Hideaway

shoot alongside him. But neither of them had even taken target practice in a year or two.
    “Do you really think that's wise?” she asked, indicating the pistols.
    He was tight-lipped. “Yes.”
    “Maybe we should call the police.”
    “We've already discussed why we can't.”
    “Still, it might be worth a try.”
    “They won't help us. Can't.”
    She knew he was right. They had no proof that they were in danger.
    “Besides,” he said, keeping his eyes on the pistol as he worked a tubular brush in and out of the barrel, “when I first started cleaning these, I turned on the TV to have some company. Morning news.”
    The small set, on a pull-out swivel shelf in the end-most of the kitchen cabinets, was off now.
    Lindsey didn't ask him what had been on the news. She was afraid that she would be sorry to hear it—and was convinced that she already knew what he would tell her.
    Finally looking up from the pistol, Hatch said, “They found Steven Honell last night. Tied to the four corners of his bed and beaten to death with a fireplace poker.”
    At first Lindsey was too shocked to move. Then she was too weak to continue standing. She pulled a chair out from the table and settled into it.
    For a while yesterday, she had hated Steven Honell as much as she had ever hated anyone in her life. More. Now she felt no animosity for him whatsoever. Just pity. He had been an insecure man, concealing his insecurity from himself behind a pretense of contemptuous superiority. He had been petty and vicious, perhaps worse, but now he was dead; and death was too great a punishment for his faults.
    She folded her arms on the table and put her head down on them. She could not cry for Honell, for she had liked nothing about him—except his talent. If the extinguishing of his talent was not enough to bring tears, it did at least cast a pall of despair over her.
    “Sooner or later,” Hatch said, “the son of a bitch is going to come after me.”
    Lindsey lifted her head even though it felt as if it weighed a thousand pounds. “But why?”
    “I don't know. Maybe we'll never know why, never understand it. But somehow he and I are linked, and eventually he'll come.”
    “Let the cops handle him,” she said, painfully aware that there was no help for them from the authorities but stubbornly unwilling to let go of that hope.
    “Cops can't find him,” Hatch said grimly. “He's smoke.”
    “He won't come,” she said, willing it to be true.
    “Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not next week or even next month. But as sure as the sun rises every morning, he'll come. And we'll be ready for him.”
    “Will we?” she wondered.
    “Very ready.”
    “Remember what you said last night.”
    He looked up from the pistol again and met her eyes. “What?”
    “That maybe he's not just an ordinary man, that he might have hitchhiked back with you from … somewhere else.”
    “I thought you dismissed that theory.”
    “I did. I can't believe it. But do you? Really?”
    Instead of answering, he resumed cleaning the Browning.
    She said, “If you believe it, even half believe it, put any credence in it at all—then what good is a gun?”
    He didn't reply.
    “How can bullets stop an evil spirit?” she pressed, feeling as if her memory of waking up and taking Regina to school was just part of a continuing dream, as if she was not caught in a real-life dilemma but in a nightmare. “How can something from beyond the grave be stopped with just a gun?”
    “It's all I have,” he said.
     
    ----
     
    Like many doctors, Jonas Nyebern did not maintain office hours or perform surgery on Wednesday. However, he never spent the afternoon golfing, sailing, or playing cards at the country club. He used Wednesdays to catch up on paperwork, or to write research papers and case studies related to the Resuscitation Medicine Project at Orange County General.
    That first Wednesday in May, he planned to spend eight or ten busy hours in the study of his house on Spyglass Hill, where he had lived for almost two years, since the loss of his family. He hoped to finish writing a paper that he was going to deliver at a conference in San Francisco on the eighth of May.
    The big windows in the teak-paneled room looked out on Corona Del Mar and Newport Beach below. Across twenty-six miles of gray water veined with green and blue, the dark palisades of Santa Catalina Island rose against the sky, but they were unable to make the vast Pacific Ocean seem any less