Hideaway

been shot twice and thrown from a moving car on the San Diego Freeway the previous night—at precisely the time that Hatch, standing in the kitchen, had a vision of the trigger being pulled and the body tumbling along the pavement in the wake of the car.

8
    For reasons he could not understand, Hatch was compelled to see the section of the freeway where the dead woman had been found. “Maybe something will click,” was all the explanation he could offer.
    He drove their new red Mitsubishi. They went north on the coast highway, then east on a series of surface streets to the South Coast Plaza Shopping Mall, where they entered the San Diego Freeway heading south. He wanted to come upon the site of the murder from the same direction in which the killer had been traveling the previous night.
    By nine-fifteen, rush-hour traffic should have abated, but all of the lanes were still clogged. They made halting progress southward in a haze of exhaust fumes, from which the car air-conditioning spared them.
    The marine layer that surged in from the Pacific during the night had burned off. Trees stirred in a spring breeze, and birds swooped in giddy arcs across the cloudless, piercingly blue sky. The day did not seem like one in which anyone would have reason to think of death.
    They passed the MacArthur Boulevard exit, then Jamboree, and with every turn of the wheels, Hatch felt the muscles growing tenser in his neck and shoulders. He was overcome by the uncanny feeling that he actually had followed this route last night, when fog had obscured the airport, hotels, office buildings, and the brown hills in the distance, though in fact he had been at home.
    “They were going to El Toro,” he said, which was a detail he had not remembered until now. Or perhaps he had only now perceived it by the grace of some sixth sense.
    “Maybe that's where she lived—or where he lives.”
    Frowning, Hatch said, “I don't think so.”
    As they crept forward through the snarled traffic, he began to recall not just details of the dream but the feeling of it, the edgy atmosphere of pending violence.
    His hands slipped on the steering wheel. They were clammy. He blotted them on his shirt.
    “I think in some ways,” he said, “the blonde was almost as dangerous as I … as he was. …”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I don't know. It's just the feeling I had then.”
    Sunshine glimmered on—and glinted off—the multitude of vehicles that churned both north and south in two great rivers of steel and chrome and glass. Outside, the temperature was hovering around eighty degrees. But Hatch was cold.
    As a sign notified them of the upcoming Culver Boulevard exit, Hatch leaned forward slightly. He let go of the steering wheel with his right hand and reached under his seat. “It was here that he went for the gun … pulled it out… she was looking in her purse for something. …”
    He would not have been too surprised if he had found a gun under his seat, for he still had a frighteningly clear recollection of how fluidly the dream and reality had mingled, separated, and mingled again last night. Why not now, even in daylight? He let, out a hiss of relief when he found that the space beneath his seat was empty.
    “Cops,” Lindsey said.
    Hatch was so caught up in the re-creation of the events in the nightmare that he didn't immediately realize what Lindsey was talking about. Then he saw black-and-whites and other police vehicles parked along the interstate.
    Bent forward, intently studying the dusty ground before them, uniformed officers were walking the shoulder of the highway and picking through the dry grass beyond it. They were evidently conducting an expanded search for evidence to discover anything else that might have fallen out of the killer's car before, with, or after the blonde.
    He noticed that every one of the cops was wearing sunglasses, as were he and Lindsey. The day was eye-stingingly bright.
    But the killer had been wearing sunglasses, too, when he had looked in the rearview mirror. Why would he have been wearing them in the dark in dense fog, for God's sake?
    Shades at night in bad weather was more than just affectation or eccentricity. It was weird.
    Hatch still had the imaginary gun in his hand, withdrawn from under the seat. But because they were moving so much slower than the killer had been driving, they had not yet reached the spot at which the revolver had been fired.
    Traffic was creeping bumper-to-bumper not because