. She drove faster than she usually did, changing lanes as traffic required, crossing the south-county flatlands toward the distant foothills and the night-shrouded mountains in the east.
At first Hatch was not sure that he had done more than guess at what direction to take. But soon conviction came to him. The boulevard led east between endless tracts of houses that speckled the hills with lights as if they were thousands of memorial flames on the tiers of immense votive-candle racks, and with each mile he sensed more strongly that he and Lindsey were following in the wake of the beast.
Because he had agreed there would be no more secrets between them, because he thought she should know — and could handle — a full understanding of the extremity of Regina's circumstances, Hatch said, “What he wants to do is hold her beating heart in his bare hand for its last few beats, feel the life go out of it.”
“Oh, God.”
“She's still alive. She has a chance. There's hope.” He believed what he said was true, had to believe it or go mad. But he was troubled by the memory of having said those same things so often in the weeks before cancer had finally finished with Jimmy.
Part III
DOWN AMONG THE DEAD
Death is no fearsome mystery.
He is well known to thee and me.
He hath no secrets he can keep
to trouble any good man's sleep.
Turn not thy face from Death away.
Care not he takes our breath away.
Fear him not, he's not thy master,
rushing at thee faster, faster.
Not thy master but servant to
the Maker of thee, what or Who
created Death, created thee
— and is the only mystery.
SEVEN
1
Jonas Nyebern and Kari Dovell sat in armchairs before the big windows in the darkened living room of his house on Spyglass Hill, looking at the millions of lights that glimmered across Orange and Los Angeles counties. The night was relatively clear, and they could see as far as Long Beach Harbor to the north. Civilization sprawled like a luminescent fungus, devouring all.
A bottle of Robert Mondavi chenin blanc was in an ice bucket on the floor between their chairs. It was their second bottle. They had not eaten dinner yet. He was talking too much.