Joe turned away from the shelves and fished his driver’s license from his wallet.
The cop compared the photo on the license with Joe’s face, read his vital statistics and compared them to the reality, then returned the card. “See the cashier.”
“What?”
“The guy when you came in.”
The wiry man with the goatee was waiting by the front door. He unlocked it as Joe approached. “You still have the phone?”
Joe offered it to him.
“No, hold on to it,” the cashier said. “There’s a black Mustang parked at the curb. Drive it down to Wilshire and turn west. You’ll be contacted.”
As the cashier opened the door and held it, Joe stared at the car and said, “Whose is it?”
From behind the bottle-thick lenses, the magnified eyes studied him as though he were a bacterium at the lower end of a microscope. “What’s it matter whose?”
“Doesn’t, I guess.”
Joe went outside and got into the Mustang. The keys were in the ignition.
At Wilshire Boulevard, he turned west. The car was almost as old as the Subaru that he had gotten from Gem Fittich. The engine sounded better, however, the interior was cleaner, and instead of pine-scented disinfectant masking the stink of stale cigarette smoke, the air held a faint tang of menthol aftershave.
Shortly after he drove through the underpass at the San Diego Freeway, the cellular phone rang. “Yeah?”
The man who had sent him to the bookstore now said, “You’re going all the way to the ocean in Santa Monica. When you get there, I’ll ring you with more directions.”
“All right.”
“Don’t stop anywhere along the way. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll know if you do.”
They were somewhere in the traffic around him, in front or behind — or both. He didn’t bother to look for them.
The caller said, “Don’t try to use your phone to call anyone. We’ll know that too.”
“I understand.”
“Just one question. The car you’re driving — why did you want to know whose it was?”
Joe said, “Some seriously unpleasant bastards are looking for me. If they find me, I don’t want to get any innocent people in trouble just because I was using their car.”
“Whole world’s already in trouble, man. Haven’t you noticed?” the caller asked, and then he disconnected.
With the exception of the cop — or former cop — in the bookstore, these people who were hiding Rose Tucker and providing security for her were amateurs with limited resources compared to the thugs who worked for Teknologik. But they were thoughtful and clever amateurs with undeniable talent for the game.
Joe was not halfway through Santa Monica, with the ocean still far ahead, when an image of the book spine rose in his mind — the name Henry James.
Henry James. So what?
Then the title of one of James’s best-known works came to him. The Turn of the Screw. It would be on any short list of the most famous ghost stories ever written.
Ghost.
The inexplicable welling of the oil-lamp flames, the flashing of the numbers on the clock, the jangling pots and pans now seemed as if they might have been linked, after all. And as he recalled those images, it was easy in retrospect to discern a supernatural quality to them — although he was aware that his imagination might be enhancing the memories in that regard.
He remembered, as well, how the foyer chandelier had dimmed and brightened and dimmed repeatedly as he had hurried upstairs in response to the shotgun blast that killed Charlie Delmann. In the fearsome turmoil that followed, he’d forgotten that odd detail.
Now he was reminded of countless séance scenes in old movies and television programs, in which the opening of the door between this world and the realm of spirits was marked by the pulsing of electric lights or the guttering of candles without the presence of a draft.
Ghost.
This was absurd speculation. Worse than absurd. Insane. There were no such things as ghosts.
Yet now he recalled another disquieting incident that occurred as he’d fled the Delmann house.
Racing from the kitchen with the smoke alarm blaring behind him, along the hallway and across the foyer to the door. His hand on the knob. From behind comes a hissing cold, prickling his neck, drilling through the base of his skull. Then he is crossing the porch without any memory of having opened the door.
This seemed to be a meaningful incident as long as he considered it to be meaningful — but as soon as skepticism reasserted itself, the moment appeared to be utterly without import. Yes, if he had felt anything at the back of his neck, it should have been the heat of the fire, not a piercing chill. And, yes, this cold had been different from anything that he had ever felt before: not a spreading chill but like the tip of an icicle — indeed, more finely pointed yet, like a stiletto of steel taken from a freezer, a wire, a needle. A needle inserted into the summit of his spine. But this was a subjective perception of something that he had felt, not a journalist’s measured observation of a concrete phenomenon. He’d been in a state of sheer panic, and he’d felt a lot of peculiar things; they were nothing but normal physiological responses to extreme stress. As for the few seconds of blank memory between the time when he’d put his hand on the doorknob and when he’d found himself most of the way across the porch…Well, that was also easily explained by panic, by stress, and by the blinding power of the overwhelming animal instinct to survive.
Not a ghost.
Rest in peace, Henry James.
As he progressed through Santa Monica toward the ocean, Joe’s brief embrace of superstition loosened, lost all passion. Reason returned.
Nevertheless, something about the concept of a ghost continued to seem significant to him. He had a hunch that eventually he would arrive at a rational explanation derived from this consideration of the supernatural, a provable theory that would be as logical as the meticulously structured prose of Henry James.
A needle of ice. Piercing to the gray matter in the center of the spine. An injection, a quick cold squirt of…something.
Did Nora Vadance feel that ghost needle an instant before she got up from the breakfast table to fetch the camcorder?
Did the Delmanns feel it?
And Lisa?
Did Captain Delroy Blane feel it too, before he disengaged the autopilot, clubbed his first officer in the face, and calmly piloted Flight 353 straight into the earth?
Not a ghost, perhaps, but something fully as terrifying and as malevolent as any evil spirit returned from the abyss of the damned… something akin to a ghost.
When Joe was two blocks from the Pacific, the cell phone rang for the third time.
The caller said, “Okay, turn right on the Coast Highway and keep driving until you hear from us again.”
To Joe’s left, less than two hours of sunlight lay over the ocean, like lemon sauce cooking in a pan, gradually thickening to a deeper yellow.
In Malibu, the phone rang again. He was directed to a turnoff that would take him to Santa-Fe-by-the-Sea, a Southwest restaurant on a bluff overlooking the ocean.
“Leave the phone on the passenger’s seat and give the car to the valet. He knows who you are. The reservation is in your name,” said the caller, and he hung up for the last time.
The big restaurant looked like an adobe lodge transported from New Mexico, with turquoise window trim, turquoise doors, and walkways of red-clay tiles. The landscaping consisted of cactus gardens in beds of white pebbles — and two large sorrel trees with dark-green foliage and sprays of white flowers.