Hideaway

the rush hour was heavier than usual but because motorists were slowing to stare at the police. It was what the radio traffic reporters called “gawkers' block.”
    “He was really barreling along,” Hatch said.
    “In heavy fog.”
    “And sunglasses.”
    “Stupid,” Lindsey said.
    “No. This guy's smart.”
    “Sounds stupid to me.”
    “Fearless.” Hatch tried to settle back into the skin of the man with whom he had shared a body in the nightmare. It wasn't easy. Something about the killer was totally alien and firmly resisted analysis. “He's extremely cold … cold and dark inside … he doesn't think like you or me.…” Hatch struggled to find words to convey what the killer had felt like. “Dirty.” He shook his head. “I don't mean he was unwashed, nothing like that. It's more as if … well, as if he was contaminated.” He sighed and gave up. “Anyway, he's utterly fearless. Nothing scares him. He believes that nothing can hurt him. But in his case that's not the same as recklessness. Because … somehow he's right.”
    “What're you saying—that he's invulnerable?”
    “No. Not exactly. But nothing you could do to him … would matter to him.”
    Lindsey hugged herself. “You make him sound … inhuman.”
    At the moment the police search for evidence was concentrated in the quarter of a mile just south of the Culver Boulevard exit. When Hatch got past that activity, traffic began to move faster.
    The imaginary gun in his right hand seemed to take on greater substance. He could almost feel the cold steel against his palm.
    When he pointed the phantom revolver at Lindsey and glanced at her, she winced. He saw her clearly, but he could also see, in memory, the face of the blonde as she had looked up from her purse with too little reaction time even to show surprise.
    “Here, right here, two shots, fast as I … as he could pull the trigger,” Hatch said, shuddering because the memory of violence was far easier to recapture than were the mood and malign spirit of the gunman. “Big holes in her.” He could see it so clearly. “Jesus, it was awful.” He was really into it. “The way she tore open. And the sound like thunder, the end of the world.” The bitter taste of stomach acid rose in his throat. “She was thrown back by the impact, against the door, instantly dead, but the door flew open. He wasn't expecting it to fly open. He wanted her, she was part of his collection now, but then she was gone, out into the night, gone, rolling like a piece of litter along the blacktop.”
    Caught up in the dream memory, he rammed his foot down on the brake pedal, as the killer had done.
    “Hatch, no!”
    A car, then another, then a third, swerved around them in flashes of chrome and sun-silvered glass, horns blaring, narrowly avoiding a collision.
    Shaking himself out of the memory, Hatch accelerated again, back into the traffic flow. He was aware of people staring at him from other cars.
    He didn't care about their scrutiny, for he had picked up the trail as if he were a bloodhound. It was not actually a scent that he followed. It was an indefinable something that led him on, maybe psychic vibrations, a disturbance in the ether made by the killer's passage just as a shark's fin would carve a trough in the surface of the sea, although the ether had not repaired itself with the alacrity of water.
    “He considered going back for her, knew it was hopeless, so he drove on,” Hatch said, aware that his voice had become low and slightly raspy, as if he were recounting secrets that were painful to reveal.
    “Then I walked into the kitchen, and you were making an odd choking-gasping sound,” Lindsey said. “Gripping the edge of the counter tight enough to crack the granite. I thought you were having a heart attack—”
    “Drove very fast,” Hatch said, accelerating only slightly himself, “seventy, eighty, even faster, anxious to get away before the traffic behind him encountered the body.”
    Realizing that he was not merely speculating on what the killer had done, Lindsey said, “You're remembering more than you dreamed, past the point when I came into the kitchen and woke you.”
    “Not remembering,” he said huskily.
    “Then what?”
    “Sensing …”
    “Now?”
    “Yes.”
    “How?”
    “Somehow.” He simply could not explain it better than that. “Somehow,” he whispered, and he followed the ribbon of pavement across that largely flat expanse of land, which seemed to darken